Among the strangest events of the past half millennium in the Vatican only might have been not to see a papacy ended by resignation - an event occurring numerous times as an undesired, but relatively painless alternative to other ways - but that the unusual and decidedly uncomfortable title of pope emeritus surviving his successor. Ratzinger, known for his eight-year reign as Benedictus, the sixteenth of that name (no cheating here, like with the many Karls, or equally latinised Caroli of Sweden) came within months of surviving his age-laden exit with a full decade, and perhaps - as has already been suggested - his successor's pontificate as well. The notion of three living popes, unthinkable but now really thinkable, already debatable, and perhaps soon to be glimpsed, with medical technology and the slackening of old mores only shuffling on in one direction.
What about his critics, then? If Benedictus was rightly (or wrongly) condemned as bulwark of conservatism, where were all these liberals? Well, if one can be something like an Aquinas in our time, or a very bleak (positively white) carbon copy, is not the impetus towards
First, it should be recounted that in its moment of great change - one seldom challenged from the clerical or otherwise left, if rarely mentioned in the positive - he stood firmly with the reformists; a broad camp whose joint venture was the knowledge that if the Church, after a near-century of hardened half-baked change, two world wars and a sovereignty the size of eight football fields won at the price of its soul, would have to change, or perceive to have done that, at least. So, with the sharpest eye at the foundations of the church (a word deliberately ). And so it was launched, and only the few decrying the election - I should say outright denying - of John and hence his successor, and the proposal that the proposed scion of steadfast dogma, Bishop Siri of Genoa (himself unaware of this) would have carried the ship on a straight course through these shoals, with Ratzinger as one of the bulwarks of change, if a moderate and largely optic one. In the large tests of the time, at least according to the liberals, this Warren Court-era of promise of change, at least, did not translate to proper substantial change in the relationship to the modern world. Meanwhile, stalwart conservatives enamoured with the pre-Vatican liturgy wailed at the aesthetical sacrifices at the altar of renewal, and eventually found a friend in their erstwhile advocate.
