But the media wanted stories beyond the usual suspects. Had the time come for a Pope from Africa or Latin America?15 A theological hard-liner, Cardinal Francis Arinze, a Nigerian who had been at the Vatican for twenty years, was on some shortlists. He had good credentials, the equivalent of two cabinet-level posts under John Paul, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and the chief of the Congregation of Divine Worship. The idea of the first black Pope sent the press speculation about Arinze into overdrive. And seventy-year-old Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes seemed the favorite if the time was right to acknowledge the increasing power and growth of Catholicism’s Hispanic base.16
The press focused on the personalities of the frontrunners. Inside the College of Cardinals, however, the underlying struggle was the same one that confronted each conclave since the 1958 death of Pius XII: would the church select a progressive committed to reform or preserve John Paul’s conservative orthodoxy? Many progressives liked Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, Milan’s former archbishop. The problem was that Martini was seventy-eight, had been retired for several years in Jerusalem, suffered himself from what appeared to be early stages of Parkinson’s, and had said repeatedly he had no desire to be Pope. Some thought he was simply a stalking horse to test the extent of the progressives’ strength in the early balloting. If he did well, they planned to consolidate around a real candidate, likely another Jesuit, Buenos Aires’s outspoken Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (to quash any momentum for Bergoglio, someone spread the rumor that he was not strong enough to cope with the strains of the job since he had lost a lung as a teenager).17
As for the conservatives, Secretary of State Sodano was mentioned a lot, but at seventy-seven many thought him too old. And some foes tried diminishing his chances by reminding their colleagues that he had once lavished praise on the theologian Hans Küng, since condemned as a heretic.18
The seventy-one-year-old cardinal of Brussels, Godfried Danneels, was a reliable moderate, and his backers hoped that the progressives and conservatives might deadlock. If so, Danneels might emerge as a compromise.19
Only as the cardinals arrived in Rome was there some chatter that Ratzinger might be a contender after all. But any such talk was always tempered by the commentary that he was so divisive it was unlikely that two thirds of the cardinals would ever agree to bow before him and kiss his ring. In a discussion of frontrunners, London’s Daily Mail noted that Ratzinger had entrenched enemies since he had risen “to prominence as something of a reformer, but has come to embody ‘radical orthodoxy.’ Liberals hate him.”20 It was not hard to understand why. On every major issue he was a reactionary advocate. He would neither brook a discussion about ending celibacy, nor consider the ordination of women as priests. Ratzinger championed still the excommunication of dissident theologians. Gays, he said, were afflicted with an “objective disorder.” Jews deplored his “theological anti-Semitism,” his view that they could only be fulfilled if they accepted Christ. Protestants bristled at his description that they were “gravely deficient” and the suggestion that their houses of worship were not worthy of being called churches.21
That Ratzinger might be considered as the next Pope scared his adversaries, many of whom spoke anonymously to reporters.22 A “church source” was quoted saying, “Cardinal Ratzinger doesn’t want a pope as right wing as Pope John Paul II. He wants a Pope more right wing than Pope John Paul II.” Another “church source” said, “Cardinal Ratzinger wants a church which is pure and disciplined. He would focus so much on the dogma and on the purity of the church that he would drive people away, and although that would not please him, it wouldn’t bother him that much either.”23 “He has too many enemies due to his heavy-handed, centralized and arrogant approach to theology,” one widely quoted “Vatican insider” said.24 “A German Rottweiler,” said an unnamed Italian cardinal.25 “It fills me with horror,” said one unidentified theologian. “He would probably be a great Pope,” one nameless Western cardinal was quoted as saying. “But I have no idea how I would explain his election back home.”26
Some worried that Ratzinger would disappoint ordinary Catholics. He might seem a bland successor to the personable and captivating John Paul. Ratzinger had little sense of humor, never lost control of his emotions, was devoid of sentimentality, and prided himself on rigorous discipline and ecclesiastical purity. John Paul realized that a successful Pope is measured in part by the same standards as a popular political leader, a dash of charisma and an occasional sense of the showman. Ratzinger had none of that.
Camillo Ruini, the Cardinal Vicar General of Rome, in remarks widely interpreted as criticizing Ratzinger, told reporters that Catholics needed a people’s pope, someone who cared more about “ministering to the faithful rather than for bureaucratic credentials.”27 John Paul had broken ground by mixing with everyone from rock stars to top athletes to aboriginal dancers. Not only did it endear him to the faithful, but it humanized a Papacy that had seemed remote with every modern predecessor except for the short tenure of John XXIII more than forty years earlier. John Paul seemed the real headliner at a 1997 Bob Dylan concert in Bologna, with 300,000 fans cheering the Pontiff to Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”28 That concert, broadcast live on Italian television, sealed the Pope’s image as a modern icon. Only inside the Vatican were top officials aware that the chief opponent to the Dylan concert had been Ratzinger.29 Mixing with popular culture was unseemly for a Pontiff, he contended, and in any case, Dylan was the wrong type of “prophet.”30 It might, argued Ratzinger, even be interpreted as an endorsement by the church of the often loose morals expressed both in the songs and personal lives of pop stars. John Paul ignored similar warnings from Ratzinger when he attended a rock concert in 2000 to raise money to relieve the crushing debts of Third World countries (he greeted the Eurythmics and Alanis Morrisette, but passed on meeting Lou Reed, whose drug-saturated lyrics were considered too risqué). Even John Paul’s annual Christmas parties were unprecedented. Over the years he shared the stage with Lionel Richie, Tom Jones, Lauryn Hill, Gloria Gaynor, Dionne Warwick, John Denver, and Whitney Houston. (After Ratzinger became the next Pope, he refused that first Christmas to meet with any of the performers who had already been invited while John Paul was alive; he canceled the event after that.)31
It had taken years for John Paul’s proactive populism to infuse Catholics with a personal enthusiasm about the church. Now some fretted that Ratzinger could cause all that to dissipate. The National Catholic Reporter’s John Allen, who five years earlier had written a biography of Ratzinger, was not surprised. “Many observers see Ratzinger as more Catholic than Jesus,” Allen wrote about the devout German.32
The conclave was set to start April 18. The 115 voting cardinals were well aware that a record-breaking two million mourners had crammed St. Peter’s to pay respect to John Paul (two cardinals, Mexico’s Adolfo Suárez Rivera and Jaime Sin of the Philippines were too ill to attend). The wait to pass by the deceased Pontiff’s casket was sometimes eight hours.I Certainly none of the cardinals was accustomed to the media horde. During the twenty-seven years of John Paul’s Papacy, CNN had created the 24/7 cycle. There was now the Internet, with its attendant minute-by-minute scrutiny. Determined to stop anonymous mudslinging, the Vatican had ordered even cleaners, cooks, and elevator operators servicing the conclave to sign an oath that threatened instant excommunication for any leaks.34 And three times the Sistine Chapel was swept for electronic listening devices (none evidently were found).
On the eve of the first session, London’s Sunday Times ran a startling headline: “Papal Hopeful Is a former Hitler Youth.” Ratzinger had never hidden that he had joined the Hitler Youth when he was fourteen, in 1941, shortly after it was made compulsory. He had addressed it in his own autobiography.35 The timid child who preferred solitude to company with other children was only six when Hitler had become Chancellor. His great-uncle on his father’s side, Georg Ratzinger, was one of Bavaria’s most note
d authors and politicians, as well as a leading anti-Semite.36 His parents—father a police officer and mother a cook in local bed-and-breakfasts—had determined his future for him when he was only twelve by entering him and his older brother, Georg, into a minor seminary. It took him six years after World War II before he was ordained a priest. And fitting with his loner personality, as a new prelate he wanted nothing of parish life. He became a theology professor instead at the southern German University of Tübingen, and delved with considerable success into a secluded world of books and philosophy. When the student riots and protests of the late 1960s hit Tübingen, it convinced Ratzinger that the outside world was a dangerous and unstable place. He moved to the backwater University of Regensburg, a place free from all the political discord he found so upsetting.37 His loyal service as the theological advisor to the German Bishops’ Conference was rewarded with an appointment in 1977 as Munich’s archbishop. For the man who preferred his days studying ancient texts and discussing church doctrine, he had trouble adapting to his administrative duties. He struggled for five years running that diocese. Few who worked with him in Munich thought he had the natural talent of an administrator or leader, traits about which the best archbishops and cardinals usually boasted.38 After his Munich service, he reentered the world of academia and the Curia when John Paul appointed him the chief of the church’s powerful doctrinal congregation. He never again tried his hand at running a diocese.
John Allen, Ratzinger’s biographer, had written that he “was only briefly a member of the Hitler Youth and not an enthusiastic one.”39 Since Hitler Youth was intended by the Nazis to break the church’s early influence on youngsters, new recruits were barraged with anti-Catholic propaganda. Was that sharp contrast to his education at a minor seminary the reason for his less than keen embrace of the Nazi youth group? It was not clear. But what was undisputed was that his membership had never been widely covered. And the Sunday Times declared that despite Ratzinger having disclosed it himself seven years earlier in his autobiography, not even many members of the church knew about it. The Times predicted it “may return to haunt him as cardinals begin voting in the Sistine Chapel tomorrow.”40
It was in fact news to millions of people. After finishing two years with the Hitler Youth, at sixteen, Ratzinger enrolled in a German army antiaircraft unit posted to guard a BMW factory that manufactured aircraft engines. That factory used forced labor consisting of inmates from the nearby Dachau concentration camp. Ratzinger long insisted he never had any combat role. When he later transferred to Hungary, and saw Jews sent to death camps, he deserted in April 1944.41
Just a few years earlier the Vatican and the Holy See had been named—and dismissed—in a series of lawsuits about restitution to Nazi victims. There were still unanswered questions about looted gold and the possible role of the Vatican Bank. Would Ratzinger’s conclave support dissipate because the cardinals might shy away from selecting not only a German, but one with youthful ties to the Third Reich?
Ratzinger offered no last-minute defense. Instead, in the final pre-conclave Mass, he told his fellow cardinals, “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism that has at its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires. . . . Adult faith is not one that follows tides of trends and the latest novelties.”42
A final snapshot of all the guesswork about who would be the next Pope was set by three British bookmakers who laid odds for gamblers. It is also a testament to how little the lay public understood about Vatican politics. Italy’s Tettamanzi and Nigeria’s Arinze led the pack at 4 to 1. Right behind was Honduras’s Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga (9 to 2). Ratzinger was back at 7 to 1, with Brazil’s Hummes at 9 to 1 and a recent surge of betting on Austria’s Christoph von Schönborn bringing him up to 14 to 1.43
On the first day of the conclave, Monday, April 18, the cardinals took only one late afternoon vote. Ratzinger and Martini were expected to end in a dead heat, setting the stage for the hand-to-hand battle between the ideologically divided camps. The surprise was that while Ratzinger got forty-seven votes, far short of the seventy-seven needed to become Pope, the progressives were splintered. Buenos Aires’s Bergoglio pulled ten votes while Cardinals Martini and Ruini got only six each.44 Could Ratzinger build on his first-ballot momentum, or would the progressives rally behind one candidate? As a result of politicking that night, Martini threw his support to Bergoglio. Eighty-one-year-old Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, too old to vote in the conclave, encouraged his fellow liberals at least to band together to block Ratzinger.45
The next morning, the cardinals took an early vote to see where they stood after a night of reflection. Ratzinger had added to his support, now tallying sixty-five. Bergoglio had more than tripled to thirty-five. The next highest vote getter was Cardinal Sodano far back with four votes. Just a day into the conclave, it was a two-man race. Bergoglio’s ascent was something of a surprise. His enemies had tried scuttling his chances three days before the conclave, publicizing the filing of a lawsuit that claimed Bergoglio was complicit in the 1976 kidnapping of two left-wing Jesuits by the then ruling Argentine military junta. The cardinal dismissed the charge.46
Australia’s Cardinal George Pell, himself talked about before the conclave as a possible contender, threw his support to Ratzinger after that vote. Cardinal Sodano gave up any hope of emerging as Pope and begun lobbying the Italians to line up behind Ratzinger. He was old, said Sodano, so he would only be a temporary place holder for the Papacy, and the fears of his polarizing the faithful were overblown.47 Angelo Scola overcame his own misgivings and also supported Ratzinger.
The cardinals were working fast. Just before lunch they took a third ballot. It almost put Ratzinger over the top with seventy-two votes (five short of becoming Pope). Bergoglio had added five but seemed stuck far back with forty. After breaking for lunch, the prelates returned and took the final ballot of that afternoon. It was decisive. Ratzinger got eighty-four votes, seven more than needed. Most came from Bergoglio defectors who evidently decided that a fast and unified front to the world was better for the church than a prolonged battle.48 Other than the conclave that had selected Pius XII on the eve of World War II, it was the fastest election in more than a century.49
The man at the center of so much controversy became Benedict XVI (in tribute to the fifth-century monk who was the patriarch of Western monasticism and Benedict XV, who had tried to prevent World War I). The exuberant crowd that greeted him when he made his first appearance as Pope sounded as if it were a soccer crowd shouting “Ben-e-detto! Ben-e-detto!”50
Ratzinger was the first German elected Pope in a thousand years and the oldest Pope in three centuries. His ascension felt as historic a change as when the cardinals had selected a Polish Pope twenty-seven years earlier. There was little doubt that to the lay public his selection was as controversial as that of any modern Pope. “From Hitler Youth to the Vatican” was the jarring banner headline in London’s Guardian; “White Smoke, Black Past,” declared Israel’s Yedi’ot Aharonot.
At a Mass he celebrated two days later for the cardinals before they left Rome, Benedict told them, “I welcome everybody with simplicity and love to assure them that the Church wants to continue in open and sincere dialogue with them, in search of the true good of man and society. . . . I have a sense of inadequacy and human turmoil at the responsibility entrusted to me.”51
For at least one moment, friends and foes alike found solace in his conciliatory tone. They hoped that the man whose motto was “truth is not determined by a majority vote” might become as Pope the church’s compassionate father.
* * *
I. American sex abuse victims were outraged that the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law, who had resigned as the chief of Boston’s diocese after the firestorm over disclosures of how he shuffled about pedophile priests rather than discipline them, led one of the nine official funeral Masses in Rome. Just as infuriating, since he was under eighty, he was one of the conclave’s voting cardinals.33<
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34
“As Flat as Stale Beer”
A week before Ratzinger was elected Pope, a split U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel in San Francisco rejected the Vatican Bank’s dismissal motion from the Nazi gold class action.1 Writing for the majority, Judge Margaret McKeown said: “In the landscape before us, this lawsuit is the only game in town with respect to claimed looting and profiteering by the Vatican Bank.” The majority noted that little was known about the IOR: “The exact relationship between the Vatican and the Vatican Bank is less than clear at this stage of the proceedings. . . . The actual dealings of the bank, however, are murky. . . . Indeed, the Vatican Bank’s holdings and its specific transactions are opaque.”2
Those Curialists who had lived through the $244 million settlement with the Ambrosiano were alarmed not only that the church’s reputation and finances were at risk, but worse that it was subject to unpredictable American courts. Benedict, however, showed no discernible concern. Nor did he discuss it with others in the Curia.3
In a classified cable sent to State Department headquarters in Washington—made public later through WikiLeaks—the U.S. embassy at the Vatican concluded only a month after Benedict’s election that he was a religious hardliner with no political skills, and that he was too old to acquire any.4 As a result, U.S. officials warned that made it doubtful that he could effectively control or streamline the unruly Curia. In his style of governing he ignored the advice of most officials and “only a handful of experts are aware of imminent decisions.”5
God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Page 56