05.01.2023

The sins of the father

He presided over the destruction of liberation theology, backed the US rollback of communism and provided ideological cover for contra death squads. Paul Demarty examines the legacy of Benedict XVI

Long in failing health, pope emeritus Benedict XVI - or Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger to his mum - died on the morning of new year’s eve. He was 95 years old, and the 10th anniversary of his retirement from the highest office in the Roman Catholic church would have fallen at the end of February.

His death brings forward the reflections, in Catholic circles and in the wider bourgeois world, on the meaning of that event, almost unprecedented. But it also raises up a whole host of other spectres posed by his biography. Ratzinger was the right age and talented enough as a theologian to put him at the centre of what has been a tumultuous period in the church’s history. Even his retirement, which he mostly succeeded in making a quiet one, was another crisis. And the institution he served for seven decades is in its worst shape perhaps since the crisis of the French revolution - certainly at a historically low ebb in terms of its reputation. Ratzinger was there the whole way along: though his predecessor and successor as pope were both bigger characters, it is Benedict’s church before us today, for better and for worse, and mostly for worse.

Ratzinger was born in 1927, in a tiny Bavarian village - the ultra-conservative heartland of Catholic Germany. He was, therefore, a small child when Adolf Hitler came to power, and an adolescent during the war years. Controversy about these years once raged, but is somewhat overblown - like more or less every teenage boy, he was a member of the Hitler Youth, and as the walls closed in on the Nazi regime in 1944-45, he was press-ganged into military service, from which he later absconded, briefly spending time as an American prisoner of war.

After his release, he - and his brother - enlisted in a different sort of army, becoming seminarians. He was finally ordained priest in 1951, but spent only a few years as a parish pastor. His real interests were academic, and by 1959 he began his career at the University of Bonn, later moving on to Munster and Tübingen.

The Catholic culture in which Ratzinger grew up was put in place, in its essentials, by pope Pius IX, whose response to the rise of secular nationalism and socialism was to rebel indignantly against the whole modern world - a programme summed up in the notorious ‘syllabus of errors’, which climaxed in its rejection, as heretical, of the idea that “the Roman pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism and modern civilisation”. Three further popes of that name variously rejected all Catholic intellectual trends outside of bone-dry neo-scholasticism; cut cosy deals with Hitler and Mussolini; and all but made a holy war of Francisco Franco’s rebellion. The overall picture is summed up by an anecdote about Pius XII, who, when speaking on the telephone, demanded that the poor soul at the other end of the line kneel for the duration.

Intellectual cage

Ratzinger found himself among a motley band of discontents with this, by all accounts, stultifying atmosphere. Some objected to the odious political moves of the 1920s and 30s; others to the suffocating intellectual cage of ‘manualist’ scholasticism (so called for the ‘manuals’ of approved answers to all the big questions, which sufficed for seminary education in the 1920s and 30s). In rejecting in the most philistine terms all modern philosophy - in a period which gave the world Edmund Husserl, Georg Lukács, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, not to mention a generation of great religious thinkers including the radical Calvinist Karl Barth, the Jewish existentialist Martin Buber and (in spite of everything) not a few dissident Catholics generally grouped under the name nouvelle théologie - the Catholic church hung a pall of terror over its intellectuals, lay and ordained alike. But they got off lucky: the ordinary laity were bludgeoned with infantile catechesis in their youth and bilked for whatever miserable pennies they could afford as adults, threatened with hellfire and damnation all the way along.

Not a few of those kneeling in front of the papal telephone realised that this situation was unsustainable. One of those was Angelo Roncalli, an aging cardinal who was elected pope John XXIII in 1958. Despairing of the state of affairs he inherited, he resolved to wheel out the biggest gun in the papal arsenal, and convened an ecumenical council - the highest decision-making body in the church, in which all the bishops of the world are invited (for the most part) to settle controversies. But Vatican II was to be a council like no other - merely in the wordcount of the texts it promulgated it outstripped the logorrhoeic achievements of Trent several times over.

The content of those documents, meanwhile, was revolutionary, by the (extremely timid) standards of the church. The church had a vital mission in the modern world, beyond merely rejecting it tout court. Protestants and even atheists could go to heaven (if they were very, very good). The famously inscrutable Tridentine mass was to be replaced, in time, with a service in vernacular languages that would involve the congregation in more than just being harangued for donations. Tellingly, the most controversial of all the great conciliar documents - Dignitatis humanae - was an open call for religious freedom regardless of particular faith (or none). Conservative cardinals resisted it to the last - “error has no rights” was (and is) the slogan.

The content of the documents was determined in large part by the influence of the periti - theological advisors appointed by bishops, who ended up producing drafts. Ratzinger was peritus to the archbishop of Cologne, Josef Frings, a keen reformer. He thus placed himself in a generation of progressive Catholic intellectuals, many of them also priests; one could name especially Hans Küng and Karl Rahner, with whom Ratzinger was close at this time, but who would later become notable adversaries.

This is not, to be sure, a recognisable picture of the man lying in state in the Vatican as I write. What happened? In short, 1968: Ratzinger, ever the academic, seems to have been badly shaken by the student uprisings of that year. The optimism of Vatican II suddenly seemed misplaced. He transferred to a far more conservative institution, Regensburg.

Pope Paul VI, who succeeded John XXIII and concluded the council, was keen to rein in its effects. Though the changes agreed by bishops may, retrospectively, seem pretty weak tea, they were widely taken in a radical spirit, and all manner of obscure tendencies ground down under the Piuses were suddenly emboldened. Most important among them, from our point of view, were the various radical left trends in the church - from the strange conversion of the English Dominicans to quasi-Marxism, to the pacifism of Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan, to - above all - the mass movement in Latin America identified with so-called liberation theology.

Ratzinger came to see all this as a dangerous infection. Along with other post-conciliar conservatives, like Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, he founded the journal Communio, dedicated to interpreting the council as minimally as possible. He was appointed archbishop of Munich by Paul at the end of his papacy, but truly came into his own when - after the brief and farcical reign of John Paul I - the cardinals broke with centuries of history and selected a non-Italian, the Polish Karol Wojtyla, as the new boss.

As was typical of the Polish hierarchy of the time, Wojtyla was a fanatical conservative, very much of the Pio Nono stamp, and, needless to say, viciously anti-communist. He had attended the council, where he was horrified to discover disagreement among his fellow prelates instead of the total uniformity of opinion he was given to expect, and largely voted with the conservative party. This attitude, of course, extended to the nature of his own office. “If he were ever in two minds on a subject,” Terry Eagleton once quipped, “both of them would be infallible.”

At his accession to the papacy, however, it would have been impossible to come out and directly attack the council (after all, conservative Catholicism is founded at least in part on the idea of councils as irrevocable, infallible events). The order of the day was containment, and there was nobody better to serve the purpose than Ratzinger, who was convinced, in stages, to become the prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) - formerly the Holy Office and before that the Roman Inquisition, guardians of orthodoxy and once the administrators of the notorious Index librorum prohibitorum, the church’s list of forbidden books (another casualty of Vatican II). It effectively made him the chief ideological policeman of the Roman church; but as one of the architects of the Vatican II settlement, he was easier to swallow for those who still hoped against hope for a more radical outcome than some random ultramontane thug.

Policemen

The duty of policeman he took to with relish. His old colleagues Küng and Rahner were harassed unceasingly for suspected ‘heresy’. More consequentially, under the John Paul-Ratzinger regime, the church abandoned its pretence of neutrality in the Cold War, laundering CIA funds to organisations like Solidarnosc as the US switched from containment to rollback.

By the same token, the brave priests in Latin America who had thrown their lot in with workers and peasants and formed egalitarian base communities among them were left to the tender mercies of the Monroe doctrine and its pet generalissimos. Ernesto Cardenal, the poet-priest who joined the Sandinista government, was publicly humiliated by John Paul on a papal visit to Nicaragua and forbidden to celebrate mass because of his refusal to resign his post. He got off very lightly compared to the victims of Pinochet, Galtieri and Colombian death squads. The formal verdict was delivered in 1984, when Ratzinger’s CDF condemned liberation theology for its focus on systemic rather than individual sins, and its acknowledgement - shock, horror! - that the church hierarchy had been a willing partner to imperialist exploitation and oppression for most of its existence in the western hemisphere.

From a Marxist - or even a merely human - point of view, it is this that constitutes Ratzinger’s greatest crime, though he shares responsibility with the pope who appointed him, and the various other reactionary cronies likewise appointed to core positions in the Vatican. It is hardly surprising that they hung the Latin Americans out to dry - little else could have been expected from such a sclerotic institution, so jealously guarding what remains of its privileges. The point remains, however, that somebody had to do it: in such emergencies, panicked institutions of this sort turn to men like Wojtyla and Ratzinger: cynics, cowards, fanatics, and backstabbers. It is they who colluded, for practical purposes, in the massacres and rapes of contra death squads, whose victims were in no insignificant part their own flock, even their own priests. They deserve to be remembered principally for that.

Cover-ups

They will not, however. After all, the US won the Cold War - or, if you ask the average conservative priest, John Paul won it single-handedly. Óscar Romero is merely one egg broken to make the end-of-history omelette; as an archbishop, gunned down at his altar, he is at least remembered, unlike the countless tortured campesinos of the base communities.

Rather, it is the sexual abuse crisis - and other scandals contemporary with it, like the horrific discovery of an old septic tank that had become a mass grave for infants at a mother-and-baby home in the west of Ireland - that will truly mark the card of these two popes.

In the typically polite bourgeois coverage of Benedict’s death, he is credited with being the first pope to take the abuse crisis seriously. There is, perhaps, some justice to this. He long argued for abuse to be brought out of the hands of individual bishops, who behaved lamentably, into the purview of the CDF, where in theory they could be dealt with more robustly. Upon becoming pope, he acted quickly to discipline Maciel Marcial, a particularly sadistic predator long protected by John Paul. (Marcial had founded an ultra-reactionary lay religious order, the Legionaries of Christ; John Paul preferred such groups, answerable to him personally, to the more established religious orders - Dominicans, Jesuits and so on - who were politically unreliable. Even the Trappists went a bit new age after Vatican II.)

Yet this is, at the same time, a ludicrously one-eyed view of things. Vatican II really did open up a modestly better way forward; the re-examination it prompted undermined the ultra-clericalism that promoted priests as almost a spiritual master race, and put in question the rule of celibacy, even - whisper it quietly - the restriction of ordination to men. The extraordinary power of priests over the punters in the pews, in the Catholic heartlands at least, led to the willful blindness about the sexual crimes of priests and religious¹. The obsession with maintaining such power, meanwhile, led bishops - including, we now know, Ratzinger in his short period in charge of Munich - to suppress stories and quietly move problem priests around. Today’s Vatican likes to blame ‘clericalism’ for the abuse crisis, but of course sees clericalism as a sin to be cured first of all by inward spiritual conversion. It is nothing so mysterious - rather it is a necessary excrescence of rigidly hierarchical institutional structures.

Beyond his personal failings in the Munich archdiocese, then, Ratzinger incontestably made the situation worse over decades, simply because he used his power to reinforce absolutism in the church. His time at the CDF amounted to a Thermidor: one of the ‘revolutionaries’ of Vatican II using his prestige to freeze everything over. By the end of John Paul II’s papacy, the Catholic church was perhaps more hierarchical in its functioning than under Pius XII. More and more decisions had to run through Rome, because Rome no longer trusted the bishops’ conferences (which, after all, had protected the liberation theologians to some extent). John Paul was the big boss - and nobody wants to give bad news to the big boss. Thus the shape of the abuse crisis: a trickle becoming a deluge, when the allegations could no longer be hidden under the carpet. As of today, the CDF’s successor body spends 80% of all its time dealing with historic abuse allegations.

Ratzinger was the first among the reactionaries of the John Paul kitchen cabinet to notice that something real had to be done, so perhaps he deserves credit for that. Even so, the church’s actions were plainly directed at preserving what remained of its reputation, rather than securing justice for the people crushed under the weight of its arrogance. As for the roots of the crisis, as late as 2019, Benedict remained obviously in denial, and blamed it all farcically on the decline in public morals since the sexual revolution, as if there was not evidence of clerical abuse stretching back to the fifth century.

Apart from the fallout from the abuse scandal, Benedict’s papacy was largely undistinguished. There was some controversy over a speech at Regensburg that seemed to some to be anti-Islam, but in context the speech rather attacked modern secularism for breeding fundamentalism as a reaction. This set the tone. He continued to rail against his old targets - gay marriage, abortion, contraception (his doggedness on the latter question almost certainly abetted the spread of Aids in sub-Saharan Africa, given the importance of Catholic aid agencies in the region). He reabsorbed the Society of St Pius X (SSPX), a motley band of ultra-traditionalist clerics who had rejected Vatican II and got themselves excommunicated in the 1980s (one of the SSPX bishops was immediately revealed to be a holocaust denier). He relaxed restrictions on the pre-conciliar Latin mass, apparently in the hope of relieving traditionalist-progressive tensions, though it had the opposite effect; Francis has now clamped down on it again, causing a great ruckus.

Two popes

There was one remarkable feature of his papacy, however, which was that it ended otherwise than by his natural death. In 2013, he dramatically stepped down, claiming to lack the strength to carry on. No doubt he remembered all too clearly the last days of John Paul, utterly stricken with Parkinson’s disease and for all practical purposes no longer in command of anything. Indeed, he had requested retirement as early as his 70th birthday, in 1997, but was refused. His last decade was supposed to be spent in contemplation and prayer at the Mater ecclesia monastery within the walls of the Vatican. So it was, for the most part, but he had his name attached to high profile public interventions on the abuse crisis and clerical celibacy. How much of this was his work or that of his reactionary hangers-on is a matter of speculation among Vaticanologists, and now I suppose we will never know.

Relations between the two popes were supposedly cordial (though they would say that …) but it is undeniable that Francis has taken it upon himself to reverse much of the John-Paul/Benedict agenda. He has cleared out reactionary cardinals like Robert Sarah from the top jobs, and extensively reorganised the curia (the Vatican bureaucracy) in the hopes of curtailing its legendary graft, wastefulness and incompetence. This has involved putting people other than cardinals in charge of things, including lay-people and women religious², bringing the church firmly into the late-20th century. His encyclicals have focused on economic inequality and ecological crisis, rather than the conventional papal obsession with the goings-on in people’s bedrooms.

We should not overstate Francis’s radicalism, of course. His own record in relation to authoritarian regimes in South America is highly questionable. He has rejected women’s ordination with the same vacuous jargon of sexual complementarity he inherited from his two predecessors. Other examples could be listed. Nonetheless, he has driven conservative clerics stir-crazy; and for the period of Benedict’s retirement, they could fixate on him as a ‘prince across the water’.

The nerve centre of reactionary Catholicism was France for a long time, but today it is the turn of the United States. The US conference of bishops, bloated with rightwing dark money and viciously committed to culture-war bigotry, poses real problems for Francis; all the more so the rightwing Catholic media, over which he has no leverage of patronage.

This is no less true on the far opposite fringe, which we find (ironically) in Benedict’s homeland of Germany. There, the church is utterly dependent on a peculiar hypothecated church tax; the ever-more thousands of people a year who are finally disgusted enough to do the paperwork and opt out of paying it poses serious risks to the German church’s financial stability. So the hierarchy has gone for broke, organised a long outreach process it calls the ‘synodal way’, and has dutifully reported the demands of the laity: married priests, women priests (or at least deacons), more acceptance of homosexuality, more autonomy for regional and national churches. The Americans have threatened schism if the Germans get their way, though it should be said that American lay Catholics have roughly the same bell curve of political allegiances as the country as a whole.

The Vatican is attempting an end run around the Germans with its own synod, bafflingly called the ‘synod on synodality’, which so far has involved a global ‘listening exercise’. The idea, however, is to keep things under control: having done their listening, it is the duty of bishops to “discern” the sensus fidei, the views of the faithful, which offers wide latitude for them to hear what they want to. The lines of potential schism are clearly visible, then, but probably more likely is a perpetual series of compromises that give enough to each faction to prevent an open break.

On this view, the Roman church has caught up with the Anglican communion of 20 years ago, during the crises over the proposed episcopal appointments of the gay men, Gene Robinson and Jeffrey John, in America and Britain respectively. Today, the official policy of Anglicanism remains shamefacedly anti-gay, but wide latitude is given for parishes to effectively set their own agenda, to the point that liberal Anglican church communities are possibly the most gay-friendly environment available in all mainline denominations of all organised religions practised in the west.

The fact that the policy remains what it is causes periodic embarrassments, partly because society really has moved on, but partly because nobody actually believes the policy - for liberals, it is homophobic, and for conservatives, not homophobic enough. Yet it is apparently possible to muddle along forever in this way, albeit in ever-decreasing circles. Likewise, the Vatican’s big summary document of all the synodal ‘listening’ scandalised conservatives by including the acronym LGBTQIA+, and lamenting that the people so named feel “excluded”, but cannot promise the only possible remedy: an end to the church’s doctrine that minority sexual orientations and gender presentations are contrary to the natural law.

In an organisation as monarchical as the Catholic church, everything depends on the next pope. As of Benedict’s death, the clock is ticking. Francis has openly said he would consider retiring, and has even written his resignation letter, to be submitted if he becomes incapacitated. He is not in the best of health, conducting most of his duties from a wheelchair. He pointedly made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Celestine V, the last pope to retire before Benedict (who was thrown in jail by his successor for his troubles, where he died). One of the major obstacles is now cleared away - there was no possibility of retirement while Benedict lived. Two popes were trouble enough.

Francis is expected to regularise the status of retired popes, to mitigate the sort of silly buggers played by Benedict and/or his flunkies in the last 10 years. In order to assure his succession by a similar figure, the consensus of the Vaticanologists is that he needs at least one more consistory (appointment of cardinals). He has his synod to take care of. Beyond that, the conservatives will likely get their wish, and be rid of him. A continuity Francis-ite pope would continue the work of turning the Roman curia from a malfunctioning ancien regime to a more-or-less modernised bourgeois bureaucracy, and continue the ideological balancing act. A reversion to the ultramontanism of John-Paul and Benedict probably would cause a split, but the most likely outcome is always more of the same, since popes appoint their successors’ electorate. All the more reason to suppose that the church’s conservatives will play hardball.

On the whole, as we said at the outset, the next pope will inherit Benedict’s church, rather than Francis’s. As Joseph Ratzinger, above all, he set the parameters of modern Catholicism, firstly by his contributions to the council, and then by his ‘counterrevolution’ at the holy office. He attempted to suppress disagreements between church factions, but made them worse. He refocused Catholic morality and politics entirely on personal and particularly sexual ethics, and then faced perhaps the single worst scandal of institutionalised sexual crimes in modern history - crimes in which he was found, in the end, to be culpable. He was an ultramontane who gave the world a divided papacy for the first time since the western schism of the 14th and 15th centuries. He will be remembered as the face of the church’s refusal to learn.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk

1. The term “religious” in this sense refers to members of religious orders who are not priests - eg monks, friars and nuns. “Priests and religious” is a common phrase in this context, and “women religious” means nuns and other nun-like vocations.↩︎

2. See note 1.↩︎