VATICAN LETTER:Is Benedict becoming more interested in creating a traditionalist 'medieval church'?
FROM A media viewpoint, the least one could say is that Pope Benedict XVI’s year has ended on a brighter note than it began.
Benedict’s handling of the incident, which saw him assaulted and knocked over by a mentally disturbed woman at the beginning of Midnight Mass in St Peter’s on Christmas Eve, was dignified and understated. He immediately got to his feet, celebrated the Mass and made no reference to the unfortunate incident in any of his many homilies, blessings and addresses over the following days.
Many noticed just how strongly the pope’s silence contrasted with the reaction of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, victim of an ugly, violent assault in Milan two weeks ago, also carried out by someone with a long history of mental problems.
The prime minister has made repeated references to the incident in a not-too-thinly disguised attempt to make the most of the widespread sympathy prompted by the attack.
In contrast, Benedict (82) has said nothing and just got on with it, rather as he did during his summer holidays in the Alps last July when he slipped, fell and broke his wrist. Then too, he just got on with it.
To some extent, though, a broken wrist was the least of the pope’s problems in 2009. The year began badly when news broke in late January that he was about to lift the 1988 excommunication of four bishops from the Society of St Pius X, the ultra-traditionalist Catholic group founded in 1970 by controversial French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
The problem was that one of the “rehabilitated” bishops was Richard Williamson, a long-time Holocaust denier. For most of the next two months, Benedict had to issue a series of unequivocal condemnations of the Holocaust to calm the troubled waters of Catholic-Jewish relations.
In early March, he took the unusual step of writing a “Letter to the Bishops” to offer his own explanation of the affair, calling the Williamson case “an unforeseen mishap” and admitting that the Holy See had mishandled the issue by not “clearly and adequately” explaining the terms of the lifting of the excommunications.
He complained too that he had been “treated hatefully” and that the affair had generated, in the words of St Paul, “much biting and devouring” within today’s church.
Remarkably, Benedict also admitted that much of the incriminating information on Williamson was “available on the internet”. In future, he promised, the Holy See would “pay greater attention to that source of news”.
His promise that the occupants of the Apostolic Palace would be surfing the web did not convince everyone. Vatican dissident theologian Hans Kung said: “He [the pope] is so shielded and cut off from the real world that he has no idea how disastrously his actions are received.”
Maybe not, but he got an idea when he travelled to Cameroon on March 17th for his first pastoral visit to Africa. During the traditional news conference on the flight to Cameroon, the pope was asked about the church’s position on Aids.
He prompted an almighty row by arguing against the use of condoms, saying: “You cannot resolve the problem of Aids with the distribution of condoms which, on the contrary, only make the problem worse.”
The European Commission, French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, Belgian health minister Laurette Onkelinx and even Belgian cardinal Godfried Danneels were just some of the international figures to immediately rebut the pope’s theories on the use of condoms.
Over two months, Benedict had certainly ruffled some important feathers given that German chancellor Angela Merkel, German cardinal Karl Lehmann and half the worldwide Jewish community had been disturbed by the “Williamson affair”.
Furthermore, one senior Vatican figure, German cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Commission for Relations with Jews, complained that his department had been left entirely out of that particular loop.
On the “sexual mores” front, one or two senior church figures may not have done Benedict many favours. In March, the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in Brazil announced the excommunication of the family of a nine-year-old girl who had been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather.
The family was to be excommunicated because they had chosen to have the girl undergo an abortion which, said the archbishop, was a “much more serious crime” than that of “killing an adult”.
Three months later, another senior Vatican figure, Spanish cardinal Antonio Canizares, prefect for the Congregation of the Divine Cult, took up the same theme. Asked about the Ryan report’s findings of systematic clerical sex abuse of children in Irish Catholic schools, he said: “What happened in some schools cannot be compared with the millions of lives that have been destroyed by abortion . . . It [abortion] has legally destroyed 40 million human lives.”
By year’s end, Benedict had almost run into another “diplomatic” incident when he announced an Apostolic constitution to welcome dissident Anglicans who wanted to convert to Rome. An anxious Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, hotfooted it to Rome to express his “concern”, adding that the constitution really was not some kind of “dawn raid” on the Anglican communion.
So, as we head into 2010, one question asks itself: does Benedict really want dialogue with the modern world or is he, in the words of Hans Kung, much more interested in creating a traditionalist “medieval church” built on the rock of various Lefebvrists and dissident Anglicans? Watch this space.