Pope Benedict XVI was a courageous pontiff who made a sincere attempt to
restore the good name of the Church
When Joseph Ratzinger was chosen by his fellow cardinals to be pope in April
2005, he was universally billed as the continuity candidate. He had spent 25
years doing John Paul II’s bidding in charge of the old Holy Office, and
most Catholics believed they knew exactly what Benedict XVI stood for. Few
expected any surprises. Yet now he has pulled off the biggest surprise of
all by becoming the first pope in 600 years to resign.
The flawless logic of his resignation letter demonstrates that there is
nothing clouding Benedict’s reason. “To steer the boat of St Peter… both
strength of mind and body are necessary,” he explained, before stating that
he simply didn’t have the stamina for it any more.
Which isn’t in the least surprising. In any other multinational organisation
of 1.3 billion members, the idea that an 85-year-old could continue to
exercise absolute authority on a daily basis would be regarded as untenable.
For the Pope is not some figurehead, the religious equivalent of Queen
Beatrix of the Netherlands, abdicating on her 75th birthday to make way for
“the next generation”. He is an absolute monarch.
Logic, though, isn’t the quality most often associated with the papacy. John
Paul II and before him Paul VI carried on in office long after their bodies
had failed them. They upheld the conviction in Catholicism that being
elected pope is a divinely ordained duty, to be carried along a personal Via
Dolorosa unto death.
But that is not what canon law stipulates. It explicitly sets out conditions
for abdication, and so Benedict has invoked them. There is no mystery, or
smoking gun, but rather just extraordinary courage and selflessness. Perhaps
having watched John Paul II, a vigorous athlete of a man when he took
office, decline into someone unable to move or to be understood, made
Benedict’s decision for him. He did not want to be a lame-duck pope; he knew
that is not what the Catholic Church needs.
Yesterday’s announcement inevitably prompts the question of how his eight
years on St Peter’s throne are to be viewed. As some kind of extended
postscript to John Paul II’s eye-catching, game-changing era? Or as a
stand-alone epoch with distinctive policies and preoccupations?
The consensus leans heavily towards the former, but history could well judge
Benedict more kindly. He may have lacked his predecessor’s physical and
spiritual charisma, and his unmissable presence on the world stage when
major events were happening around him (the collapse of the Berlin Wall, two
Gulf wars, 9/11), but Benedict has nevertheless shown himself to be very
much his own man. Two of his decisions as pope illustrate what a break he
made with his predecessor.
Just as they don’t retire, popes also avoid at all costs admitting that they
get things wrong, notwithstanding that they are infallible in certain
matters of faith and morals. So few can have expected “God’s Rottweiler”, as
he was known when he was carrying out John Paul’s orders in relation to
dissenters, to start breaking the mould as pope by issuing mea culpas. But
that is precisely what he did.
In January 2009, for instance, he wrote to every Catholic bishop in the world
to confess to his own mishandling of the case of Bishop Richard Williamson.
This self-styled English prelate, a member of the fundamentalist Lefebvrist
group excommunicated by John Paul, had been readmitted to the Catholic
Church on Benedict’s watch. But days before, Williamson had given a TV
interview in which he denied the Holocaust. The international outcry was
huge – and magnified because of Benedict’s own brief spell in the Hitler
Youth. The Pope’s response was a heartfelt and humble letter of apology.
His second volte-face came over the issue of paedophile priests. Under John
Paul, the issue had been shamefully brushed under the carpet. The Polish
pontiff, for example, declined to hand over to justice one of his great
favourites, Father Marcial Maciel, the Mexican founder of the Legionaries of
Christ, a traditionalist religious order. Despite well-documented
allegations going back many years about Maciel’s sexual abuse of youngsters
in his seminaries, he was treated on papal orders as an honoured guest in
the Vatican.
Yet within a month of taking office, Benedict moved to remove any protection
and to discipline Maciel. He ordered the priest, then in his late eighties,
never again to say mass or speak in public. And when Maciel died in 2008,
his low-key funeral was followed by a rapid dismantling of the religious
organisation he had built.
It was part of a concerted drive that made Benedict the first pope to
sincerely attempt to address clerical abuse and restore the good name of the
Catholic Church. In March 2009, for example, he sent another letter of
apology, this time to Catholics in Ireland. “You have suffered grievously,”
he wrote to Irish victims of paedophile priests, “and I am truly sorry. I
know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured. It is understandable
that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the Church. In her
name, I openly express the shame and remorse that we all feel.”
That is quite a statement coming from a pope. It may be that his own past as a
lieutenant of John Paul made him part of the problem, but he was unafraid to
look this appalling betrayal of trust in the eye, not least in a series of
meetings he arranged on his travels.
In fact Benedict wasn’t much of a traveller. Global Catholicism and
international leaders usually had to come to him in Rome rather than vice
versa. Yet, though small of stature and delicate as bone china in demeanour,
he grew slowly into the dignity of his office after it had initially
threatened to swamp him.
So his 2010 trip to Britain did not, as had been widely predicted, pale beside
the enduring and vivid memory of John Paul’s barnstorming 1982 visit.
Instead the crowds warmed to this serious man, with his nervous smile and
understated humanity, as he kissed babies and waved from his Popemobile.
Even sceptics responded positively to his determination to speak his mind
about the marginalisation of religion.
There were, inevitably, notable failures in his reign. He was too much the
career Vatican insider to shake up the curia, the Church’s central
bureaucracy. Its scheming and corruption was exposed for all to see in the
“Vatileaks” scandal last year, with Benedict’s own butler, Paolo Gabriele,
convicted of stealing the Pope’s private papers that revealed squabbling
cardinals and unprincipled priests in the papal inner circle.
And Benedict’s chosen “big tent” approach to leadership – which was to make
him more German Shepherd than Rottweiler by welcoming dissidents back into
the fold – also soon blew away. What remained was a willingness to make
concessions to schismatic ultra-conservatives, but paper-thin patience with
liberal theologians or grassroots movements such as that demanding genuine
doctrinal change in Austria.
Patently more at home in a library or a theological college than on the world
political stage, Benedict could be clumsy – as when in September 2006 his
return to his alma mater, Regensburg University in Bavaria, was overshadowed
by derogatory remarks about the prophet Mohammed which he quoted in his
lecture. But he went out of his way to make amends on a trip to Turkey soon
afterwards, joining Muslim clerics in prayer in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.
This was only the second time a pope had ever entered a mosque.
For every failure, there was a success. His inaugural encyclical, Deus Caritas
Est (“God is Love”), in December 2005 broke new ground, first in being
written in such a way that non‑theologians could follow it, and second in
celebrating human love without the standard Catholic exemptions for gays,
the unmarried and those using contraception. “Sex please, we’re Catholics”
was the reaction of the influential Catholic weekly, the Tablet.
Though his decision to opt for retirement will mark out this papacy in
history, Benedict’s eight-year rule did not see the Catholic Church perform
spectacular U-turns on any major doctrinal questions. Yet it was also so
much more than a seamless continuation of what had gone before.
John Paul II may have left his cardinals with little choice other than to
elect Joseph Ratzinger as a safe pair of hands. But Benedict XVI has, by the
way he has stood down and by his record in office, made it more possible
that a moderniser, in touch with the realities of life in the 21st century,
will be chosen as the 266th successor to St Peter.
Peter Stanford is a former editor of the 'Catholic Herald’
