Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (70 page)

A similar mix of good intentions and limited vision characterized Benedict’s response to the crisis over clerical abuse in Ireland. From the 1990s onwards the standing of the Church in what had been till then the most Catholic country in Europe was pulverised by a relentless torrent of revelation and accusation about the physical, mental and sexual abuse of minors by clergy and religious, in parishes, church-run schools, penal institutions and orphanages. Ireland in the age of the short-lived ‘Celtic Tiger’ was in any case in the grip of a gleeful if belated wave of secularization, which the abuse scandals fed. But a series of public reports, particularly those on the diocese of Ferns (2006), and the Murphy report on the Dublin archdiocese (2009), made clear that such abuse had indeed been shockingly prevalent, shielded by a culture of deference and concealment in which civil as well as religious authorities were complicit. These revelations triggered a number of Episcopal resignations over complicity through concealment, the silencing of victims, or the pastoral redeployment of known abusers. In April 2004 the Archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal Desmond O’Connell, was obliged to step down in favour of his recently appointed coadjutor, Diarmuid Martin, a toughminded Vatican diplomat with clean hands who had been bussed in to lead the Irish Church’s response to the crisis. In March 2010 it was the turn of the Archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Sean Brady, to face widespread calls for his resignation, in the wake of revelations that, as a diocesan official in the 1970s, he himself had sworn abuse victims to secrecy.

In this fevered atmosphere, on 19 March 2010, after a series of frosty meetings with the Irish bishops, Benedict issued a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, deploring the abuse and its cover-up, expressing sorrow to the victims, and acknowledging the roots of the scandal in ‘inadequate procedures for determining the suitability of candidates for the priesthood and the religious life; insufficient human, moral, intellectual and spiritual formation in seminaries and novitiates; a tendency in society to favour the clergy and other authority figures; and a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal’.
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This was the fullest acknowledgement to date by any pope of the problem of sexual abuse and its root causes, and Benedict’s letter was intended to make clear how seriously he took the crisis, in Ireland and more widely. But to many observers within as well as beyond the
Church his response seemed to fall short of what was required. The pope suggested in his letter that the wave of abuse might be a consequence of recent secularising trends, in which the softening of zeal since the Second Vatican Council, and the abandonment of traditional practices like regular confession, had played a major part. To his critics, Benedict seemed too ready to blame deep-seated and endemic problems on the liberalisation of Catholicism after the Council, rather than face up to the links between abuse and the Church’s long-standing clericalist ethos and authoritarian structures. Benedict’s letter also laid the responsibility for the mishandling of abuse cases squarely on the shoulders of the Irish bishops. There was no acknowledgement anywhere in it that inadequacies in the Church’s law or in the Vatican’s own direction might have contributed to failures in pastoral care and the demands of justice. And Benedict’s subsequent refusal of the resignation of two of the auxiliary bishops of the Dublin diocese criticized in the Murphy report seemed to many to undermine the efforts of reformers like Archbishop Martin to deal decisively with the situation and restore public confidence.

Scandal over sexual abuse dogged the last years of Benedict’s pontifcate, and added measurably to the drift away from the Church which he so deplored. In 2010 he had established the
Pontifical Council for the New Evangelisation
, with the specific remit of reversing the ‘progressive secularization of society and the eclipse of the sense of God’ in Christianity’s European heartlands. But the relentless leakage went on, not least in his native Germany, where
Die Zeit
newspaper reported that 180,000 Germans had formally ended their affiliation to the Catholic Church and withdrawn from paying the church tax in 2010, a 40% rise on the previous year, well beyond any mere statistical fluctuation. In the decade to 2011, the numbers of Catholic clergy in Europe as a whole had dropped by 9%, the number of seminarians was down by 22%, male religious by 18%, female religious by 22%. Scandal over money as well as sex contributed to a growing sense of malaise and disenchantment. The stubborn opacity of the activities of the Vatican Bank (IOR) had led to longstanding suspicions of corruption (notoriously, Vatican financial corruption had provided the central strand for the plot of the 1990 gangster-movie
Godfather
III). In 2010 the Italian authorities froze $30,000,000 of Vatican funds, on suspicion that it was part of a money-laundering scheme. The money was subsequently released, and later that year Benedict established the Financial Information Authority, in an attempt to increase transparency and restore international confidence. But the Vatican’s
financial troubles did not go away. In May 2012, allegedly after a falling out with Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, the bank’s president, Ettore Tedeschi, was ousted by the board of directors, amid mutual accusations of corruption and malpractice. In January 2013 the Italian financial authorities froze all transactions with the Vatican Bank because of its failure to comply with EU regulations governing transparency. For a month, visitors to Vatican City shops and tourist facilities were unable to pay by credit card, until the Vatican was bailed out by a Swiss bank which did not have to abide by EU regulations.

Against this background the so-called Vatileaks scandal erupted. From mid-2011 an anonymous source began leaking Vatican documents to the Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, including papal correspondence and confidential memos from Mgr Georg Gänswein, the former Lefeb-vrist seminarian, who had been Benedict’s secretary and trusted gatekeeper since 2005. Gänswein’s involvement fed press appetite for the revelations, for he had been nicknamed ‘Bel Giorgio’, ‘Gorgeous George’, by Italian journalists, on account of his film-star looks and dashing life-style (his leisure interests included tennis, skiing and flying light aircraft). Though none of the leaked documents provided proof of criminal malpractice, cumulatively the dossier revealed a labyrinthine and chronically dysfunctional central administration, riven with poisonous rivalries and jostlings for position. Benedict’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone, was portrayed in the leaked documents as unpopular and isolated, inclined to cronyism and resistant to attempts at financial or administrative reform. It emerged that the pope’s own butler, Paolo Gabriele, was the main source of the leaks, though those who thought him a puppet for more exalted conspirators pointed out that he could neither read nor understand the German in which some of the key documents were written. Gabriele’s quarters in the Vatican were discovered to be stacked with crates of papers, purloined, as he claimed, in a desire to purge the Church of corruption. In a blaze of publicity, the pope’s butler was tried, convicted and imprisoned by a specially constituted Vatican court in October 2013, but pardoned by the pope two months later. Benedict stubbornly resisted lobbying to replace Bertone as Secretary of State, but he was badly shaken by the scandal, and established a commission of three senior cardinals to investigate the affair. On 17 December 2012 they presented him with a 700-page report. The secrecy surrounding this dossier gave scope for unconfirmed rumours of phone-tapping, conspiracy, intimidation and blackmail, and a Vatican clerical homintern,
meeting in Roman saunas and gyms.

Whatever its actual contents, the Commission of Cardinals’ findings were apparently disturbing enough to crystallize Benedict’s concern that he no longer had the energy to tackle the multiple problems which beset his pontificate. Never robust, and now in his eighty-sixth year, Benedict’s energies during long papal ceremonies had been visibly flagging for some time: he had been obliged to use an undignified electric trolley during processions in St Peter’s. In the course of a book-length interview with the journalist Peter Seewald in 2010, Benedict had said that ‘if a pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically, and spiritually capable of handling the duties of office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign.’
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At the time of its publication this remark might have been taken as a reflection on the incapacities of the painful final years of John Paul II. It was in fact a statement of sober conviction, and in the face of his own failing strength and mounting difficulties, Papa Ratzinger now determined to act on it. He seems to have revealed his intentions to no-one but his brother Georg, with whom he floated the idea sometime before Christmas 2012. In the course of a routine meeting with cardinals on 11 February 2013, and speaking rapidly in slurred Latin so that only one (female) journalist grasped the enormity of what was being said, Benedict dropped his bombshell. He was careful to avoid any implied criticism of his predecessor’s dogged continuance in office, but was equally clear about his own different perceptions.

‘I am well aware’, he declared, ‘that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering. However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfil the ministry entrusted to me.’
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He therefore announced that he would step down at 8.00 p. m. on 28 February, clearing the way for the election of a successor.

Benedict’s sensational resignation was taken by many as a tacit admission of his own incapacity to deal with the problems which had multiplied in his pontificate. He had been elected to halt the secularization of Europe: Europe was more secular than ever. Some in the Church had hoped that a long-term Curial insider would initiate reform of the
Church’s sclerotic central administration: that administration was mired deeper than ever in scandal. At one level, therefore, his resignation could be seen as an admission of defeat. Yet the first papal resignation for six centuries was also a revolutionary act of extraordinary imagination and courage, a bolt from the blue, precipitating a momentous shift in understanding of the very office of pope. For more than a millennium the papacy had functioned at least as much as a religious icon as an administrative centre, and the papal office had been exercised and perceived as different in kind from that of all other bishops. A pope’s episcopal colleagues are obliged to offer their resignation when they reach seventy five (an offer which is rarely refused), and all cardinals are automatically disqualified from participation in papal elections when they turn eighty. Only the pope had been thought to be above questions of effectiveness and competence. Both Paul VI and John Paul II had made a religious virtue out of their old age and incapacity, seeing in them a participation in the Cross of Christ, which had to be carried to the end. In his brief and unassuming statement to the cardinals, in which he asked forgiveness for his own deficiencies, Benedict accepted the legitimacy of that view, but rejected it for himself. With his insistence that the papacy is not only Christianity’s most exalted religious office, but precisely a hugely demanding job, with mundane responsibilities which the incumbent must be fit to discharge, this modest professional theologian changed the rules of the game. Many regretted and some deplored his decision. But it was clear at once that Benedict had liberated all future popes to think of their election as a fixed term appointment, just as he had liberated the cardinal electors by the realisation that the Church is not necessarily stuck with an ageing or unsuitable choice: death was no longer the only mode of release.

Benedict’s resignation took the Church into uncharted waters. What would a retired pope be called, where would he live, what would he wear? These questions were by no means trivial: the Church has a long memory, and the Vatican had not forgotten Avignon and the era of rival popes. There were concerns that an ex-pope in retirement in Bavaria or elsewhere might become a focus of division. In due course Benedict announced that he would assume the title ‘His Holiness Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI’ and continue to dress in papal white, that he would live in a specially converted convent building in the Vatican grounds (after a period living at Castel Gandolfo, to give his successor a clear run in) but also that he would disappear from public view, living a secluded life of
prayer and study in preparation for the one final journey which all men must make. The sentiments were admirable, though many thought that his courageous act of renunciation would have been more complete had he reverted to his own name, to simple clerical dress, and had taken himself permanently out from under his successor’s feet. More problematically, the proposed arrangements for Benedict’s Vatican seclusion included the company of Mgr Ganswein, whom Benedict had appointed Prefect of the Pontifical Household as recently as December 2012. This powerful and prestigious post controlled access to the reigning pope, and carried with it a titular archbishopric. ‘Bel Giorgio’ was duly consecrated just one month before Benedict’s resignation speech. It now appeared to be envisaged that he would remain as Prefect of the Papal Household, while continuing also as Benedict’s secretary and companion. It was by no means obvious that such an arrangement was workable, or if workable, would be likely to appeal to Benedict’s successor.

A P
OPE FOR THE
P
OOR

As the cardinals streamed to Rome in the last weeks of February, the shock of Benedict’s resignation gave way to a ground-swell of rare cardinalatial candour about the dysfunction at the heart of the Church’s central administration. Cardinal after cardinal called for urgent reform of the Curia as the first priority for any new pope. The sense of crisis was heightened by breaking news that the Scottish cardinal, Archbishop Keith O’Brien, had been denounced by a group of serving and former clergy, claiming that, while seminary rector, he had pressed sexual advances on them. O’Brien’s immediate resignation as Archbishop of Edinburgh, and the announcement that he would take no part in the election, supported these allegations and brought the sexual scandals which had haunted the Church for the last two decades insistently close to the Conclave itself.