I ring, and Federico Lombardi himself opens the door.
Loyal, meticulous, softly spoken and always available, Lombardi is a mystery. He was one of the closest colleagues of three popes, and he lingers in the memory of journalists as the spokesman of Benedict XVI during his long trek to Golgotha. Who is he? He has spoken so often, but we don’t know anything about him.
On the one hand, he’s a Jesuit of great humility, who is generally admired and loved. His life of austerity and reading, marked by a certain detachment, and his self-abnegation, contrasts with some of the entourages of the popes he has served; they lived beyond their means, surrounded by luxury, money-laundering and sex scandals; he chose to live below his means. And even today, when I meet him, he comes on foot from the Jesuit headquarters in the Borgo, where he lives in a Spartan bedroom. He is probably one of the few people in the Vatican who really respects the three vows of the religious life (poverty, chastity, obedience to God), to which, like all the members of his Congregation, he added a fourth vow of special obedience to the pope.
On the other hand, Father Federico is a ‘papimane’ (pope-maniac), as Rabelais so nicely puts it to describe prelates who live in blessed adoration of the pope. This Loyola has turned obedience to the pope into an absolute, a value placed far above the truth. The adage applies to him as it does to all Jesuits: ‘I will believe that black is white, if that’s what the Church says.’ Having become colour-blind under Ratzinger, Lombardi has often seen the black smoke as white. So much so that journalists have frequently rebuked him for his double-speak: a spokesman who side-stepped truths, downplaying the number of paedophilia scandals that rained down unpredictably on the pontificate, and thus winning himself the nickname of ‘Pravda’. As Pascal, who didn’t like the Jesuits, wrote: ‘We can say things that are false and believe that they are true, but the term “liar” includes the intention of lying.’
During five long meetings with Lombardi, this priest, with his winning manner, calmly answered my questions and tactfully corrected my interpretations.
‘I don’t think there’s a contradiction between truth and obedience to the pope. As a Jesuit, I am of course at the service of a positive interpretation of the holy father’s message. That is where I have put my passion. But I have always said what I thought.’
The American Vaticanologist Robert Carl Mickens is hardly convinced by this rewriting of events, which he severely criticizes. ‘The Catholic Church is certainly the organisation that talks most about the truth. The word is always on its lips. It is forever brandishing “truth” around. And at the same time it is an organisation more given to lying than any other in the world. The spokesman for John Paul II, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, and the spokesman for Benedict XVI, Federico Lombardi, never tell the truth.’
During the pontificate of Benedict XVI – an almost uninterrupted sequence of failures, errors, scandals, issues and controversies – the soldier Lombardi was obliged to step up to the front on very many occasions. Required to perform innumerable contorted acts of diplomacy, to defend the indefensible, the elderly priest is now starting a well-deserved retirement.
Federico Lombardi came to the Vatican under John Paul II, more than twenty-five years ago, where he was put in charge of Radio Vatican, a post traditionally reserved for Jesuits. And yet, according to his friends and former colleagues, whom I have interviewed, Lombardi never took the hard line of John Paul II or Benedict XVI. He is rather on the left, close to the sensibility of Italian social Catholicism. In fact, Father Lombardi has always played against type: he has served popes who were very dissimilar to him, and in the end he was thanked by a Jesuit, Francis, whose ideas he shared, and who should, had things turned out better, have been ‘his’ pope.
‘For me, the priority was to be at the service of the reigning pope. A Jesuit supports and identifies with the pontifical line. And since I studied in Germany, I had great admiration for Ratzinger’s theology, for his equilibrium,’ he says.
Climbing the steps of the holy see, like other members of the nunciatures, Lombardi was promoted under John Paul II: he was appointed head of the Vatican press office (the general office of communication), before becoming spokesman to the pope shortly after the election of Benedict XVI.
In this job, he succeeded the Spaniard Joaquín Navarro-Valls, whose links with Opus Dei are well established. When he was young, everyone thought he was sexy: ‘Why would the Lord only call ugly people?’ Pope John Paul II is supposed to have said of him when he was complimented on his entourage! Strangely, Navarro-Valls was a celibate layman who had taken a vow of heterosexual chastity without being forced to, as Jacques Maritain and Jean Guitton did in their day.
I have always been amused by these chaste, ‘numerary’ laymen in the Vatican who are not keen on ‘members of the fair sex’, and have only one fear: having to get married! Why do they take a vow of celibacy that no one expects them to take? If they aren’t married, doubts grow; and if they are not known to have a woman in their lives, no doubts remain permissible. Federico Lombardi is a priest.
And now the spokesman for the three last popes launches, over the course of our various discussions, into a number of comparisons. He is subtle, almost always pertinent.
‘John Paul II was the man of the peoples. Francis is the man of proximity. Benedict XVI was the man of ideas. I remember first and foremost: the clarity of his thought. Benedict XVI was not a popular communicator like John Paul II was able to be, or as Francis is today. He didn’t like the applause, for example, while Wojtyła loved it. Benedict XVI was an intellectual, a great intellectual,’ Lombardi tells me.
An intellectual, then. Among the many cardinals that I have interviewed, they all acknowledge that if John Paul II was spiritual and mystical, Benedict XVI was above all a great theologian. Some put forward this argument to add contritely that he wasn’t really made to be a pope.
‘For me he’s the greatest theologian of our time,’ Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re explains to me.
Cardinal Paul Poupard, goes further. ‘I was a colleague of Ratzinger’s for 25 years. And, how can I put it, governing wasn’t his forte.’
When he stepped down, the pope himself laid claim to the power of his theological work, but acknowledged his administrative weakness. ‘Practical government is not really my speciality, which does, I would say, amount to a certain weakness,’ Benedict XVI wrote in his book Last Testament.
Ratzinger, an egghead? Without a doubt. The theologian left behind him impressive intellectual work for the Catholic Church, even if it is now chiefly discussed by people who tend to value him too highly, speaking of him as a ‘cardinal thinker’, and those who play down its importance – a good teacher, no more.
The purpose of my book is not to retrace the life, or even the intellectual life, of the future Pope Benedict XVI. For my subject, I need only to focus on a few dates and some salient points. First of all, the Bavarian childhood of the young Ratzinger, in a modest, loving, rural family, where everyday life was made up of faith, German classical music and books. In photographs from the time, Joseph already has that chubby, pink face, the effeminate smile, the rigidity, the stiffness of body, that we would later see in him when he became pope.
A curious image: when he was a child, he says, he ‘liked playing at priests’ (as others play with dolls). Another cliché: his mother was possessive and a love-child. Third cliché: he was the son of a police inspector, with all that that implies in terms of authority and rigour; but his father was anti-Hitler. Joseph Ratzinger would later be accused of being a member of the Hitler Youth in Germany and some would even insultingly call him Pope ‘Adolf II’, who would bless you ‘in the name of the Father, the Son and the Third Reich’.
His membership of the Hitlerjugend is well attested, and the pope has explained himself at length on the subject. He joined the Hitler Youth at the age of 14, like the great majority of young Germans in the mid-1930s, and his enlistment does not necessarily reflect his ideological proximity
to Nazism. Joseph Ratzinger would subsequently desert from the Wehrmacht, in which, as he has frequently repeated, he was enlisted against his will (the biography of Benedict XVI was minutely studied in Israel when he was elected, and the pope was exonerated of his alleged Nazi past).
A devotee of Goethe and the Latin and Greek classics, with a love of the paintings of Rembrandt, the young Ratzinger wrote poems and learned the piano. Early on, he fed on German philosophy, Heidegger and Nietzsche – the kind of food that often leads to anti-humanism, and Ratzinger is, in fact, very ‘anti-Enlightenment’. He also read the French thinkers, starting with the poet Paul Claudel, and even (Cardinal Poupard tells me) learned the language to be able to read Claudel in the original. Ratzinger was so moved by the author of Le Soulier de satin that he would reread his profession of faith through Claudel’s conversion, glossing over the fact that Claudel’s conversion was inspired by his passionate reading of Une Saison en enfer by a young anti-clerical and homosexual ‘mystic in the savage state’: Arthur Rimbaud. Ratzinger also read Jacques Maritain, and several serious studies have shown how close some of Ratzinger’s theses are to those of Maritain, particularly on chastity, love and the couple. But the future pope could also be naïve and fragile: he was a keen reader of The Little Prince.
We have little information, apart from anecdotes and an autobiography so controlled that it conceals shadowy areas and essential hubs, about the ecclesiastical vocation of the young seminarian Ratzinger, or about his powerful inspirations, even if the choice of the priesthood, and its corollary, celibacy, accords with the speculative character of the future pope. The photograph of his ordination, on 29 June 1961, shows him happy and proud, all dressed in lace. He is a rather handsome man. He is still nicknamed ‘the choirboy’.
‘Collaborator with truth’: this was the motto that Joseph Ratzinger chose when he was made a bishop in 1977. But was he driven by the truth? And why did he become a priest? Must we follow and believe him? Benedict XVI often lies, as we all do; sometimes you have to let him lie. And we guess, we are told, that in making the case of the priesthood and celibacy, there may have been ‘complications’ in the life of the young Ratzinger.
For him, puberty was a parenthesis, a time of doubts, disorder, perhaps vertigo that he wanted to forget, a time of sleepless nights. According to his biographers, it appears that this boy with the fluting voice, strangled like that of François Mauriac, was confused during his youth, and that he encountered emotional difficulties. Was he the kind of little prodigy who fills his teachers with wonder but doesn’t know how to talk to a girl in a bar? Did he discover a wound cauterised by chastity, in which he sought refuge? We don’t know. Let us not forget how hard it was for an adolescent immediately after the war (Ratzinger was 20 in 1947) to guess his possible ‘tendencies’ or to know that he was ‘homophilic’. By way of comparison, so precocious and courageous a person as the Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who belonged to the same generation as Joseph Ratzinger, was able to write in his youth, in a letter of 1950: ‘I was born to be serene, balanced, natural: my homosexuality was an extra, it was outside and had nothing to do with me. I always saw it by my side as an enemy.’
Homophilia as an internal ‘enemy’: is that the personal experience of this troubled and insecure pope who has always spoke of his ‘great weakness’, his ‘holy anxiety’, his fundamental ‘inadequacy’ and his secret loves ‘in different dimensions and different forms’, even though, of course, he adds: ‘going into intimate details would be out of the question’? How can we tell?
In any case, Joseph Ratzinger played the shy virgin; he was never attracted by the other sex, unlike John Paul II or Francis. There is no mention in his life of any girl or woman; his mother and sister are the only ones who counted; and furthermore, Maria was essentially and lastingly in charge of the house. Several witnesses confirm that his misogyny hardened with the years. We might also note that, very belatedly, a single carnal impulse for a woman, before his time in the seminary, was miraculously discovered in 2016 by the pope’s official interviewer, Peter Seewald, during conversations for the holy father’s farewell book. This ‘great love’ is said to have troubled the young Ratzinger a great deal, and complicated his decision to take a vow of celibacy. However, Seewald seems so unconvinced by this information that it was not published in his book of interviews with the pope emeritus – ‘for lack of space’, Ratzinger would say. In the end, it would be revealed by Seewald in the newspaper Die Zeit, and therefore prudently confined to a German readership. At the age of almost 90, the pope suddenly invented an ‘affair’! Between the lines, and at no one’s prompting, he suddenly revealed that he was once (before the vow of chastity, of course) in love with a woman! A heart beneath the cassock! Who would have believed it?
And in fact nobody did. The last confession was so incredible that it was immediately decoded as a failed attempt to silence the rumours, by then almost universal in the German press, about the pope’s supposed homosexuality. To be counter-intuitive, this secret love may perhaps even have been a confession. Might this be one of Virgil’s shepherdesses who were really shepherds? Was she Albertine, the famous character in In Search of Lost Time, behind whom was hidden Proust’s moustachioed chauffeur? The anecdote appeared so manufactured, and artificial, that it had the paradoxical effect of rousing people’s suspicion still further. ‘One only leaves ambiguity to one’s detriment’, Cardinal de Retz liked to say – a phrase that applies to everyone in the Vatican.
One thing is certain: Joseph Ratzinger only half-chose the priesthood: as a priest, he would also be a professor; as pope, he would go on spending his holidays in Castel Gandolfo writing for whole days at a time. Which didn’t stop him from moving quickly, thanks to a peerless intelligence and capacity for hard work: as soon as he was ordained, he became a teacher; as soon as he became a bishop, he was created cardinal. His election to Peter’s throne was in the order of things, as soon as John Paul II died.
Was he progressive or conservative? It seems a strange question, since Joseph Ratzinger has always been associated with the right wing of the Church. Obvious in the context of the present day, the answer was more difficult at the time. Contrary to the nicknames imposed on him in the meantime – ‘Panzer-Kardinal’, ‘God’s Rottweiler’, ‘German Shepherd’ – the young Ratzinger began his career on the left of the Church as an exegete of Vatican II (in which he participated as ‘peritus’ or expert). Cardinals who knew him at the time and witnesses that I have questioned in Berlin, Munich and Regensburg, have talked to me about him as a progressive whose thought was complex and far from intransigent. Joseph Ratzinger was quite open and benevolent. He didn’t assume that every expression of dissent was down to Lutherans or atheists. In debate, he often seemed hesitant, almost shy. ‘The Ratzingers are not very exuberant,’ he would say in one interview. He was said never to impose his point of view.
And yet, contrary to the path taken by his former theologian friend Hans Küng, or his fellow cardinal Walter Kasper, Joseph Ratzinger would gradually undertake an increasingly restrictive reading of Vatican II. A man of the council, and therefore a progressive, he became its demanding and orthodox guardian, so much so that he could no longer accept any interpretation other than his own. A man who had grasped the importance of Vatican II and saluted its modernity would go on to try and control its effects. By now the sixties and May 1968 had happened – and Joseph Ratzinger had taken fright.
‘Ratzinger is a theologian who got scared. He was afraid of the Second Vatican Council, afraid of liberation theology, afraid of Marxism, afraid of the “sixties”, afraid of homosexuals,’ I am told by Professor Arnd Bünker, an influential Swiss theologian I interviewed in St Gallen.
More than any pope before or after him, Joseph Ratzinger was filled with ‘sad passions’. So serene in general, he was the enemy of the ‘sexual liberationists’: he was haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, might be having pleasure. He turned his obsessions with ‘nihil
ist deviations’ (meaning May 1968) into encyclicals. His obsessions became papal bulls.
The pontificate of Benedict XVI, during which a strict orthodoxy settled in, seemed like a ‘restoration’ to his opponents: Benedict XVI himself used the word, synonymous with the return to divine-right monarchy, prompting controversy.
‘It’s true, he put Vatican II in the freezer,’ a cardinal who was close to the former pope concedes.
What did he think, at this time, about social questions and, among them, of homosexuality? Joseph Ratzinger knew about the issues from his reading, at least. Several of the Catholic authors that he venerated – Jacques Maritain, François Mauriac – were obsessed by it, and the subject also terrified Paul Claudel.
The future Pope Benedict XVI used the following significant expression, in the form of a kind of self-censorship which is still a sign of the times: he claimed to read only ‘respectable writers’. Never in his career did he mention the name of Rimbaud, Verlaine, André Gide or Julien Green, authors that he must have encountered, and probably read, but who ruled themselves out precisely because of their confessions. On the other hand, he was able to display his passion for François Mauriac and Jacques Maritain, writers who were ‘respectable’ at the time because their inclinations were only revealed later.
Finally, where his culture is concerned, we would have to admit that Joseph Ratzinger adopted one part of Nietzsche’s philosophy: ‘Without music, life would be a mistake.’ We might even say that the future pope was a ‘fabulous opera’ all by himself: he was wild about German music from Bach to Beethoven, overlooking the homophile Handel. And most importantly: Mozart, whom he had already played on the piano as a child with his brother. (‘When the Kyrie began, it was as if heaven was opening up’, Ratzinger said, looking back on his youth.) The operas of Mozart enchanted him, while Italian opera – which was often summed up, according to a famous phrase, as ‘the efforts of a baritone to stop the tenor and the soprano from sleeping together’ – bored him. Joseph Ratzinger’s inclination was not Mediterranean but Teutonic: the subtlety of Cosí, the ambiguous erotomania of Don Giovanni and, of course, the quintessential androgyny of Apollo et Hyacinthus. Mozart is the most ‘gender theory’ of all operatic composers. Some monsignori I have interviewed called Ratzinger a ‘liturgy queen’ or an ‘opera queen’.
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 52
