No cardinals of color need apply
Rome 2005: it’s the election of the successor to John Paul II. The highly popular Polish-born Karol Jozef Wojtyla had reigned for a quarter century, and his death and funeral in 2005 set world media records. In 1978, JP II’s selection had come at a traumatic time for the Church: his predecessor John Paul I had died after only 33 days as Pope. In 1978, the College of Cardinals’ white smoke – the traditional signal from the Vatican chimney telling the world they’ve reached agreement on who will be the next Pope – heralded the choice of the first non-Italian in centuries. In 2005, was the Church now ready for a non-European to replace him?
Not the Church of the College of Cardinals. Their selection of another European kept the Vatican firmly in the hands of the hierarchy of white Europeans when the world’s Catholics were increasingly Latin American, African, and Asian. Whatever you think of the current Pope Benedict XVI, there is little question that he is (a) white; (b) European; (c) extremely conservative. Hell, he had even directed American Catholics to vote for born-again incumbent George W. Bush (or to not vote for pro-choice Catholic John Kerry) in 2004.
Amidst speculation over a number of cardinals-of-color from Brazil to Nigeria as potential popes, in 2005 the College of Cardinals, for reasons known mainly to themselves (rewarding a leading Vatican vicar, keeping the Pope-ship in the “family,” innate conservatism – just wild guesses, since they don’t have to justify a thing), chose a man who had mainly lived in the Vatican. Given life spans these days, the world might have to wait a good ten or fifteen years until it again has a chance to see if the CoC will dare enlarge its gene pool of candidates.
Can Americans hurdle their own color barriers?
‘Nuff said on the selection of popes. How about that major preoccupation of Americans for the last couple of years, the election of the successor to George W. Bush? Should it be John McCain, who thinks that economically, things are just fine, and that it’s silly to want better gas mileage? Or Barack Obama, who some people can’t believe is as American as McCain? In fact, he may be even more American than McCain, since Obama was born in the United States, while McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. I won’t hold it against him – both my kids were born overseas while I was working at US embassies, and both have US citizenship at least as good as... Governor Schwarzenegger’s.
But we all know that for many people, such matters as pronounce-ability of name, skin tone, normal guy-ness, etc. are all important in determining their vote come November. Even if such gut reactions have absolutely no relation to those voters’ economic and other interests. As in the archetypical blue collar Reagan Democrat who voted for Bush over Gore and Kerry because he thought Bush was a “nice guy." No matter that Bush opposes almost everything that made life better for earlier generations of blue-collar workers: freedom to organize for better working conditions and wages; progressive taxation to fund education for wide swathes of Americans; regulation of industry to prevent the excesses of capitalism (see sub-prime crisis) from killing the golden goose.
So that’s my question: will Americans, through their vote this fall, make the Electoral College any more color-blind than the College of Cardinals? If Barack Obama’s name, color, diet, waist-size make enough Americans uncomfortable, does that mean that the country’s default position is a 70-something man whose major claim to our allegiance is that he was a prisoner of war four decades ago? But whose physical attributes are the equivalent of comfort food for American political appetites?
These days I’m reading bits from my yellowed copy of novelist Graham Greene’s Collected Essays. Greene, the convert to Catholicism who specialized in tortured consciences, chose to write about several popes, including John XXIII, who acceded to the Papacy at the ripe age of 77 (“everyone was convinced that I would be a provisional and transitional Pope”). Is that the kind of subconscious reasoning that goes into some people’s evaluation of McCain? A transition to what? A one-term extension of Bush? (and who would want more of that?) Two terms and McCain’s into his eighties – even Ronald Reagan, the oldest man elected President, was “only” 78 when he finished his second term.
God knows that whoever is elected in November will have to face monumental problems: extraction from Iraq; an economic crisis that has echoes of 1929; crash program to avert climate disaster; ditto for American infrastructure, so it doesn’t crash on the citizenry, etc. etc. Maybe we should question why in their right minds Obama and McCain want to take this list on, but they do. So what do Americans want: the “comfort” of a McCain who might look like Uncle John but whose temper in times of crisis has military leaders a bit concerned? Or a Barack Obama, whose international standing could bring America back into a true leadership position among nations?
Here’s hoping that Americans will be able to do better than the College of Cardinals, and choose a man who is all about the future, and who “looks like America.” Not the America of the Vietnam era, but melting pot America that is the current reality. An America – under a melting pot President – that would be a part of the world rather than apart from it.