How Many Divisions Has Benedict XVI ?

England doesn't have the pope on the main evening news each evening. He tends to make a yearly appearance in Lewes, he might make it onto the screens at Easter, but otherwise he he hasn't made much of an impact since the Reformation (well the Irish protestants take another view, agreed).

Temporal power has always been the pope's objective. There is no other kind of power, after all - spiritual power is but an aspect of how to gain the first and only kind.

It is a shock to watch him as he is watched where his writ runs so publically. He speaks wielding all the authority acceding to him from moral certainty universally recognized, and wields moral power in his political interest with the sophistication of millenia of existence and acquired understanding. If a measure of importance is who tries to know you, then the world and his wife come seeking audience with Benedict.

In Poland's failure to grasp the European ideal and its political leaders' attempt to speak not to the modern world but the primitive politics of nation state low-grade popularism, which was met by discreet indications that their european goals should conform to those of their bishops (or Bishop's), we see some of this; although in comparison with John Paul II's interventions in the east of Europe, nudging them into line was a bagatelle. It is noteworthy as well that the giant step in European Union consolidation took place under a German Chancellor and a German Pope; the Holy Roman Empire is a powerful image that lives in European conciousness, particularly when there is unwise fanning of the flames of external cultural threat.

Now that there has been such glorious success in the overthrow of the state socialist regimes, where might what are now Benedict's Divisions be seen next? Socialism's passing has left a space where ideas of the right and the good are no longer anchored in the secular and anticlerical. And scientific advance in understanding and tecnical means for the observation of our world are undermining, too, many of the socialist secular positions that were, as much as anything, defined by opposition to any political power drawing, for its strength, upon moral religious stance.

Until now arguments on the ordering of kinship groups and their generation of society, social hierarchies and intergenerational relations, the nature of conciousness and its claims on social as well as personal determination of its defence, have been cast in the crude and primitive emotionalism of fundamentalism and horror show propaganda.

Benedict's Divisions are immensely more powerful in their intellectual and technical skills, and will take the dispute of power in its moral or spiritual guise, and its control, far into the political elites regardless of political frontiers.

When Gordon Brown was granted his audience with the Pope he delivered into Benedict's hands a copy of his father's sermons, especially printed and bound up for that purpose. If we are to believe the English press in their adulation for the 'son of the manse' moral imprinting the leader of the Labour party's interregnum enjoyed, he delivered the blueprint to his soul.