A Popular Temperament

MECHELEN, Belgium —  When Cardinal Godfried Danneels has had a rough day, his eminence repairs to his apartment, turns on the stereo and puts on a CD of Dixieland jazz.

In the bouncy, raucous tunes of old New Orleans, he finds constant, reinvigorating proof that “there are some people who are really enjoying themselves.”

Danneels, Belgium’s leading Roman Catholic cleric and archbishop of its largest diocese, is an eminent theologian and a visible, effective and beloved pastor. Catholics who speak of a progressive candidate to succeed Pope John Paul II often mention this son of a Belgian elementary school teacher, who at age 7 felt the first stirrings of the calling to become a priest.

As a youngster, he recalls, two things drew him to religion: the beauty of the liturgy as he saw a priest officiate at the altar, and the feeling of satisfaction he got when he took bread and sandwiches to a needy family in his village.

The archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels speaks six languages fluently, including English, and he is 67--an age many Vatican handicappers believe about right for the next pope: young enough to assume the reins of the church, but old enough to guarantee a shorter pontificate than John Paul’s.

“Clearly he is one of the cardinals that the other cardinals will be looking at,” said Father Tom Reese, editor of America, a leading Jesuit magazine. “The other cardinals know who he is, academic theologians know who he is, and certainly they would have a great amount of respect for him as a bishop and a scholar.”

In a College of Cardinals dominated by doctrinal conservatives, Danneels is part of a small but articulate group of moderate-to-progressive clerics, along with Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, Carlo Maria Martini of Italy and Roger Etchegaray of France. They favor reform in the direction of shared decision-making in the church, as opposed to a heavy concentration of power in the Vatican.

But the Belgian’s hopeful temperament makes him popular with conservative Catholics as well and is perhaps most crucial in establishing him as one of the papabili, or top-rated candidates to become the next pope.

At a synod of European bishops in October 1999 at the Vatican, an optimistic Danneels impressed his peers by arguing that, instead of condemning hedonism, the church should recall that Jesus Christ came to bring fullness of life.

Even in today’s multiple challenges to the church--the declining number of men who want to be priests, dwindling attendance at Mass, increasing secularization of Western society--there are hidden benefits, he believes.

“I think that every problem in the church obliges us to put the right questions, and then to clarify the solutions,” Danneels said in an interview in this picturesque market town north of Brussels, site of his see. “It helps us, by suffering.”

It is this upbeat faith, undaunted by adversity, that is cited as Danneels’ most alluring trait by some who know him. “People are looking for what he provides: spiritual leadership,” said Doris K. Donnelly, professor of theology at John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio. “It draws people like a magnet.”

An average of three times a year, Belgium’s prelate attends conferences sponsored by a transatlantic program, which Donnelly directs, on continuing the reform agenda launched at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

“He is able to galvanize people,” the American professor said. “He’s at home with the king [Belgium’s Albert II] and with the peasants.”

In increasingly multicultural Belgium, now home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants from North Africa, Turkey and other countries, Danneels is also conscious of the needs of non-Catholics. In his New Year’s homily, he called on Christians to do more for the newcomers.

The archbishop hardly minimized the difficulties confronting the church, and Christianity in general, in many Western nations. He reminisced, for example, about growing up as the eldest of six children in the Flemish hamlet of Kanegam, where only one of the 900 people in the parish didn’t attend Sunday services.

“In a few years, 20 or 30 years maximum, we have passed from a totally Christian society, public Catholicism, to a kind of minority, a diaspora situation,” he said. Europe now requires missionaries as much as Africa, he said. “In Africa, the problem is that they have too many gods. We have nothing, not one.”

To revive the faith in his bishopric of 2.4 million people, of whom about half are believed to be Catholic to some degree, Danneels has begun evening catechism classes. He has also collaborated on a book, which has become a Belgian bestseller, on religion’s interaction with politics, economics, science, culture and philosophy.

‘Very, Very Good . . . on Television’

The soft-spoken, often jocular Danneels frequently appears in the media, and is “very, very good, especially on television,” said Mark Van De Voorde, editor of Kerk en Leven, a Catholic newspaper in Antwerp. In fact, he said, the archbishop is such an articulate guest that when Catholic radio and television in the neighboring Netherlands marked their 50th anniversary last year, they invited Danneels to speak instead of his Dutch counterpart.

As a theologian, the Belgian, who was ordained in 1957 and became archbishop in 1980, might be termed a resolute moderate. He said he would be willing to discuss ending the priestly obligation of celibacy, if marriage would encourage more men to take vows. (He was dubious.)

Allowing women to become priests is another question altogether, he said, suggesting that it would badly split the church. As for the Vatican bans on birth control and abortion, “there’s so much more in the church than those few rules on sexual life,” he insisted.

Young people today, Danneels said, increasingly ignore those elements of Catholic doctrine and look to the church for other reasons--for example, in seeking comfort when a loved one has died.

Bert Claerhout, editor in chief of Tertio, a Belgian Catholic weekly, said: “For me, he’s a liberal, but all the same in the tradition. He is not a revolutionary. He is not going to destroy the house.”

On March 4, 1996, Danneels underwent triple coronary bypass surgery. People who know him say he has lost a good deal of weight since the operation and seems fitter than ever.

A scandal involving a pedophile priest--and possible negligence by Danneels and his archdiocese--seemed to tarnish his star for a while. But his forceful, articulate performance at the 1999 European synod impressed his peers, who elected him one of the three “grand relators” who took the bishops’ proposals to the pope.

Could he see himself running the church? Danneels became mirthful and somewhat opaque, dismissing speculations about papabili as “hypotheses, suppositions and gossip.” But he offered a vision of what the next pope’s agenda should be.

John Paul’s successor must be “someone who is really preoccupied with evangelization and the dialogue with modern culture,” Danneels said. “One of the big challenges for the church will be how to handle all those new inventions and sciences [that offer] the possibility to manipulate human nature.” This will require, he added, “a dialogue between the intellectual power of the church and the intellectual and technical power of the modern world.”

Belgium’s cardinal has “little time” for anything but work. He could go out for a beer, he said, but there are so many taverns in Mechelen, a town of 76,000, that politeness would oblige him to visit all of them so nobody would feel slighted.

What he does to unwind is listen to music. Every night before sleeping, he puts on a CD--Bach or Gregorian chant, Brahms or Mahler. He even has a complete collection of Beatles recordings.

Is he the only cardinal with Beatles albums? He smiled. If that’s the case, Danneels said, “it’s a pity for the cardinals.”