This month, Pope Benedict XVI will celebrate the fourth anniversary of his election as the vicar of Christ.It is not the cruellest month of his pontificate - there are many others that can qualify for that designation - but it will undoubtedly be an occasion to reflect on what has transpired since the last anniversary.
In great measure, that will have to be a melancholy exercise.
Although there are highlights during the past year for the Benedictine papacy - improved relations between Rome and Beijing, some laudable developments in Islamic-Catholic understanding, some significant points of convergence with Britain's Prime Minister on the global economy and the priority of debt relief for poor nations, and a remarkably successful visit to the United States - the past 12 months have seen a string of misjudgments, misunderstandings and maladroit manoeuvres that have left seasoned Vatican watchers staggering in disbelief.
When the decision was made to lift the 1988 excommunications of four bishops validly but illicitly ordained by the renegade French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the Vatican generated an international tsunami of outrage. The debacle persisted for weeks.
Although there were many church leaders uncomfortable with this "gesture of mercy" - Archbishop Lefebvre's dissident Society of St. Pius X has been a thorn in the side of the papacy for decades - the anguish and confusion rose to extraordinary heights when it was revealed that one of the bishops, Richard Williamson, was an unrepentant anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier (or at least minimizer), and inclined to espouse his offensive views through various media outlets. Several in the universal episcopate expressed their displeasure outright.
It is one thing to brace for the predictable criticism emanating from the Catholic left or even among Catholic centrists, but it is quite another when cardinals confess to their anger and do so in public.
Senior churchmen in France, Germany, Austria and Britain moved quickly to distance themselves from what was initially understood to be the rehabilitation and reconciliation of the Lefebvrists.
In fact, no such action was intended.
The lifting of the excommunications was merely an opening shot; much more needed to be done before the schismatic bishops were integrated into full church communion and given a valid ministry of oversight, and the outstanding theological issues that nourished the division needed to be resolved.
But the damage was done.
Various Vatican bodies, particularly the press office of the Holy See, issued clarifications, leading prefects and presidents of relevant departments, such as the Pontifical Council for Relations with the Jews, moved to contain the mounting fury, and Benedict himself met many Jewish and Catholic groups to assuage their fears and underscore the church's teaching on the Shoah.
Eventually, the Pope issued a letter to the episcopate in which he took pains to make fine canonical and theological distinctions around the issue of the Lefebvrist bishops and the lifting of their excommunications, acknowledged that curial vigilance was negligent in some areas, and professed his personal pain at being so relentlessly attacked, particularly by Catholics. This was an unprecedented papal initiative and a key indicator of the gravity of the situation.
What is especially revealing about the letter - its content and tone - is not smooth spin-doctoring (that is mercifully absent) but visceral incomprehension that what was conceived of as an act of papal generosity has become a cause célèbre.
At the same time as this was unfolding, Benedict was faced with the embarrassment occasioned by the announcement that Rev. Gerhard Maria Wagner was to be the new auxiliary bishop of Linz, Austria.
The appointment of an auxiliary is not ordinarily the stuff of controversy.
But it appears that, in the vetting process, Vatican officials forgot to canvass the opinion of other Austrian bishops, particularly the powerful Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, and in failing to do their homework recommended the appointment of a cleric of eccentric, polarizing and despicable views. Father Wagner declined the appointment.
Parallel to the Williamson and Wagner affairs is the Maciel crisis.
Marcial Maciel is the Mexican founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a congregation of priests of growing influence and rigid ardour, and their lay movement, Regnum Christi. For years, Father Maciel enjoyed Vatican approval, sometimes in the face of expanding evidence of sexual impropriety and his congregation flourished. Then Rome acted, he was disciplined (although the allegations of the sexual abuse of seminarians were never formally proved) and he receded from public view and died.
Now it has been established that he fathered a child and had a mistress for years. This is more than a public-relations disaster for the Legionaries, and the Vatican is painted with the larger brush of scandal.
Not a good year to be Pope.
Arguably, these problems are the responsibility of the Vatican bodies charged with immediate oversight, but the buck stops with Peter.
This is unfair in many ways. A theologian (and Joseph Ratzinger is a theologian of the first order) who could write that "Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism [but] instead an encounter, a love story ... an event," deserves to be remembered for more than the muck and mire of seedy controversies and bureaucratic bungling.
As Benedict sits in his study - likely his only sanctuary - he can be excused for thinking that the past year was his annus horribilis.
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(Source: G&M)