The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrung his hands above his head in triumph as he emerged as Pope on to the balcony of St Peter’s eight years ago. He had won! He had longed to be Pope. He has loved being Pope. He expected to die as Pope.
Two weeks ago he announced in Latin he wasn’t up to it any more. Up to what?
He spent most of his time writing and took time off to tinkle on the piano and stroke his cat.
He’s been waited on hand and foot.
He has his handsome secretary Georg Ganswein to do his every bidding.
There’s been talk of frailty, encroaching dementia, mortal illness. There’s been pious spin about a holy act of ‘humility’.
But one of his predecessors, sprightly Leo XIII, who died 110 years ago, went on until he was 93. Benedict knew from the start, aged 76, that he would grow old in office.
We’ve heard about the so-called papal ‘resignation’ almost 600 years ago.
But there wasn’t one.
There were three rival Popes back then, and one of them was a psychopath.
They were sacked by a council of all the bishops and cardinals to get back to one Pope at a time.
Since then, every Pope has died in office. Resignation isn’t in Benedict’s vocabulary. The real reason he has quit is far more spectacular.
It is to save the Catholic Church from ignominy: he has voluntarily delivered himself up as a sacrificial lamb to purge the Church of what he calls ‘The Filth’.
And it must have taken courage.
Here is the remarkable thing you are seldom told about a papal death or resignation: every one of the senior office-holders in the Vatican – those at the highest level of its internal bureaucracy, called the Curia – loses his job.
A report Benedict himself commissioned into the state of the Curia landed on his desk in January.
It revealed that ‘The Filth’ – or more specifically, the paedophile priest scandal – had entered the bureaucracy.
He resigned in early February.
That report was a final straw.
The Filth has been corroding the soul of the Catholic Church for years, and the reason is the power-grabbing ineptitude and secrecy of the Curia – which failed to deal with the perpetrators.
Now the Curia itself stands accused of being part of The Filth.
Benedict realises the Curia must be reformed root and branch. He knows this is a mammoth task. He is too old, and too implicated, to clean it up himself. He has resigned to make way for a younger, more dynamic successor, untainted by scandal – and a similarly recast Curia.
Benedict was not prepared to wait for his own death to sweep out the gang who run the place. In one extraordinary gesture, by resigning, he gets rid of the lot of them.
But what then?
The Curia are usually quickly reappointed.
This time it may be different.
It involves scores of departments, like the civil service of a middling-sized country. It has a Home and Foreign Office called the Secretariat of State.
There’s a department that watches out for heresy – the former Holy Inquisition which under Cardinal Ratzinger dealt with, or failed to deal with, paedophile priests. Benedict realises the Curia must be reformed root and branch.
He knows this is a mammoth task Benedict realises the Curia must be reformed root and branch. He knows this is a mammoth task
And there is a Vatican Bank, the dubiously named Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), which was rocked by scandal in the early Eighties for links with the mafia.
The Curia is a big operation.
It maintains contact with all the bishops of the world, more than 3,000, in 110 countries.
The Curia oversees the hundreds of thousands of priests who care for the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
The flow of information, and money, in and out of the Vatican is prodigious. What makes the bureaucrats different from normal executives is they don’t go home and have another life.
Unless you’re a full cardinal, with a nice flat and housekeeper, you go back on a bus to the microwave and TV in a Vatican-owned garret. Rivalries between departments, vendettas between individuals, naked ambition, calumny, backstabbing and intrigues are endemic.
The former president of the Vatican Bank, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, once told me that the Curia is a ‘village of washerwomen. They wash clothes, punch ’em, dance on ’em, squeezing all the old dirt out’.
But who was he to talk?
In that same interview Marcinkus admitted he appropriated $250 million from the Vatican pension fund to pay a fine, levied by the Italian government, for financial misdemeanours.
Amazingly, he saw nothing wrong with that. Not surprisingly, some of the bureaucrats let off steam in unpriestly ways. Some are actively gay men who cannot normalise their lives with a partner because of Catholic teaching.
They frequent discreet bars, saunas and ‘safe houses’. On another level there are individuals known to have a weakness for sex with minors. It appears the people who procure these sexual services have become greedy.
They have been putting the squeeze on their priestly clients to launder cash through the Vatican. There is no suggestion that the bank has knowingly collaborated.
But in January, Italy’s central bank suspended credit-card activities inside Vatican City for ‘anti-money-laundering reasons’.
The Pope was already furious over the theft by his butler of private correspondence and top-secret papers last year.
The thefts were probably an attempt to discover how much the Pope knew of malfeasance within the Curia. Then news of a Vatican sex ring and money scams reached his ears late last year.
Benedict should not have been surprised. Hints of a seamy Vatican underworld have been surfacing for years.
In March 2010, a 29-year-old chorister in St Peter’s was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes, one of them a seminarian, for a papal gentleman-in-waiting who was also a senior adviser in the Curial department that oversees the church’s worldwide missionary activities.
Last autumn Benedict ordered three trusted high-ranking cardinals to investigate the state of the Curia. This was the report that was delivered to him just weeks ago.
It was meant for Benedict’s ‘eyes only’ but details of a sex ring and money-laundering scams last week reached the Italian weekly Panorama. Then the daily La Repubblica ran the story.
The timing of the report has coincided with fresh allegations of priestly sexual abuse in Germany.
Meanwhile, Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and Cardinal Sean Brady of Ireland have been accused of covering up paedophile abuse.
Benedict has resigned to ensure that the whole ‘Filth’ from many countries of the world right up to the Vatican centre is cleansed. He has given up his job to kick out all the office-holders and start again.
While the college of cardinals appears to have been shocked by the resignation, Benedict’s drastic decision was both predicted and strongly recommended two years ago by an eminent American psychologist and former priest.
In 2011, Dr Richard Sipe, a greatly respected world expert on the priestly abuse scandal, declared that only the Pope’s resignation would resolve the paedophile priest crisis. Sipe charged that ‘along with other bishops, Benedict was complicit earlier in tolerating and covering up the crimes of the priests’.
This month a documentary film, Mea Maxima Culpa, is on release in the UK. It claims that Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, refused to remove a paedophile priest called Father Murphy in the Nineties.
Sipe concluded that the Church’s only hope was a ‘courageous act’ on the part of the Pope.
He could begin to heal the Church ‘by resigning from the papacy and calling for the resignation of all the other bishops, like him, who were complicit in the abuse scandal’.
So the Pope’s resignation could be just the beginning of a wave of resignations, and/or sackings, when the new Pope comes in. With just three days left of his pontificate, Benedict accepted with lightning speed Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s resignation.
O’Brien was not involved in covering up for paedophile priests – but allegations that he had made inappropriate advances towards priests in the Eighties were enough for Benedict to confirm that he was not to join the conclave.
On Tuesday, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, former head of the Catholic Church in England, declared that the Vatican must ‘put its own house in order’.
In a bold castigation of the papacy and the Curia, the cardinal said: ‘There is no doubt that today there needs to be renewal in the Church, reform in the Church, and especially of its government.’
The cardinal was referring to the decision made at an historic meeting of the world’s bishops in 1962, known as the Second Vatican Council, which called for devolution of power from Rome.
Bishops and lay Catholics throughout the world complain that the shift of authority away from Rome to the local churches has not happened. As a result, the absolute power of the Vatican has been corrupting absolutely.
The establishment of a large, over-powerful Curia is a quirk of history.
When the Pope lost his papal territories, which stretched from Venice down to Naples, in the mid 19th Century, the civil service stayed on to run the Church from Rome.
On Tuesday, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, former head of the Catholic Church in England, declared that the Vatican must 'put its own house in order.'
The culture of a highly centralised Church government is now deeply entrenched. John Paul II, the energetic superstar Pope, seemed just the man to clean up the Curia. But he bypassed it, preferring to spend his time travelling the world.
Benedict might have made a start on it – but he retreated into bookish pursuits.
But even if a reformer gets in, he is going to have his work cut out to change an institution that has amassed such a centralised grip. Choosing a new team to be trusted may take just as long.
There is every chance that the old ways will return. But Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor may well be disappointed if a Pope in the mould of Benedict is elected. Benedict believes in strong central government. He has no time for devolution. And he may still have influence.
He has gone on record to assert that those who dissent from Catholic teaching should leave.
He has said that he would be happier with a smaller, totally loyal and faithful Church.
Benedict’s favoured candidate would likely bring a puritanical pressure to bear on sexually active Catholics living together outside of marriage, or using contraception, or in gay relationships. The coming conclave is set to be the most contentious for centuries.
Whichever side wins – the conservatives, the reformers or the devolutionists – will create tensions and antagonism between Catholicism’s different pressure groups.
My guess is that we are going to get a younger Benedict. I believe that we will get a Pope who will remove any cardinal, bishop or priest who is in any way implicated in the paedophile scandal.
But he will also move to exclude Catholics, high and low, who are not prepared to follow the Church’s teachings on sexual morality as a whole. Benedict’s stunning self-sacrifice constitutes, in my view, the greatest gamble in the papacy’s 2,000-year history.
If it works, the Church will begin to restore its besmirched reputation.
If it fails, we Catholics are headed for calamitous conflict and fragmentation.
* John Cornwell is the author of Hitler’s Pope and Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint