Church faces choice between self-confidence, rigid conservatism

By Matthias Drobinski

MUNICH (DPA): In the high places of the Vatican, the wriggling and jockeying over the cardinals' consistory that has been meeting there since Monday has already begun.

Don't expect too much, the official voices chant, we plan to meet until Ascension Thursday, to meet and talk and discuss. Nothing more, they say. But despite the official efforts to downplay it, the gathering of 155 cardinals is one of the most important assemblies in recent Catholic history.

For one unavoidable if unpleasant thing, it gives the princes of the church a chance to acquaint themselves with the candidates in line to succeed the ailing Pope John Paul II. The race for the Holy See is already on and whoever manages to position himself well during the current consistory will have guaranteed himself an important role when the final laps begin.

Beyond that, the substance of the current consistory is important. Even without benefit of a decisive round of voting, the discussions will help decide how daring or how restrained the Church's future efforts to reform itself will be.

Not even the Pope disagrees with the need for reforms, and consistently over the past few years respected cardinals such as Vienna's old Franz Cardinal Koenig have complained about the Vatican's centralized authority, its distrust of local churches, the excessive power of its state secretary's office and the omnipresent control mechanisms of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

By now, even the Church's highest-ranking members recognize how crippling the delay in implementing reforms in the world's oldest institution has become.

The question the cardinals have to answer is far wider- reaching than just improving the Church's internal functioning. The big question is what the Church will become and how it will act in the troubled world of the early third millennium.

Will it be a Church brimming with self-confidence or quivering with anxiety, a Church so afraid of change that it tries to keep as much unchanged as it possibly can?

In the next few days, the assembled cardinals will help to decide whether the blossoming spirit of revival and renewal, of reformation and renovation in the Catholic Church will continue to flourish, whether this Ascension Thursday will really be as elevating and uplifting for the spirit as its name suggests.