Catholic Church isn't a democracy, nor should it be
The question of the Pope retiring is irrelevant

Before the Paul Martin firing farrago, an Ipsos-Reid poll found that 68 per cent of Canadians in general, and even 58 per cent of avowed Liberals, thought Prime Minister Jean Chretien should retire. One can confidently expect these numbers to swell in the next poll, given recent events. Which is fair ball. While Chretien, or any other Canadian prime minister, is not directly elected to the office, he is there on the representative sufferance of those who exercise their democratic right of franchise, and the prime minister should accept the message and plan his exit.

Another late-May poll, this one conducted by Leger Marketing, found that 55 per cent of Canadians surveyed think that Pope John Paul II is now too old and frail to occupy his position, and should retire. While J.P. II might derive some encouragement that despite his troubles with Parkinson's Disease, fewer Canadians want him to step down than Chretien, who is younger and in good physical health, the fact that such a poll was taken and deemed to have any relevance bespeaks a profound ignorance of the principles of Catholic Christianity.

The Church, in short, it is not a democratic institution, but in addition to the question about the Pope's retirement, the Leger poll also asked and found that 72 per cent of Canadians, and 74 per cent of Catholics, agreed that the Church's opposition to abortion, contraception, and its mandatory celibacy rule for the priesthood are "dated" and "out of sync with the times."

And so they are, thankfully, in this distempered era, but the operative ignorance and conceit revealed in the poll results are captured in the notion that the Church could or should alter its policies to conform to the variable winds of cultural trends and fashions.

Of course, lumping abortion, which the Church from its earliest days, and Judaism prior to that, has always considered to be homicide, in with contraception and clerical celibacy, muddies the waters to the point of incoherence. Proscription against murder is a God-given, basic doctrine, straight from the Ten Commandments; while the Roman Church's forbidding contraception is a dogmatic interpretation not necessarily shared by other Christian denominations, and priestly celibacy is an article of canon law dating from the 12th Century. While it could be argued that the celibacy rule could be legitimately altered and contraception could conceivably be revisited in ecumenical dialogue, abortion is non-negotiable.

As for a pope resigning, it has happened before, albeit just six times in 2000 years; the last one being nearly 600 years ago (Pope Gregory XII in 1415), and never for reasons of age or health.

However, the implication of taking polls like the Leger survey is that popular sentiment on these issues might have some legitimate purchase of church policy. It doesn't, shouldn't, and can't if the Catholic Church is to remain Catholic, particularly, on matters of essential doctrine and morals, which encompass abortion. If the Church ever became beholden to democratic will, it would cease to be the Church of Jesus Christ, who is the only One it is legitimately accountable to.

The Christian Church is neither a private club nor a public service, nor is its doctrine merely a mutable collection of ideas and teachings. It is the living body of a person whom Christians believe is God, the creator of the universe, who became a man, suffered, died, and rose from the dead for the salvation of humanity. His teachings and moral principles, articulated in Holy Scripture and through the oral tradition passed directly to His apostles, and preserved by the Church for two millennia, are fixed and finished. No alteration of essential Christian doctrine is possible.

No one is obliged to accept this as true. Coerced faith is an oxymoronic concept, and one of the most basic Christian beliefs is in human free will - the wonderful but terrible gift that provides us the sovereign capacity to either love or reject God. However, no one who thinks that God, as He has explained himself in Scripture and Holy Tradition, doesn't measure up to their personal moral convictions and ideological notions, has any right to call themselves "Christian," and thus, democratic dissent on fundamental doctrinal matters is illegitimate from the get-go.

John Paul does not occupy the throne of St. Peter at the sufferance of the Church's membership, and such popular sentiment that he ought to step down that exists is irrelevant, something North Americans in particular seem to have trouble grasping.

The onus on the individual Christian is to try and conform him or herself as much as possible to the standards, teachings, and demands of the Gospel, not to attempt to bend the Gospel into conformity with their private judgment or the ephemeral Zeitgeist. That was Lucifer's conceit, and look where it got him.