CARDINAL CARLO MARIA MARTINI:CARDINAL CARLO Maria Martini, who has died aged 85, was a divisive figure within Roman Catholicism. For the many Catholics who wish to see thoroughgoing reform, especially in their church's stance on gender and sexuality, he was the best pope they never had.
Throughout the 1990s, Martini, as archbishop of Milan, offered a nuanced, progressive and high-profile counter-balance to the moral conservatism of pope John Paul II. To traditional Catholics, however, he was an extremist, willing to sacrifice the church’s distinctive and time-honoured teaching in order to cosy up to contemporary social attitudes in the secular world.
There was an element of caricature in both views. Although he believed that rules themselves could get in the way of faith, Martini never advocated ditching Catholicism’s entire rulebook.
So when he spoke in support of the use of condoms, for instance, as the “lesser evil” in preventing the spread of HIV/Aids, he was not suggesting that the church’s continuing prohibition on “artificial contraception” be abandoned by everybody.
He was a strong supporter of women’s rights, including their ordination to the diaconate (one step short of the priesthood), but he did not demand that seminaries open their doors to all regardless of gender.
However much his chances of being John Paul II’s successor were talked up – by both admirers and detractors – in the real world it was never going to happen.
Those who openly and prophetically position themselves beyond the mainstream of Catholicism are hardly likely to win the support, in a papal conclave, of the necessary two-thirds of cardinal electors. However just dreaming of the prospect of Martini as pope heartened many Catholics.
John Paul’s long papacy became ever more conservative as his health declined in the 1990s and into the first years of the new millennium. While the Vatican spent its time announcing what could not be tolerated, the archbishop of Milan travelled the world, talking in positive terms of supporting families rather than banging on about abortion, and welcoming all into churches rather than barring those who did not conform to official rules.
Martini never directly criticised John Paul – or the inner circle who eventually ran the papacy for him (including Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI). He was too subtle for that, but his disapproval was clear. He sometimes managed to couch it as a joke. So while Rome was working itself up into a lather to celebrate the millennium in 2000 as an opportunity for the world to return to the pews en masse, Martini gently pointed out that Jesus was in all probability born in 6BC, so we had already missed his anniversary.
On another occasion, when John Paul in 1994 had forbidden Catholics even to discuss the question of female ordination in a new encyclical, Martini suggested that the prohibition only lasted for that millennium – ie six years.
Born near Turin, Martini joined the Jesuits at the age of 17 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1952. He spent the next three decades as an academic, becoming rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome in 1969 and of the whole Gregorian University that houses it in 1978.
The following year, though, in his first flush of papacy when his own opinions did not seem so fixed, John Paul appointed Martini to head Europe’s largest archdiocese, Milan. He remained in the role for 22 years and was widely admired in the archdiocese.
He was made a cardinal in 1983 and served for six years (up to 1993) as president of the European Bishops Conference. He also produced a series of books and he wrote a monthly column for Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Martini was not an ivory-tower academic and, while he never served as a parish priest, he had the popular touch. Indeed, it was his overriding concern that the church should be speaking to and supporting the everyday lives and dilemmas of Catholics that shaped so much of his work and thinking.
To that end, he was never keen on the dressing up that goes with being a cardinal, labelling clerics in their cassocks as “pompous”.
It is perhaps now easily forgotten that John Paul’s health was always in question after the assassination attempt on him in 1981, which left him permanently debilitated, but while he soldiered on until 2005 despite the limitations placed on him by Parkinson’s disease, Martini retired in 2002, after receiving the same diagnosis.
He lived out his final years in Jerusalem at the Biblical Institute and later in Milan. He remained outspoken until the very end.
In an interview published after his death, he spoke more emphatically than was his habit in life of an institution of “empty churches” that is “200 years out of date” and in need of “transformation”. It was one last attempt to get the message heard.
Carlo Maria Martini: born February 15th, 1927; died August 31st, 2012