c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Asking whether the pope matters in the lives of Catholics is not the same as Stalin’s World War II inquiry about how many divisions he had.

Nor is it a dissident riff on when and how Pope Benedict XVI will inscribe his definitive signature on the Catholic Church.

The new pope has been the subject of continual speculation by the chattering classes within Catholicism. The latter is composed mostly of prelates, priests and pundits _ that is, those whose lives and well-being are intimately associated with the personnel and policies of the official church.

The latter is not necessarily the same as the good works of the Catholic Church that may be under the auspices of its officials but whose energy, financing and delivery are in the hands of ordinary believers. The latter live outside of, and often at a distance from, the great Vatican combination of aura and shadow that arches like a rainbow across St. Peter’s Square.

This sparkling veil constitutes the known world for those we might term, with due reverence and minimal irony, the ecclesiastical buffs or insiders who operate the behind-the-scenes machinery that they identify with the Catholic Church. This is the field of dreams for such good people, including the armies of Vatican bureaucrats, but it has little relevance to or interest for the billion Catholics who, preoccupied with everyday cares, have no time or leisure to think about them.

How much difference does the pope make in the lives of these people? They are happy to have an inspiring leader, of course, and are delighted when a pope visits their country. When Pope John Paul II apologized to the Jewish people for Christian anti-Semitism, they were moved and proud. They know that no other religious leader could do that with quite the same impact on the whole world.

But most Catholics are not thinking about the pope during their long days of working, caring for and worrying about the future of the youngest and the oldest in their families, and keeping their balance on the wobbly carousel of everyday living.

They have no time for the speculation or intramural gossip that tingles in the thin but luminous membrane of the official church. They are too absorbed with paying bills, feeding and educating children, keeping their attention on the big world and on each other at the same time.

Do most Catholics give the pope’s latest utterances at St. Peter’s Square or the possibilities of whether or not he will write an encyclical any thought at all? Despite the fact that such issues mesmerize the official ecclesiastical class as well as correspondents who cover this universe as if it summed up the Catholic Church, most Catholics are happy if the pope says something encouraging to them and the world. But they are minimally influenced by most of what the official Church does.

They do not lose sleep, as mesmerized clerics do, worrying about who will be the next bishop of their diocese or which prelates will be named cardinals.

Indeed, as a practical matter, bishops might better bypass the pulpits to which they send missives to be read at Mass and send them directly to the recycling bin. Catholics are loyal and generous. That is why they are called the faithful. But they have a short attention span for the dull boilerplate of messages from the bishop’s office.

While this may be disappointing or disillusioning to many bishops, it is a truth that they might well meditate on at their next meeting.

The Catholic Church lives not in the Vatican or the local chancery office but in the lives of believers who understand that they are the church and it is alive because they are alive. They apply teachings to themselves and bring them to bear in that real world of time and chance that surrounds and is not summed up by the romantic inside world of Vatican activity.

MO/Ph END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

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