It seems impolite to say so, given Pope Benedict XVI’s chastened retreat
to the shadows of the Vatican, back in 2013, but his papacy was a failed
one. For nearly eight years, he led the Catholic Church in the broad collapse of its moral authority, from the crisis of criminal priests to the further alienation of women to the blatant dysfunction of the Church’s own bureaucracy.
Still, there is one sense in which Benedict succeeded. After a career spent railing against relativism, he relativized the world’s last divine-right office, becoming the first Pope since 1415 to resign and giving his successor, Francis, the sway that he so astonishingly exploits today.
At the end, the self-styled Pope Emeritus, still dressed in his white robes, lifted off from the Vatican in a white helicopter, which took him to Castel Gandolfo, the papal vacation palace on a lake outside Rome. He assumed the quiet, cloistered existence of a retired prelate.
Today, he has broken his silence with “Last Testament,” a late-in-life attempt at personal reckoning that amounts, instead, to a reiteration of the ethical detachment that undercut him from the start.
The
new book is drawn from a series of interviews with the German
journalist Peter Seewald. Throughout it, the former Pope displays an
astounding emotional and religious indifference. If I reiterate a litany
here of Benedict’s well-known controversies—if I seem to be rehashing
hackneyed debates—it is only because he himself revisits them in this
book, but always to defend, never to reëxamine, much less to regret.
Seewald gets to the root of Benedict’s problems about a third of the way
through the book, when he asks him why his voluminous writings seldom
address Nazism.
“Well, the eyes are always looking to the future,”
Benedict replies. “And it was not specifically my topic.” Really? The
Pope Emeritus, né Joseph Ratzinger, came of age wearing the uniform of a
Wehrmacht soldier; he was conscripted at the age of seventeen, served
in an anti-aircraft unit, deserted shortly before Germany’s surrender,
and was captured by Allied forces, then briefly held as a P.O.W. His
assessment of the Nazi years should, as a result, have special gravity,
yet he blithely says that such a reckoning is “not my task.”
That
distancing reply—from a German who feels no need to look back—meshes
with his impulse to absolve Catholic authorities of any failure during
the Holocaust.
Benedict remembers
the war-era Church as a “place of resistance,” and in important ways
that was true. (Pius XII, the Pope at the time, may have been secretly
supportive of an early plot to overthrow Hitler.)
In “Last Testament,”
Benedict lingers on the figure of Michael von Faulhaber, the longtime
Cardinal Archbishop of Munich, who ordained young Ratzinger to the
priesthood, in 1951. Faulhaber often receives praise for a series of
Advent sermons he gave in 1933, which the Vatican has characterized
as an exemplary “rejection of the Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.”
But
Faulhaber’s real task, as he himself made clear, was to defend not
living Jewish persons but Jewish texts—namely, the Old Testament, which
Hitler-friendly Christians wanted expunged from the Bible. Faulhaber’s
own secretary insisted that, in speaking of ancient Israel, the cardinal
“had not taken a position with regard to the Jewish question of today.”
In response to a priest who wanted the Church to forthrightly condemn
the Nazis’ persecutions, Faulhaber wrote, “The Jews can help themselves.
Why should the Jews expect help from the Church?”
Benedict, in looking
back, explains that some Catholics, including his own father, wanted
more from the cardinal. But his present assessment of Faulhaber and
other prelates is wholly uncritical. For Benedict, the defense of Jews
against the genocide was, and continues to be, a moral mandate of no
significance to Catholicism. If there was official Church resistance, it
was only for the Church itself.
The
same aloofness marks the rest of Benedict’s account, from his start as a
young-turk theologian to the tumultuous years of his pontificate. At
the Second Vatican Council, he was party to the liberal overthrow of the
entrenched bureaucracy of the Curia.
But no sooner did the Council end,
in 1965, than Ratzinger aligned himself with those insisting that no
substantial change—what he calls elsewhere
“a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture”—had taken place.
Subsequently, as Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith, Ratzinger was “God’s Rottweiler,” the bête noir of liberal
Catholicism, cracking down on liberation theology, nuns regarded as
“radical feminists,” and the “intrinsic moral evil”
of homosexuality.
Amazingly, he writes, about his time as Cardinal
Prefect, “I deliberately never wrote any of the documents of the office
myself, so that my opinion does not surface; otherwise I would be
attempting to disseminate and enforce my own private theology.” As if
anticipating the reader’s inevitably incredulous reaction, he adds, “Of
course, I was a co-worker and did some critical redrafting.”
And
yet Ratzinger’s theology was evident in the many fierce promulgations
that were issued above his signature.
In 1995, he went beyond Pope John
Paul II’s rejection of women’s ordination to declare that the
prohibition was “set forth infallibly,” a doctrinal solemnizing that has
tied the hands of the otherwise liberalizing Pope Francis, who issued
his own reiteration of the ban early this month.
The Cardinal Prefect
even scowled at John Paul II for organizing the first World Day of
Prayer for Peace, in 1986, in which more than a hundred and fifty
religious leaders were invited to Assisi. “This cannot be the model!”
Ratzinger told a newspaper reporter at the time. Now he tells Seewald,
with surprising equanimity, that John Paul “knew that I took a slightly
different line.”
Once he was Pope,
Ratzinger’s different line led him, in 2009, to lift the
excommunication of the traditionalist cleric Richard Williamson, a
notorious Holocaust denier, sparking a controversy he now dismisses as
“stupid,” and to denigrate Islam
just after the fifth anniversary of 9/11, repeating a medieval slur
that led to worldwide protests by Muslims, and about which Benedict now
seems cavalier. (“I just found it very interesting to bring up this part
of a five-hundred-year-old dialogue for discussion,” he says.)
Benedict
should get credit for defrocking four hundred sexually abusive priests
during his papacy, although, again showing a present failure to
appreciate the moral scale of past mistakes, he describes to Seewald his
dread of “premature intervention” in abuse cases and the need to “go
about it slowly and cautiously.”
More to the point, he seems utterly
disconnected from the consequences of his instruction, as Cardinal
Prefect in 2001—just as the Boston Globe was laying bare
the scandal—that priestly sex-abuse cases “are subject to the
pontifical secret,” a ruling that prompted bishops to quietly bring such
matters to the Vatican, not to civil authorities. That, of course, was
the bishops’ essential failure.
The very end of Pope Benedict’s pontificate was marked by a storm of controversies, from the Vatileaks scandal,
perpetrated by his personal valet, to revelations of grievous Vatican
Bank corruptions to insinuations about the influence of a “gay lobby”
inside the Vatican bureaucracy to whispers about rebellions against the
Pope from within the Curia itself.
At a time when the captain of an
Italian cruise liner ran his vessel aground and jumped ship,
Benedict was widely seen as the captain of a vessel (the bark of St.
Peter?) dangerously adrift. But that is not his assessment.
“That I was,
so to speak, the problem for the Church, this was not and is not my
view,” he tells Seewald. About the crises that all but destroyed the
moral authority of Roman Catholicism, he calmly says, “One has to reckon
with such things in human beings. I am not aware of any failures on my
part.”
That statement lays bare
Ratzinger’s ethical obtuseness—as if “such things in human beings” did
not apply to him. The Pope Emeritus lives his life at such a level of
abstraction, ever shoring up the bulwarks of institution and doctrine,
that he consistently misses the real meaning of the human experiences
that challenge both.
“The important thing is that the faith endures
today,” he says. “I see this as the central task. All the rest is just
administrative issues, which it was not necessary to unleash during my
tenure.” It is as though the renegade captain were saying, from the
safety of land, that the ship is intact, even if, because of certain
administrative issues, it founders on the rocks.
When
Benedict resigned from the papacy, some wondered about the state of his
health. Was he headed for a long, demoralizing physical decline of the
sort that made his predecessor what he calls “a martyr to the sufferings
of the world”? Obviously not, given his apparent good health for a man
of eighty-nine. Benedict now says that he secretly decided to resign in
August, 2012, although he did not actually do so until February of the
following year. “Were you in a depression?” Seewald asks him in the
book. “Not a depression, no, but things weren’t going well for me,” he
replies.
The true meaning of
Benedict’s resignation did not become clear until the unrelentingly
positive spirit of his successor began to show itself. He pays full
tribute to Francis, expressing how “beautiful and encouraging” it is
that the Church is “alive and full of new possibilities.”
But he seems
not to grasp that the Francis phenomenon
runs far deeper than the Argentine’s personal charisma. Benedict is one
of those who perceive Francis as a maestro of style, not altering the
substance of belief, when, in fact, style and substance are inseparable.
Benedict’s approach—not mainly his reticence, but his
detachment—stamped his era with belief removed from real life, a moral
perception so partial as to be immoral, with drastic consequences for
the Church and all whom the Church was called to serve.
Francis is
anything but detached, and his perceptions are rooted in a visceral
preference for experience over ideology. While the white-robed Pope
Emeritus retreated to the seclusion of Castel Gandolfo, Pope Francis,
only this month, opened it to the public.
That
there is something tragic in Benedict’s story does not mitigate its
negative weight, but it is impossible to read “Last Testament” without
feeling sorry for a man whose life has been so branded by fear. Of
course, entering manhood when and where he did, he came by fear
naturally, but he never shook it. He was not afraid for himself,
perhaps—he seems a man of personal courage—but he was terrified for the
institution he served and over which he came to preside.
It was this
fear that, across decades, sparked the peculiar ruthlessness of his
ecclesiastical boundary protection.
When, as Pope, Benedict presided
over the great Eucharistic celebrations in St. Peter’s Square, he made
it a point always to firmly place the sacred host on the outstretched
tongues of the faithful—this despite the liturgical change of Vatican II
that called for the host to be placed in the communicants’ cupped
hands.
When Seewald asks him why, Benedict explains that among “the many
people on St. Peter’s Square” there were surely those who might, as he
puts it, “pocket the Host” and take it away.
For what, a papal souvenir?
How far that seems from casting bread upon the waters, or from passing
bread around a table at which misfits and trouble-makers are welcome,
or, for that matter, from prizing the bread, as the Mass does, for its
having been broken.