The Pope

by Anthony McCarten

  The same fears that had plagued Ratzinger since the Marxist uprisings of 1968, when he was second chair in dogma at Tübingen, and throughout his time at the CDF now beset him as pope. And he would tackle them in his own way. Where John Paul had embraced celebrity culture, photo opportunities, far-reaching worldwide travel, and mass outdoor events of worship, Benedict was of the view that, as Gibson notes, “every aspect of modern, postconciliar culture, from pornography to rock music, was … a symptom of the crisis.” He even went as far as to publicly support theological criticism of the Harry Potter books (despite having never read them himself), saying they were “subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.”

  But the wheels of societal change were well in motion, and Benedict’s traditional outlook, combined with his detachment from the everyday lives of millions of people he was now tasked with leading, risked alienating an already dwindling population of Catholics in the twenty-first century.

  It is fair to say that Pope Benedict’s papacy got off to a rocky start and never really recovered its footing. As one journalist noted, he frequently appeared to be “as gaffe-prone as his secular counterpart in Rome, Silvio Berlusconi, as he lurched from one public relations disaster to another.” In November 2005, just seven months into his new role, Benedict released his first major instruction as pope. In it, he described acts of homosexuality as “grave sins,” “intrinsically immoral,” and “contrary to the natural law,” as well as reiterating that it was “necessary to state clearly that the Church, while profoundly respecting the persons in question, cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture.’” The global media picked up on these descriptions of homosexuality as evidence of the church’s willingness to link the ongoing sexual abuse scandals to priests with homosexual tendencies. And while this was an unsurprising position, given what we know about Benedict and the church’s views on the subject, it was hardly in line with his statement in his first general audience speech: “I would like to place my ministry at the service of reconciliation and harmony between persons and peoples.”

  INTERFAITH CONTROVERSIES

  Pope Benedict fared equally poorly when it came to diplomatic relations with the Islamic world. In a September 2006 speech entitled “Faith, Reason and the University—Memories and Reflections,” which he delivered at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria, where he had been a professor, he compared the “structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur’an.” He sparked outrage by quoting the Byzantine emperor Manuel Palaeologus, who, in a dialogue with a Persian scholar, dated to 1394 and 1402, had written, “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The pope later claimed to have referenced the quotation with the sole intention of drawing out “the essential relationship between faith and reason.” But the damage had already been done.

  As Paul Badde, a member of the Vatican press corps who was traveling with Benedict on the papal plane, recalled, “It would have taken a Shakespeare to capture the cosmic drama that came crashing down on him upon his return to Rome with the delayed reaction to a few of his many words, at a watershed of his pontificate.” The speech drew fierce criticism from Islamic leaders, who demanded an immediate personal apology; violent protests erupted across the globe, and attacks on Christians soon followed. In Iraq, effigies of Pope Benedict were burned, two Christians were murdered, and the Vatican was threatened with a suicide attack by an insurgent group; in Somalia, a sixty-five-year-old Italian nun was murdered in an apparent reprisal attack; firebombs were thrown at churches in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; and a fatwa against the pope was issued by the political wing of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

  Four days later the Vatican issued a statement defending the pope’s use of Manuel’s words within the wider context of his speech and insisting that Benedict “sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful and should have been interpreted in a manner that in no way corresponds to his intentions.” Support for the pope came from Western politicians, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, American secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, and Australian prime minister John Howard, but did little to dampen the flames.

  It is hardly surprising that the Catholic Church and various other Christian leaders rallied around the pope, denouncing the hysteria surrounding the speech as absurd. What was surprising was a statement made by the very man who was runner-up in the previous year’s conclave: Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio. A spokesman for the cardinal told Newsweek Argentina of Bergoglio’s “unhappiness” with the pontiff’s speech, declaring that “Pope Benedict’s statement doesn’t reflect my own opinions.… These statements will serve to destroy in 20 seconds the careful construction of a relationship with Islam that Pope John Paul II built over the last twenty years.”

  The Vatican was furious at this flagrant act of insubordination during the first major crisis of Benedict’s pontificate and demanded the removal of Bergoglio’s spokesman of eight years, Fr. Guillermo Marcó. Marcó dutifully resigned and explained that he had not, in fact, been speaking on behalf of the cardinal but as president of the Institute for Interreligious Dialogue, thereby sparing his boss the Vatican’s further wrath.

  By November 2006, the post-speech furor had calmed somewhat, so rather than cancel his planned trip to Turkey, the pope decided to use the opportunity to try his hand once more at diplomacy, on what he termed a “mission of dialogue, brotherhood and reconciliation” designed to promote better relations with the Eastern Orthodox Church. It was seen as a deeply symbolic gesture when Benedict became only the second pontiff (after John Paul II) to visit an Islamic place of worship, silently praying alongside senior Muslim clerics at Istanbul’s Blue Mosque.

  Protests were minimal, and the trip was largely considered to be a success. Benedict chose his language more carefully than he had at Regensburg: he praised the “remarkable flowering of Islamic civilization in the most diverse fields,” and hoped that Christians and Muslims would “come to know one another better, strengthening the bonds of affection between us in our common wish to live together in harmony, peace and mutual trust.”

  If a collective sigh of relief was breathed in the corridors of the Vatican as the pope boarded his plane back to Rome, it did not last long. No sooner had he built bridges between Catholics and Muslims than he began dismantling those with Judaism.

  Benedict’s much-talked-about childhood under Hitler’s shadow should have meant that he, more than anyone, was acutely sensitive to Jewish-Catholic relations. He did indeed make some solid efforts in the early days of his papacy to strengthen ties between the two faiths by visiting synagogues in Cologne, New York, and Rome; and he condemned “the genocide of the Jews [as] atrocious crimes that show all of the evil that was contained in the Nazi ideology.” But this period of goodwill was relatively short-lived.

  Pope Benedict’s detachment from subjects he found difficult, evident in his memoir, Milestones, outraged some members of the Jewish community. During a visit to Auschwitz in May 2006, he failed to mention anything to do with collective German or Catholic guilt over the Holocaust and made no reference to anti-Semitism. A little over a year later, in July 2007, the pope—bowing to traditionalist pressures, many believed—decided to give widespread permission for the celebration of the Latin-spoken Tridentine Mass. Largely in abeyance since 1970, it featured a Good Friday prayer that called for Jews to acknowledge Jesus Christ and referred to “the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness.”

  Benedict justified his decision in a letter to bishops, stating, “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and
great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.” Jewish leaders around the world were quick to condemn the move, and in a statement issued by the Jewish-American advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League, spokesman Abraham H. Foxman called it a “body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations.” He said, “We are extremely disappointed and deeply offended that nearly 40 years after the Vatican rightly removed insulting anti-Jewish language from the Good Friday Mass, it would now permit Catholics to utter such hurtful and insulting words by praying for Jews to be converted.… It’s the wrong decision at the wrong time.”

  Benedict’s attempt six months later, in February 2008, to resolve the crisis by modifying the missal and removing reference to “blindness” left many unsatisfied, because it still called for God to “enlighten [Jewish people’s] hearts” and for them to recognize Jesus Christ as their savior.

  The entire affair could have been avoided had Benedict sought greater and more balanced advice before pursuing a potentially damaging course of action. The Tridentine Mass was known to be controversial. In fact, it was considered so provocative that the council of Vatican II had toned down the language of the Good Friday prayer and replaced it with “Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant.” Yet Benedict, a learned theologian, seemed completely unprepared for the outrage its reintroduction sparked.

  All this leads to speculation over whether the pope was arrogant, incompetent, suffering from a failure of foresight, or just indifferent. Was Benedict so self-confident on theological matters that he led without consultation? Was he simply blind to the consequences of his actions? Or, rather, did he just hope for the best and fail to consider anything but a positive response? One thing was certain: the pope was incapable of learning from his mistakes. Less than a year after the unsatisfactory revision of the Good Friday prayer, his very ability to lead the Catholic Church was called into question when he decided to lift the twenty-year-long excommunication of four members of the ultratraditionalist group the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, one of whom was a known Holocaust denier.

  Cambridge University–educated bishop Richard Williamson was an insidious and unrepentant fundamentalist of the worst order; he referred to Jews as “enemies of Christ bent on world domination” and had articulated various theories disputing the reality of the Holocaust since the 1980s. Days before the pope announced his decision to lift the excommunications, Swedish television aired an interview with Williamson in which he stated his belief that the historical evidence was “hugely against six million [Jews] having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.… I believe there were no gas chambers.… I think that two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers.”

  Intent on his words causing as much offense as possible, Williamson had even calculatingly traveled to Regensburg to give his interview on German soil, with full knowledge of that country’s laws against Holocaust denial. The church, however, proceeded with the reinstatement, stating, “The Vatican has acted in relation to the excommunication and its removal for the four bishops, an action that has nothing to do with the highly criticisable statements of an individual.”

  The outcry was deafening. Benedict’s decision was described by an anonymous senior Vatican source as “the biggest catastrophe for the Roman Catholic church in modern times.” Placing such great importance on healing internal schisms with an ultratraditionalist faction of the church that would bring 150,000 Catholics back into the fold seemed unfathomable when set against the damage it would do to interfaith relations globally. Benedict’s legitimizing of Williamson was described as “shameful” by Rabbi David Rose of the American Jewish Committee: by “welcoming an open Holocaust denier into the Catholic Church without any recantation on his part, the Vatican has made a mockery of John Paul II’s moving and impressive repudiation and condemnation of anti-Semitism.”

  In Germany, the Central Council of Jews severed ties with the Catholic Church in protest at the lifting of the excommunications, and Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had always maintained a strict policy of not commenting on internal church matters, took the unprecedented step of making a statement on the crisis: “If a decision of the Vatican gives rise to the impression that the Holocaust may be denied, this cannot be left to stand.… The pope and the Vatican should clarify unambiguously that there can be no denial and that there must be positive relations with the Jewish community overall. These clarifications have, in my opinion, not yet been sufficient.”

  These words carried so much weight that the following day, February 5, 2009, the Vatican made its own statement, claiming that Pope Benedict had not been aware of Bishop Williamson’s views when he lifted the excommunication and that Williamson had been ordered to publicly withdraw his comments before being readmitted to the church. (He refused and was promptly removed from his seminary.) But this excuse only exacerbated uncertainty about the pope’s competence. How could he not have been aware? And if he genuinely hadn’t been aware, why had his advisers not informed him?

  In a letter of apology to bishops a month later, Benedict effectively admitted his own incompetence, writing, “I have been told that consulting the information available on the internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on.” But he also defended the concept of welcoming the priests back into the fold: “Should not we, as good educators, also be capable of overlooking various faults and making every effort to open up broader vistas?… I do not think that they [Williamson and the others] would have chosen the priesthood if, alongside various distorted and unhealthy elements, they did not have a love for Christ.… Can we simply exclude them, as representatives of a radical fringe, from our pursuit of reconciliation and unity?”

  The picture of Pope Benedict that we are left with is not of a commanding leader steering his then 1.18 billion followers through a time of crisis, but of a frail and confused old man drowning in shallow waters while those closest to him watched. At eighty-one, and after a lifetime of prayer and study inside his theological ivory tower, he was completely unprepared for the fact that the decisions he made as pope had real consequences for real people. His failure to grasp the severity of this and previous crises made it clear just how detached from the world the pope really was, left many within the church questioning whether they had elected the wrong man, and caused many outside its walls serious concern about the impact these failings were having on society.

  Such fears were published in black and white in November 2010, when secret cables released by WikiLeaks revealed a damning report sent by the U.S. embassy in the Vatican to the secretary of state in Washington, dated February 20, 2009, and entitled “The Holy See: A Failure to Communicate”:

  Summary: Together with other flaps, the recent global controversy over the lifted excommunication of a Holocaust denying bishop … exposed a major disconnect between Pope Benedict XVI’s stated intentions and the way in which his message is received by the wider world. There are many causes for this communication gap: the challenge of governing a hierarchical yet decentralized organization, leadership weaknesses at the top, and an undervaluing of (and ignorance about) 21st century communications. These factors have led to muddled, reactive messaging that reduces the volume of moral megaphone the Vatican uses to advance its objectives.

  The report went on to outline in detail the failures, perceived by the embassy and their confidential high-ranking Vatican sources, of a small number of “decision-makers advising the Pope,” who were “all men, generally in their seventies” with a distinct lack of “generational or geographical diversity,” all of which meant they “do not understand modern media and new information technologies.” The pope’s right-hand man and “highest ranking official,” Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, who was “tasked with managing the Curia,” cam
e in for the worst criticism and was labeled a “yes man” by critics who held him responsible for the curia’s disorganized state. Sources labeled “strictly protect” by the embassy also revealed concerns over the “Italio-centric nature of the Pope’s closest advisors,” who favored “old-fashioned, inwardly focused communications written in ‘coded’ language that no-one outside their tight circles can decipher.” Among Benedict’s staff, there was only one senior member, Archbishop James Harvey, from an Anglophone country, and the source felt this “meant few had exposure to the American—or, indeed, global—rough and tumble of media communications.” Furthermore, Benedict had surrounded himself with such a small pool that advisers outside the inner circle lacked “the confidence to bring him bad news.”

  Amid such chaos and with such a secretive institute as the church, it was impossible to ascertain not only who was responsible for the failings but also whether there were any credible candidates available to begin to tackle the problems faced and, in doing so, save Benedict from further disaster.

  THE FINAL THREE YEARS OF TURBULENCE

  The final three years of Benedict’s papacy afforded him little respite from scandal. The rigidity of his traditionalist views consistently put him at odds with a society more vocal and critical of the church’s conduct than any pope had experienced. He prefaced visits to Spain, the United Kingdom, and Ireland with statements condemning these countries’ “aggressive secularism” with respect to campaigns over gay and abortion rights, which he believed contrary to “natural law.” Moralizing such as this was met with particular hostility in Britain and Ireland, for at the same time as he was criticizing people’s demands for greater freedoms, he was also calling a meeting of all Irish bishops to address the scandal of sexual abuse of children by clergy.