For a few weeks last April, Rome was once again the center of the world. Day by day the news from the Holy See was disseminated urbi et orbi, and the global media had no choice but to tune in. The death and funeral of Pope John Paul II, followed by the election of his successor, Benedict XVI, have changed the Catholic Church and its place in the world.
The global media, which had waited long and prepared thoroughly for the death of the aged pontiff, was still taken by surprise by the unexpected scale and intensity of the mourning. Some three million people—most of them young—made the pilgrimage to Rome to pay their last respects, including most of the world’s leaders, and more than two billion watched the funeral on television—the largest audience in history. It was the best possible reply to Stalin’s question: “How many divisions has the Pope?” Those who sniped at the “authoritarian” Vatican could not deny this visible evidence that during the Wojtyla pontificate the Church had thrived. Catholics were more numerous, more influential, more catholic than ever before.
What they saw was also a shock to those who believed the caricatures of the late pope’s rigid, closed, Cold War mindset. John Paul II’s requiem was an unprecedented display of Christian unity: Praying alongside thousands of Catholic cardinals, bishops, and clergy gathered before St. Peter’s Basilica were leaders of all the major Orthodox and Protestant churches. Even non-Christians were caught up in the sacred drama of the Mass: At the Sign of Peace, the Presidents of Israel and Syria spontaneously shook hands.
And the cardinals themselves were visibly startled when, after the Eucharist, the multitudes left them in no doubt about the sanctity and greatness of the “foreigner” who had truly earned the title of Holy Father. They cried out: “Magnus!” “Grande!” “Santo subito!”
Such a papal canonization by popular acclamation had not occurred for fourteen centuries, since St. Gregory the Great’s funeral.
Such a papal canonization by popular acclamation had not occurred for fourteen centuries, since St. Gregory the Great’s funeral. The chief celebrant, Cardinal Ratzinger, acknowledged this conviction that John Paul II was already in the company of the saints by evoking the poignant memory of his last, speechless benediction: “We can be sure that our beloved Pope is standing today at the window of the Father’s house, that he sees us and blesses us.” As the wind blew the pages of the Gospel left open to the sky, the coffin was carried to its final resting place in the grotto alongside St. Peter himself.
After this moment of catharsis came the conclave, and with it a new endurance test for the Church under less benign media scrutiny. Once again, however, the expectations and assumptions of the critics were confounded. Press campaigns were mounted for a Third World pope, a non-European pope, a liberal pope, even an Italian pope. But when the white smoke went up, the figure who eventually emerged onto the balcony was Joseph Ratzinger.
Though Dean of the College of Cardinals and John Paul II’s ablest lieutenant, he had been demonized as a “Grand Inquisitor” and written off as too reactionary, too divisive, or simply too old to be elected. Though he was instantly lampooned in the British tabloid press as “God’s Rottweiler,” and his adolescent years in the Hitler Youth were pored over in lurid detail, “Papa Ratzi” quickly disarmed his critics. The authority with which he had presided over the transitional period between his predecessor’s death and his own election removed many doubts about whether his shy and scholarly temperament was suited to the public eye. His much-noted homily on the eve of the conclave, in which he denounced the “dictatorship of relativism,” pulled no punches. The secularization of the West had mutated into a new totalitarianism that threatened the very existence of Christian civilization, just as Communism had once threatened to extinguish that civilization in the East. This was a manifesto calculated to deter the faint-hearted. He had done all he could to discourage his own election, but he accepted his destiny when it became clear, as it quickly did once the cardinals were locked away in the Sistine Chapel, that he was head and shoulders above the rest, the last survivor of the Second Vatican Council, the best man for the job.
The new pope took the name Benedict XVI, and much symbolism was read into this choice. Had he been thinking of St. Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western monasticism, or Benedict XIV, the Pope of the Enlightenment and friend of Voltaire? No: It was the passage of the liturgy known as the Benedictus—“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”—that had inspired him.
This courteous German gentleman had indeed come in the name of the Lord; whether he will be blessed in his efforts to sustain, broaden, and deepen the revival of Catholicism begun by his great predecessor and friend, only time will tell. None of the 6,000-odd journalists and experts who reported “the event of a generation” from Rome was better qualified to speculate about this than George Weigel.
Weigel knows the dramatis personae and the Church itself inside out. This distinguished American theologian also had a ringside seat last Eastertide as NBC’s consultant in Rome. He begins with a moving account of the last days of John Paul II, which in effect adds the final chapter to his authoritative biography, Witness of Hope, and does justice to the political, the spiritual, and the personal dimensions of the story.
But what about Pope Benedict?
But what about Pope Benedict? Readers unfamiliar with Weigel, who devoted many years to gaining the late Pope’s confidence and writing about him, might imagine that he would have mixed feelings about the new Pope. Not a bit of it: In common with the majority of younger Catholics, whose formation occurred during the Wojtyla papacy, Weigel welcomed the choice of Cardinal Ratzinger, the man who stood closer to John Paul II and who understood his strengths and weaknesses better than any other. He chronicles the conclave day by day, reconstructing the private and public dynamics within the college of cardinals, and demonstrating why the media got the outcome so badly wrong, having been misled by its own tendency to translate theological categories into political ones.
Weigel devotes a luminous chapter to “The Church that John Paul II left behind,” concluding that the challenge for Benedict XVI is very different from the conventional view. For example, the decline in the numbers of priests since 1978 has actually been quite small, and huge numbers of new seminarians in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are now in the pipeline. Issues like celibacy and women’s ordination, which loom large in Europe and North America, do not keep the Pope awake at night. But he does need to worry about the quality of bishops, especially in the West, because they have often been unable or unwilling to lead in the “reform of the reform” which has been under way since John Paul II resolved the post-conciliar crisis of confidence by a renewal of orthodoxy.
Similarly, the received wisdom is that the late Pope was authoritarian, but this ignores the vital distinction between his charismatic, dynamic evangelism and the inability of the Vatican bureaucracy to translate his ideas into action. Weigel shows that the Roman curia was left largely unreformed and as a result some of John Paul’s most imaginative plans remain unfulfilled. It is the same story with the consecrated orders—the Jesuits, monks, friars, and so on—whose signal decline since Vatican II has yet to be reversed. Finally, the Catholicity of Catholic universities and seminaries gives, Weigel thinks, cause for grave concern, not least in North America, where some institutions have been a source of scandal.
The new Pope’s background as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for twenty-four years gives him an incomparable insight into all these fields. But Benedict XVI also has his own priorities. Foremost among these is his desire to begin the process which will have as its goal the reconversion of Europe. It is this decisive battleground which, more than any other factor, explains why the cardinals chose to buck the demographic trend within the Church by electing another European Pope—perhaps the last for a long time.
As Weigel shows, the then Professor Ratzinger grasped as long ago as 1968 that the Church would need, sooner or later, to confront the spirit of militant atheism not only in the East but also in the West. In the first half of the twentieth century, radical nihilism and modern technology had proved a lethal combination. The new, postmodern version of secular religion preaches tolerance and human rights, but in practice it countenances a culture of death—abortion, euthanasia, eugenics—at its very heart. Above all, it privatizes morality and denies Europe’s Christian heritage. For the Bavarian Ratzinger, like the Pole Wojtyla, that heritage was the root of all morality. It was not the state but morality that had withered away when Communism cut it off from its religious roots. Weigel quotes Ratzinger, in a key passage written in the year the Berlin Wall fell, challenging all those who speak the language of liberty and rights in the absence of God: “If there is no longer any obligation to which [man] can and must respond in freedom, then there is no longer any realm of freedom at all. . . . Morality is not man’s prison but rather the divine element in him.”
Pope Benedict has wasted no time in setting about his task of reclaiming the lost sheep of Europe.
Pope Benedict has wasted no time in setting about his task of reclaiming the lost sheep of Europe. He told his first synod in October 2005, “A tolerance that allows God as a private opinion but which excludes him from public life, from the reality of our world and our lives, is not tolerance but hypocrisy.” Contrasting hubristic claims of universal rights and international law with the reality of genocide and oppression, he added, “When man makes himself the only master of the world, and master of himself, justice cannot exist.” This is a message for Catholics, too, who may be tempted to lower their horizons to a purely secular indictment of global injustice, rather than affirming the message of Jesus Christ.
What are the means by which Benedict XVI hopes to accomplish a mission that many Catholics, let alone others, are bound to see as quixotic? Europe, created in ancient times and baptized in medieval times, has lapsed in modern times. The European Union, founded by Catholic statesmen after the eclipse of civilization, has now turned its back on the source of that civilization, symbolized by the refusal of Europe’s leader’s to make explicit acknowledgment of Christianity in framing their constitution.
Yet Weigel is convinced that Pope Benedict will not capitulate to secularism. Not only can he be expected to fight every inch of the way in the public arena, as became evident in the referendums on moral issues held in Italy and Spain this year; he can also be expected to redefine the terms of the engagement in a Catholic way.
This means reminding the world what Catholicism is fundamentally about: Not charity or ecumenism for their own sake, but the praise and worship of God through the sacraments. Hence the Pope has already placed the mystery of the Eucharist at the center of his reforming endeavors. For Benedict XVI, the Mass, which the televisual spectacle last April revealed to a world largely unfamiliar with Christian worship, is God’s gift to humanity. Weigel’s marvelous little book—tribute, treatise, and tract rolled into one—reminds us that, as the man whom John Paul II entrusted with his new Catechism, this musical Pope has an “exquisite” ear for theological and liturgical nuance. In restoring the dignity and beauty of holiness, he reaches out to a world that longs to give meaning to existence. He is aware that an obsession with liturgy can degenerate into “a nice little alternative world . . . pointless, just fooling around.” The fortunes of this pontificate will turn on whether he is right that all who are touched by “the radiance that is His” will rise above the secular preoccupations that have weighed down the Church. As those who failed to foresee Pope Benedict’s election have discovered, one does not second-guess the Holy Spirit by enslaving oneself to the Zeitgeist.