In John Allen's recent column, he lets us in on an informal poll he has taken, regarding what cardinal electors may be most looking for in a papal candidate.
The single most common refrain I hear from many cardinals today, in fact, is that if anything John Paul II has been too much a visionary, too much a man of big dreams and soaring imagination, and not enough a governor. Many believe that the internal management of the Church has suffered on John Paul’s watch, and they hope the next pope will be more attentive to the nuts and bolts of routine administration – clerical discipline, episcopal appointments, coordination across the offices of the Roman Curia. This observation, I stress, is born not of a review of the literature on papal elections or my own spiritual reflections, but interviews with roughly half of the men who will actually cast ballots.
While John Allen is lionized in many places, his writing -- even or especially along with apparently extensive coöperation at the curial level -- smacks of a sociopolitical view of the Church that at least historically seems to have derived from secularized reporting of the second Vatican council and a misunderstanding of the revived phrase "People of God" as Corporation of God, LLP (tm; emphasis on the first "L"). And clericalism. I realized some time ago that one does not have to be a member of the clergy -- now I wonder whether one even need be a believer -- to be infected with clericalism.
We do not need a CEO with a different "style," or even with the same one. We need more faith in the work of the Spirit. And I suppose that we will only get that if we ask for it, not by breath-less political analysis.