Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  This document was widely understood as a restorationist attempt to halt creeping relativism in the Catholic Church’s relations with other churches and other faiths. It was issued, however, without prior consultation with the two Vatican bodies charged with direct responsibility for Ecumenism and inter-faith dialogue, and was accordingly resented. Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity considered the document ecumenically disastrous, and issued a statement explaining and correcting its emphases: he described it as ‘perhaps too densely written’, a phrase which in Vatican-speak was as near to a howl of protest as protocol allowed. Kasper later let it be known that when he went to the pope with a file full of protests about Dominus Jesus from spokesmen and leaders of the other Christian churches, Papa Wojtyla seemed uncertain of the exact content of the document. The implication was clear: the pope was no longer in charge of major statements and policy decisions issued under his authority.

  John Paul II’s pontificate, the longest since Pius IX and the second longest in history, will also be judged one of the most momentous, in which a pope not only once more reasserted papal control of the Church, and thereby sought to call a halt to the decentralizing initiated as a result of the Second Vatican Council, but in which the pope, long since a marginal figure in the world of realpolitik, once more played a major role in world history, and the downfall of Soviet Communism. John Paul’s own contradictions defied easy categorizations. Passionately committed to the freedom and integrity of the human person, he was the twentieth century’s most effective ambassador for such freedoms, setting his own country on a path to liberation and thereby helping trigger the collapse of the Soviet empire. Two of his major encyclicals, Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio, celebrate the ability of the free human mind to grasp fundamental truth and to discern the will of God which is also the fulfilment of human nature. Yet under his rule, the last quarter of the twentieth century saw a revived authoritarianism in the Catholic Church, in which, in the judgement of many, theological exploration was needlessly outlawed or prematurely constrained. Passionately committed to reconciliation with the Orthodox, his pontificate saw an expansion of Catholi cism within the former Soviet Union which outraged Orthodox leaders and hardened the ancient suspicions he so painfully and sincerely laboured to dispel. This Polish pope did more than any single individual in the whole history of Christianity to reconcile Jews and Christians and to remove the ancient stain of anti-Semitism from the Christian imagination: his visits to the Roman synagogue and above all to the Holy Land in 2000, and his repeated expressions of penitence for Christian anti-Semitism, were imaginative gestures whose full implications and consequences have yet to appear. Yet he canonized Maximillian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan who voluntarily took the place of a married man in a Nazi concentration camp death cell, but who had edited an anti-Semitic paper between the Wars. Wojtyla also canonized Edith Stein, the Jewish convert to Catholicism who became a Carmelite nun and died because she was a Jew in Auschwitz in 1942. The pope saw Stein as a reconciling figure. Jews saw her as an emblem of proselytization and, as in the case of Kolbe, an attempt to annex the Shoah for Catholicism. Wojtyla was not deflected from his purpose, and despite protests both canonizations went ahead.

  Wojtyla’s dying was as magnificent as anything in his life. In the summer of 2004 he visited the international shrine of Lourdes. Visits to the national shrines of the Virgin were a routine feature of his apostolic journeys, but now he came to the greatest of all the shrines of Catholicism, as he himself declared, less as pope than as a sick and ailing pilgrim. His increasing immobility was both moving, and painful to watch: praying at the grotto of the apparition, he slumped forward and could not raise himself, manifestly a dying man. Over the next six months speculation about resignation or what emergency measures might be put in place if the pope were to become mentally incapable, were rampant. In February 2005 he was rushed to the Gemelli hospital in Rome with a respiratory infection which made a tracheotomy necessary: the world’s most impassioned talker was now struck dumb. Still the crowds gathered, and still he struggled to greet them. Back in the Vatican, he was unable to carry out the demanding ceremonies of Holy Week: for the first time in the twenty-seven year whirlwind of his pontificate, someone else (Cardinal Ratzinger) led the meditations on the stations of the Cross in the Coliseum on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, the pope appeared at his Vatican window to bless the crowds and lead the midday prayer of the Angelus. A microphone was placed before him, but he struggled in vain to speak: the colossus was in chains. In the following week his condition suddenly worsened. Papa Wojtyla, the second longest-serving pope in history, died at 9.37 pm on Saturday 2 April.

  His last spectacular crowd-pulling appearance now began. In the twelve hours after his death, 500,000 people flocked to St Peter’s square, and over the next week four million pilgrims, a million and a half of them from Poland, flooded into the city, queuing for up to sixteen hours at a time to file past his body. On the day of his funeral, more than a million mourners assembled in St Peter’s square and the other great squares of the city, where enormous TV screens had been placed. The funeral mass, presided over by Cardinal Ratzinger and attended by representatives of most of the world’s churches and by 140 leaders of non-Christian religions, as well as by 200 heads of state and diplomatic representatives including three Presidents of the USA, was relayed to an estimated two billion viewers round the world, making it the most watched event in history. The Prince of Wales postponed his wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles, scheduled for the same day, and attended the funeral. There was non-stop media coverage: the death of the pope, even more than his life, had become the greatest show on earth. Banners round the crowded Piazza San Pietro demanded peremptorily ‘Santo subito’ – ‘Canonize him at once.’ (It was said that the banners had been organized by the Focolare Movement.)

  Wojtyla preached a craggy and at times uncomfortable Christianity, but he was neither a prude nor a pessimist. He was the first pope in history to write extensively about sex as a mirror of the life of the Godhead, even advocating that married lovers should seek orgasm together. His inaugural sermon had been a resounding affirmation of a Christian humanism, calling for a renewed world order in the light of the gospel: ‘open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilisation and development. Do not be afraid. Christ knows what is in man. He alone knows it.’ There was nothing escapistly otherworldly about his message. Believing that the Christian Gospel illuminates politics and economics as well as individual morality, he translated theory into practice by his role in the liberation of Poland. He rejected Marxism not only for its practical consequences, but for its collectivist metaphysic, which he believed ‘degraded and pulverized the fundamental uniqueness of each human person.’ His own philosophy emphasized the supreme value of free and loving moral action, in which each person realizes their own individuality. But for him such action was never the freedom to invent oneself from scratch. True liberty and happiness came from grasping the divine reality which underlies the world – ‘the splendor of truth’ – and acting in harmony with it. Truth is the hard thing, a terrible joy, obedience to which runs counter to our own desire for security. But it joins us to Christ on the Cross, that figure in which true humanity, suffering humanity, is raised for all to see, a source of resurrection, but also of more authentic existence now.

  He will be remembered for many things, not least for the way in which his charismatic and authoritarian personality halted and reversed the relativization of papal power, which had been one of the most marked and most apparently irreversible transformations effected by the Second Vatican Council. Virtually single-handedly, he placed the Papacy back at the centre of Catholicism. His long pontificate meant that he left behind him a hierarchy most of whose members he had appointed: he had elevated to the Cardinalate, for example, all but two of the 115 electors who were to
choose his successor.

  But his uncomfortable vision of the costly freedom of the Gospel is perhaps his most distinctive legacy. For all his openness to people of other faiths, he had utter confidence in the ancient teachings of Catholicism, certain that lives lived in accordance with them are the most richly human. His own excruciating perseverance in the face of crippling illness was a deliberate clinging to the cross, a witness to the nobility of suffering and the value of the weak whom society prefers to sideline. In his last years he endured publicly all the indignities and diminishments of the sick and aged, which he had once ministered to in others in a thousand encounters with the oppressed, the poor and the sick on those endless journeyings. Someone in his entourage, daunted by the sight of such sufferings, had once asked him if it made him weep. ‘Not on the outside,’ said Wojtyla.

  VI THE PROFESSOR

  The unprecedented publicity surrounding the death and burial of Pope John Paul II helped determine the outcome of the Conclave to elect his successor. Wojtyla’s long and dramatic pontificate made the election of an older and less flamboyant man a virtual certainty. The cardinals would not want another quarter-century pontificate, and were therefore likely to opt for a transitional figure, who would provide continuity with the previous regime, while allowing a breathing-space for reflection on new challenges and new directions. But the scale of the media coverage of the death and burial of Papa Wojtyla brought home to them as to everyone else how much his personal stature and celebrity had transformed the world’s perception of the papal office itself. A holy and cheerful mediocrity on the pattern of John Paul I was not this time a serious option. Whoever was elected must look like a pope, able to occupy Wojtyla’s chair with conviction, even if by common consent there was no one in the Sacred College capable of filling his shoes. For there were few obvious giants among the cardinals. Had Wojtyla died five years earlier, the imposing Jesuit Cardinal Martini of Milan, a first-rate and progressive theologian who had packed his cathedral week after week with crowds of young people who came to listen to his challenging expositions of the New Testament, would have been a virtually unstoppable candidate. But Martini, seventy-eight and retired, was now living for much of the year in Jerusalem. More to the point, he was said to be in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, and though he did in fact attract substantial support on the first ballot, in reality another ailing pope was not to be contemplated. There were very few notable Italian papabili among the 115 cardinal electors, and the Conclave would feel freer than ever to look outside Italy for Wojtyla’s successor. Speculation ranged round a number of African, Indian and Latin American cardinals, and the Jesuit Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio, known for his personal holiness and passionate commitment to the poor, attracted many votes. In the event, however, a German, Joseph Ratzinger, was elected on the fourth ballot, in one of the shortest conclaves of modern times, on Tuesday, 19 April 2005. By a coincidence which passed largely unremarked, it was the feast day of St Leo IX, the greatest German pope of the Middle Ages.

  Born in Bavaria in 1927 into an intensely Catholic family, Joseph Ratzinger was the youngest of three children of a policeman whose dangerously outspoken contempt for Hitler led him to take a series of progressively lower-profile rural postings, and eventually to early retirement in 1937. Ratzinger himself, like his elder brother Georg, had determined on ordination, but he was co-opted into the Hitler Youth, and served from 1943 in an anti-aircraft unit, though he later claimed never to have fired a shot. At the end of the war he deserted from the army, but was arrested anyway by the Americans. On his release he returned to the seminary. His théological training was in the Catholic Faculty of Theology at Munich, where he combined ordination preparation with work towards a doctorate on St Augustine, and he and his brother were ordained together in 1951. After a year as a curate he was appointed to a teaching post in the seminary at Freising, while he worked on his Habilitation, the post-doctoral higher qualification required of anyone wishing to take up a teaching position in a German University. Ratzinger’s theological vision had been shaped by the revival in patristic studies pioneered by exponents of the Nouvelle Theologie like Henri de Lubac. His ‘great Master’ was Augustine, and he disliked what he saw as the excessive intellectualism of the neo-Scholasticism which even then dominated Catholic theology (and in which Karol Wojtyla was at the same moment being trained at the Angelicum in Rome). He therefore chose to write his Habilitation dissertation on the more mystical theology of St Bonaventura, for whom revelation, Ratzinger argued, was not a matter of the transmission of truth to the intellect, but the unveiling of mystery in the activity of God in history. While he was still at work on this study, he was offered the chair of Dogmatic Theology at the University of Freising (the success of his Habilitation being considered a foregone conclusion) and his parents, now in their seventies, sold up the family home and moved into his professorial residence with him. He was therefore devastated when one of the examiners of his Habilitation failed the dissertation, placing the young professor’s new position in jeopardy, and threatening his family’s security. Ratzinger feverishly reworked his dissertation, and resubmitted successfully within a matter of months, but the embarrassment and fright of this early (and, he was convinced, unjust) failure stayed with him. Forty years on he would devote an entire chapter of his short memoir, Milestones, to the episode, clearly still a neuralgic point with him.

  In fact, however, he was now launched on a stellar rise as one of the brightest hopes of German Catholic theology. A series of increasingly prestigious appointments took him to Bonn, Munich and Tubingen, where in 1966 his appointment to the new chair in Dogma was secured by an admiring friend, Hans Kung. In 1969 he moved back to Bavaria, to a senior position in the new University of Regensburg. But his celebrity extended far beyond the university world. With the opening of the Second Vatican Council, Ratzinger had been appointed peritus or adviser to the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Josef Frings, one of the key progressive spokesmen in the Council, famous for a sensational speech attacking the most powerful of the Roman curial congregations, the Holy Office, as ‘a source of scandal’. Ratzinger made common cause with the other leading Conciliar theologians, including Yves Congar, Karl Rahner and Hans Kung, in attacking the ossified Scholasticism dominant among the ‘Roman theologians’, arguing that the Church had ‘reins that are far too tight, too many laws, many of which have helped to leave the century of unbelief in the lurch, instead of helping it to redemption’.42 He helped draft key sections of the Council’s Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, and played a major role in the composition of the decree on Revelation, Dei Verbum. In his commentaries on the work of the Council he was vocal in support of the notion of collegiality, what he called an ‘ordered pluralism’ in the Church, and attached special importance to the work of the local episcopal conferences as expressions of the shared responsibilities of the whole episcopate. With Congar, Rahner, Kung and others he was a founding member of the editorial board of the progressive theological journal Concilium, and in 1968 he was one of more than 1,300 signatories of an outspoken declaration, organised by Concilium, on the right of theologians ‘to seek and speak the truth, without being hampered by administrative measures and sanctions’. The declaration offered a trenchant critique of the secretive methods of the Holy Office in censuring theologians, calling for greater openness, and the right of accused theologians to a proper hearing.43

  Yet already by 1968 Ratzinger had become alarmed by some of the post-Conciliar developments within the Church, and even by some of the Council’s own documents. An enthusiast for the decrees on the Liturgy, the Church, and on Revelation, he had been consistent in an Augustinian scepticism about the value of human culture without grace, a scepticism which the horrors unleashed by the ‘atheistic pieties’ of Nazism and Marxist materialism seemed to confirm. He was therefore dismayed by what he saw as the vapid and theologically naive optimism of the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium e
t Spes. In a laudable attempt to engage with modern culture, its (mostly French) authors, he believed, had presented a naively unproblematized account of human existence with insufficient religious content. The document, he thought, was full of benign generalities, ‘whereas what is proper to theology, discourse about Christ and his work, was left behind in a conceptual deep freeze, and so allowed to appear … unintelligible and antiquated.’ The Constitution also overused the notion of the ‘people of God’, thereby encouraging merely sociological and political conceptions of the Church, at odds with the more firmly and centrally Christological and spiritual emphases of the constitutions on the Liturgy and on the Church. Here was an account of humanity which left sin out of the equation, and which forgot, as he would later say, that the one legitimate form of the Church’s engagement with the world was ‘mission’.44 Ratzinger’s alarm about the direction of post-Conciliar Catholicism was dramatically heightened by the revolutionary upheavals which swept through the universities in 1968. The political radicalization of many theology faculties included Ratzinger’s own department at Tübingen. Campus pamphlets which denounced the Cross as ‘the expression of a sadomasochistic glorification of pain’ and the New Testament as ‘a document of inhumanity, a large-scale deception of the masses’ horrified him, and he came increasingly to relate these excesses to his fears that the Council itself was being hijacked and distorted. Its true legacy, he believed, lay in its texts, read conservatively in the light of earlier teaching, not in the so-called ‘Spirit of Vatican II’, which he considered was becoming a hold-all justification for a rationalizing theology without roots, the erosion of what was distinctively Christian by ‘lightening loads, adapting, making concessions’. He concluded that ‘anyone who wanted to remain a progressive in this context had to give up his integrity’.45 ‘Progressive’ joined ‘speculative’ in his vocabulary as a term of severe disapproval. He began to distance himself from former theological collaborators like the great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, whom he considered had allowed himself ‘to be sworn in according to the progressive slogans’ and increasingly in thrall to a radical, speculative and politicized mind-set remote from scripture, the Fathers, and the concrete realities of Catholic tradition.46