When Pope Benedict XVI startled one billion members of theglobal Catholic church and made news all over the world with his resignation inRome, he did so in Latin, saying that he was planning to step down due to adeterioration in “strength of mind...to adequately fulfill the ministryentrusted to me.”
That he made the stunning announcement in the ancient languageof the Roman Catholic Church seems somehow perfectly fitting for a papacysteeped in — some Vatican observers might even say trapped by — tradition and ayearning to return the Church to a time of obedience that existed before theSecond Vatican Council 50 years ago.
Coming two days before Ash Wednesday, the Vaticanannouncement that Benedict would conclude his papacy February 28, with theconclave to elect a new pontiff in mid-March, suggests a majestic passing ofpower on global television just before the Easter liturgy of Christian rebirth.In other words, how the 85-year-old pope announced his resignation, the onlypontiff to do so in some 600 years, and the choreographed timing of thetransition he has imposed says everything about who he is as a leader of thechurch.
Benedict will be remembered as the pope of ironies, a moralfundamentalist and chief theologian under his predecessor Pope John Paul II.His prosecutorial bent left him ill-suited as pastor of a global church at atime when the church is in crisis in North America and Western Europe and yetgrowing in Africa and Latin America.
The persona every pope seeks is that of peacemaker, themoral statesman on the international stage and a champion of peace. But mosthistorians and Vatican watchers would agree that this pope has hardly been apeacemaker. His papacy has been particularly divisive, pitting a moreconservative cabal inside the Vatican against more liberal forces trying topush the Church to rethink celibacy, to consider ordaining women and to reflectmore deeply on the internal corruption that prompted a priest sex abuse crisisto lead to a financial crisis in the church.
Although several of his encyclicals gave eloquent voice tothe values of a moral statesman and champion of peace, the image of apeacemaker eluded Benedict, largely because of the clergy abuse crisisinherited from John Paul II.
Although he engineered a major reform in 2001 as CardinalJoseph Ratzinger, persuading John Paul to consolidate the power in hisCongregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to defrock the worst clergyoffenders, as pope he recoiled from holding complicit cardinals and bishopsaccountable even when they violated the trust of the church.
Harsh media coverage in 2010 of the abuse crisis that rockedIreland and Western Europe exposed failures of the Vatican’s ancient system oftribunals to handle cases of a criminal nature when cardinals and bishopfunction with de facto immunity.
Amid those unresolved issues, the pope approved an investigationof American nuns, prodded by Cardinal Bernard Law, who had resigned in 2002 asthe disgraced archbishop of Boston following a sex abuse crisis that engulfedthe city and the country. Media coverage praising nuns, and criticizing theVatican, had barely abated when Paolo Gabriele, Benedict’s personal butler, wasarrested for leaking internal documents to the journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi foran explosive book, Sua Santità (His Holiness).
The ensuing media coverage portrayed Cardinal TarcisioBertone, the Secretary of State, as a polarizing figure within the Roman Curia,and a target of Vatican officials who used the butler in trying to drive theresignation of Bertone. Benedict stood by Bertone as the larger story emergedof a culture of Curial cardinals, who by tradition show absolute loyalty to thepope, as balkanised in turf wars.
Losing the loyalty of his own butler, with whom he had lunchin his living quarters several times a month, was perhaps the harshest blow forBenedict. In the last two years he had shown uncommon detachment from the dailygrind of governance, retreating after lunch to work on scholarly writings inthe afternoons. Meanwhile, lower-level Vatican staff and would-be successorsjockeyed for power.
As Cardinal Ratzinger he spent nearly a quarter-century asprefect of CDF. Among notable priests who suffered the loss of their licensesto teach theology after closed proceedings were Hans Küng, a former colleagueof Ratzinger’s at Germany’s University of Tübingen for his critique of papalinfallibility, and Charles Curran of Catholic University of America for criticisingthe 1968 encyclical banning birth control devices.
Ratzinger became famous for an unflinching, prosecutorialapproach to theology, which made him a bête noir among many progressives withinthe Catholic Church. Küng famously called him the Grand Inquisitor, after thedark cardinal who persecutes heretics in The Brothers Karamazov.
As pope, it seemed Benedict needed his own inquisitor tohelp bring structural reform by punishing cardinals and bishops, like Law, withmuch to answer for in presiding over an abuse crisis that has rocked the churchto its core. In the end, Benedict could not bring himself to reform thefraternal culture of the Curia that had given him supreme power. In theunkindest of ironies, the scandal he worked so hard as a cardinal to reversehad its own inexorable drive which wore down his energy. By failing to foster agovernment of laws, he hands his successor the same problem John Paul handedhim.
Jason Berry writes on religion for GlobalPost SpecialReports and for GlobalPost’s new religion blog, “Belief.” He is the author of“Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church” (Crown),which won the Investigative Reporters and Editors 2011 Book Award.
