Chicago Tribune - April 19, 2005
Mary Voboril, Staff Writer

The chances of any of this coming to pass, of course, are virtually nil, so Ossorio termed Tuesday's election of Vatican hard-liner Joseph Ratzinger as "heartbreaking. Really a shame."

"Downright confrontational," said Mike Cullen, co-director of the New York City chapter of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. "Not a good thing," he added. "The worst decision they could have made was that guy."

And the newly-minted Pope Benedict XVI, said Larry Kramer, a New York playwright, is "just as bad as the old one. Virulently homophobic."

The near-certainty that Benedict XVI, 78, will maintain the status quo set by the late John Paul II, however, should not come as any great surprise. No matter who was elected, "There was certainly not going to be any great sea change. The church does not move that quickly," said Msgr. Thomas Leonard, pastor of Holy Trinity Catholic Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

But don't despair: "Time Magazine once said that the church moves with the speed of a glacier -- but move she does," Leonard said.

Just look at the bridges John Paul built to the global community of 1.3 billion Muslims, a number that now outpaces that of Catholics.

"We welcome the election of the new pope," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "From his background, it seems that he will probably continue in the line of John Paul II, and we hope that that would include reaching out to the Muslim world and being strong on moral issues. The main thing from the Muslim perspective is to continue outreach efforts, interfaith efforts and promote social justice throughout the world."

Cullen, however, didn't see much chance that the new pope would be more sympathetic to the justice needs of victims of priestly abuse. "Quite the opposite," he said. "He's going to stand up for the church, right or wrong."

Kramer, who initially said that the new pope was "just as bad" as John Paul when it came to gay issues, later amended that Benedict XVI was, in fact, "known to be worse. That's what the word is out on the gay grapevine."

Bruce Steele, editor-in-chief of the gay magazine "The Advocate," said that "one of the Vatican's moral crusades during the last papacy was the elimination of anything that looks like equality for gay relationships. In that crusade, under John Paul II, Ratzinger was the chief general."

He said Ratzinger also wrote a document in 1986 called "On the pastoral care of homosexual persons," referring to gay orientation as "an intrinsic moral evil that must be overcome."

"I would hope that the pope would care for the health and well-being of all Catholics throughout the world, and that would include many very devoted gay and lesbian Catholics," Steele said.

NOW's Ossorio said the church, in electing Ratzinger, was showing an unresponsiveness to "urgent needs of women, men and families" in general.

"We are possibly facing another decade or so of a ban on condoms and birth control, a blind eye to dying victims of AIDS/HIV and a Vatican run only by celibate men," she said. "Birth control is a fundamental human right, and to exclude women is profoundly flawed and discriminatory."

There may be no great change in store, but Msgr. Leonard advises giving the new pope a little breathing room.

"He's going to have a chance to make his own mark," Leonard continued. "He's got difficulties: He's got to re-evangelize Europe, he's got to worry about the Third World both in Africa and in South America and the question of poverty and riches. "Sometimes when you've been the No. 2 man and you become the No. 1 man, your style might change a little bit," he said. "The job makes the man."

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