<div dir="ltr"><div id="printbody">From: <i>The NewYorker</i><br></div><div id="printbody"><br><div id="pagebody" class="">
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<div class="" title="2013-02-12T19:17:34">February 12, 2013</div>
<h1 class="">The Disastrous Influence of Pope Benedict XVI</h1>
<div class="">Posted by <cite class=""><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/john_cassidy/search?contributorName=John%20Cassidy" title="search site for content by John Cassidy" rel="author">John Cassidy</a></cite></div>
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<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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…”
</p>
<div id="entry-more"><p>
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:
</p>
<blockquote><p>He sent me to give the Good News to the poor.<br>
Tell prisoners that they are prisoners no more.<br>
Tell blind people that they can see,<br>
And set the downtrodden free.</p></blockquote>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
In a <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/theologian-hans-kueng-on-pope-benedict-a-putinization-of-the-catholic-church-a-787325.html" target="_blank">2011 interview</a> with the German newsmagazine <em>Der Spiegel</em>,
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:
</p>
<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“His record was terrible,” David Clohessy, executive director of the
twelve-thousand-strong Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/11/pope-complicit-child-abuse-say-victims" target="_blank">told <em>The Guardian</em></a>.
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/11/pope-resignation-reaction-around-world" target="_blank">noted</a>,
“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.”
</p>
<p><em>Photograph: Stefano Dal Pozzolo/Getty.</em></p></div>
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