In the late afternoon of May 13, 1981, while the pope was being driven around St. Peter’s Square in his Popemobile during a general audience, a Turkish gunman named Ali Agca fired three shots at him at almost point-blank range. He was rushed to the Gemelli Hospital. Agca was immediately arrested, later telling the examining magistrate that he was a “nationalist atheist” who hated both the Catholic Church and American and Russian imperialism. He added that he had hoped to kill the pope during his visit to Turkey in November 1979 but that his intended victim had then been too well protected. In Rome he was an open target. Agca’s paymasters, if any, were never revealed, though the Bulgarian government came under heavy suspicion. On his recovery John Paul announced that he had forgiven his would-be assassin; in 1983 he visited him in prison, and something approaching friendship developed between them. In later years the pope also received Agca’s mother and brother in audience.
After five hours of surgery and the loss of three-quarters of his blood, his convalescence was long: it was not till October that he was completely restored to health. But by 1982, having by now become something of a media superstar, he was able to resume his harrowing travel schedule, making four or five major journeys a year around the world. By the end of his twenty-six-year pontificate he had chalked up a total of 104 foreign journeys to 129 countries. In May–June 1982—despite the Falklands War, which very nearly caused a cancellation—he went on a six-day visit to Britain, the first ever by a reigning pope, during which he preached in Canterbury Cathedral. In March 2000 he was in Israel—what, one wonders, would Pius XII have thought?7 In 2001, in Damascus, he became the first pope ever to pray in an Islamic mosque. His one regret was that he never managed to get to Russia.
In other respects, however, John Paul II can now be seen to have been closer in thought to Pius XII than he was to John XXIII. And perhaps it was not entirely surprising. For virtually his entire adult life until he came to Rome, the Polish Church had had its back to the wall, struggling first against the Germans, then against the Russians for its very survival. Wojtyła had fought for that church as it was, not as it might be, and on becoming pope at fifty-eight he was too old to change. His fourteen encyclicals reveal him if anything as a reactionary, doggedly reasserting the old Catholic teachings on euthanasia, abortion, the ordination of women, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage. Those who had looked to his predecessor for a major change of policy on birth control—permitting the use of condoms if only to prevent the spread of HIV—knew all too well that from John Paul II they could expect nothing of the kind. Where he surprised everybody was in his berserk canonizations of everyone in sight: quite apart from the 1,340 men and women whom he beatified, the first step to sainthood, he canonized no fewer than 483 new saints, more than had been made in the previous five centuries.
Toward the end of his pontificate John Paul was a firm opponent of the Iraq War. In his 2003 State of the World Address he made his views abundantly clear: “No to war!” he declared. “War is not always inevitable, but it is always a defeat for humanity.” Later he is quoted as pointing out that “wars do not in general resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore ultimately prove futile.” How right he was; but by this time he was failing fast. In 1991 there had appeared the first signs of Parkinson’s disease—though the Vatican characteristically kept it secret for twelve years, admitting it only in 2003, by which time his speech was noticeably slurred and he was confined to a wheelchair. He died on the evening of Saturday, April 2, 2005, forty-six days short of his eighty-fifth birthday. The Requiem Mass which was said for him six days later was attended by well over four million people, almost certainly the largest single Christian pilgrimage in history.
THE FUNERAL SERVICE for John Paul II was conducted by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, at that time prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Holy Office and before that as the Holy Inquisition. There his principal duty was to ensure that those teaching in Catholic institutions kept within the strict doctrines laid down by Rome. Despite his reputation as “God’s rottweiler,” Ratzinger was in fact of a mild and gentle disposition and was generally considered the favorite for the succession; and although favorites are often passed over by the conclaves, no one was surprised when, on the fifth ballot, he was duly elected, the seventh German pope in history but the first since the eleventh century.
For the highly intelligent theologian that he undoubtedly is, Benedict has not, at the time of writing, proved himself as surefooted as one might have hoped. In little more than two years he managed seriously to offend three important religious groups: first the Muslims, then the Jews, and finally the Protestant churches. The first faux pas occurred in a lecture which he gave less than eighteen months after his accession at his old University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006. “Show me,” he said,
just what Mohammed introduced that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith that he preached.
It subsequently appeared that the pope had merely been quoting, rather than endorsing, the alleged words of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus in 1391, but he unfortunately failed to make that clear at the time. There were widespread protests all over the Muslim world, and on the West Bank two Christian churches were firebombed. Later the pope made a handsome apology, which he repeated at a specially convened reception for twenty high-ranking Muslim diplomats at Castel Gandolfo. Two months later he paid an official visit to Turkey. There were hostile demonstrations at Istanbul airport, and special security measures had to be taken for his protection, but he prayed in the Blue Mosque, and the visit was accounted a fair success.
Next, he needlessly antagonized the Protestants. A papal declaration issued on July 11, 2007, stated:
It is nevertheless difficult to see how the title of “Church” could possibly be attributed to [Protestant communities], given that they do not accept the theological notion of the Church in the Catholic sense and that they lack elements considered essential to the Catholic Church.
This time there was a howl of protest. The president of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy described the declaration as “a huge step backwards,” while his French equivalent gave a sinister warning of “external repercussions”—though no one was quite sure what he meant.
Shortly afterward he turned his attention to the Jews, many of whom already felt a sense of outrage at the Church’s apparent insistence on canonizing Pope Pius XII. Although Benedict has given no grounds for accusations of personal anti-Semitism, his decision on July 7, 2007, to permit once again the Tridentine Mass, which includes a prayer that asks God to lift the veil so that the Jews “may be delivered from their darkness,” was not well received in Jewish circles. Still less popular was the subsequent lifting of excommunication on the four breakaway bishops from Archbishop Lefebvre’s Society of St. Pius X, among whom was the English Bishop Richard Williamson, notorious for his continued denial of the Holocaust.8
These were all positive actions, which could—and should—have been avoided. The far greater storm in which Benedict soon found himself engulfed was not of his own making. The storm first broke in Ireland, with horrific revelations of widespread child abuse, and frequently of gratuitous physical violence, in Catholic schools and orphanages. Almost as reprehensible was the instinctive cover-up by the Church, which had tended to transfer those responsible to another parish rather than risk unpleasant publicity by defrocking them on the spot. The pope could have earned a reputation for swift, decisive action by instantly removing the Irish primate, Cardinal Seán Brady, after he admitted having been involved in this cover-up in the 1970s, but at the time of writing Brady remains in his position. Meanwhile, the scandal over clerical pedophilia has spread across Europe and the United States. True, in March 2010 the pope wrote a letter addressed to the Catholics of Ireland, apologizing for the “sinful and criminal” abuses that had been going on for several de
cades. Here again, however, one wonders why he limited his apology to Ireland—with the result that Catholics in Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, and above all Germany inevitably feel that what happens in their countries is of less concern to him. His reactions have been too little, too late, and the storm shows no sign of abating.
It is now well over half a century since progressive Catholics have longed to see their Church bring itself into the modern age. With the accession of every succeeding pontiff they have raised their hopes that some progress might be made on the leading issues of the day—on homosexuality, on contraception, on the ordination of women priests. And each time they have been disappointed. Sometimes, indeed, the Church seems to take a step backward: as recently as July 15, 2010, it elevated the ordination of women to the status of “grave delict,” making it one of the most serious crimes in canon law and effectively putting it on the same level as child abuse.9
And so, what with one thing and another, the present pontificate has gotten off to a distinctly shaky start. Even during Benedict’s otherwise successful visit to Britain in September 2010, the Anglican hierarchy was hard-pressed to hide its indignation at his recent offer to welcome into the Catholic priesthood those married Protestant bishops and priests who were leaving their own church in protest against the ordination of women bishops. But the pontificate is still unfinished, and we can as yet draw no final conclusions. All that can be said is that Pope Benedict will prove better than many of his predecessors, worse than others, and that after nearly two thousand years, and despite the atmosphere of agnosticism that prevails in much of the world today, the Roman Catholic Church—with its two billion members, representing as it does half of all Christians and about one-sixth of the global population—is, despite everything, flourishing as perhaps it has never flourished before. If he could see it now, St. Peter would—I think—be proud indeed.
1. See chapter 7.
2. See chapter 16, and Gibbon’s comment: “The most scandalous charges were suppressed: the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.”
3. See chapter 20.
4. See chapter 8.
5. It had served as a mosque throughout the Ottoman period but had been declared a secular museum by Kemal Atatürk in 1935.
6. Having for many years been convinced that the pope was indeed murdered, I have now reread the evidence on both sides and have changed my mind. The murderer, if there was one, must somehow have gained admittance to the papal apartments in the middle of the night. Unless one or both of the papal secretaries (or one or more of the small team of nuns who did the cooking and cleaning) were implicated in the plot, which I find hard to believe, I do not see how he managed to do so.
7. He would at least have been relieved that, even at the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial, John Paul made no apologies for past silences.
8. A visit to Israel in May 2009, during which he naturally followed John Paul II’s example with a visit to the Yad Vashem memorial, did much to mend the fences.
9. The Times of London, June 16, 2010. It is only fair to add that in subsequent issues, the charge was indignantly rebutted by Catholic apologists.
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