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

by Eamon Duffy

  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.

  But in the event the visit was a personal triumph: protest was relatively low key, enthusiastic crowds greeted the pope wherever he went, and 80,000 people defied the British weather to attend an all-night prayer vigil in Hyde Park. Meticulously briefed by the local Scottish and English hierarchies, and with the help of a gifted speech-writer in the Secretariat of State, the pope handled potentially explosive issues such as the relationship between church and civil law with a deft mixture of tact and forcefulness. In an historic address to both houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall, Benedict had high praise for British democracy and its international influence, but warned against what he saw as a drift towards the marginalization of religion in British society. Benedict’s preoccupation with the erosion of the Christian heritage of Europe was here given positive expression, as he insisted on the complementary character of ‘secular rationality and religious faith’ in determining ethical norms for a healthy society. Religion, he insisted was ‘not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation.’ That message was underscored two days later by the open-air beatification ceremony in Birmingham for John Henry Newman, one of Benedict’s own intellectual heroes, and the embodiment of a humane and liberal British Catholicism in dialogue with secular culture.

  Personnel changes at the Vatican are key signals of the character of any new pontificate. Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, talented President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, was swiftly removed from his important Vatican post and dispatched as Nuncio to Egypt. In the normal course of things, the head of a major Vatican Dicastery could have expected to be made a cardinal: Fitzgerald’s exile to Cairo was a clear indication of the new pope’s steely scepticism about what he regarded as his predecessor’s imprudent overtures towards non-Christian faiths. To fill his own former post at the CDF, Benedict appointed an American, William Levada, who had collaborated with him at the CDF and who as Archbishop of San Francisco had been notably non-confrontational in dealing with the city’s assertive gay culture. His appointment was seen as a sign both that the new pope would retain an active engagement with the work of the Congregation, but also that he wished to see its procedures and working ethos move in a more sympathetic direction. A bookish canon-lawyer, Tarcisio Bertone, replaced the seasoned diplomat and Vatican bruiser, Angelo Sodano as Cardinal Secretary of State. Bertone had no previous diplomatic or political experience, a serious lack in the pope’s CEO: but he had served under Cardinal Ratzinger as Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and his appointment reflected Benedict’s preference for working with familiar and like-minded colleagues, already manifested in the appointment of Levada to the CDF. Benedict would have been better advised, however, to find a more adroit and experienced chief adviser. Bertone was to prove an unpopular and inept lieutenant, and over the eight years of Ratzinger’s pontificate the Curia was to be dogged by poor communication, and increasingly riven by internal rivalries.

  Benedict himself was to prove not only badly advised, but personally accident-prone. In the world of media sound bites, the carefully nuanced utterances of this pope-professor could prove disastrous for public relations. During a visit to his old University of Regensberg in September 2006 Pope Benedict delivered a learned lecture to an audience of scientists and scholars on ‘Faith, Reason and the University’. His theme was the union of goodness and rationality in the divine nature, and the consequent need for a proper understanding of the nature and place of reason in human value systems. The bulk of the lecture dealt with defective Christian and post-Christian understandings of rationality, but the pope began characteristically, with a reference drawn from his recent reading of a fourteenth-century account of a dispute between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologus and an unnamed Muslim teacher about the use of force in religion. The pope quoted the Emperor’s remark, ‘show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find only things bad and inhumane, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’ Benedict went on to characterize this remark as ‘astoundingly harsh’, and he drew attention to the Qur’an’s teaching that ‘There is no compulsion in religion’. Predictably, however, the world media seized on the sound bite from the long-dead emperor, and repeated it as if it were the pope’s own opinion. Muslim and secularist pundits rushed to condemn Benedict’s alleged Islamophobia, there were protests and demonstrations by Islamic militants, and a nun was murdered. Vatican attempts at clarification did little to quell the uproar, and the subtleties and qualifications of the pope’s utterance counted for nothing. Benedict could hardly be blamed for ignorant distortions of his words by people who mostly had not bothered to read them. But a cannier operator, or one with firmer and more media-attuned advisers, might have avoided giving even the unintended provocation of an inflammatory quotation from a fourteenth-century inter-faith polemic.

  The Regensburg address was undoubtedly Benedict’s own work, and throughout his pontificate he placed his vocation as a theologian firmly at the centre of his exercise of his role as pope. He moved his vast scholarly library into the Vatican, along with his piano and his cats, and devoted much of his time to study and writing. Continuing a practice established while he was still prefect of the CDF, he held an annual symposium, or ‘Schülerkreis’, of his former doctoral students at the papal summer retreat of Castel Gandolfo. He continued writing and publishing theological work under the name of Joseph Ratzinger, notably a trilogy of volumes on the person of Jesus, written in a distinctive blend of meticulous scholarship and traditional piety. Benedict’s characteristic and in some ways innovatory theological emphases were more momentously on display in his three encyclicals. The first of them, Deus Caritas Est, published on Christmas Day 2005, startled a world conditioned by hyperbole from the media to expect only harsh theological reaction from this former doctrinal guard-dog, by taking the form of a theological meditation on divine and human love. In it Benedict sought to reconcile profane and sacred love, Eros and Agape, as complementary human expressions of the love which is the life of the Godhead. The second part of the encyclical incorporated un
published material from the writings of John Paul II, and portrayed the church as a community of love in action. Benedict’s choice of love as the central value in the life of the church attracted widespread praise. What was less noticed was that this thoroughly Augustinian emphasis on love as the supreme Christian virtue rested on a sharp distinction between the constitution of the church, the sphere of love, and the constitution of society, the sphere of justice. That distinction represented a retreat from a key element in previous papal social teaching, which drew on the Christianized Aristotelianism of St Thomas Aquinas to stress the role of justice as a central principle in the church’s engagement with and critique of society. Benedict’s emphasis on love, however attractive, seemed to some to threaten the withdrawal of the church from involvement in the struggle for justice and the structural transformation and improvement of society, in favour of a reliance on personal charity.

  Benedict’s second encyclical, Spe Salvi, promulgated in November 2007, was a nuanced exploration of the difference between Christian hope and Utopian optimism, remarkable for its personal and in some places exploratory theological tone: no previous papal encyclical had introduced leading ideas with the professorial qualifier, ‘I think’! His third and last encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (2009) originally intended to mark the fortieth anniversary of Paul VI’s major social encyclical, Populorum Progressio (1967), represented Benedict’s most significant contribution to Catholic social teaching. No papal encyclical is ever the sole work of the pope who signs it, but Caritas in Veritate, a long and dense document, bears very plainly the marks of its multiple authorship. Once again, Benedict placed love at the centre of Christian life and of the Church’s social doctrine. But he now attempted to balance this emphasis with an insistence that love must be underpinned by justice. The encyclical drew on the theories of two Italian economists, Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, to suggest that the market is properly informed not by individualism, competition, and narrowly conceived utility, but by an ethic of reciprocity and gift. The market is a form of encounter between human beings, and not merely a mechanism for the transfer of commodities and the generation of profit. Hence the market is not a morally neutral place, but one of the principle forums within which society is constructed, a fundamental arena for the enactment of justice, charity and the reciprocity of the gift, given and received. Benedict responded to the international banking crisis by insisting on the need for stronger international financial regulation and, allegedly drawing on material provided by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, he called for a strengthening of the United Nations, and for international cooperation to ensure that justice, reciprocity and shared decision-making operated in such areas as population migration, and aid to developing countries. The encyclical’s intriguing theological mix did not entirely allay worries on the left that the pope’s distinctive Augustinian perspective represented a retreat in the church’s social teaching from a concern for justice. Yet by the same token, alarmed North American theological and social neo-conservatives set about dismantling the encyclical, to separate out Benedict’s personal input ( judged inspiring and worthy of a golden mark), from the ‘incoherent sentimentalism’ of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace’s leftist contributions (to be underscored in red).49

  But Benedict’s most immediately influential theological utterance had come early in his pontificate, and had been addressed to a far narrower audience than his encyclicals. The new pope’s first Christmas address to the members of the Roman Curia in December 2005 was a reflection on the fortieth anniversary of the closure of the Second Vatican Council. In it, Benedict suggested that a ‘hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture’ had distorted much of the theology and pastoral action of the preceding forty years. This mistaken emphasis on the fundamental novelty of the Council’s teaching, and on the conflicts and compromises which underlay its documents, had, according to Benedict, been eagerly promoted in the media. But it risked driving a wedge between the pre-Conciliar and post-Conciliar Church. Liberal Catholic insistence on the dynamic ‘spirit of the Council’, which it was assumed had not always been perfectly embodied in the Conciliar texts, effectively gave a blank cheque to innovation and theological whim. By contrast, in a properly Catholic hermeneutic of continuity, the true ‘spirit of the Council’ could be determined only by a close reading of the Conciliar documents themselves, and the respectful interpretation of those documents in accordance with earlier ‘magisterial’ teaching.

  As might be expected from a theologian of his calibre, Benedict’s formulation of the notion of a ‘hermeneutic of rupture’ was carefully nuanced, and far from static: he contrasted ‘rupture’, for example, not with a hermeneutic of continuity, but with a ‘dynamic of fidelity’, a ‘hermeneutic of reform and renewal’ . All the same, the rhetorical drift of his address was unmistakably hostile to much that had been considered ‘progressive’ in the Church since Vatican II, and had the whiff of a manifesto about it. While disclaiming any intention to make an exact parallel, Benedict provocatively quoted St Basil of Caesarea’s lurid picture of the state of the Church after the Council of Nicaea, evoking in his words ‘the confused din of uninterrupted clamouring, [which] has now filled almost the whole of the Church, falsifying through excess or failure the right doctrine of the faith.’ This utterance was seized on by some as a charter for reaction. It was seen, probably correctly, as tacit papal approval of the attack launched by the Papal Vicar of Rome, Cardinal Ruini, earlier that same year, on liberal interpretations of the Council, in particular those offered in the major scholarly five-volume history of the Council edited by the Bologna-based historian Giuseppe Alberigo. The ‘hermeneutic of rupture’ rapidly became a party watchword, convenient shorthand for ideas literally out of court. The phrase might be and was used to undermine or condemn many of the mainstream liturgical, pastoral and theological changes since the close of the Council. There was far more at stake here than niceties of theological terminology. A one-sided insistence on continuity seemed to many Catholics to trivialize the Conciliar call to renewal, and prompted some to ask whether, on this reading of things, anything very much had in fact happened at Vatican II.50

  The allegedly dire effects of a ‘hermeneutic of rupture’ applied most obviously to the liturgy, where change had been most controversial. On 7 July 2007 Benedict made clear his own sympathies, in the apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum. In it, he dramatically reinstated the pre-Conciliar forms of the Mass and other sacraments as venerable and legitimate expressions of Catholic worship. While the liturgy as reformed under Paul VI was to remain normative, the older rite, now officially dubbed the ‘extraordinary form’ of the Roman Rite, was declared never to have been formally abrogated, and could henceforth be freely celebrated by any priest. Bishops, religious superiors and parish priests were urged to make celebrations in the older form freely available, where requested by ‘stable groups’ of the faithful, and provision was made for enabling such celebrations even where a local bishop disapproved. This drastic reversal of the papal liturgical policy of the preceding forty years caused widespread consternation. Most diocesan bishops were opposed to it, seeing in it a repudiation of the pastoral renewal of the post-Conciliar years, a subversive papal encouragement of liturgical anarchy and the potentially divisive enshrinement of rival understandings of the Church in very different forms of worship. Traditionalist groups rejoiced, seeing in the pope’s action support for a wider critique of the Conciliar and post-Conciliar reforms.

  The pope’s determination to reverse some of the liturgical changes of recent years in the teeth of episcopal opposition was exemplified again in the Vatican’s imposition of a new English translation of the Roman Missal in 2011. There had been widespread dissatisfaction with the English-language Missal of 1973, hastily prepared in the heat of the post-Conciliar liturgical reforms, and the English-speaking Episcopal conferences therefore commissioned their own greatly improved version, which was completed in the late 1990s. Publicatio
n of this version was blocked by the Vatican, however, which instead imposed a third version, prepared by the so called Vox Clara commission, established by Benedict under the chairmanship of the pugnaciously conservative Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell. This new Missal came into use in Advent 2011, and consciously embodied the norms for translation outlined in John Paul II’s 2001 instruction on translation, Liturgiam authenticam. This document privileged translation ‘integrally and in the most exact manner, without omissions or additions … and without paraphrases or glosses’ over against the notion of ‘dynamic equivalence’ which had underlain the 1973 Missal. The Vox Clara version was, accordingly, clunkily literal, heavily reliant on sacralized and Latinate terms, and clogged with ninety-word sentences and multiple sub-clauses, in an attempt to reproduce not merely the sense, but the very sequence and structure of the original Latin. Priests found themselves struggling to make such prayers intelligible when declaimed to parish congregations. But the peremptory manner of the Missal’s imposition over the heads of the local Episcopal conferences was as at least as disturbing as any rhetorical shortcomings.