Backing candidates in a papal conclave is a notoriously unrewarding enterprise and in my case, with limited inside knowledge of the field, reasons for abstaining abound. I do, however, have a broad 'person specification' in mind. Both the Church and the modern world need a pope with a deep spiritual life and uncommon wisdom.
The challenges facing the Church extend far beyond the Vatican into local communities in which countless saints live simple lives of self-giving love, foster the faith of their children, provide hospitality to refugees, and face suffering and death in the hope of resurrection. Their faith moves hearts and transforms the world around them.
Papal leadership can also awaken faith. I remember as a child finding my father sitting, early morning, in our semi-darkened lounge room, crying over the news of Pope John XXIII's death. And my father was not one to cry easily. John Paul II's pilgrimages for world peace and economic justice also moved many.
In my view, the major challenge facing Benedict's successor is that of leading the Church to live with the advances as well as the flaws of this age so that our common life communicates the good news in a vibrant manner to the broader culture. But that's where uncommon wisdom is necessary.
At least in the West today, the Catholic Church is bedevilled by polarisation, a pattern found in social and political life fairly broadly. Traditionalists, judging that this age is in steep decline, turn to the Church's leadership for tighter control over doctrine, liturgy, and Church practice. Progressives, strongly valuing modern expressions of freedom, look to the Church's leadership to remove constraints in the very same areas.
Much debate is defined by the contrast between these extreme positions, which may be held by few individuals yet nevertheless set the terms of public interaction. Middle positions abound. However, since interlocutors define themselves by the extremes they reject, those who hold middle positions end up talking past each other.
Neither of the polarised stances adequately accounts for the great advances and the terrible flaws of the present. We can only move beyond polarisation by developing a discriminating, multi-layered approach to our age.
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's ground-breaking work, A Secular Age, is widely recognised as the best phenomenological and analytical account of the place of religion in our time. One central line of his thought is encapsulated in an earlier essay:
In modern, secularist culture there are mingled together both authentic developments of the gospel, of an incarnational mode of life, and of a closing off to God that negates the gospel. The notion is that modern culture, in breaking with the structures and beliefs of Christendom, also carried certain facets of Christian life further than they ever were taken or could have been taken within Christendom.
In relation to the earlier forms of Christian culture, we have to face the humbling realisation that the breakout was a necessary condition of the development.
Leading the Church in such a culture requires a capacity to discern between those elements of modern life that are of God and can lead to a fuller faith, and those that negate transcendence, shutting people into acquisitive, aggressive, or egotistic worlds. Such discernment can only be accomplished by entering into the culture.
Essential here is an engaged, open stance, sensitive to the struggles of contemporary seekers, rather than pushing pat answers to over-rehearsed questions. And having entered the world of contemporary seekers, such leadership then requires the imagination to present the gospel and the Church's theological tradition in a way that garners their attention — in fact, that opens up the mystery of God already present.
Could we have a pope who patiently attends to the action of God in the broader culture while being utterly faithful to the gospel way of life?
James McEvoy teaches theology at Flinders University and Catholic Theological College, Adelaide. He is an Adjunct Lecturer at Australian Catholic University.