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The pope who was God’s shy, studious, charming, conservative radical

Catherine Pepinster - The Tablet - Mon, Jan 9th 2023

The pope who was God’s shy, studious, charming, conservative radical

After just eight years on the throne of St Peter, Joseph Ratzinger radically altered the course of the papacy by resigning, but not before making his mark as a thinker looking both backwards to the certainties of the past and forward to the new evangelising possibilities of the future.

Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, who died on 31 December 2022, was one of the most influential figures in the Catholic Church during the late-twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first. He developed a reputation for steely determination and rigorous pursuit of the truth, even to the extent of constraining theological exploration and pursuing those individuals he saw as trespassing outside legitimate doctrinal boundaries during his years as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. As Pope, he presided over a Church that often seemed ill at ease with itself, increasingly divided over the liturgy and shamed over child abuse. He attracted controversy and surprised both his supporters and his detractors. But nothing matched the shock of his announcement of his resignation in February 2013, the first by a pope for nearly 600 years. 

During his 24 years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith he was right-hand man to Pope John Paul II and shared responsibility for decisions and policies of the latter years of the Wojtyla pontificate, which many progressive Catholics found hard to stomach. As the Polish pope became increasingly frail, it was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who emerged as the leading figure in the Vatican, earning a reputation as a fearless hardliner – reflected in the nicknames “Panzer Cardinal” and “the Rottweiler”.

His election as Pope Benedict XVI was not unexpected. He dominated proceedings following the death of John Paul II on 2 May 2005, celebrating his funeral Mass, giving a memorable homily, and impressing the cardinals assembled in Rome for the conclave with the calmness and assurance of his meditations. The kingmaker, it seemed, might well become king. And so it turned out. The name he chose referred to the patron saint of Europe, Benedict of Nursia, whose monastic rule begins with the word “Listen”. The previous Benedict, the XV, had unsuccessfully attempted a role as peacemaker during the First World War, and expressed grave concern for defeated Germany, which no doubt made a deep impression on the young Bavarian Joseph Ratzinger. The name’s European connections reflected Ratzinger’s concern that it was Europe, once Catholicism’s heartland, that most needed leadership and direction.

Benedict XVI, perhaps freed by no longer having to be the Vatican’s  policeman, seemed a gentler soul than the former Prefect of the CDF. Rather than the contested issues which bubbled under the surface – divorce, celibacy, contraception, abortion and women’s ordination – he focused on wider-ranging, more fundamental beliefs. His earliest achievement was the encyclical Deus Caritas Est, a beautifully written exposition of Catholic faith in the power of love.

But Benedict’s combative and controversial side came to the fore with his most notorious speech: the Regensburg address. Given during a visit home to Germany in September 2006, it was a powerful argument in favour of reason that was lost in the controversy surrounding a brief, explosive reference to Islam. Within a few days, anger had spread throughout the Arab world. By the time he had apologised, mobs were burning his effigy in the streets of several cities.

His short papacy was considered from its beginning a transitional pontificate, bridging the gap between the papacy of John Paul II – of the Cold War and post-Cold War – to the post-9/11 era of the twenty-first century. It concerned itself with ideas, with theology and the life of the mind and the spirit rather than diplomacy or efforts to encourage greater roles for the laity and episcopal collegiality. Limitations to papal authority and the curtailment of the influence of the Curia were not on the agenda.

His commitment to the documents of Vatican II came with his own personal interpretative key to the Council’s meaning and legacy. Those who had most feared his election grew increasingly convinced of his desire to dismantle the reforms of the Council, especially of the liturgy. While he became best known for his intellectual expositions of the faith, not only through his encyclicals but also through his addresses during his travels – particularly those in Westminster Hall during his British state visit of 2010 and in the Reichstag during his German state visit of 2011 – the papacy of Benedict XVI became increasingly embroiled in controversy, in public relations gaffes, and in revelations of clerical infighting, financial corruption and chaotic mismanagement.

In the latter years of his papacy, Benedict XVI not only suffered from the inevitable decline of his health and energy but appeared to be increasingly burdened by the demands of his office. Not only was there the distress of increasing revelations about child abuse but the treachery of humankind was evident, too, in the leaks from his own household and the theft of his personal documents. While his resignation stunned the world, he had left a clue. In Peter Seewald’s book-length interview, Light of the World, published in 2010, he had said: “If a pope clearly realises that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign”.

Joseph Ratzinger was born on Easter Saturday, 16 April, 1927, in Marktl am Inn in Upper Bavaria, into an intensely Catholic family, the youngest of three children born to Mary (née Peintner) and Joseph, a cook and a policeman. His early life was deeply affected by the Second World War. His father’s opposition to Nazism led to work demotions and harassment. In 1943, at the age of 16, Joseph was conscripted into anti-aircraft work in Munich, later joining the army. By the end of the war he had deserted but he was taken prisoner by the US forces, eventually being released in June 1945.

He then entered seminary, studied theology at the Catholic faculty of theology in Munich, where he worked towards a doctorate on St Augustine, and was ordained alongside his elder brother Georg in 1951. Ratzinger became a curate in a parish but his pastoral experience was limited. He returned to academia, to the seminary in Freising. 

Ratzinger quickly became one of the most noted young professors of theology in Germany. Theodore Hesburgh, the president of the University of Notre Dame, invited him to join the university’s theology faculty. Ratzinger wrote back: “I’d love to come, but I don’t think my English is good enough yet.” He taught in Bonn, Münster and Tübingen, where in 1966 his friend Hans Küng helped him secure the chair in dogmatic theology. At this time, Professor Ratzinger was considered a progressive theologian, lecturing on the need for more openness and tolerance in the Church, and critical of the rigidity of the Vatican.

In January 1959, just three months after his election, Pope John XXIII announced the calling of a general council. During the four sessions of the Second Vatican Council, between 1962 and 1965, every aspect of the Catholic Church’s life was transformed. The young professor Ratzinger acted as adviser, or peritus, to the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Josef Frings, and wrote Frings’ sensational speech in which he called for reform of the Holy Office and for the need for greater transparency. He wrote warmly of episcopal collegiality and was crucially involved in drafting the decree on revelation, Dei Verbum, and key parts of Lumen Gentium, the dogmatic constitution on the Church.

Ratzinger joined with Hans Küng, Karl Rahner and Yves Congar to found the progressive theological journal Concilium in 1965. Yet his disquiet – about the spirit of the age and about how this was influencing the Council – grew and he came to view Gaudium et Spes, the Council’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the Modern World as lacking in theological content, too sociological, too political and lacking the spiritual depth of other documents. The Council, Ratzinger came to believe, had been hijacked and its thinking distorted. In 1969, he left Tübingen and returned to Bavaria, to the relative academic backwater of Regensburg University. In 1972, he co-founded the theological journal Communio with Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Walter Kasper and others, who kept the reforms of the Council under a tighter rein than the editors of Concilium.

One of the most profound changes in the history of the Catholic Church came when the reforms to the liturgy called for by the Council’s constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, were implemented. The revised Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970 and republished in two subsequent editions by John Paul II largely displaced the use of the pre-Vatican Council liturgy, the final edition of which had been published in 1962. For Joseph Ratzinger, the rejection of the old liturgy came to symbolise all that was wrong with the Council’s reforms. The liturgical changes offended him aesthetically; they horrified him because he believed they rejected tradition, and they appalled him because he felt they had led to liturgy designed by committee.

In 1977, Paul VI appointed Ratzinger to be Archbishop of Munich and Freising, promoting him to cardinal soon after. Ratzinger took the opportunity to expound his increasingly conservative views, concerning himself with the dissolution of tradition and authenticity, and becoming known for his critique of contemporary society. He now saw it as his prophetic duty to highlight the vices of the times, as well as to focus on the loss of faith in the West, the decline in vocations to the priesthood and the misdemeanours of those in holy orders.  Then, in 1981, he was called to Rome to take over as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Paul VI’s successor, John Paul II. They had become friendly during the first conclave of 1978 (which had led to the short-lived papacy of John Paul I). They had a certain amount in common: their lives and those of their countries had been profoundly affected on the ground by the Second World War and then the Cold War. They had both been in Rome for the Council and had been perceived as reformers; both had become increasingly pessimistic about the West’s slide away from Christian faith and values.

At the CDF, Cardinal Ratzinger made assertive orthodoxy the hallmark of John Paul’s pontificate. His role as the watchdog with not only bark but bite was most clearly in evidence in his congregation’s dealings with Latin American liberation theologians, who were offering a sharp theological critique of unjust societies. In spite of their protests, they were accused of making an accommodation of Christianity with Marxism. Theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff were effectively silenced while the US moral theologian Charles Curran had his licence to teach withdrawn after he wrote critically on Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical which taught that the use of artificial contraception by married couples was gravely sinful.

There was a sense that John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger were stifling theological dialogue. In 1994, the Pope’s apostolic constitution Ordinatio Sacerdotalis declared the debate about the ordination of women closed. Christ, he said, chose men to be Apostles and so only men could be priests. “The Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination to women and this judgement is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” It was unclear what “definitively held” meant. It was said by some that Cardinal Ratzinger had stepped in to stop John Paul making this statement infallible. This was followed in 1998 by a demand that Catholic theologians teaching in Catholic institutions sign a profession of faith and an oath of fidelity. Many of them already felt under pressure, given that the CDF’s 1990 instruction, “On the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian”, had been seen as an attack on their autonomy.

Perhaps the most sustained and controversial campaign by Ratzinger’s CDF was that against the widely respected Belgian Jesuit theologian Jacques Dupuis. His book Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism was subjected to a lengthy investigation which officially concluded with a five-page “notification” that there were “notable ambiguities and difficulties” in the book “which could lead the reader to erroneous or harmful opinions”. The judgement highlighted Ratzinger’s distaste for relativism, which he sometimes appeared to think was synonymous with pluralism.

There were times when Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger did not see eye-to-eye. In 1986, John Paul II welcomed people of many faiths, including Muslims and Hindus, to Assisi to pray together for world peace. Cardinal Ratzinger had little enthusiasm for it, though 25 years later, as Pope Benedict XVI, he attended the anniversary events in Assisi. Nor did he share John Paul’s fondness for canonisations – he created more saints than any other pope – which decreased markedly after Ratzinger’s election. But these were exceptions. The Wojtyla-Ratzinger partnership profoundly shaped the papacy during the 1980s and 1990s. “The Pope trusts me”, Ratzinger once said. “I’ve had a say in the Pope’s official teaching and contributed something that has also given shape to the pontificate.”

As John Paul became increasingly infirm, the power and the influence of the CDF and particularly its Prefect grew. Its most controversial move was the publication in September 2000 of the declaration on the unity and universality of Christianity, Dominus Iesus. The declaration denied the possibility of real “faith” for non-Christians. Only “belief” was a possibility for them. Muslims and others also felt rejected by a passage about “followers of other religions” being in a “gravely deficient situation”. Jews were offended by the way Dominus Iesus glossed over their special relationship to the Catholic Church, and cancelled a day of dialogue. Its forbidding of the use of the term “sister churches” (previously used by Paul VI) to denote the Church of England and other Protestant denominations, which were to be described as mere “ecclesial communities”, caused grave disquiet and hurt.

Within the Vatican there was dismay that the two organisations concerned with ecumenism and inter-faith dialogue had not been consulted. John Paul II felt it necessary to assure Queen Elizabeth II when she arrived on a visit shortly afterwards that there could be “no turning back” from the commitment to ecumenism.

When John Paul II died in April 2005, it soon became apparent that the cardinals did not want another lengthy papacy. Speculation grew in the press that the conclave would elect a candidate from the developing world. But word spread that Europe and its loss of faith was a constant theme of the cardinals’ discussions.

After one of the shortest conclaves in modern times, Cardinal Ratzinger was elected on the fourth ballot. He was one of the best known members of the College of Cardinals. As its Dean he had celebrated and preached at the funeral Mass of John Paul II and had presided over the General Congregations which met between the Pope’s death and the conclave. He had surprised people with his manner during the Congregations, seemingly keen to engage and converse rather than direct in the more authoritarian John Paul style. These encounters were no doubt recalled by the cardinals as they voted.

Cardinal Ratzinger would not always have been the preferred choice. He had suffered ill health; he was not comfortable on the public stage; to many, he remained a highly divisive figure. Yet he was clearly an able candidate, with a respected intellect, and someone who stood for the values of the previous pontificate. Even those wary of his record at the CDF saw someone who would be a safe pair of hands and who would avoid the personality cult which had grown up around John Paul.  At his inaugural Mass the following Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI preached to the crowds for the first time, greeting not only Catholics but fellow Christians and the Jewish people, and “all men and women of today, believers and non-believers alike”. He went on to speak of “the contemporary desert, the desert of poverty, abandonment, loneliness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life. The Church as a whole and all her pastors must lead people out of the desert towards the place of life.”

The new Pope’s life was somewhat different from that of his predecessor. The Poles at the Vatican, including John Paul’s secretary, Stanislaw Dziwisz, were despatched home. His circle consisted of his housekeeper, Ingrid Stampa, his secretary, Mgr Georg Gänswein, his brother Georg, and fellow priests from his days teaching and studying theology. They included Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec and Cardinal Angelo Scola. During his time at the CDF, Joseph Ratzinger had continued to meet these colleagues each summer for a Schülerkreis, a summer school that would focus on a particular theme each year. They became as much of a part of the Benedictine papacy as they had of his cardinalship, with the gatherings held at Castel Gandolfo.

Appointments to the Curia proffered contrary evidence as to the papacy that Benedict wanted to develop. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a Salesian, was appointed Secretary of State. He seemed an unlikely choice, given his lack of diplomatic experience. The choice of Cardinal William Levada of San Francisco as Benedict’s own successor at the CDF was a surprising one. He was known for his nuanced dealings with problems over homosexuality in the West Coast Church.

In September 2005, he had a cordial four-hour meeting with Hans Küng, the rebel theologian and darling of the progressives, whom John Paul had never agreed to meet. This willingness to dialogue set a tone that was unexpected. But other early developments in Benedict’s reign caused alarm among more liberal-minded Catholics. First there was the move of Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, the expert on Islamic and Arabic culture, from his post as president of the Council for Interreligious Dialogue. Walsall-born Fitzgerald was known to be warm in his dealings with other faiths, perhaps too warm. He was appointed instead to be nuncio to Egypt and the Arab League. It was at the very least a sideways move, suggesting that Benedict would be taking a less conciliatory line to other faiths, particularly Islam.

Many were dismayed by the hand of friendship offered to the Society of St Pius X, whose members had long defied Rome over the Tridentine Rite. Associates of theirs were allowed to take over a college in Bordeaux. Again, it was a sign of what was to come. In late-2005 came a document from the Congregation for Catholic Education which exasperated more progressive elements in the Church. Norms for the admission of candidates to seminaries appeared to suggest that not only those who practised homosexuality but those with what were called “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” were not to be accepted for priestly training. Although many associated the Instruction with child abuse scandals, there was no evidence in the document to substantiate the claim of a link between homosexuality and abuse.

Benedict was genuinely alarmed by clerical sex abuse in the Church. As CDF Prefect he had spoken just days before John Paul’s death of the need to get rid of “the filth” in the Church. As Pope, he did what John Paul had never done: he took action against Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the arch-conservative Catholic order, the Legionaries of Christ. For years there had been complaints that Maciel had abused young boys and seminarians in his care, but as the order grew in influence and Maciel enjoyed the special protection of John Paul, the then Cardinal Ratzinger had in 1999 halted an inquiry into the accusations and rumours. The book Vows of Silence by Jason Berry and Gerald Renner convincingly indicted Maciel, and the CDF re-opened the investigation. By May 2006, in the second year of Benedict’s pontificate, the Vatican told Maciel to end his ministry, no longer to celebrate Mass and instead opt for a life of penitence.

If a first encyclical is traditionally perceived as setting the tone of a papacy, then Benedict was not so much an authoritarian as Pope but a man primarily concerned with love. Deus Caritas Est, published in January 2006, was a fluent and accessible 16,000-word treatise on the relationship between spiritual and erotic love and on the charitable role of the Church in the world. It explored eros, or erotic love, agape, the spiritual and selfless love as demonstrated by Christ, and charity, the love at the heart of the Church’s activities in a world where religion was too often associated with hatred and violence.

enedict’s views on the liturgy came nowhere near securing the same praise. He kept Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos in his post as president of the Ecclesia Dei Commission, the Vatican office set up to help facilitate the return of schismatic groups such as SSPX. It was a decision that was to lead to outspoken claims by Castrillón about the revival of the Tridentine Rite.

Relations with Islam were one of the thorniest issues of Benedict’s pontificate, and his dealings with Judaism were no less a theological hot potato. This, after all, was a German pope, a former member of the Hitler Youth, although he had been coerced into membership and later fled the German army. Benedict well understood the difficulties. “To speak in this place of horror,” he said in Auschwitz- Birkenau concentration camp during his trip to Poland in May 2006, “where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible – and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from Germany … I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God.”

Welcome as these words were, he provoked controversy by suggesting that the German people were as much victims of Hitler’s Nazi regime as those killed in the concentration camps. His comment that the Germans “were used and abused as an instrument of the [Nazis’] thirst for destruction and power” hinted at a revisionist interpretation of history. Benedict acknowledged the importance of the Holocaust, but saw it as a neo-pagan phenomenon, rather than accepting old Christian prejudices against Jews as its seedbed.

But it was during a trip home to Bavaria that he became embroiled in his greatest crisis. The visit involved a visit to Regensburg, where he had spent many years as professor and vice-rector of its university. He delivered a very academic public lecture, reflecting on reason and the threats to it, and making the point that, in Christianity, God is understood to act in accordance with reason.

Benedict’s comments about Islam included his fateful quoting of the fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and you will find only evil and inhuman things such as his command to spread the faith with the sword.” Benedict went on to comment on the “startling brusqueness” of the remark but endorsed the view that “spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable”. Within a few days, anger had spread throughout the Arab world. There were fears for the Pope’s safety.

Ratzinger had long been suspicious of what he saw as relativism and too empathetic an engagement with other religions, including Islam. As well as removing Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald from the Council for Interreligious Dialogue, in the summer of 2005 at his Schülerkreis he had discussed Islam with his former doctoral students. But he was no longer just a professor engaged in discussion with students; he was the Pope. Yet it took five days of continuing anger before Benedict spoke to repair the damage done. By the time he said that he was “deeply sorry for the reactions” towards passages in his address that “were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims”, his effigy was being burned in the streets of several cities. 

 

A few days later came a Vatican effort at reconciliation when ambassadors from Muslim countries were invited to a papal audience at Castel Gandolfo, where Benedict expressed his profound respect for Muslims and reiterated that interfaith dialogue was vital for peace. A fortnight later, 38 Muslim clerics and scholars responded to the Pope, thanking him for distancing himself from his controversial remarks but also criticising his mistakes and oversimplifications.

 

The next test for Benedict was the visit later that year to Turkey. The three-day visit was unlike those normally made by Popes, with placards and posters erected before his arrival by those outraged by his Regensburg address. For those Turks desiring a religious state, Pope Benedict had come to represent the hostile West. More than 4,000 security personnel, including consultants from the FBI, worked for weeks on the security of the visit. But the Pope, after previously making his doubts about Turkey’s European credentials clear, seemed to reverse his thinking, telling the Turks that the Vatican favoured the country’s admission to the EU. 

 

In later speeches during the visit, Benedict described Turkey as a bridge between East and West and said that authentic dialogue and fruitful debate were the only way forward. It was a bravura performance of conciliation; whether it was clever diplomacy or a genuine rethink on Benedict’s part is questionable. The lasting image was that of the Pope praying in the Sultan Ahmet Camii, or Blue Mosque.

 

For all the political dramas, the trip to Turkey had followed an invitation from the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. This highlighted a very different approach from the Orthodox leader to Benedict than to his predecessor. Benedict was known to express theological views with which the Orthodox were more in sympathy. But the visit, dominated by rows over Islam, did not lead to a significant thawing in Catholic-Orthodox relations. While there was personal warmth between Patriarch and Pope, there was nothing new in the joint declaration they signed.

 

Ecumenical warmth was far more evident in encounters between Benedict and Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The first significant meeting came just days after the Pope returned from Istanbul and Ankara. The highlight of Williams’ six-day visit to Rome was his conversation in the papal library with his fellow theologian which began with a discussion of the work and teaching of St Benedict. For all the conviviality and the scholarly connections, the encounter was not without its problems. The consideration of the ordination of women bishops and the blessing of homosexual unions in the Anglican communion was causing anxiety in Rome and Benedict told Williams that how they were dealt with would shape the future of Catholic-Anglican relations. 

 

In their joint statement, they focused on seven areas where the Churches could stand united: respect for life; sanctity of marriage; outreach to the poor; care for creation; interreligious dialogue; addressing the negative effects of materialism; and pursuit of peace. It became evident during the Benedictine papacy that ecumenism no longer meant striving for unity with Christian denominations, but finding common ground on which they could witness to the world together.

 

Within the Catholic Church, there were deepening divisions between traditionalists and progressives. In March 2007, just two months before the Fifth General Conference of CELAM, the council of bishops’ conferences of Latin America and the Caribbean, the CDF issued a Notification declaring that the writings of the respected Latin American Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino “contain propositions which are either erroneous or dangerous and may cause harm to the faithful”. There was widespread anger among many theologians. During his visit to the conference in Aparecida, Brazil, Benedict uncompromisingly defended the traditional family, life issues and mandatory priestly celibacy – a defence that could have been seen as a direct attack on the growing support in Brazil for married priests.

 

Even deeper divisions were to be exposed by Benedict’s decision to ease access to celebrations of the pre-Vatican Council liturgy. In July 2007, to the delight of traditionalists and the dismay of liberals, Benedict published Summorum Pontificum, which relaxed restrictions on the use of the Tridentine Rite. Benedict declared: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too and it cannot be all of a sudden forbidden.” Except that, in effect, it had been, by Popes John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II. The motu proprio did restrict use of the old rite to “stable groups”, although what size a stable group was, was not made clear. If Benedict had wanted to give universal approval for use of the Rite, he would ­presumably have done so. He could have taken the Church back to the Counter-Reformation theology of the Council of Trent, which the Second Vatican Council had effectively announced was in the past. Instead, he took a more cautious path, although one that was to later cause deep divisions in some parishes. Yet his lifting of restrictions on the use of the pre-conciliar liturgy was the clearest sign that Benedict XVI held fast to the conservatism of Joseph Ratzinger – at least in liturgical matters. A liberal at heart he was not.

 

The publication of Summorum Pontificum could also be interpreted as Benedict taking a swing at episcopal power. Previously, priests would have to obtain special permission from their bishop to celebrate Mass in the older form of rite; now the local ordinary would have to bow to the request. The most problematic issue was the way the old rite spoke of the Jewish people. While the 1962 edition of the Missal had removed the adjective “perfidious” from its description of the Jews in the Good Friday liturgy, prayers for their conversion –  in direct contradiction of the teaching of the Council document Nostra Aetate – were still extant. Equally offensively, Christians of other denominations were described as “heretics”. 

 

Benedict rewrote the prayers in the Good Friday liturgy to be celebrated according to the Roman Missal of 1962 himself, removing references to “Jewish blindness” but leaving untouched the petition that Jews be converted to Christianity. His version did nothing to soften the offence caused to many Jews, who, after so many years of growing warmth between Judaism and Catholicism, feared that progress was being undone.

 

While Benedict was instinctively conservative in matters of theology, ecclesiology and liturgy, there were ways in which he was strikingly a man of the twenty-first century. He was increasingly concerned with the environment and green issues. In September 2007 he urged young people to take steps to save the planet “before it is too late”. The protection of the environment, he said, was the most urgent responsibility of their generation. 

 

His speeches reflected two strands of Catholic teaching: concern with the care of Creation, and the need to protect the environment because the poorest suffer the most from its degradation. They are in the front line as water levels rise and crops are destroyed. It was the commitment to solidarity and justice that convinced leaders such as Benedict and organisations such as Caritas of the need for the Church to speak out about climate change and global warming. 

 

There was even speculation that Benedict’s second encyclical would be about green issues, but when it was released in Advent 2007, Spe Salvi – Saved by Hope – was a meditation on Christian hope and its relationship to modern culture. Rather than the utopias of Marx and others, Benedict writes that only belief in Christ, the God with a human face, can bring lasting hope: “Man has need of a hope that goes further. It becomes clear that only something infinite will suffice for him, something that will always be more than he can ever attain. Our contemporary age has developed the hope of creating a perfect world that, thanks to scientific knowledge and scientifically based politics, seemed achievable. Biblical hope in the Kingdom of God has been displaced by hope in the kingdom of man … It has become clear that this hope is … receding.” 

 

The contemporary age was something that Benedict frequently fretted about. There was an abiding tension in his thinking: a willingness to engage with the world, yet not to be wholly part of it; to be prepared for dialogue with other faiths and other Christians, yet always to be aware of the dangers of syncretism and relativism; to revere continuity and tradition, yet sometimes to be bold and to change. As a result, at different times, Benedict upset those who were concerned about his papacy from the moment he was elected, and dismayed those who had longed to see him on the throne of St Peter. While the latter wanted him to roll back the years to a pre-conciliar Church; the former feared that was exactly what he was doing. 

 

One issue that particularly concerned Benedict was the conflict in the Middle East. Vatican officials were concerned that Christians were being targeted in Iraq and the ancient Christian community was in danger of disappearing. Benedict shifted the emphasis from theological engagement with Islam to urging Muslim-majority countries to respect freedom of worship for minorities. But this risked confrontation and provocation, and never more so than his decision in 2008 to baptise an Italian Muslim. The time – the Easter Vigil – and the venue – St Peter’s Basilica – could not have been higher profile. To the Muslim concerned, Magdi Allam, who was known for criticising Islam as a violent and oppressive religion, that Benedict agreed to personally baptise him was a “courageous and historical gesture”. To other Muslims, including scholars who had engaged in dialogue with the Pope after the Regensburg debacle, his decision appeared triumphalist. 

 

The issue of religious freedom was ­regularly mentioned by Benedict during his visits abroad. The visit to the US that spring turned out to be a template for his visit to Britain two years later and to Germany in 2011. First, in advance of all three trips, there were predictions of protests and low turnout. Instead huge crowds followed the Pope’s visits and millions watched on television. The protests were small. Each visit was marked by major speeches – to the UN in the US, to civic leaders in Westminster Hall in Britain, and again to parliament at the Reichstag in Germany. There were small, affecting gestures: prayer at Ground Zero in New York, and at the shrine of St Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey, ­alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury. And there were also meetings with the ­victims of sexual abuse. 

 

The Pope confronted the issue of abuse even before the visit to the US had actually started. “I am deeply ashamed and will do whatever is possible that this does not happen in the future,” he told journalists on the flight across the Atlantic. “Paedophiles will be completely excluded from the priesthood. It is more important to have good priests than many priests. We will do everything possible to heal this wound.” The abuse scandal had traumatised the US Church ever since it was first exposed years earlier in Louisiana and Boston; it has cost the Church US$2 billion in legal fees and payouts and has led to five dioceses being declared bankrupt. There have been continuing arguments over whether the CDF under Ratzinger did enough to deal with abuse. It had never offered training, or guidelines for best practice, or sponsored research. Throughout Benedict’s pontificate, it remained a neuralgic issue. 

 

So did the liturgy, including the continuing controversies over the breakaway Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). Summorum Pontificum gave traditionalists, including schismatic ones, hope that this Pope understood their concerns and regretted the casting aside of the pre-conciliar liturgy. By January 2009 the SSPX had had some dialogue with Benedict, but his most dramatic move came that month when he revoked the excommunication of four men who had illicitly been ordained as bishops in 1988 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had died in 1991. Their welcome back into the Church took place after one of the four, Bishop Bernard Fellay, had indicated that they accepted Church teaching and the primacy of the Pope. 

 

The decree, from the Congregation of Bishops, said that it was hoped that it would be followed by the prompt fulfilment of full communion of the Catholic Church with the SSPX. But on the very same day that the revoking was made known, one of the four, Richard Williamson, interviewed on Swedish television, questioned the deaths of six million Jews in the Holocaust and denied Nazi gas chambers had ever existed. The Chief Rabbinate of Israel broke off relations with the Vatican. Several German-speaking cardinals criticised the Vatican openly. Cardinal Karl Lehmann of Mainz called it a catastrophe; Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna described it as a mistake. It was, as The Tablet leader put it, “A Damaging Fiasco”.

 

Benedict responded by saying the gesture had been a paternal act of mercy. Many Catholics feared it was clear evidence the Pope wanted to take the Church backwards to a pre-Vatican II era. Yet the demands of a contemporary pontificate are such that a Bavarian Catholic who preferred to celebrate Mass ad orientem in a small chapel now often had to officiate at services in vast arenas around the world. 

 

In Australia, where he travelled for World Youth Day in 2008, he spoke to 400,000 young people of the spiritual desert of the modern world and the dangers of the desert, too, for the planet, as it faced the threat of climate change which had brought a drought to the region that year. “There are scars that mark the surface of our Earth: erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption,” he said during his opening address in Sydney Harbour. 

 

In France, that autumn, visiting Paris and Lourdes, he returned to another common theme: concern that the Christian heritage of France was being forgotten in a society refusing to recognise its past. The emphasis was on what would later become known as “the new evangelisation”: that in our multicultural, globalised society Catholics must reach out to every human being without distinction to proclaim love and truth. As to interreligious dialogue, Benedict said that good dialogue required good formation. There was no meeting with French Muslims, despite their growing number. 

 

Relations with Jews remained highly charged. Benedict called participants to the Synod of Bishops to a Mass to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pius XII. It particularly distressed the Chief Rabbi of Haifa who was to address the Synod on Jewish scriptures. In a last-minute addition to his script he said of those religious leaders that Jewish people believed had failed them in the Nazi era: “We cannot forget and forgive it. And we hope that you understand our pain, our sorrow over the immediate past in Europe.” These difficulties and the Williamson affair caused particular attention to be given to the visit of Benedict to Israel in the spring of 2009.

 

Benedict acknowledged a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, voicing the need for a just solution on both Israeli soil, in Tel Aviv, and again in the Palestinian Territories. He acknowledged Palestinian suffering but also urged young people to resist the temptation to resort to terrorism. He described the wall built by the Israelis to separate themselves from the West Bank as tragic but acknowledged that hostilities had caused it to be built.  Benedict was less sure-footed when he spoke at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial of the “millions of Jews killed in the horrific tragedy of the Shoah” but made no overt mention of the Nazis – which several religious and political leaders pointed out was a serious omission from a German pope. 

 

What continued to dominate Benedict’s discourse was his concern about secularisation and a decline in faith – issues evident in 2009 being announced as the Year for Priests, and the declaration of St John Vianney as the Patron of All Priests. There was concern that offering Vianney as a template for the priesthood was hard to square with the theology of Vatican II, which emphasised that priests and people shared a common priesthood, and that the clergy should not be put on a pedestal above the laity. 

 

The other focus of Benedict’s attention at this time was the global economic crisis, and in July came publication of his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, a critique of the way unfettered pursuit of profit had led the world to a crisis that was destroying jobs, families and communities. Like Paul VI before him, he scrutinised modern society and its lack of respect for human development. But he went further, urging humanity to treat the planet with the regard it deserved as God’s Creation.

 

Benedict was to return to this theme in December, when in advance of the Copenhagen summit on climate change, he urged humanity to change its lifestyles to save Creation and promote cohesive development. Caritas in Veritate also developed ideas about what it means to be human – it is essentially about relationship, or to use one of the encyclical’s favourite words, “fraternity”. 

 

Fraternity between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion was sorely tested by Benedict’s creation of a “personal ordinariate” that would enable Anglicans to enter into communion with Rome while retaining their Anglican patrimony. The secrecy of the negotiations – the Archbishop of Canterbury was kept in the dark – distressed many in both Churches. 

 

In Britain there was also concern over the Pope’s remarks to the bishops of England and Wales on a visit to Rome about equality legislation – something considered to be a direct intervention in the Equality Bill wending its way through Parliament. The Pope was accused of intervening in the nation’s affairs. Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster defended the Pope, saying that he had been expressing the views of many Britons when he asserted that legislation designed to improve equality had the effect of imposing “unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs”. 

 

There was also controversy in Ireland. Publication of two reports in 2009 exposed not only disturbing levels of clerical abuse in Ireland but the shameful incompetence of the Church in dealing with the abusers, who had not been removed from office or handed over to the police. Instead, bishops had covered up the scandals, preferring to protect the Church’s name than deal with traumatised children. In a move unprecedented in the Church, Benedict summoned the entire Irish hierarchy to Rome and publicly rebuked them. Abuse of minors, said the Pope, was “a heinous crime and grave sin”. But Benedict was criticised for not making an apology and for failing to sack any bishops. 

 

The abuse crisis had become one of the gravest problems of Benedict’s pontificate. Details emerged, soon after the Irish bishops’ visit and the uproar over the post-visit statement, of similar scandals in Holland, Austria and Germany. There were accusations that the Vatican had created a culture of silence with a 2001 letter to bishops from the CDF – then under Benedict’s watch. But just weeks later came a pastoral letter to the Irish from Benedict in which he said he was truly sorry for the suffering caused by abusive priests. He also announced that there would be a visitation to Ireland to examine the abuse crisis and draw conclusions. Benedict’s insistence, though, that the problem had been caused by secularisation was widely felt to be entirely inappropriate, particularly given that Ireland had been such a clericalised culture and it was only a change in that culture that had led to an end to the deference given to the Church, and for the behaviour of its leaders to be properly scrutinised.

 

That Easter, the media turned on the Catholic Church and on Pope Benedict in particular. In Tucson, Arizona, lawyers revealed documents showing that it had taken the CDF 12 years to satisfy an American bishop’s request in 1992 for the defrocking of a priest who had molested two boys of seven and nine in the confessional. Michael Teta was eventually laicised in 2004. The New York Times, meanwhile, claimed that the Pope, while head of the CDF, had not defrocked a Milwaukee priest who had abused more than 200 deaf children. 

 

Outside the Vatican, traumatised victims and distressed Catholics were not only dismayed by the revelations but angered by evidence of the lack of action in the past. But there was evidence that the then-Cardinal Ratzinger had attempted to act. Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna revealed that when he had discussed allegations of abuse against his predecessor, Cardinal Hans Herman Groer, with Ratzinger, the CDF prefect had wanted him to be investigated. But a group in the Vatican – “the diplomatic party in the State Secretariat who wanted to shove everything on the media” as Schönborn put it – had protected Groer. “I distinctly remember Ratzinger saying sadly afterwards ‘The other party got its way,’” said Schönborn. 

 

There was a growing understanding in the Vatican that it was vital for the Pope to be seen as engaging with the issue – and that meant he had to meet victims. In Malta that year (2010) he met eight men in private – the third time he encountered abuse victims. He was also to meet victims of abuse during his trip to the UK. 

 

The visit to the UK in September 2010 was dominated by the central themes of Benedict’s pontificate: secularism and the role of Christianity in Europe’s history. But a somewhat softer line had been developed – that there was a need for faith and secular society to come together for there to be dialogue between them, just as there should be dialogue with other faiths. Unlike the visit of John Paul II, which took place during the Falklands War and was a pastoral visit to the Catholics of the UK, 2010 was a state visit, albeit without the pomp that surrounds the visit of a secular head of state. It was also pastoral and ecumenical, involving dialogue and ceremony with the Church of England, and it included the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, long esteemed by English Catholics but also held in high regard by Joseph Ratzinger himself. 

 

There were difficulties in the run-up to the visit. The nuncio to the United Kingdom was taken seriously ill, hindering diplomatic dialogue between London and Rome that is vital to successful preparations. A ludicrous internal memo from the Foreign Office revealed that junior and middle ranking officials brain-storming for the visit had suggested that the Pope should launch his own brand of condoms. The British ambassador to the Holy See had to visit the Vatican Secretariat of State to offer a grovelling apology. 

 

Security was a major issue, with protests expected. An umbrella group, Protest the Pope, was created, which claimed that thousands of people would march through central London on 18 September, the day that the Pope would preside over a prayer vigil in Hyde Park. There were predictions of large demonstrations of people protesting over abortion, gay issues and paedophilia. Anxieties melted away as the Pope landed in Scotland and began his visit by meeting Queen Elizabeth II at Holyrood. Starting there solved two problems: it avoided the Queen having to travel all the way back to London from her Scottish summer holiday in order to meet the Pope, and it satisfied the Scots, including Scottish Nationalist leader and Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, that the country enjoyed prominence during the visit. 

 

Crowds turned out along the route from the airport into Edinburgh – as they did throughout the visit, which included a parade in Edinburgh and an outdoor Mass in Glasgow. In London, there was a celebration of Catholic education and an interfaith dialogue gathering at St Mary’s College, later St Mary’s University, a meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace, private chats with politicians and Mass at Westminster Cathedral. 

 

The Friday afternoon in London was one of the major highlights of the visit: Benedict’s address on faith and reason to the great and the good of the UK, in Westminster Hall, the site of St Thomas More’s trial. His erudite plea for the place of faith in society was listened to by four previous prime ministers – Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – while the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, called away by the death of his father, was represented by deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. 

 

It was followed by evensong at Westminster Abbey, the once Catholic church of St Peter, where Benedict knelt and prayed at the tomb of St Edward the Confessor alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury. The poignancy of the two Church leaders coming together reminded many of the time in Canterbury Cathedral in 1982 when John Paul II and the then archbishop, Robert Runcie, had also knelt in prayer. Then there had been hope of maybe, one day, complete unity. 

 

This time, after the ordination of women priests in the Church of England and other theological difficulties and disagreements, there was less optimism that the English break with Rome might be healed. But there was mutual respect and desire to work together as Christian pilgrims, presenting, as Benedict put it, “the Risen Lord as the response to the deepest questions and spiritual aspirations of the men and women of our time”. This common Christian witness was vital, Benedict saw, to counter growing secularism. 

 

In Glasgow, during his homily, he had told the crowd to evangelise a culture threatened by the “dictatorship of relativism” by making a case for “faith’s wisdom and vision in the public forum”, echoing many of Benedict’s common themes. At Westminster Hall, he warned: “If the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident – herein lies the real challenge for democracy.” Later he told his audience that religion is “not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation”. The threatened protests came to very little; instead the British were surprised by the Pope, given they knew little about him other than his reputation as an arch-conservative Rottweiler. Instead they discovered another Benedict: shy, charming, studious.

 

Nothing pleased Benedict more than continuing to write theology. In November that year, as the Church’s cardinals in Rome gathered for not only the consistory but also for what was termed a summit to discuss urgent issues, including religious freedom around the world and the sex abuse crisis, the Pope managed to overshadow his own gathering.

 

An extract from his book-length interview with Peter Seewald was published on the Saturday afternoon of the gathering in L’Osservatore Romano, revealing a shift in Benedict’s thinking on the use of condoms in countering the spread of HIV/Aids. He seemed to imply that they could be used in exceptional circumstances. If a male prostitute used a condom, he said, this could be a first step towards taking moral responsibility for his actions. Those Catholics who for years had agonised over the Church’s approach to contraception saw a chink of light. So engaged were both the Church and the world by these conversations with Seewald that little was made of another comment by Pope Benedict: he could envisage that a Pope might resign, even be obliged to do so. 

 

As right-hand man to John Paul II, Benedict had seen close up the burden of office on an ageing and sick man. But there were other reasons, too, that might well have led to his eventual decision to resign. At the end of 2010, a series of leaked cables between US embassies worldwide and Washington were published, including cables from its diplomats to the Holy See revealing unflattering analyses of mismanagement and ineptitude in the use of modern media, and even claims that there was still antisemitism inside the Vatican. 

 

This was only the beginning. In the following years, a series of leaks from inside the Vatican itself – dubbed “Vatileaks” by the press – revealed squabbling and bullying, blackmail and power struggles, and a lack of financial transparency. Benedict’s energies also continued to be consumed by the scandal of sexual abuse of minors by members of the clergy. In the spring of 2011, the Vatican demanded that bishops’ conferences around the world produce draft policies to address child sex abuse within a year. It would be left, however, to the Jesuits to organise a major sex-abuse symposium the following year. While the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was also involved, survivors of abuse were disappointed that the Pope himself did not attend. 

 

Benedict continued to focus on the loss of faith, especially in Europe, and by 2011 his Pontifical Council for the New Evangelisation was beginning to take shape. By 2012 it was fully fledged and the Year of Faith, announced in late 2011, was aimed at reinforcing the faith of both practising and lapsed Catholics. His apostolic letter, Porta Fidei, revealed that the Year, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, would situate the Council as part of a “hermeneutic of continuity”. There was no “rupture” with the past.

For the traditionalist Pope, the theology and liturgy of the pre-conciliar Church had not been repudiated. Not all the faithful agreed. In Germany, there were calls from theologians for major reforms, including an end to mandatory priestly celibacy. This hit a raw nerve in Rome, as did the Austrian Priests’ Initiative, involving several hundred priests in one of the Church’s heartlands. Like the Germans, they criticised the Church for failing to consider reforms such as allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion.

The tensions and the troubles were beginning to engulf the studious Pope, who preferred to speak of beauty as a path to God and of the personal encounter with Christ. There were investigations into America’s women Religious and the imposition of Cor Unum to oversee Caritas Internationalis. Throughout Benedict’s pontificate the Vatican had exerted pressure on Church organisations to strengthen their Catholic identity and become more explicit instruments of evangelisation. But attention was distracted from evangelisation. Instead, 2012 was punctuated by revelation after revelation of clerical infighting, financial corruption and management chaos in the Vatican. 

 

In March, Benedict ordered a criminal inquiry into the source of the leaks. It was not just an embarrassment to him as the h

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