This view was widespread in Vatican circles. Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, a key player in the Roman Curia in the years that Andreotti was in power, called the lower court ruling “incredible." Cardinal Fiorenzo Angelini compared Andreotti to Jesus Christ, another victim of an unjust verdict, and hoped for a “resurrection" from the Supreme Court. L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, expressed “full solidarity" with Andreotti, saying the verdict “can only be rejected by good sense." Cardinal Camillo Ruini, head of the Italian bishops conference and a key advisor to the Pope, took the occasion of an address to the Italian bishops to express his “intact personal esteem" for Andreotti. Conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi minced no words, charging that Andreotti was the victim of “politicized sectors of the magistrates that have tried to change the course of democratic politics." Berlusconi, who has made attacking the alleged bias of the judicial system a staple of his rhetoric, was elected in a landslide to the prime minister’s job on May 13, 2001, despite the fact that he faces several rather serious criminal indictments himself. Many Italian voters simply assumed the charges were politically motivated and looked past them.
The point is not whether Andreotti is guilty or innocent. (In the end, the case was heard by Italy’s highest court, which reversed the appeals court and absolved Andreotti on all charges.) Most Italians assumed the courts didn’t really care about guilt or innocence. The episode confirmed for them how criminal trials are often an extention of politics by other means. Liberal judges will convict conservative defendants, and vice-versa. As one writer in La Repubblica, a major Roman daily, put it November 20, 2002, “Practically every high-profile case in Italy is ‘instrumentalized’ and transformed into a new Dreyfus affair."
The result is deep ambivalence inside the Vatican about automatic referral of accusations against priests to the police. What about situations, Vatican officials wonder, in which the civil authorities are out to get us? It is a question that strikes many Americans as paranoid, but not so in Rome. Americans will insist that this is not our experience, that by and large our district attorneys and judges are fair and independent, and their involvement is needed to correct the Church’s tendency to protect its own. Why can’t the Vatican trust the American church to craft policy that makes sense for its situation? There’s merit to that question, and in the end the Vatican did not block U.S. policies requiring credible allegations to be relayed to civil authorities. Yet in a globalized world, nothing remains local for very long. The Vatican is keenly aware that the United States is the world’s leading culture and that whatever American Catholics do will be watched and imitated. The Vatican was convinced that the American bishops were setting a global precedent, and they worried about what that precedent might mean in cultures with different experiences of the trustworthiness of the legal system.
Layer Four: Europe
During the diplomatic wrangling over the war in Iraq, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous distinction between “old" and “new" Europe, suggesting that opposition to the U.S. position was coming from a superannuated old guard. Whatever the merits of Rumsfeld’s analysis, there is no place that’s more “old Europe" than the Holy See, since it is both Europe’s oldest state and its oldest continually functioning institution of any sort. On many contemporary issues, from Church/state relations to gay marriage, the Holy See embodies a sort of antique European tradition that stands over against the present secularized European consensus. At the same time, many of the officials who call the shots in the Holy See have grown up in the same prominent families, attended the same schools, and move in the same cultural circles as Europe’s political, industrial, and intellectual leaders. They cannot help but be, in many ways, cut from the same cloth.
When I arrived in Rome in July 2000, one of the first things I did was to make the rounds of English-speaking ambassadors accredited to the Holy See. The ambassadors can be good sources of insight on the Vatican, because in some ways they have an insider’s knowledge, but at the same time they are not part of the Holy See and can maintain a critical distance. One of the ambassadors gave me the following advice in trying to make sense of Vatican diplomacy: “Never forget that the Holy See is located in Europe, and most of its key decision-makers are European. If all else fails, ask yourself how European governments see a particular issue, and nine times out of ten that will end up being the stand of the Holy See."
Not everyone, it should be said, buys this bit of analysis. I once asked Cardinal Francis Stafford, an American who heads the Pontifical Council for the Laity, if he believed the Vatican thinks like other European governments. He laughed, asking: “European governments of what century?" Stafford has a point—the Holy See and, say, the post-revolutionary government of France have some deep philosophical differences. Yet the ambassador’s comment also reflects a genuine insight, which is that the sociological reality of European upbringing and a primarily European circle of discourse cannot help but exercise a tug on the way the personnel in the Vatican think. Here we’ll take two examples of the point: Vatican attitudes toward the Middle East and toward the United Nations.
MIDDLE EAST
European governments tilt toward the Palestinians on the Israeli/Palestinian problem, driven in part by a widespread European sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people, in part (at least in Britain and France) by the legacy of colonial pro-Arab policies. The European left, for whom colonialism is akin to original sin, has watched as the Israeli government repeats what they regard as the classic oppressive behavior of a colonial power, and it has fueled a severe political reaction. This tendency has been especially pronounced since the 1982 Israeli incursion into Lebanon, and the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps carried out by Israel’s Lebanese allies. The election of Ariel Sharon, widely regarded as the author of that atrocity, as Israel’s prime minister brought European sympathy for the Palestinians to a new level. For those in search of a more crass explanation, there is also a long history of trade relations between Europe and Arab nations.
Whatever the reason, the Palestinians generally see Europe and the EU as a major beachhead of international support. For much of the 1990s, the European Union was a principal source of financial backing for the Palestinian National Authority. In March 1999, the European Council affirmed the Palestinians’ “unqualified" right to self-determination, “including the option of a state." Some observers sympathetic to the Israelis say that at times European governments have veered dangerously close to tacitly endorsing terrorism. On April 15, 2002, Austria, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden supported a UN Human Rights Commission resolution that approved the use of “all available means, including armed struggle" to establish a Palestinian state. It is difficult to imagine the United States, especially in the post-9/11 era, voting to accept such language.
These policy choices reflect popular sentiment. A May 2002 survey conducted by First International Resources for the Anti-Defamation League found that by a two-to-one margin Europeans are more sympathetic to the Palestinians than the Israelis on the conflict in the Middle East. The survey also found that the more closely Europeans follow their media, the more likely they are to support the Palestinians, which reflects the pro-Palestinian tilt of much of the European press. In 2003, for example, Israel’s Foreign Ministry briefly refused to speak with the BBC after it aired a documentary comparing Israel to Iraq, implying that Israel is not a democracy and suggesting that Israel had used nerve gas against the Palestinians. The film employed concentration camp imagery, drawing jailed nuclear spy Mordechai Vanunu clutching at and peering through a barbed wire fence. It also juxtaposed America’s refusal to discuss Israel’s nuclear capability with Bush saying “the greatest danger facing America and the world is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical and biological weapons."
This wide European sympathy for the Palestinians has long been reflected in the Holy See. The Vatican has vocally supported the Pa
lestinian right to self-determination. John Paul II repeated the point in March 2003, when he received the credentials of Oded Ben-Hur as Israel’s ambassador to the Holy See. “The Holy See is convinced that the present conflict will be resolved only when there are two independent and sovereign states," the Pope said. Sometimes the rhetoric can be much sharper. In April 2002, Vatican spokesperson Joaquin Navarro-Valls issued a statement saying that the Pope “rejects the unjust and humiliating conditions imposed on the Palestinian people as well as reprisals and revenge attacks which do nothing but feed the sense of frustration and hatred." During the 2002 crisis at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, when Palestinian gunmen forcibly entered the basilica and refused to leave, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, regularly referred to the standoff as an Israeli “siege," even accusing the Israelis of trying to “exterminate" the Palestinian people.
In terms of specific policy proposals, the Vatican has long supported the deployment of international observers, meaning some kind of peacekeeping force, to the region and a special international status for Jerusalem—both proposals anathema to Israel’s conception of its own sovereignty. The Vatican’s affection for the Palestinians is visible in ways large and small. In the chapel just off the main hall used for meetings of the Synod of Bishops, for example, the walls are lined with a set of pearl-white Stations of the Cross, a gift to John Paul from Yasser Arafat. The Pope personally instructed that Arafat’s gift be placed in this high-profile spot.
The European cultural matrix of the Holy See is, of course, only one factor shaping this stance. Vatican diplomats are genuinely convinced that the current state of affairs amounts to a serious injustice against the Palestinians. Beyond that, there is also the realpolitik concern for the fate of the 300,000 Christians in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, of whom a little under half are Catholic. These Christians are almost entirely Palestinian Arabs, and their welfare is linked to the general situation of the Palestinian community. Under the weight of the second Intifadah, the occupation, and the general economic malaise, Christians have been abandoning the “Holy Land" in large numbers. In the town of Bethlehem, for example, the proportion of the population which is Christian has dropped from 80 percent before 1948 to less than 33 percent today. The Holy See’s nightmare scenario is that the holy sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and elsewhere will become museums without living Christian populations. More broadly, the Holy See is concerned about its dialogue with Islam, especially given post-9/11 concerns about a clash of civilizations. The Holy See’s perceived support for the Palestinian cause is obviously of value in fostering good relations with Islam, at both the global and local levels.
In this mix, the European contribution is one factor that produces a foreign policy tilted toward the Palestinian cause. In extreme form, this tendency can lead the Church into embarrassing situations. Witness the case of Auxiliary Bishop Hilarion Cappucci, a member of the Syrian Greek–Melkite rite who served in Jerusalem in the 1960s and 1970s and who holds the personal title of patriarch. He was arrested by Israeli security forces in 1974 on his way back from a trip to Lebanon, after his Mercedes sedan was found loaded with TNT and rifles headed for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. At the time Cappucci belonged to Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s main faction, and was a member of the PLO’s parliament-in-exile. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison, but released in 1977 after a personal appeal from Pope Paul VI. Now in his eighties, Cappucci has lived since 1977 in a private apartment in Rome. He was supposed to keep away from the limelight, but that did not stop him from being at the right hand of Tarik Aziz, Saddam Hussein’s deputy, when Aziz visited Assisi in February 2003.
Within the internal debates in the Holy See, there are relatively few voices that challenge the pro-Palestinian consensus, because virtually all the senior officials who are at the table when decisions are made come from a European cultural milieu in which this orientation is conventional wisdom.
UNITED NATIONS
Those aware of the titanic battles the Holy See waged at United Nations conferences in Cairo and Beijing in the 1990s, or the criticism the Vatican directs at United Nations agencies on issues of family planning, sometimes find the Holy See’s strong pro-UN bias on most other matters puzzling. In 2000, for example, the Holy See accused the United Nations system of “utilitarian" and “Malthusian" values in connection with a manual on birth control in refugee camps. The fact is, however, that in concert with other European governments, the Holy See has been among the leading supporters of a strong role for the United Nations in international affairs. As papal nuncio to France, Angelo Roncalli—later to become John XXIII—was active in behind-the-scenes work on the drafting of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When the General Assembly took up the declaration in 1948, observers from the Holy See were present. In later years, the Vatican was the fifth nation to ratify the UN convention on the rights of the child and was among the first to ratify the anti–land mine treaty that won for its supporters a Nobel Peace Prize.
This stance was clearly on display during the buildup to the Iraq war, as one of the grounds upon which the Vatican criticized the proposed U.S. action was precisely the lack of an international warrant. “A single member of the international community cannot decide: ‘I’m doing this and you others can either help me or stay home.’ If that were the case, the entire system of international rules would collapse. We’d risk the jungle," said French Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, at the time the Vatican’s top diplomat. Then Archbishop Renato Martino, an Italian who heads the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and who is now a cardinal, made a similar point January 4, 2003. “Evidently, unilateralism is unacceptable," Martino said. We cannot think that there is a universal policeman who takes it upon himself to punish those who act badly. . . . The United States, being part of the international assembly, has to adapt to the exigencies of others."
The Holy See is uniquely positioned to speak about the need for global governance, since it has been exercising a kind of planetary responsibility for the Catholic Church for two millennia. The Catholic worldview is by definition supranational, which is what has always made the Church dangerous to totalitarian states. In part, this concern for a meaningful international order is born of the sense that in a globalized world, only an international body will be able to ensure that economic, social, and political transformations are channeled in directions that promote the common good. Without an international political entity in which citizens can exert influence over their own destiny, the global stage is left to commercial and military actors that do not have the same motivations to pursue the welfare of all.
Yet the European cultural subtext to the Vatican is also part of this picture. Europeans tend to be among the most enthusiastic supporters of the United Nations system based on their own twentieth-century history, which painfully illustrated the bankruptcy of nationalism. This was an especially telling point for John Paul II, who was nineteen when the Nazis invaded Poland and spent much of his adult life under the Soviet system imposed on Poland after the Second World War. The same instinct that led Europeans to be willing to surrender chunks of sovereignty in order to make the European Union work is also behind the push for a beefed-up UN. For most Europeans, support for the United Nations falls into the category of common sense, outside the bounds of most political debate. It’s a policy upheld by both left and right. Inside the Vatican, therefore, with the exception of personnel concerned most directly with issues of family and sexual morality, the bias in favor of the United Nations, and other international bodies such as the International Criminal Court, is strong. We’ll return to this point in chapter 7, in the context of flashpoints in the relationship between the Holy See and the United States.
5
VATICAN THEOLOGY
One night during the October 1999 Synod of Bishops, National Catholic Reporter publisher Tom Fox and I had been out for dinner with colleagues, and afterward, shortly
before 11:00 P.M., we began to make our way across St. Peter’s Square. It was a cold autumn evening, after the peak of tourist season, and the square was virtually deserted. From a distance, I caught site of a tall figure wearing a long black coat, with a briefcase perched at his feet, standing alone near the obelisk in the center of the square. It took me a moment to realize it was Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna. At the time he was just fifty-four, the second-youngest cardinal in the world, and an ecclesiastical wunderkind.
Schönborn comes from a distinguished Bohemian family, with nineteen priests, bishops, and archbishops among his ancestors. A Dominican, Schönborn did his postgraduate work in theology under Joseph Ratzinger at the University of Regensburg in Germany. John Paul II tapped him in 1988 to serve as editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1992. He was named auxiliary bishop of Vienna in 1991, archbishop in 1995, and entered the College of Cardinals in 1998. Many Vatican watchers have treated Schönborn for years as Ratzinger’s crown prince, the favorite to succeed him at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Others think he may be destined for still higher office—the papacy itself.
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