Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (67 page)

Remarkably for so diffident and soft-spoken a personality, he added to this reputation in a series of outspoken book-length interviews with favoured journalists, in which he called for the commencement of the work of ‘restoration’ after the post-Conciliar confusions, a ‘reform of the reform’ which would re-insert the teachings of the Council into the longer perspective of traditional Catholic belief and practice. The language of these interviews was occasionally startlingly unguarded, even waspish, for so highly placed a curial figure. He called for a new ‘non-conformism’ which would confront rather than collude with the cultural revolution which had marginalized the Christian heritage of Europe, and he criticised the Church’s ‘euphoric post-Conciliar solidarity’ with the secular world. His fierce and frequent criticism of the new Mass was also remarkable in a Vatican official, since it implied Paul VI’s responsibility for what Ratzinger saw as a tragically flawed liturgical revolution.

The election of so controversial a figure in one of the shortest conclaves of modern times took many commentators by surprise. In fact, the cardinals opposed to his candidacy had been unable to identify a plausible alternative, and Ratzinger had entered the Conclave already with an impressive body of support. He was quite clearly the ablest spokesman for the values of the previous pontificate, and one of the few curial cardinals with a world reputation. Everyone respected his intellect. As Prefect of the CDF for more than twenty years, he was the best-known member of the Curia, and since an interview with the CDF was a routine feature of
ad limina
visits, every cardinal who was also a diocesan
bishop had had dealings with him. In these encounters, his careful preparation, attentive listening, unfailing courtesy and great linguistic gifts had earned the respect even of those who did not share his outlook. As Dean of the College of Cardinals he presided and preached at the funeral of John Paul II with dignity, presence and a manifest emotion which surprised those who had thought of him as a bloodless administrator. As Cardinal Dean he also presided at the General Congregations which had administered the Church between the death of John Paul and the start of the Conclave. In these meetings he displayed a markedly collaborative spirit. Even cardinals who believed that under John Paul II the papacy had become over-directive felt that here might be a man who, for all his close association with the previous regime, appeared to be a less dominant personality, and more of a team player.

Close collaborators though they had been, John Paul II and Benedict XVI were indeed radically different kinds of men. Joseph Ratzinger was both more learned and more theologically sophisticated than his predecessor, but also a good deal less religiously adventurous, a man of the sacristy whose shy and even spinsterish temperament stood in utter contrast to the titanic energies and extraordinary life-story of Wojtyla. John Paul II was a stout defender of tradition, yet he was untroubled by the some of the post-Conciliar liturgical discontinuities which so disturbed his successor. He had thought nothing of drastically recasting two of the most precious devotional treasures of the Catholic Church, blithely adding an entirely new set of ‘mysteries’ to the ancient fifteen sorrowful, joyful and glorious mysteries of the Rosary, and breaking with centuries of popular piety by eliminating from the Stations of the Cross the figure of Veronica, the woman who had allegedly wiped Jesus’ face with a towel (a theme which has inspired some transcendentally great religious art). Wojtyla’s piety was populist, and saturated in the preoccupations and attitudes of Polish Catholicism. He had a strong apocalyptic streak, represented by his insertion into the sacrosanct Easter Calendar of the new and frankly kitsch visionary Polish cult of the ‘Divine Mercy’, and by his belief that the bizarre and hazy visions of the ‘Third Secret of Fatima’ related directly to the attempt on his life by Ali Agca. Benedict XVI was also deeply indebted to the traditional piety of his native Bavaria, to the baroque churches, the music and the devotional practices of his youth. But his traditionalism was altogether more considered, bookish and conceptual than Wojtyla’s. These instinctual differences between them were evident in Ratzinger’s notable lack of
enthusiasm for the millennium celebrations, and his profound reservations about the wisdom of John Paul’s Assisi prayer-services with leaders of other faiths. It had been evident to the discerning eye when, on John Paul II’s authority, the Third Secret of Fatima was published. The CDF’s theological commentary on it was notably lukewarm and generalising, a damage-limitation exercise designed to empty the ‘secret’ of its apocalyptic menace and to demonstrate that, as Cardinal Ratzinger observed dryly to one journalist, ‘Nowhere does it say anything more than what the Christian message already says.’
⁴⁸

To some observers, the choice of a European cardinal was both a surprise and a disappointment. Demographic change and the spread of drastic secularism meant that the growth areas of Catholicism now lay outside Europe, in Latin America, Africa and Asia, where congregations were large, seminaries and convents full. This might have suggested that the time was ripe for a non-European pope. But no single cardinal from the developing world commanded the confidence of the College of Cardinals, and Europeans still just formed the majority of the electoral College. The fact that Christianity in Europe was on the defensive, numbers dwindling, vocations drying up, seemed to many cardinals a reason for seeking a pope who would make the reversal of these trends a priority. Cardinal Ratzinger had written and lectured extensively on the crisis presented to the Church in secular Europe, he had repeatedly insisted on the continuing importance of the continent’s Christian heritage, even to the extent of publicly opposing the admission of Turkey into the European Union. His address to the cardinals before the Conclave had taken as its theme the need to oppose secularism and the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ in the West in all its manifestations. Here, it seemed, was a man whose preoccupations met the needs of the moment, and who had the intellectual equipment to attempt both diagnosis and cure. And a sedate seventy-eight-year-old who had repeatedly offered his resignation and longed for a Bavarian retirement in the latter years of Papa Wojtyla, Papa Ratzinger was unlikely to be pope for long, and he would certainly be less peripatetic than his energetic predecessor. His election promised a shorter, quieter pontificate.

Ratzinger’s choice of the name Benedict XVI was a shrewd gesture. Conflict within the Church about the heritage of Vatican II made the choice of names a political minefield, which the new pope circumvented by avoiding the name of any recent pope. He explained his choice of
name by reminding the cardinals that Benedict XV had been a peacemaker and reconciler, as he himself wished to be. He reminded them also of the key role of the monastic movement in the formation of Europe. John Paul II had made St Benedict co-patron of Europe: here was confirmation of one of the chief priorities of the new pontificate. Commentators, fearful of the new pope’s reputation as a hammer of dissent, took comfort from the fact that Pope Benedict XV had ended the hunt for heresy by calling a halt to the Modernist crisis.

Pope Benedict’s early speeches and sermons made clear that he understood well his own equivocal reputation, and the need to reassure those who feared from him authoritarian rigidity and a withdrawal from engagement with other faiths and other Christian traditions. Within twelve hours of his election, his programmatic concluding address at the end of the Conclave (delivered in Latin) stressed the importance of ‘collegial communion’ and the fellowship of bishops in ‘one apostolic college’. He asked for the ‘constant, active and wise collaboration’ of the cardinals and for a growing closeness with his fellow bishops ‘in prayer and counsel’. He pledged his commitment to the continuing implementation of the ‘timeless’ teaching of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, though he added the significant qualifying phrases ‘in the wake of my predecessors and in faithful continuity with the millennia-old tradition of the Church’. He declared that his ‘primary commitment’ would be to work for ‘the full and visible unity of all Christ’s followers’, and he assured those of other faiths and none that ‘the Church wants to continue to build an open and sincere dialogue with them’.

The new pope’s early months were spent blamelessly enough at his desk, confirming appointments, seeing the heads of the Vatican congregations, receiving the world’s bishops on their
ad limina
visits, edifying the crowds at the weekly Wednesday audiences with low-key devotional expositions of the psalms. On 13 May he announced, to no one’s surprise, that the beatification process of his predecessor would commence immediately, without the usual five-year pause, and the cause was duly launched in the Lateran basilica on the eve of the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, 28 June. But there was otherwise a notable lack of excitement: only two trips outside Rome were planned for his first year, the first of them a helicopter-hop to the Adriatic coast of Italy, to preach at the Eucharistic Congress at Bari, a month after his election. It was noted that the new pope did not make a detour to visit the nearby shrine of Padre Pio, Italy’s favourite miracle-working saint, as his predecessor certainly
would have done.

This low-key symbolic disengagement from the folksier aspects of John Paul II’s regime manifested itself in other shifts of style and aesthetic. The pope-mobile was replaced by a less spectacular open vehicle. The Polish pope had trekked the world leaning on a strikingly modern silver pastoral staff designed by the sculptor Lelio Scorzelli for Pope Paul VI. Countless photographs had shown the ageing Wojtyla memorably hunched beneath Scorzelli’s gaunt and tortured image of the Crucified Christ. In 2008 Benedict formally abandoned this iconic object, in favour of an altogether tamer and churchier-looking nineteenth-century golden cross, originally made for Pio Nono and carried by all his successors until the mid-1960s. And commentators noticed the new pope’s attention to what he wore. Ratzinger lived a simple, even austere lifestyle, preferring plain food (Bavarian potato ravioli was a particular favourite), drinking water, going to bed early. But he was always a dapper dresser, and now appeared in designer sunglasses, baseball caps and a quilted white jacket on holiday. In ceremonial mode also there was a notable attention to
couture:
he restored a more old-fashioned image of the papacy by reviving the round, red soup-plate papal hat (the ‘saturno’) and the hand-made red slippers abandoned by Wojtyla, and, to the outrage of animal rights campaigners, Benedict also sported the traditional ermine-trimmed papal cap (‘camauro’) and shoulder-cape (‘mozetta’). (After his resignation,
Time
magazine ran a jokey feature on Benedict’s ‘twenty-five best hats’.) On the other hand, Pope Benedict’s official coat of arms broke with papal tradition by replacing the triple tiara and crossed keys with a simple episcopal mitre and keys. No pope since Paul VI had actually worn the tiara: but the abandonment of even its heraldic use by this German pope was a deliberate signal that the immemorial claims of the popes to sovereignty over the secular world had been a theological cul-de-sac, an end to the legacy of Gregory VII and Boniface VIII. And at his papal inauguration, Benedict was invested with a redesigned pallium, in the form of a broad white stole crossed over the left shoulder. This deliberate return to the appearance of the vestment in the first Christian millennium may have been designed to recall older and more collegial forms of papal ministry, less offensive to Eastern Orthodox sensibilities. If so, this particular piece of arcane archaeological revivalism turned out to be less than practical. The Ratzinger pallium kept slipping inconveniently from his shoulders and, doubtless with some embarrassment after the fanfare of the inauguration, it was quietly abandoned
in favour of the traditional circular pattern. But one more substantial change seemed to represent an implicit judgment on the wisdom of at least one of John Paul II’s decisions. In June 2007, a Vatican
motu proprio
abolished John Paul II’s controversial provisions for the election of a pope in a hung conclave by a simple majority, and reinstated the requirement for a two-thirds majority in all cases, a matter of sound sense and long experience, and a reversion which suggested that some at least of John Paul’s decisions had been made without Ratzinger’s agreement.

There were some equally surprising continuities. Benedict was never to rival his energetic predecessor’s enthusiastic accumulation of airmiles. Yet despite his age and shyness, over the next seven years he carried out more than two dozen ‘Apostolic journeys’ in Europe, Africa, North and South America and Australasia, and proved unexpectedly effective in his handling of the crowds. Despite his ferocious reputation as ‘God’s rottweiler’, Benedict’s gently courteous manner disarmed hostility, and a pastoral trip to the United States in April 2008, widely expected to provoke confrontation and protest from liberal Catholics, was a striking success. Papa Ratzinger charmed Americans by his warm appreciation of the nation’s inherited Christian values, and disarmed them by his repeated and manifestly heartfelt apologies for the scandal of sexual abuse by clergy and religious, which had traumatized (and drastically impoverished) some American dioceses. There was a marked and, to some, unexpected, absence of the finger-wagging reproach that had characterised some of the sterner pastoral interventions of John Paul II.

Benedict’s State Visit to Great Britain in September 2010 epitomized the effectiveness of this aspect of his pontificate. After months of highprofile media coverage of clerical sexual abuse in Britain, the projected visit was a major worry to the Scottish and English Catholic authorities. Relations between government and church had recently been embittered by the enforced closure of all Catholic adoption agencies, because of their conscientious refusal to place children with same-sex couples. The announcement of the visit provoked a torrent of media hostility, and there were threats that celebrity secularists would seek Benedict’s arrest for alleged complicity in the cover-up of sexual abuse. A fatuous officejoke memo from a minor foreign-office official precipitated a diplomatic crisis by proposing that the official souvenirs of the visit should include a new brand of papally endorsed condoms.