A transformation of the papacy ?should no longer be postponed?, said Giancarlo Zizola at the end of his concluding article last week. This week the editor of The Tablet looks at the radical decentralisation that such a reform might entail. POPE JOHN PAUL II is one of the great men of the twentieth century. In that greatness lies the problem. At the end of the second millennium, he has governed the Catholic Church in the style of Pius XII rather than that of John XXIII. I am only the Pope, John XXIII said. Will future observers, from the vantage point of the third millennium, judge John XXIII and his council to have been a blip on the screen of history?

The Pope from Poland knew by heart in school those verses of the nineteenth-century Polish romantic poet, Juliusz Slowacki, who had predicted the coming of a Slav pope who would be quite unlike Pius IX: This one will not Italian-like ? take flight At cannon?s roar or sabre thrust But brave as God himself stand and give fight Counting the world as dust.

Karol Wojytyla has a mystical sense of his own and his country?s vocation. He saw himself as called to strengthen the Church against iniquity. It fell to him, he believed, to reassert integral Catholic doctrine against the corrosive inroads of liberalism and dissent. He set to, confidently, with an iron will.

The command structure at the top of the Catholic Church was established by a line of nineteenth-century popes who imposed on it a massive centralisation of authority. Recovering from a low point in the eighteenth century, the Church in the first part of the twentieth reached a zenith of apparent success and influence. That glittering achievement must never be forgotten. It explains the nostalgia many Catholics feel for that style today, and it would be understandable indeed if some curial cardinals in Rome rejoiced at the restoration brought about by John Paul II.

Besides its command structure, however, the Catholic Church exhibits many elements of pluralism. Its popes are elected, its abbots are elected, and for over a thousand years its bishops were elected. It has a diversity of liturgical rites and of spiritualities; its religious orders have fought for and won a relative autonomy, based on the particularity of their vocations; in a number of countries there is a tradition of local discretion in the choice of bishop; and Catholic Churches of the Eastern rite have their own Byzantine liturgy, their own canon law, and a married priesthood.

Now once more, in the person of John Paul II, there is a Pope who towers over the Church. It is as though the papal office were on a level of its own, with bishops, priests and lay people subjected to it. The bishops? own voices are subordinate even though they are declared by Vatican II to be themselves vicars of Christ in their own dioceses. The Vatican II doctrine of collegiality ? that the bishops, with the pope, govern the Church as a college in succession to the apostles ? seems now to mean that the team are being collegial if they say the same thing as the captain. Meanwhile, the Curia, the papal civil service, has tended once more to take over the role of the Church?s central government, whereas in fact its proper function is to be a papal instrument. The Curia treat us as altar boys, the late Cardinal Bernardin, Archbishop of Chicago, once expostulated to me while in Rome.

Though the rigidity of the Catholic system must not be exaggerated, the present symphony conducted from Rome sometimes seems not so much a blend of sounds and variations on a theme as one note played by many instruments. That makes it harder to listen to. The secular Western world sees John Paul II as a hero, but warms to the singer rather than the song.

Yet the song, for those who hear it, is magnificent. Open wide the doors for Christ. Do not be afraid. Christ knows ?what is in man?. He alone knows it. In Christ is the truth about what it means to be human; to be contrary to Christ is to be contrary to the truth.

What prevents the song from being more widely accepted? This Pope, who was so successful in the first phase of his pontificate, when he shook the rotten tree of Communism to such effect, became more pessimistic in the second phase, when he rode out against the permissive relativism of the developed West. Sometimes he has shown his anger. He urged a third way for Poland between Communism and capitalism and it was not forthcoming. He hoped that Europe?s eastern half would re-evangelise its western half and it did not happen.

Catholic believers, for their part, will be modern in their own way. Many have made up their own minds and have opted for the maximum of pluralism. Quietly, they have renegotiated the terms of their membership. They widely believe, for example, that the use of contraception to plan their families is licit. They are not going to be driven out of the Church for this reason, although John Paul II has reasserted the ban on contraception in such strong terms as to suggest that anyone who infringes it is denying the sovereignty of God.

It is bad for Catholic authority when some doctrines which are advocated so strongly by the Pope are widely rejected. The credibility gap on these issues is dangerous, and the laity?s loss of confidence extends to the whole hierarchy. People do not expect bishops to speak their minds on contraception, optional celibacy, and women priests; they know their pastors have to toe the party line, for otherwise they will not survive. They see that issues such as the admission of divorced persons to Communion, under certain circumstances, are not allowed to be discussed. Inevitably, there are those ? too many ? who leave.

A more pluralistic format allowing a genuinely collegial approach would make a dialogue about these issues possible. Paul VI?s encyclical reaffirming the ban on contraception, Humanae Vitae, was not a collegial act. How much greater would have been its authority, Cardinal Suenens pointed out, if it had been ? but it would then also have been different. The initial response to it by bishops? conferences was pluralistic, each filtering the contents in its own way. But the apparent opening towards the future was closed progressively by Paul VI and definitively by John Paul II. It was their judgement that the forces of pluralism unleashed might shake the Church to pieces.

Which way will the popes of the third millennium tilt the balance? The documents and intention of the Second Vatican Council remain determinative. If future popes decide to opt for greater pluralism, there is only one way to start ? with the bishops. And if they want to counterbalance the Curia, they will have to give collegiality a stronger expression.

That is what the Second Vatican Council did not do. It set out the doctrine of collegiality in the third chapter of its beautiful constitution on the Church, then left it side by side with the restated doctrine of absolute papal primacy. As an English interpreter of the Council, the late Bishop Christopher Butler, used to observe, there was now a moral obligation on the pope to govern collegially ? but he did not have to.

To close the gap between theory and practice, Paul VI instituted the Synod of Bishops. It was meant to perpetuate the conciliar experience, but has become too much of a rubber stamp. One synod, which stands out as an example, was called in 1980 ? the first of John Paul II?s papacy ? to discuss marriage and the family. All the lay couples invited were ardent supporters of Humanae Vitae, and the synod?s proceedings and recommendations were manipulated thoroughly. One or two brave bishops sought to raise the real concerns of their people about contraception and divorce; they awakened no response, and one of the bishops from an English-speaking country who attended was said to feel almost suicidal on the plane journey home. When the papal document subsequently appeared, it could have been written without the bishops ever having gone to Rome; but the Pope could now appeal to their consensus.

Few synods are so unsatisfactory. But these should be great moments of teaching for the whole Church and for the world; they fall short of that potential.

There will come a pope who will make changes. But how can he proceed without breaking up the Church? An ultramontane liberal could produce the same polarisation, only in the opposite direction, as with Pope John Paul II, who has governed the Church from the right. The risk of still worse division, when he is no longer there to hold the ring with his remarkable and charismatic personality, is high.

A reforming pope could not survive if he set out to do everything himself, nor should he try. He would need to enlist the bishops? majority support, and rest on this power base. Where might he begin? The key is the Code of Canon Law, which in 1917 claimed for the first time that the right to appoint all bishops everywhere belonged to the bishop of Rome in virtue of the primacy he exercised. In working so hard to bring about the change, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, knew very well what a powerful instrument of centralisation he was introducing. Until the nineteenth century, by contrast, the appointment of bishops was left, in the vast majority of cases, to the local Church.

A canon which is comparatively recent and breaks with tradition could obviously be revised. A reforming pope might first announce that he was convening a gathering of the senior metropolitan archbishops to help him work out how to give the Synod of Bishops a more deliberative function, with careful safeguards to preserve his own position. I need help, he might say. After all, I am only the Pope. I cannot, like Atlas, take the whole world on my shoulders. To strengthen myself, I have to strengthen my brothers. They must enjoy fully the say in the government of the Church which the Second Vatican Council allotted to them. The Catholic doctrine of collegiality must become Catholic fact. Henceforward, executive authority must be shown by structural expression to belong not to the pope and the Curia, but to the pope and the synod.

He would go on, of course, to pay a well-deserved tribute to the devoted work of the Curia, without which ? whatever radical changes may have to be made to it, especially if there is ever prospect of reunion with the Orthodox ? no pope could fulfil his function.

Such a move would be likely to receive massive support from the world episcopate, including the most conservative members. There would then be no difficulty in revising the canon which reserves all episcopal appointments to the pope. A commission of canon lawyers could be instructed by pope and synod to suggest a range of forms for appointment to the episcopal office appropriate to the local Churches. No candidate could take up office until confirmed by the bishop of Rome, who would also reserve the right to appoint bishops for Churches under persecution.

Perhaps there might even be a return to a process by which the people would play a significant part in electing their bishops. Such a move would be popular among the Catholic laity upon whom, in the last resort, the Church depends (as Newman said, it would look pretty odd without them). The American priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley was startled at the results of a survey he conducted of lay opinion in seven countries ? Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Philippines, Poland, Spain and the United States. Of the seven measures offered for comment, ranging from the appointment of bishops to married priests and women?s ordination, the one which secured majority assent in every single country was the election of bishops. Greeley considered this remarkable because, as he pointed out, it is not as yet an item on any church group?s agenda for change.

This would be only the starting point. It would be no gain if bishops started behaving like ultramontane popes in their own dioceses. They would need in their turn to deepen their collegial relationship with their priests and lay people, actively encouraging the public opinion in the Church which Pius XII said was essential. They would need to free theologians to develop pluralistic approaches in keeping with the scope of their endeavour, which, since Vatican II, is as wide as human experience itself. As the Council?s constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, put it: The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men and women of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. The vision of Vatican II is of a people?s Church on pilgrimage with humankind.

That reaffirmation of Christian humanism implies particular theologies to meet particular situations. It implies inculturation ? the earthing of the Gospel in particular cultures. But when liberation theology sprang up in Latin America in answer to the needs there, it was checked or outlawed from the centre ? the two instructions from Rome deployed a range of arguments against it, and there was of course a case to answer. But as a result, Pope John Paul II?s preaching in the Third World, powerful though it was in his commitment to the poor, was not able to seize the moral and intellectual high ground in the same way as in Eastern Europe. The liberation theology he had developed for the Second World, by taking Marxist concepts, such as alienation, and turning them against Marxism itself, was not transferable. The Third World had developed its own liberation theology, but he could not use it. When he went to El Salvador in 1983, he praised the murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero as a diligent pastor and prayed at his tomb, but could not affirm him as a martyr.

The reforming pope I have posited would know that his collegial move would also kick-start the stalled ecumenical process. Ut unum sint, breathed Pope John XXIII as he lay dying, and that same prayer that all may be one became the title of John Paul II?s 1995 encyclical on ecumenism. The Catholic Church?s deep commitment to ecumenism is today not in doubt; it breathes through every page of Ut Unum Sint, which contains an extraordinary invitation. Paul VI knew that the papacy, while part of the answer to the ecumenical challenge, was also part of the problem, and Pope John Paul II knows it too. Ut Unum Sint goes so far as to invite church leaders and their theologians to assist in finding a way of exercising the primacy which will enable it to be recognised by all as a service of love.

The blunt fact is, however, that unless the Catholic Church is governed through a collegiality which is structurally safeguarded, no Orthodox, Anglican or Protestant Church will take a single practical step towards unity with it. The right speeches will be made ? and it is important that they should be. There will be meetings and assemblies and above all there will be joint prayer. All this is indispensable. But action will not follow.

There would be plenty of officials in Rome who would have great doubts about this imaginary pope?s reforming programme, just as they had about Pope John XXIII?s calling of a council. They have seen ideologies come and go while the Church remains. What need is there, they would ask, as they asked in Pope John?s time, for the Church to be updated? Why open windows to the modern world; you never know what may fly in.

Ever since Pius IX famously declared in the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 that the papacy had no need to reconcile itself with progress, liberalism and modern civilisation, the Catholic Church has been struggling with the question of whether to be modern, and if so, how. The modernist crisis of the early years of the twentieth century, when the efforts of Catholic intellectuals to reconcile Christian faith with modernity were rejected as heretical, is not over. There have been some surprising developments, however. Having previously condemned religious liberty as a most pestilential error, the Catholic Church accepted it at Vatican II, and it became central in the preaching of Karol Wojtyla as a weapon against atheism; while in his pontificate, the Catholic Church has emerged as the greatest defender of human rights. When he visited Rome after the Second Vatican Council, the eminent civil rights lawyer, the late Paul Sieghart, was overjoyed to discover that this ideal of the French Revolution is alive and well in the Vatican.

More surprises of that sort could be in store. ? This is an edited extract from a chapter John Wilkins contributed to The Papacy and the People of God, edited by Gary MacEoin and published by Orbis. In a subsequent article, a biographer of the Pope, George Weigel, will give his own assessment of the 20 years of John Paul II?s, papacy.

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