Papal voyages are rarely about the pope alone.
They hold a mirror to the societies he visits, coaxing rare debate about
spiritual matters in distinctly secular lands; they offer the body
language, the tantalizing hints, the sideways glances that give tangible
expression to theological nuance; they provide the scripted symbols,
the ecclesiastical theater, that the Vatican presents as the choreography of faith.
Pope Benedict XVI’s
just-completed visit to Britain was all those things and more: at a
time when the Roman Catholic Church is submerged under a sexual abuse
scandal, the pilgrimage gave a sense of just how much Rome relies on
reflexes honed over centuries to defend itself, to display power and
cohesion in its quest to revive credibility.
A few snapshots from the papal album:
At Mass in Westminster Cathedral — the late-Victorian basilica just down
the road from the Anglicans’ much older Westminster Abbey — a phalanx
of scarlet-robed senior clerics gathered not just in prayer but as the
emblem of a Vatican hierarchy held in place by the pope’s divine
authority.
Then there was the Most Rev. Rowan Williams,
the archbishop of Canterbury and the spiritual head of the Anglican
Communion, bowing to the pope in a gesture of respect despite his
church’s five-century break with the papacy in Rome.
On another occasion on the packed, papal schedule, at Westminster Abbey,
the pope himself shook the hand of Canon Jane Hedges, a senior Anglican
cleric who is both female and married — anathema twice over to Roman
Catholic orthodoxy. “Perhaps,” Archbishop Williams said, “we shall not
quickly overcome the remaining obstacles to restored communion.”
Yet, encountering the turbulent Anglicans, with their fractious debate
over the ordination of openly gay and female clergy, the pope might well
have felt vindicated in his long-standing vision of his church as a
monolith that prizes dogmatic certainty above change, that plays a very
long game indeed.
If, after all, a pope could finally be received in the inner sanctums of
Anglicanism after so many centuries since Henry VIII broke with Rome,
then, surely, the church could survive its latest travails to restore
its frayed authority among the faithful.
The Vatican, of course, has long been a master of symbols. Since the days of the peripatetic John Paul II,
papal handlers have perfected a form of ecclesiastical spin — shrewdly
defining and massaging the messages, the sound bites and the images that
will dominate the headlines surrounding each day of the voyage.
Again at Westminster Cathedral, the pope smiled broadly in the presence
of young Britons, bowing to him in adoration and zeal — the kind of
visual antidote to the associations that have come to prevail of priests
acting with impunity to abuse those who placed innocent trust in their
pastors.
But the symbolism also reflected a steely commitment to the cohesiveness
of the church and the continuity of its message. Long ago, as Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict was the point-man of a previous pope in
opposing confusion of the faith with political messages, of setting the
markers of belief in times of turmoil in Europe and Latin America.
“The faith is never automatically present,” the cardinal told me in an
interview in 1992, when the context was simpler, before the sexual abuse
scandal had come to claw at the church leadership (although cases of it
had been reported to the Vatican). “A mental, intellectual, spiritual
battle is always necessary to evoke it and, in this sense there is a
battle going on even now,” he said speaking of what he saw as troubled
and perilous era after the fall of Communism.
Those words now seem oddly prophetic, illuminating both the pope’s
strategic vision, and his fundamental quandary as the abuse scandal
crowds the whispering corridors of the Curia. The church’s role,
Cardinal Ratzinger told me, is to “on the one hand maintain an open
attitude toward the development of the faith, but also defend the
foundations.”
With the sexual abuse scandal, that dilemma has become more acute and
many critics have found the pope badly wanting in establishing some form
of balance between his defense of those “foundations” and his handling
of the crisis.
Too often, the argument goes, he has erred in favor of defending the
church hierarchy. But if he were to open an ecclesiastical Pandora’s
box, purging errant priests, how far would this latter-day inquisition
spread through the base of his temporal power?
Taking a charitable view — as did many British analysts — Peter
Stanford, a columnist in The Observer, wrote that Benedict had convinced
skeptics “that he sincerely wants to tackle the ‘unspeakable crimes’ of
pedophile priests which were covered up for so long by the church.”
But, Mr. Stanford said, “the true success of his visit will ultimately
be judged not only by greater openness in our society to the voice of
religion, but also in Pope Benedict’s own willingness to listen and
learn.”
Throughout his career, first as the Vatican’s dogmatic enforcer and then
as pope, Benedict has been associated, by outsiders at least, more with
laying down the law rather than listening.
But can those authoritarian
instincts, nurtured during the papacy of John Paul II, be softened
without further jeopardizing his own authority?
That was one question awaiting the pope when he returned to Rome (not to
mention the matter of the Vatican bank being embroiled in a
money-laundering investigation).
As papal biographer John L. Allen Jr. wrote in the National Catholic
Reporter, the “declarations of papal contrition” for clerical abuse have
become “almost routine.”
But, “if he keeps issuing roughly the same
apology, he’ll aggravate his enemies and may frustrate a growing share
of his allies.”
So either Benedict must “figure out something new to say” or, as his
critics demand, embark on measures “which would lend his words new
significance.”
“Otherwise,” Mr. Allen wrote, “the risk is that something that was
initially hailed as an important moment in solving the sexual abuse
crisis could become, with time, another force in keeping it alive.”
SIC: NYT/EU