FROM DER SPIEGEL ONLINE June 15, 2012
Everything will be much easier from now on. The Roman Catholic Church has taken a step forward.
--
Exhausted in the Vatican: The Final Battles of Pope Benedict XVI
By Fiona Ehlers, Alexander Smoltczyk and Peter Wensierski
The
mood at the Vatican is apocalyptic. Pope Benedict XVI seems tired, and
both unable and unwilling to seize the reins amid fierce infighting and
scandal. While Vatican insiders jockey for power and speculate on his
successor, Joseph Ratzinger has withdrawn to focus on his
still-ambiguous legacy.
Finally,
there is clarity. The Holy See has cleared things up and made the
document accessible to all: a handout on checking whether apparitions of
the Virgin Mary are authentic.
This
"breaking news" from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
(CDF) reveals the kinds of issues the Vatican is concerned with- and the
kind of world in which some there live. It's a world in which the
official Church investigation of Virgin Mary sightings is carefully
regulated while cardinals in the Roman Curia, the Vatican's
administrative and judicial apparatus, wield power with absolutely no
checks and the pope's private correspondence turns up in the desk
drawers of a butler.
It's
a completely different apparition of the Virgin Mary that has pulled
the Vatican and the Catholic Church into a new crisis, whose end and
impact can only be surmised: the appearance of a source in the heart of
the Church, a conspiracy against the pope and a leak code-named "Maria".
Since the end of May, the
pope's former butler, Paolo Gabriele, has been detained in a
35-square-meter (377-square-foot) cell at the Vatican, with a window but
no TV. Using the code name "Maria," he allegedly smuggled faxes and letters out of the pope's private quarters. But it remains unclear who was directing him to do so.
Even with Gabriele's arrest,
the leak still hasn't been plugged. More documents were released to the
public last week, documents intended primarily to damage two close
associates of Pope Benedict XVI: his private secretary, Georg Gänswein,
and Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's top
administrator. According to one document, "hundreds" of other secret
documents would be published if Gänswein and Bertone weren't "kicked out
of the Vatican." "This is blackmail," says Vatican expert Marco Politi.
"It's like threatening total war."
A House in Disarray
Fear is running rampant in the
Curia, where the mood has rarely been this miserable. It's as if someone
had poked a stick into a beehive. Men wearing purple robes are rushing
around, hectically monitoring correspondence. No one trusts anyone
anymore, and some even hesitate to communicate by phone.
It all began in the accursed
seventh year of the papacy of Benedict XVI, with striking parallels to
the latter part of Pope John Paul II's papacy. The same complaints about
poor leadership and internal divisions are being aired outside the
Vatican's walls, while the pope himself seems exhausted and no longer
able to exert his power.
Joseph Ratzinger turned 85 in
April. This makes him the oldest pope in 109 years, and one of the few
popes who have exercised what Benedict has called this "enormous" office
at such an advanced age.
Of course, he is still enviably
fit, both mentally and physically, especially compared to his
predecessor in his later years. But speaking has become unmistakably
more difficult for Benedict than at the beginning of his papacy, and
it's hard to miss that his movements have become stiff and cautious.
He recently told a visitor that
his old piano hardly gets any use anymore. Playing it requires
practice, he added, but he doesn't have any time for that. He prefers to
continue working on the last part of his series on Jesus, which he
wants to finish before dying.
A Ship with No Captain
These days, it isn't difficult
to find clerics at the Vatican who are willing to talk, provided their
identities remain anonymous.
The monsignor who finds his way
to a restaurant near Piazza Santa Maria in Rome's Trastevere
neighborhood one evening worked closely with Ratzinger in the CDF for
years. But even before the waiter arrives with water and wine, the
monsignor delivers his verdict on Ratzinger's papacy: "The pope doesn't
fully exercise his office!" In his view, instead of having things under
control, they control him.
The pope isn't interested in
daily affairs at the Vatican, says the anonymous monsignor. Still, this
is not exactly unprecedented, as his predecessor also neglected the
Curia. While the Polish pope spent a lot of time traveling, his German
successor is apparently happiest while poring over books and writing
speeches. "He simply isn't taking matters into his own hands," the
monsignor says. In essence, he adds, the pope faces a different power in
Rome -- and one he hasn't take command of.
Although the Vatican is
Catholic, it's also two-thirds Italian. In the end, says the monsignor,
the Vatican's employees and administration don't care who among their
ranks leads the Church. Even for someone who has been living there for
decades, the monsignor says, "the Vatican is a ball of wool that's
almost impossible to untangle -- not even by a pope."
When John Paul II died in April
2005, the Curia was in terrible shape. Events and personnel decisions
had been postponed during his last few years, in which he was often ill.
The new pope was expected to finally clear off the desks and give the
Curia a fresh start.
But, for the most part, such
reforms haven't materialized. Priests still hold all key positions,
including those on the Council for the Laity and the Council for the
Family. The only woman in a senior position, Briton Lesley-Anne Knight,
was driven out of office as secretary-general of the Catholic
development agency Caritas Internationalis in 2011 for having openly
opposed the Church's male-dominated hierarchy.
Fractured and Ferocious
A "reform of the Curia" is
probably a contradiction in terms. Its hierarchical, essentially
medieval organizational model is incompatible with modern management.
The Vatican is an anachronistic, albeit surprisingly tenacious system,
in which pecking orders and an absurd penchant for secrecy and intrigue
prevail. "The only important thing is proximity to the monarch," says a
member of a cardinal's staff. Rome works like an absolutist court, one
in which decisions are made by people whispering things into the others'
ears rather than by committees. "There are many vain people here,
people in sharp competition with one another," the staff member adds.
Who spoke with whom, and for
how long? What did they talk about? Who attends early Mass with whom,
and who invites whom to dinner? Who's in and who's out? Who belongs and
who doesn't, and who's coming into favor and who's falling out of it?
"This mood fosters feelings of exclusion, discrimination, envy, revenge
and resentment," the monsignor says. And all things have now appeared in
the so-called Vatileaks documents.
Papal secretary Gänswein, in
particular, has made many enemies. As the pope's gatekeeper, he has
influence over who is granted or denied the pontiff's favor as well as
over which events and issues might command his attention. This power can
trigger fear, jealousy and derision in the corridors of the Apostolic
Palace, the pope's official residence. For Gänswein, it seemed almost
miraculous that he was able to spend an entire evening relaxing and
conversing with German clerics at the Vatican's embassy in Berlin last
September. It was an experience he couldn't have had in Rome.
The Vatican is disintegrating into
dozens of competing interest groups. In the past, it was the Jesuits,
the Benedictines, the Franciscans and other orders that competed for
respect and sway within the Vatican court. But their influence has
waned, and they have now been replaced primarily by the so-called "new
clerical communities" that bring the large, cheering crowds to Masses
celebrated by the pope: the Neocatechumenate, the Legionaries of Christ
and the traditionalists of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) and the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter- not to mention the worldwide "santa mafia" of Opus Dei.
They all have their open and
clandestine agents in and around the Vatican, and they all own real
estate and run universities, institutes and other educational facilities
in Rome. Various cardinals and bishops champion their interests at the
Vatican, often without an official or recognizable mandate. At the
Vatican, everyone is against everyone, and everyone feels they have God
on their side.
Perhaps Benedict XVI simply knows the Vatican too well to seriously
attempt to reform it. "As pope, this veteran curial insider has turned
out to have virtually zero interest in actually running the Roman
Curia," writes John L. Allen, a biographer of the pope.
The current scandal unfolded against this backdrop. The revelations
about the secret Vatican documents -- dubbed "Vatileaks" by none other
than papal spokesman Padre Federico Lombardi -- first emerged more than
four months ago. They suggest a Vatican mired in corruption and
character-assassination campaigns, a plot that seems hardly limited to a
butler's alleged act of theft.
The central figure is Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, whom the pope
instructed in July 2009 to clean up at the Vatican administration. The
overzealous lawyer imposed cutbacks in various areas, including
construction contracts, real estate and management of the Vatican
Gardens. In a letter to Bertone, he wrote that he had turned a Vatican
budget deficit of €7.8 million ($9.8 million) into a surplus of €34.5
million within a year by putting an end to old boys' networks that
"always awarded contracts to the same companies" -- at double the prices
customarily paid outside the Vatican. Viganò made himself unpopular
with his fight against waste and abuse of office.
He was maneuvered out of his
position after only 27 months and, since October, he has been the
Vatican's ambassador to the United States in Washington, far away from
the Vatican. He has perceived his transfer as a punishment. In a letter
of protest to the pope, he painted a blunt picture of the Curia: "The
realm is fragmented into many small feudal states, with everyone
fighting against everyone else." The conditions, he wrote, are
"disastrous" and, even worse, are "well-known" to the entire Curia.
The Vatileaks scandal has also
brought to light the reasons behind the sacking of another senior
official. Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, head of the Vatican bank until shortly
before Pentecost, was apparently shown the door because he was trying to
bring more transparency to the scandal-ridden institution. His goal was
to make the bank -- where Mafia godfathers once deposited their money
for safekeeping -- eligible for the Organization of Economic Cooperation
and Development's (OECD) "white list" of supposedly clean
organizations. Tedeschi wanted the Vatican to finally disclose
transactions that satisfied international standards on combating money
laundering. He failed.
Observers believe that the
banker's case is the real core of the scandal, a power struggle over
control of the Vatican's finances. This most likely explains why
Tedeschi was so vigorously ousted. The bank's board of directors issued
absurd justifications for his expulsion, saying that Tedeschi, a
professor of business ethics, was unpredictable and had drawn attention
to himself through his absences.
In any case, it's clear that
Tedeschi has lost out in a struggle against Bertone. It apparently
displeased the pope's second-in-command that new guidelines could make a
cut in the Vatican's assets.
An Old Guard Ignored
It would be overly simplistic
to interpret all of this as merely a conflict between reformers and
traditionalists. In reality, it's about the Church's sclerosis, and a
problem that has a name: Benedict XVI.
The Vatican's old guard, made
up of Italian cardinals and their backers, believed that they had found a
transitional pope in Ratzinger. But now the transition is in its eighth
year, and the Curia is roughly where it was near the end of the
previous pope's life: There's no one in sight to firmly assume the helm.
Benedict XVI surrounds himself
with individuals he's known for a long time, and he's given them
considerable power. When he appointed Bertone to his senior office, the
pope bypassed the usual pecking order of the cliques. He and Gänswein,
known in Rome as the "Black Forest Adonis" on account of his
southwestern-German origins, have become too powerful and independent
for many cardinals in the Curia. Bertone and Gänswein were the primary
targets of the attack code-named "Maria."
Cardinals from Italy's
provinces have noticed that their access to the Holy See is slipping
away. Although Bertone is Italian, he prefers his fellow members of the
Salesian order, elevating them to key positions and nominating them as
cardinals. In addition, the 77-year-old Bertone is seen as a poor
manager and awkward diplomat. In the summer of 2009, a delegation of
cardinals reportedly asked the pope to replace him.
But the head of the Vatican administration can hardly be the only
target of the "Maria" attacks. The reason for this is that it's highly
likely that he would only have remained in office for another six months
in any case so as to clear the position for a successor. No, "Maria" is
aiming higher than Bertone.
Uncomfortable in Office
The Catholic Church has a leadership problem at the center of its
baroque court. The leaked documents ultimately harm Benedict himself,
and the scandal is also fundamentally detrimental to the papacy itself.
With each additional day of speculation over the true masterminds behind
the plot, there is a growing impression of a difficult papacy and a
weakened pope who is no longer calling the shots.
For a long time, Ratzinger
himself could hardly believe he was suddenly the leader of all
Catholics. More than a month after his election, on May 24, 2005, he
paid another visit to the place in the Vatican where so many things had
begun for him: the seminary in the Campo Santo Teutonico, a green island
in the cramped papal state, directly adjacent to the sacristy of St.
Peter's Basilica.
He had lived here during the Church's sweeping modernization effort
known as Vatican II and, in 1982, he returned to Rome from Munich,
staying "in a room with only the bare necessities around me so that I
could make a fresh start."
Ratzinger remained loyal to the seminary community until he was
elected pope. For decades, he celebrated Mass at 7 a.m. there every
Thursday, and he often ate with students in the dining room, had
discussions with them and attended the Christmas party in the fireplace
room. It was a place to which he could seek refuge from his duties as
head of the CDF, a kind of adopted family.
He hasn't been to the seminary since his last visit, in late May
2005, which lasted over an hour. In parting, Ratzinger signed the
guestbook. He wrote "Benedict XVI" and then, leaving a small space,
scribbled "pope." At first he wrote it with a lower-case p, but then he
changed it to an upper-case one.
None of his predecessors had ever signed anything like that -- and
Benedict himself would never do it again. It was almost as if he had to
tell himself: My God, I'm the pope!
Ratzinger felt uncomfortable
with the power he had assumed, which is one reason he has declined to
comprehensively reform the system. He has preferred to place his trust
in his underlings.
A Need for Family
Benedict doesn't need the
Vatican; he needs a small family. Family is sacred to him, and it's
something he has always sought throughout his life. The only surviving
member of his family is his older brother, Georg. His father, Joseph,
died in 1959 and his mother, Maria, in 1963. His sister, Maria, ran his
household for about 30 years, even in Rome, until her death in 1991.
When she died, he wrote in his memoirs: "The world became a little
emptier for me."
For Ratzinger, all of these
issues remain unresolved. At the World Meeting of Families held in Milan
in early June, he responded to questions about family in an ad hoc and
unscripted manner. "Hi, pope," a 7-year-old girl said to him. "I am Cat
Tien. I come from Vietnam. I would really like to know something about
your family and when you were little like me." The 85-year-old Benedict
replied: "To tell the truth, if I try to imagine a little how paradise
will be, I think always of the time of my youth, of my childhood. In
this context of confidence, of joy and love, we were happy, and I think
that paradise must be something like how it was in my youth."
Ratzinger has repeatedly tried to foster this "environment of
trust," but it has repeatedly been damaged. When Ratzinger moved into
the papal apartments in 2005, he suddenly had to go without a longtime
confidante. Ingrid Stampa, the housekeeper who had succeeded his sister,
was not permitted to join Ratzinger in his new quarters. She had been
disgraced in the Vatican for having once pointed at St. Peter's Square
from the window of the pope's apartment and waved to the crowd -- an
unforgivable faux pas.
Instead, four lay sisters with
the Memores Domini association -- Loredana, Cristina, Manuela and
Carmela -- became his new housekeepers. They looked after him for five
years, attended his prayers every morning, celebrated Christmas and
saints' days with him, and ate their meals with him.
Then one of them, Manuela
Camagni, was killed in a traffic accident in 2010. The pope was shaken.
He knelt before her coffin, delivered a eulogy and spoke of the
"unforgettable family-like moments" he had enjoyed with her.
With the betrayal of his butler, who had been at his side around
the clock, the small world of Joseph Ratzinger has once again been
thrown out of joint.
The Elusive 'Benedict Effect'
When compared with
expectations, the results of Benedict XVI's seven years as pope have
been rather modest. The German pope will not be remembered much for his
avowed fight to preserve the unity of the Church. Instead, he will be
remembered as a victim of circumstances and of fragmented, competing
factions, as a pontiff plagued by scandals, mistakes and gaffes. He even
built walls back up that seemed to have been worn down long ago. His
papacy has consisted of years of ongoing apologies and alleged or actual
misunderstandings.
He has annoyed the Protestants
by declaring that denominations other than his own are not true
churches. He has alienated Muslims with an inept speech in the Bavarian
city of Regensburg. And he has insulted Jews by reinserting a prayer for
the conversion of the Jews into the Good Friday liturgy.
He has also snubbed the Church
by currying favor with the traditionalists of the Society of St. Pius X,
which rejects the Vatican II reforms. The current backlog of Church
reforms, which had already started piling up under his conservative
predecessor, John Paul II, has only gotten bigger under Benedict. The
Catholics' Day held in May in the southwestern German city of Mannheim,
with its 80,000 attendees, was a last cry for change in the Church.
The fact that the pope is
German has not had a lasting effect on Germans. When he was newly
elected, the German media spoke of a "Benedict effect," of how having a
German pope would positively influence conversion and retention rates in
Germany. But, if it ever really existed, this effect quickly
dissipated. Since Benedict's election in 2005, the number of people
leaving the Catholic Church in Germany has more than doubled, and it's
been the highest most recently in Ratzinger's former Archdiocese of
Munich and Freising. Only 30 percent of Germans are still Catholic
today.
The claim, often made by
enthusiastic Catholics on German talk shows -- that all of this is a
German or European problem and nothing but sour grapes, and that the
Church is more successful elsewhere -- isn't even true in deeply
Catholic Latin America, where the number of Catholics has been sharply
declining. Evangelical Christians, on the other hand, are multiplying
there like the loaves and fishes in Canaan
Ratzinger
has only been able to make it through those seven years by making sure
he has small escapes. In addition to his everyday duties, he has written
books and encyclicals on Christian love ("Deus Caritas Est") and on
hope ("Spe Salvi").
Some
of his writings have become best-sellers, even in hopelessly
secularized Germany. Indeed, this pope has managed to put the Vatican
back on the secular world's radar. His encyclicals, his thoughts on
reason and faith, and his criticism of the relativism of all values have
been closely followed in the press. He has been seen as a pope who
understands the zeitgeist.
In
fact, the pope's failure to live up to many expectations has actually
often benefited the Church. "Christianity, Catholicism, is not a
collection of prohibitions; it's a positive option," Benedict said
before his trip to Bavaria in 2006. Although he stands behind dogma and
pure doctrine, he tries not to alienate anyone, even if he admittedly
hasn't always been successful at it. By now, the pope seems about as
mild as the Queen of England during his appearances. He knows how to
captivate a crowd without spectacular gestures. He has met with
Holocaust survivors in Auschwitz, abuse victims in the United States and
people with AIDS in Cameroon.
Benedict
has understood better than others what the Church's real condition is
-- and how far removed it is from his ideal. His stumbling block has
always been the Curia. Perhaps the real thing learned over the last
seven years is just how powerless a pope can be.
Already Searching for a Successor
The
pope only wanted to be a "simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the
Lord," a "servant of the truth." Now he stands before the reality of his
own mortality. For some time, he has been overcome by periods of "deep
sadness," says a source close to Benedict, though he notes that it is
unclear whether this is merely sadness or genuine depression.
Ratzinger
survived two mild strokes in the early 1990s. Both his father and
sister died of strokes. The pope takes aspirin as a preventive medicine.
He is plagued by osteoarthritis in his knees, especially the right one.
Walking is getting more difficult for him, and he now uses a rolling
platform, which he mounts upon entering St. Peter's Basilica, such as
when he is wearing heavy garments.
He
hasn't gone on vacation in the mountains since 2010. Sometimes he takes
short walks with his secretary in the Vatican Gardens, where he says
the rosary.
In
the Curia and the backrooms of the Vatican's palaces, efforts are
already underway to search for a successor. The possible outcomes of a
conclave are analyzed and candidates are discussed, as was done seven
years ago. Some say the next pope should be someone like Pius XII, the
pope between 1939 and 1958 who was a calculating and predictable power
player and Vatican insider. Or someone like Paul VI, the pope from 1963
to 1978, who paid attention to the Curia's interests. The name of
Cardinal Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan, has been mentioned, as
has that of Leonardo Sandri, an Argentine cardinal with Italian roots.
Another possible candidate is Curia Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi,
president of the Pontifical Council for Culture and one of the few
Vatican insiders who is adept at handling the media, politics and the
public.
The
Italians, with 30 votes, still form the largest bloc in a conclave.
Some believe that, after more than 33 years of foreign dominance --
first by a Pole and then by a German -- it's high time to elect an
Italian pope. After all, proponents of the idea argue, an Italian
cardinal knows the Roman Curia best. But the Italians' prospects have
become slim since Vatileaks, says Vatican expert Marco Politi. "If the
scandal has exposed one thing, it is the typical Italian mess. Italians
are no longer seen as papabile (capable of becoming pope). They have discredited themselves with their power struggle."
Last Days and Legacies
Benedict
himself knows that he doesn't have much time left. "The last segment of
my life is now beginning," he told birthday guests in April.
In
fact, his planning hardly goes past next July, when he will attend the
Catholic "World Youth Day" in Rio de Janeiro. Healing the rift with the SSPX will be at the top of his agenda in the coming weeks, in addition to admonishing feuding groups to exercise mutual respect.
With
the dispute that has erupted over the assessment of the reforms of
Vatican II, which began 50 years, the pope is now experiencing a return
to his own past. Will the once liberal-minded and now conservative
pastor find the strength to foster reconciliation at the end of his
life? To blaze some middle path between tradition and modernity for the
world's 1.2 billion Catholics?
"Stalin
was right in saying that the pope has no divisions and cannot issue
commands," Benedict said in the 2010 book-length interview "Light of the
World." "Nor does he have a big business in which all the faithful of
the Church are his employees or his subordinates. In that respect, the
pope is, on the one hand, a completely powerless man. On the other hand,
he bears a great responsibility."
Benedict
has always seen himself as a teaching rather than a governing pontiff.
The professor-pope from the small Bavarian village of Marktl am Inn will
undoubtedly not go down in the annals of Church history as Benedict the
Great.
But
he will be remembered as a church leader with a human face, as someone
who has remained true to himself as a theologian, and as someone who
turned his back on the power within his own four walls. In other words,
as a pope with a lower-case p.
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