Perhaps the most telling index of the severity of the various PR and
managerial catastrophes which have beset the papacy of Benedict XVI is
that there’s now a budding literary genre attempting to explain them.
It’s also a measure of the reduced global profile of the papacy these
days that, to date, the Italians basically have a monopoly on it.
Last year brought Attaco a Ratzinger: Accuse e scandali, profezie e complotti contro Benedetto XVI
(“Attack on Ratzinger: Accusations and Scandals, Prophecies and Plots
against Benedict XVI”) by two of the best Italian Vatican writers going,
Paolo Rodari and Andrea Tornielli.
Though hardly blind to the Vatican’s own failures, Rodari and Tornielli also suggested there’s an effort afoot to damage the moral authority of the pope and the church, perhaps even of cosmic dimensions.
(One chapter ponders whether Benedict’s woes were foretold by Fatima and other Marian apparitions.)
Though hardly blind to the Vatican’s own failures, Rodari and Tornielli also suggested there’s an effort afoot to damage the moral authority of the pope and the church, perhaps even of cosmic dimensions.
(One chapter ponders whether Benedict’s woes were foretold by Fatima and other Marian apparitions.)
Now we have another take, in the form of C’era Una Volta Un Vaticano “Once Upon a Time,
There was a Vatican” by Massimo Franco, a veteran political writer for Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious daily newspaper.
Franco has long explored the intersection between faith and politics, as witnessed by his 2005 book Imperi paralleli (“Parallel Empires”) about relations between the Holy See and the United States.
In terms of the building blocks of his argument, Franco covers much
the same ground as Rodari and Tornielli: the sexual abuse scandals; the
crisis over lifting the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop;
conflicts within the Vatican, even among cardinals, “worthy of the epoch
of the Borgias”; the notorious Boffo case, in which senior Vatican
officials were accused of sabotaging the director of the Italian
bishops’ newspaper by leaking false documents suggesting he harassed a
woman because he wanted to pursue a gay affair with her boyfriend; and
on and on.
“Implosion,” Franco suggests, is the word many Vatican-watchers
apply to the current state of affairs.
There’s a palpable sense of fin du régime
in the Roman air, he says; Franco quotes diplomats accredited to the
Holy See comparing themselves to the final ambassadors to the Republic
of Venice just before its collapse in 1797.
Yet Franco applies a different spin to this malaise. The meltdowns
of the last five years are symptoms rather than causes, he says, of a
much deeper crisis.
They’re signs of the end of an epoch, in which the
Vatican represented the religious and moral sentiments of Western
civilization, and the dawn of a new era in which Catholicism has become a
minority subculture.
Neither the Vatican nor the hierarchy more
generally has figured out how to respond to this new world, Franco
argues, explaining the “profound confusion” one detects among all the
pope’s men.
The day of reckoning was held at bay for a half-century by the Cold War, and for a quarter-century by the towering charisma of Pope John Paul II, Franco says, but now the bill has come due.
Franco refers to “a Vatican” in the book’s title because he doesn’t mean to suggest that the Vatican itself is passing away.
In any conceivable scenario, it will continue to be an important global institution and a point of reference for Catholics everywhere.
What’s now in decay, he argues, is instead a certain kind of Vatican – the Vatican as chaplain of the West, treated with deference by courts and governments, able to shape history by the exercise of its institutional power.
Something new has to replace that Vatican, he says, and its outlines are still vague.
Franco’s diagnosis has ruffled feathers in some Vatican circles,
especially those around Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Secretary
of State.
Franco not only faults Bertone for weak internal governance
and a lack of geopolitical vision – due, Franco suggests, to a
preoccupation with Italian affairs – but also says some of his early
moves were animated by ambitions to be the next pope.
(If that’s really
true, most church-watchers would say it’s a long shot; fairly or not,
Bertone is associated with such a string of disasters that some
cardinals would regard it as akin to electing the captain of the Titanic
as CEO of the steamship company.)
Yet in broad strokes, Franco’s argument is actually fairly
Vatican-friendly, almost to the point of making excuses.
He argues that
its travails ought to be seen in tandem with the strategic and economic
troubles of the United States, all indicators of profound mutations in
the global order.
The take-away might well be that the fault is not
really in Bertone and Benedict’s other aides, but in their stars.
In truth, the stumbles of Benedict’s papacy are probably fueled by a
combination of factors: the personal characteristics of Benedict’s
team, including an emphasis on family spirit which, at times, comes at
the expense of subject-matter competence; cultural hostility to the
church’s teaching and to Benedict XVI, sketched by Rodari and Tornielli,
which circulates in the media, the academy, the legal profession, and
even in some sectors of the church; and broad global transformations,
especially the emergence of a fragmented post-modern culture in the
West, highlighted by Franco.
In that complicated mix, C’era Una Volta un Vaticano is an
important contribution, exposing a shift in the historical plates which
lies beneath the occasional earthquakes in Rome.
One hopes the book will
eventually find an English publisher.
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