The Pope has promoted his personal secretary to archbishop
and put him in charge of the Papal Household.
He’s
been called Gorgeous George, il Bel Giorgio and even the Black Forest
Adonis. And ever since making his world debut in the spring of 2005 as
the 48-year-old personal secretary of the newly elected Pope Benedict
XVI, Mgr Georg Gänswein has been one of the most talked about
personalities at the Vatican.
Never in recent memory
has a papal aide been such an obsession for tabloid writers, and adoring
women. His fans have even erected several websites on the internet,
mythologising the Pope’s strikingly handsome secretary as a former ski
instructor, tennis player and helicopter pilot.
Currently aged
56 and with grey creeping through his sandy-coloured hair, he is still a
youthful and attractive figure compared to the old men with fleshy
jowls and balding heads who are more commonly associated with the Roman
Curia.
And now his admirers have something much more substantial to
celebrate in the dashing German monsignor than merely his enduring good
looks and proximity to the papal throne.
Pope Benedict
announced that he was making his personal assistant the prefect of the
Papal Household and was elevating him to the senior rank of archbishop.
It
was a surprising move that undoubtedly delighted Don Georg’s friends
and fans, but one that also left many others – especially some inside
the Vatican – perplexed and troubled.
“The naming of Gänswein as
prefect and archbishop is a scandal,” complained one church official.
“The Renaissance papacy lives,” he said, clearly accusing the Pope of
promoting favourites.
Many reports said Pope Benedict
gave Mgr Gänswein the important new post so he could shore up an
Apostolic Palace left in disarray in the wake of the VatiLeaks scandal.
They suggested the previous prefect of the Papal Household, the
(recently created) Cardinal James Harvey, was responsible for hiring the
papal butler who was eventually convicted for stealing the Pope’s
personal papers and leaking them to the press.
In their scenario, the
new appointment of the meticulous and regimented papal secretary,
especially because of his closeness to the Pope, would be the best
guarantee against future security breaches. That may be true.
But they
overlooked the glaring fact that Mgr Gänswein had a more immediate
supervisory role over the butler and spent much more time in his
presence than did Harvey.
Nonetheless, Pope Benedict
made Mgr Gänswein prefect and catapulted him to the second-highest rung
of the Church’s hierarchy in order to strengthen his role as
“gatekeeper”.
Although the prefect of the Papal (or Pontifical)
Household works with the Secretariat of State in deciding who has access
to the Pope and who doesn’t, because of his intimacy with Benedict,
Archbishop-elect Gänswein will have effective power to make the final
decisions.
The reason is simple.
As the Pope grows older and frailer, he
will need to rely increasingly on this man whom he deeply trusts to
protect him from being manipulated by others.
It is
an even greater preventive measure than the one Pope John Paul II took
in 1998 when he named his own personal secretary, Mgr Stansilaw Dziwisz,
as adjunct-prefect and bishop (five years later as archbishop).
The
move was unprecedented at the time and it caused lots of grousing in the
Curia.
“Don Stanislaw”, who is now the Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow,
shrewdly filtered a constant flow of visitors to private audiences,
morning Masses and meals with the extrovert Pope.
Archbishop-elect
Gänswein, on the other hand, is working with the much more introverted
Pope Benedict. Unlike Dziwisz, he will be admitting many fewer people
into see the pontiff, but will likely have the same influence – if not
more – on the important decisions Benedict will make as he ages.
And
this is what makes those unhappy with the new appointment most nervous.
Georg
Gänswein, despite his athletic and youthful appearance, is extremely
conservative. But he has been careful to tone down his “traditionalist”
side.
Shortly after the election of Benedict XVI in 2005, all references
to the papal secretary’s life prior to his new-found fame disappeared
from the internet.
Only later did any personal information about him
gradually find its way back into the public forum.
One reason for this,
it appears, is that he initially began his seminary training at the
international seminary in Ecône (Switzerland) run by the Society of St
Pius X (SSPX), or Lefebvrists.
This was finally reported in 2009 by
French magazine L’Express and repeated on numerous, mostly
Vatican-friendly internet sites.
No one at the Vatican has ever
officially denied it.
A two-year gap in the biography
of Archbishop-elect Gänswein suggests this earlier seminary training
was certainly a possibility.
The new prefect of the Papal Household has
said in interviews that he decided to become a priest in 1974 when he
was 18.
But it was not until two years later, at the age of 20, that he
began his seminary training for the Archdiocese of Freiburg, the local
church for which he was ordained in 1984 at 28.
Gänswein earned a
doctorate in canon law in 1993 at the University of Munich, and after
two years working in the archdiocese, he was hired in 1995 by the
Congregation for Divine Worship in Rome to an initial five-year term as a
staff member.
It was during this time, while living
at the Teutonic College inside the Vatican, that he got to know the
then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Gänswein, who was then 39, obviously
made a strong impression on the then-prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), for hardly a year later (1996) the future
Pope took the extremely rare step of having the young German priest
transferred from Worship to the CDF.
While working at
the doctrinal office, Gänswein also taught canon law at the Opus Dei-run
University of the Holy Cross in Rome. In 2003 Cardinal Ratzinger asked
him to be his personal secretary. He replaced Mgr Josef Clemens, another
German nine years his senior, who was named bishop and No. 2 official
at the Pontifical Council for the Laity.
Then, just a year and half
later, Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope and he took Mgr Gänswein with
him to the Apostolic Palace.
There is a widespread
conviction among officials in the Roman Curia that the personal
secretary has had an unusually strong influence on Pope Benedict’s
governance of the Church, especially on his personnel appointments. And
the outcome has not always been happy.
One particular case worth noting
happened in early 2009 when the Pope named the little-known Fr Gerhard
Maria Wagner, apparently a friend of Mgr Gänswein, as an auxiliary
bishop in Linz, Austria.
Shortly after his appointment was announced,
however, it was reported that Fr Wagner had written articles calling
Hurricane Katrina “God’s punishment” for the sins of a sexually
permissive society and condemning the Harry Potter books for “spreading
Satanism”.
The uproar among Catholics in Austria spread throughout
Europe and became so intense and embarrassing that the Vatican
eventually convinced the priest to “resign” before he was even ordained a
bishop.
It is also widely believed that
Archbishop-elect Gänswein serves as one of the Pope’s chief advisers for
Curia appointments and governing decisions.
But perhaps more than
influencing Pope Benedict, the personal secretary serves to confirm,
reinforce and encourage the pontiff’s already conservative leanings.
No
one more than he has consistently spent long periods of time in
conversation with the Pope.
And he likes to let people know that they
are very close. Visitors are often somewhat taken aback to hear Mgr
Gänswein refer to the Pope and himself as “us”.
Now as
prefect of the Papal Household he will add even broader institutional
powers to his already more intimate duties of sharing the Pope’s living
arrangements and looking out for his health.
Georg Gänswein will
essentially run the Apostolic Palace, as it were, and supervises the
planning of papal visits in Rome and throughout Italy.
And, naturally,
he will continue, with more authority than before, to help Pope Benedict
set his and the Church’s agenda.