Next Pope will determine direction of church

Angela Mulholland, CTV.ca News

he cardinal who succeeds John Paul II as Pope will have to take over a Roman Catholic Church that is struggling with dwindling membership in Europe and North America, competition from evangelical sects in Latin America and increasing tensions with Islam in Africa.

Cardinals attend a mass for the late Pope.

In the Western world, the Church has long been engaged in war against secularism. If the numbers at mass each Sunday are any indication, it's largely been losing that war. In a culture focused on commercialism and wealth, the Catholic teachings of humility and sacrifice are struggling to find a place.

In the U.S., where for centuries the bulk of the Church's funds have come, the Church is dealing with a PR nightmare of the clergy sexual abuse crisis and could also be facing millions of dollars of payouts in lawsuits.

Many say the problem is that the Church has grown hopelessly out of touch on such issues as women rights, homosexuality, divorce and birth control. But Marc Cardinal Ouellet, Archbishop of Quebec City says no matter how loud the call grows for change, those topics are likely not up for discussion.

"I don't think there will be a change in the practical decisions of the Church. What there will be is a deepening of the reasons why it is so," Ouellet told CTV News following word of Pope John Paul's death.

No matter who is the next leader, do not expect to see him relaxing stances on critical moral issues, Ouellet says. Montreal Jean-Claude Cardinal Turcotte agrees that while the Catholic Church may be open to adjusting and modernizing, its key positions on doctrinal matters are unlikely to waiver.

"It would be terrible if the Church some day said 'We're going to take a survey, and what is not popular, we're going to drop it.' It would be terrible and that would not be faithful to the Christ," he says.

That may not be what many lapsed Catholics want to hear, but Turcotte says the Church is willing to see the pews remain empty.

"We will be maybe not as numerous as we were in the past, but we will have very convinced and engaged people. And I think that's progress," he says.

For those who want to reform the Church from within, many are calling for a rethinking of church hierarchy. The Vatican grew into a "spiritual superpower" under Pope John Paul II, say most observers, somehow drifting far away from what the Church itself had envisioned for itself at the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965.

Then, the Vatican was bent on reform and evolving into the modern age. The consensus was that it was time to shrink the papacy, to move power from Rome to the churches. The Council called for a return to the notion of "collegiality" -- democracy within the Church, with local bishops' and national synods helping to guide both local decisions and church-wide planning. Instead, the Curia -- the Vatican's notoriously secretive bureaucracy -- has only grown in power during John Paul II's 26-year papacy while the opinions of the clergy working "in the field" have been largely ignored.

Some say the problem was John Paul himself. For a man who had grown up under Nazism and communism, the model of a pope as an absolute autocrat may have seemed natural. What's more, his charisma made him such a media sensation, and the Church's very image became tied to him. In the developing world, the next pope faces a completely different set of challenges. It is there where two-thirds of Catholics now live and where the Church continues to grow.

In Latin America -- home to four of every 10 Catholics in the world -- priests say they are finding it increasingly hard to compete with the growth of evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

Estimates are that about 30 per cent of Chileans are now members of evangelical churches, 10 to 20 per cent of Brazilians are Protestant, as are almost 40 per cent of Guatemala. Meanwhile, the majority of those who count themselves Catholics no longer attend church regularly. The evangelicals have won their following, say some, with their emphasis on liberation theology and an encouragement of spiritual and well as material success. The Catholic Church, in contrast, has remained as conservative as ever.

In Africa, there are further problems. The continent's estimated 850 million people are now nearly evenly divided between Muslims in the north and Christian and animists in the centre and south. But Christians often live uneasily among growing Muslim populations. Thousands have been killed in recent years in fighting in Sudan, Nigeria, and elsewhere - where skirmishes often break out between Muslims on one side and Christians and animists on the other.

Some observers say that the fierce competition for converts in Africa has led to a more militant form of Islam spreading in the continent, making it increasingly fertile ground for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Pope John Paul took some steps to heal these divides, becoming the first pope to travel extensively through Africa and to pray in a mosque. But others say he wasn't able to go far enough. CTV’s Vatican affairs correspondent Gerald O'Connell says it was left to Nigeria's Cardinal Francis Arinze to step in and work to demand change, even accusing Nigerian political leaders of manipulating Islam for their own interests.

As the Church's cardinals work to select a new pope, the choice they make may say a lot about how the Church will evolve in the years ahead.

If they choose someone from the West, it may say they are seeking to maintain the status quo or to focus their energies of reviving their traditional stronghold. If they choose a candidate from the developing world, it may signal they are choosing to shift power to the Church's "emerging market."

The latter decision may be wisest, suggest projections from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. It estimates that at the rate that Church's core is shifting, by 2100, there will be three times more Christians in the world's South than in the North. Who the Vatican chooses to manage and encourage that growth remains to be seen.