It says much about the Vatican that in the age of wireless communication it uses smoke signals to announce the election of a pope. The primitive technology caused mass confusion five years ago.
The belching from the Sistine Chapel’s stovepipe went from black — meaning no pope — to sort of white, the colour that signalled the conclave of cardinals had picked the new spiritual leader for a billion Roman Catholics.
There was jubilation.
The long pontificate of John Paul II, the most charismatic pope of modern times, would be a tough act to follow. The sense of expectation in St. Peter’s Square was electric.
Then, on the balcony of the basilica, the chosen one emerged — Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The sight of him subdued the crowd in an instant.
He took the name Benedict XVI and called himself a “humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord.”
Many knew him better as the hard-line theologian whose years at the doctrinal department once responsible for the Inquisition attracted labels like “Cardinal No” and “God’s Rottweiler.”
“When the cardinals made this choice, they knew who they were getting,” Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, a top Vatican official, said in an interview.
The Roman Catholic Church was facing formidable challenges. Pews were increasingly empty and the priesthood was shrinking. Within the Church, a battle raged over its relationship to modernity, characterized by deep divisions over the historic reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
The majority of cardinals wanted someone who would bring order. Ratzinger was their man.
Five years later, missteps and crises threaten to define his papacy. With the Church at a crossroads, and the battle between reformers and conservatives intensifying, Benedict’s reign is in tumult.
“Characterizing this pontificate is a whole series of mishaps that are unusual for a Church with a tradition of being circumspect and diplomatic,” says Daniele Menozzi, a university professor of Christian history at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.
Asked to describe the pontificate, a leading Canadian theologian, Rev. Gilles Routhier, was brief: “A lot of turbulence.”
Relations with Protestants, Jews and Muslims have been strained by gaffes and revisions of Catholic doctrine or practice. Within the Church, progressives are appalled by reactionary signs — most notably by talks to bring the ultra-conservative Society of St. Pius X, and one of its Holocaust-denying bishops, back into the fold.
Even Papal appointments have turned into public relations fiascos. The archbishop of Warsaw resigned before his inauguration after admitting he collaborated with the secret police in the days of Poland’s communist regime. And a bishop in Austria had his appointment revoked after describing Hurricane Katrina as God’s punishment for the sins of New Orleans.
Then came the sex scandals. The Church in several European countries was rocked, including the Pope’s native Germany.
Internal division became public, with at least two Cardinals calling for a review of celibacy. Austrian Cardinal Christopher Shoenborn, an ally of Benedict’s, even accused the late John Paul II of blocking Ratzinger’s investigation of a high-profile case in the mid 1990s.
Charges that Ratzinger participated in protecting pedophile priests rallied the Vatican’s top brass to protect Benedict’s moral authority. But the campaign has at times backfired: The pope’s personal preacher compared allegations against the pontiff to the worst forms of anti-Semitism, and the Vatican’s Secretary of State, while defending celibacy, linked pedophilia to homosexuality. Outrage forced the Vatican to issue clarifications on both.
Rarely has an officially infallible papacy spent so much time at damage control.
“The pontificate is finished,” says a leading Vatican scholar in Italy, who asked to remain anonymous, claiming a fear of excommunication. “This man will never recover the credibility that the papal ministry needs.”
Few other observers go that far. Not yet.
The son of a Bavarian police officer, Ratzinger spent years as a professor of theology before briefly heading an archdiocese in southern Germany.
In 1981, Pope John Paul II appointed him Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. For almost 25 years, Ratzinger enforced policies that impose celibacy on the clergy and ban women priests. He once called homosexuality an “objective disorder.”
Theologians judged to have strayed from Church doctrine were banned from writing and teaching. In his defence, Ratzinger proclaimed: “I am not the Great Inquisitor.”
The day before his election as pope, he delivered a homily excoriating what he considers the main ill of modern society: “A dictatorship of relativism is being created that doesn’t recognize anything as definitive and that leaves as the ultimate measure its own egotism and its own desires.”
Compared to his predecessor, he’s a monastic and isolated Pope. Now 83 — his birthday was Friday — his intellectual references are medieval theologians. And his penchant for papal garments not worn since the reforms of Vatican II in the 1960s is seen by some progressives as a calculated and infuriating slight.
In a country where the Church still wields political clout, his papacy has taken forceful public stands against hot-button issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.
“His task is not to look for applause from today’s world,” says Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s spokesperson. “His task is to speak of the truths of the Christian faith. If you forget them, you’ll find yourself in bad shape.”
Lombardi also notes a concern for African development and a commitment to peace made evident, he says, by the Pope’s trip to the Holy Land shortly after Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza in January 2009.
On sex abuse, Lombardi describes Benedict as a leader in confronting the problem. Two powerful clerics — Gino Burresi of Italy and Marcial Maciel Degollado of Mexico — were removed from public ministry early in the Pope’s reign.
He was the first Pope to meet with victims of abuse, including members of Canada’s First Nations in 2009. Measures to prevent similar abuses have been put in place, Lombardi insists.
On ecumenism, Lombardi notes the Pope’s visits to mosques and synagogues.
“He visited three synagogues in five years; John Paul II visited one in 24 years,” Lombardi says, quickly adding, however, that the late pope made history by being the first to do so.
Still, relations with other churches and religions have been anything but smooth.
“They understand nothing of ecumenism, these heads of the Vatican,” charges Paolo Ricca, a top Protestant theologian in Rome. “It’s a disaster.”
In 2006, the Pope outraged Muslims with a citation from a medieval scholar that suggested Islam is rooted in violence and linked the Prophet Mohammad to evil. He later expressed regret for causing offence.
The following year, he eased restrictions against celebrations of the mass in Latin, known as the Tridentine rite. It meant the return of a Good Friday prayer that calls for the conversion of Jews. It did not go over well.
Worse was to come in January 2009. The Pope lifted the 1988 excommunication of four bishops with the fundamentalist Society of St. Pius X, and set up a committee to negotiate its return to the Church. Days later, one of the bishops, the Briton Richard Williamson, gave an interview denying the existence of the gas chambers used in the Holocaust.
The uproar forced the Pope to write a second letter to bishops — his first was on the Latin Mass. Routhier, of Laval University, says he can’t recall a Pope in the last 60 years who had to twice write “to explain and justify himself.”
Benedict acknowledged his move had left many bishops “perplexed,” and expressed regret for his “mistakes.”
He even made clear that a simple Internet search would have revealed Williamson’s often-stated views, and saved him a mess of trouble.
“I have been told that consulting the information available on the Internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on,” he wrote. “I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news.”
But Benedict noted that for the Church, an issue bigger than Williamson was at stake. Trying to heal the schism with a group driven out by Vatican II sent defenders of those reforms to the barricades.
“Some groups,” Benedict lamented, “openly accused the Pope of wanting to turn back the clock to before the (Second Vatican) Council: as a result, an avalanche of protests was unleashed, whose bitterness laid bare wounds deeper than those of the present moment.”
The battle over Vatican II — and the future direction of the Church — was openly engaged.
Vatican II, an ecumenical council that ran from 1962 to 1965, radically changed the way the faithful experience the Church. It reformed the practice of sacraments such as baptism and penance, and introduced mass said in the language of parishioners.
It left Church doctrine largely untouched, including positions on celibacy and contraception. But much was done in the name of “the spirit of Vatican II,” a notion fueled by the social winds of the 1960s. Liberation theology — with priests focused on the poor, influenced by Marx and sometimes backing revolutionary struggles in Latin America — was the most obvious example.
Today, a key demand of reformers is a more democratic Church. They want to break the absolute power of bishops over their diocese and make them accountable to parishioners, who would have a greater role in running parishes. As for priests, they would be seen more as men than representatives of God.
Vatican II also suggested salvation might also be found in other religions and Christian churches. It was one of many reforms that had the founders of the Society of St. Pius X packing their bags.
“There exists only one saviour and that saviour founded only one church — the Catholic Church,” Rev. Davide Pagliarani, head of the Society in Italy, said in an interview.
Globally, the Society says it has 725 churches, 522 priests, 215 seminarians and four bishops. In Rome, it has a small chapel on the ground floor of an old residential building in the heart of the city. Thirty adults, most of them young couples, filled it for the Easter Sunday service. The mass was sung in Latin, the priest spent most of the time with his back to the faithful, and those without seats knelt on the cold stone floor at appropriate moments.
The Society’s Italian headquarters is in the town of Albano Laziale, 25 kilometres south of Rome. Behind a high wall, surrounded by palm, pine and olive trees, the Society’s “spiritual centre” is home to five priests.
Pagliarani’s office is on the second floor. On one wall is the portrait of Pius X, the staunchly orthodox Pope from 1903 to 1914; on another is one of French Archbishop Marcel-Francois Lefebvre, the Society’s founder, who confirmed Pagliarani in 1980, when he was 10 years old.
Pagliarani says the Society already considers it “a great result” that its members are airing their views at talks with Church officials every two months.
“The Society is doing it as a service to the Church and the Pope,” he says, making clear the Church needs to be saved from itself.
Vatican II, he adds, developed a “Catholicism that increasingly tries to transform itself — how can I put it? — to secularize itself.” The more “accessible” it becomes, the less compelling it is to believers and future priests, he argues.
The success of the talks is far from guaranteed. The Society’s insistence that the Jewish people committed “deicide” — a teaching the Church modified in 1965 — is only one stumbling block. Another is the whole of Vatican II. But Pagliarani believes the growing number of new priests who don’t adhere to its reforms could dissolve that obstacle over time.
“There are different ways to renounce the Council. The most explosive one,” he says, “is the Pope leans out the window of St. Peter’s and says, ‘I was wrong for 40 years.’ Another way — and again, providence will choose — is that the Council becomes obsolete.”
In his letter to the bishops, the Pope said the Society must accept teachings that emerged from the Council. But he also cautioned those who see Vatican II as a break with the past.
“Some of those who put themselves forward as great defenders of the Council also need to be reminded that Vatican II embraces the entire doctrinal history of the Church,” the Pope wrote. “Anyone who wishes to be obedient to the Council has to accept the faith professed over the centuries, and cannot sever the roots from which the tree draws its life.”
What’s clear is that Benedict believes a hefty dose of doctrinal discipline is in order.
In his recent letter to Irish Catholics on the sex abuse scandals, he partly blamed pedophile priests on Council reforms being “misinterpreted.” He said penalties under canon law were avoided and priests adopted “ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel.”
In an interview, one leading exponent of reforms called the Pope’s analysis “scandalous.”
Another, Laval University’s Gilles Routhier, says the Pope should seize the opportunity to make bishops accountable, thereby ensuring more transparency and reducing the likelihood of future cover-ups.
But Menozzi, the professor of Christian history, believes a “siege mentality” has taken hold. With time, Benedict could perhaps bolster his legacy with historic initiatives — normalizing relations with China, for example, or meeting the head of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow, responsible for the largest Eastern Orthodox Church in the world.
But for now, a tired-looking Benedict sits atop a very troubled Church.
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