[Vision2020] The Disastrous Influence of Pope Benedict XVI

[Art Deco]

From:  *The NewYorker*

 February 12, 2013
The Disastrous Influence of Pope Benedict XVI
Posted by John Cassidy<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/john_cassidy/search?contributorName=John%20Cassidy>
  [image: 145277373-465.jpg]

Spare me any more reverential coverage about Pope Benedict XVI and his
decision to give up his office. On a personal level, I wish him well. At
the age of eighty-five and increasingly infirm, he surely deserves a rest.
But as far as his record goes, he can’t leave office a moment too soon. His
lengthy tenure at the Vatican, which included more than twenty years as the
Catholic Church’s chief theological enforcer before he became Pope, in
2005, has been little short of disastrous. By setting its face against the
modern world in general, and by dragging its feet in response to one of the
worst scandals since the Reformation, Benedict’s Vatican has called the
Church’s future into question, needlessly alienating countless people
around the world who were brought up in its teachings.

Not that it matters much, but you can count me among them. When I was a
boy, in Leeds, West Yorkshire, the nuns at Sacred Heart Primary School
taught my classmates and me the New Testament from slim paperbacks with
embossed navy-blue covers. We each got four of them: “The Good News
According to Luke,” The Good News According to Matthew,” “The Good News
According to Mark,” and “The Good News According to John.” Of the four
gospels, the most thumbed, by far, were those of Luke, which contains many
of Jesus’s parables, and Matthew, which features the Sermon on the Mount:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the
meek, for they will inherit the earth…”

It was the early seventies, an era of hope and optimism for many Catholics.
Following the lengthy Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII in
1959, the Church had made a determined effort to modernize some of its
doctrines and practices. Masses, which for many centuries had been confined
to Latin, were now celebrated in other languages. Priests, who
traditionally faced the altar during services, had been instructed to face
their congregations and invite them to participate. In place of a
stultifying focus on ancient dogmas and ceremonies, there was a return to
the actual teachings of Jesus, which were being interpreted in increasingly
liberal and egalitarian ways, as evidenced by the words of a popular folk
hymn we used to sing, a few lines of which I recount from memory:

He sent me to give the Good News to the poor.
Tell prisoners that they are prisoners no more.
Tell blind people that they can see,
And set the downtrodden free.

 I didn’t know it at the time, but the church’s concern with
bread-and-butter issues had been expressed from the top. In 1967, Pope Paul
VI, John XXIII’s successor, issued “Populorum Progressio,” an encyclical on
“the development of peoples,” which asserted that the global economy should
serve the many, not just the few. Updating the Church’s teachings to take
account of widespread poverty and inequality, the Pontiff recognized the
right to a just wage, security of employment, and decent working
conditions. He even recognized the right to join a union.

Not everybody shared the vision of Catholicism as an urgent and uplifting
force for social justice, though many people in South America and other
developing areas of the world did. (In some places, it became known as
“liberation theology,” a phrase coined by the Peruvian priest Gustavo
Gutierrez.) Many older priests, including the venerable Canon Flynn, who
oversaw my local church, Our Lady of Lourdes, had little time for
innovations. They were content to celebrate the sacraments as they always
had, saying Mass every day, issuing the last rites to stricken
parishioners, and doling out “three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys” to
penitents, such as my young self, who came to confess their sins. But the
energy and the future of the church appeared to rest with the modernizers.

This was despite the fact that Paul VI also reaffirmed many of the
Vatican’s traditional teachings on social issues, such as extramarital sex,
birth control, homosexuality, and enforced celibacy for priests and nuns.
Paul was hardly a revolutionary. He wasn’t willing to challenge the harsh,
self-denying ordinances that a series of Roman popes had foisted on
Christianity during the Middle Ages. But in calling for peace and social
justice, in reaching out to other faiths, in traveling extensively—he was
known as “the Pilgrim Pope”—and in making some reforms at the Vatican, such
as surrendering his tiara (the papal crown) and barring cardinals over the
age of eighty from voting in papal elections, he seemed interested in
reconciling the Church to modern reality.

With the arrival of Pope John Paul II, in 1979, all that started to change.
In many ways, Karol Wojtyla was an admirable man: a part of the Polish
resistance against the Nazis; a vocal opponent of wars and militarism (in
2003, he criticized the invasion of Iraq); a supporter of canceling debts
in the developing world; and a massively charismatic leader. In theological
and practical terms, though, he was a dreadful throwback. With the Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, at his side, as the Vatican’s
chief theologian, he set about unmaking much of the modernization project
of the previous twenty years. He issued lengthy and emphatic rulings
condemning abortion, birth control, and homosexuality. He dismissed calls
for the relaxation of the celibacy rules for priests, and for the
ordination of women. He criticized liberation theology and surrounded
himself with dyed-in-the-wool conservatives like Ratzinger. Within the
hierarchy of the Church, questioning traditional teachings, even gently,
became a potential career-ender.

After John Paul died, in 2005, and Ratzinger took over, the conservative
counter-offensive continued. Indeed, it intensified. The Vatican eased
restrictions on the Latin Mass and invited back into the Church some
excommunicated members of the Society of Saint Pius X, an
ultra-conservative group dedicated to reversing the Second Vatican Council.
(One member of the group, an English bishop called Richard Williamson,
turned out to be a Holocaust denier. Last year, belatedly, the Society
expelled him.) In criticizing the “culture of relativism” in modern
societies, and “the anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom,”
Benedict made clear that he saw his primary mission not as extending and
enlarging the Catholic Church but as purifying it, by which he didn’t just
mean dealing with the child-abuse scandal. He meant casting off extraneous
growths and getting the Church back to what he saw as its proper roots. If
this process alienated some current and former members of the faith, so be
it. Benedict said numerous times that the Church might well be healthier if
it was smaller.

In a 2011 interview<http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/theologian-hans-kueng-on-pope-benedict-a-putinization-of-the-catholic-church-a-787325.html>with
the German newsmagazine
*Der Spiegel*, Hans Küng, a dissident Swiss theologian who knew Pope
Benedict when they were both young priests in Germany, made a telling
comparison between him and Vladimir Putin, pointing out that the two
leaders had inherited a series of democratic reforms they set out to
reverse. Putin and Benedict both “placed their former associates in key
positions and sidelined those they didn’t like,” Küng said. He added:

One could draw other parallels: the disempowerment of the Russian
parliament and the Vatican Synod of Bishops, the degradation of Russian
provincial governors and of Catholic bishops to make them nothing but
recipients of orders; a conformist ‘nomenclature’; and a resistance to real
reforms.… Under the German pope, a small, primarily Italian clique of
yes-men, people with no sympathy for the calls to reform, were allowed to
come into power. They are partly responsible for the stagnation that
stifles every attempt at modernization of the church system.

 The strategy of circling the wagons and seeking to defy the world was
displayed, to terrible effect, in the Church’s reaction to the child-abuse
scandal. As the Vatican official that John Paul II asked to deal with the
crisis when it broke, Benedict was presented with extensive evidence that
sexual abuse was widespread and tolerated by church authorities. But it
wasn’t until many years later, when tremendous damage had already been done
and many further crimes had been committed, that Benedict, as Pope,
apologized for the acts of pedophiles in cassocks, adopted a zero-tolerance
policy for the Church, and met with some of the victims. Even then, though,
say some critics, he and his colleagues in the Vatican resisted efforts to
find and punish the perpetrators.

“His record was terrible,” David Clohessy, executive director of the
twelve-thousand-strong Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests, told *The
Guardian*<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/11/pope-complicit-child-abuse-say-victims>.
“He knows more about clergy sex crimes and cover-ups than anyone else in
the Church, yet he has done precious little to protect children.” From
Ireland, where investigations are continuing into extensive abuse at
church-run orphanages and schools, John Kelly, one of the founders of the
country’s Survivors of Child Abuse group, said, “I’m afraid to say Pope
Benedict won’t be missed, as the Vatican continued to block proper
investigations into the abuse scandals during his term in office.… For us,
he broke his word.”

As a result of the sex scandals and the Vatican’s futile attempt to turn
back the clock, Pope Benedict’s Church is in increasingly perilous shape.
Throughout much of the developed world, the number of people attending
services is declining steadily, and yet there is a tremendous shortage of
priests. In places like Ireland and Benedict’s own Germany, young people
are deserting the Church in droves. Even in developing countries like
Brazil, the Church is facing challenges from other creeds.

Of course, in a religion of more than a billion, there are some bright
spots and some inspiring individuals. When I went home to Leeds not so long
ago, I found that an enthusiastic young Polish priest had taken over my
childhood church and was trying to save it from closure. To do some good,
and raise some money, he was planning to turn the rectory into a halfway
house for young offenders. Listening to him celebrating Mass like a man
possessed, I was reminded of the Catholicism of the Sermon on the Mount and
of St. Francis of Assisi—the Catholicism that the nuns had tried to drill
into me decades before.

In Rome, however, the conservative theologians and placeholders are still
running the show. Sadly, that is likely to continue. “During [Benedict’s]
time in office,” Küng
noted<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/11/pope-resignation-reaction-around-world>,
“he has ordained so many conservative cardinals, that amongst them is
hardly a single person to be found who could lead the Church out of its
multifaceted crisis.”

*Photograph: Stefano Dal Pozzolo/Getty.*





-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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