[There is a lot in this article that could be disputed. I'll leave that to others to do. One thing that is relatively minor but which irks me is the result of Rocco Palma's attempts to be cute and gossipy. It was only a matter of time before someone in the mainstream media picked up Rocco's pet name for Papa, "His Fluffiness", which I consider demeaning, and then there is the remark about the tracksuit, which the writer at least indicates could be baseless. Still....]
The pope nobody knows
MICHAEL VALPY
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
VATICAN CITY — April rain clouds scud across St. Peter's Square propelled by a gusty, cold wind. It is just past noon and the end of Wednesday's weekly general papal audience. The open Mercedes-Benz Popemobile carrying white-mopped Benedict XVI rolls down the ramp in front of the basilica and heads toward the Apostolic Palace.
A brass band that has played for him — its members clad in lederhosen — marches off the square with loud oompah-oompahs and banging cymbals, before the baleful gaze of a senior official of the Roman Curia, the papal bureaucracy.
“The bands,” he says, a lace of irritation in his voice. “There seems so many of them now. A German thing, I suppose. Can you imagine trying to do your work against that?”
He gestures next with a sweep of his arm to indicate the thousands of people still standing on the square. “And I suppose you've heard about the crowds? More people turning up for this Pope than used to turn up for John Paul's audiences?”
He takes in the scene in silence for a moment. Then the official — as is customary with Vatican bureaucrats, he has agreed to speak only for background — says unexpectedly: “Why are they there?”
It is a statement capturing perfectly the mood that pervades the Vatican one year into the reign of the new Pope — a mood of uncertainty, of uneasy questioning in the city-state that rules an institutional Christian faith of 1.1 billion adherents.
What is the Roman Catholic Church that the previous Pope, the colossus John Paul II, has left behind? And where will it be taken by the secretive intellectual and scholar Benedict, who has succeeded him — the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, incongruously nicknamed His Fluffiness, for his hair?
Perhaps above all, throughout the precincts of Michelangelo's soaring dome and the Doric columns of Bernini's colonnade, the mood is one of apprehension that “behind the great façade of the church,” — as the pre-eminent Swiss Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng put it in a conversation this week — “the church's life is very poor.”
But there are façades, and façades. Just off St. Peter's on the Piazzo Pio XII, the lederhosen band — Bavarian, of course, like Benedict — blats a dissonant, drooping coda and its musicians set down their instruments, slap each other's backs, laugh too noisily. And why not, having just played at St. Peter's for their Pope?
The contrast they present to the serious Curia bureaucrat could hardly be more striking, as striking as the contrast to the edgy Vatican found in Bavaria itself — Germany's southernmost, predominantly Catholic state, where the cash registers are set to ring in the second tourist season along the Benediktweg, the Benedict Path, tracing young Joseph Ratzinger's early life in the picturesque Alpine countryside.
The future pope's birthplace of Marktl Am Inn (population 2,700), where he spent his first two years as the son of the village police chief, drew 125,000 tourists in 2005. The year before, there were only 3,000. The house where he was born, on the village square, just sold for 3.5 million euros (nearly $5-million). Crucifix cookies and papal-mitre-shaped pastries are for sale in the bakery. The grocery store sells papst-bier — pope beer.
The village council has incorporated its tourism office as a commercial business, and put up more than $400,000 to refurbish a village information centre, design a new traffic plan and parking lot and tour-bus stop, print brochures, put up signs and create a website. At the nearby shrine of Our Lady of Altotting — incidentally, with one of Bavaria's most pleasant restaurants, the Hotel zur Post, on the medieval kappelplatz — Benedict's visit this September is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of people.
An hour's drive south, near the Austrian border, is Traunstein (population 19,000). Brochures advertise Benedict walks and Benedict cycling tours that take visitors to the high school he attended, the empty Ratzinger family house, the parish church of St. Oswald, where he celebrated the first mass of his priesthood, and the local St. Michael's seminary, where until recently he annually spent the week between Christmas and the new year.
Eucharistic vessels that Benedict might have used are in a glass display case in the city hall foyer, along with his portrait, painted by a local artist. A delegation of city officials travelled to Rome after his election to name him an honorary citizen — and to bring him his favourite bread, from Rosemarie Kotter's bakery.
Yet even those blithe scenes cause frowns in the Vatican. It issued a quiet reproof to Marktl Am Inn last year, saying Benedict XVI did not wish to become the object of a personality cult.
One wonders if the Vatican of John Paul II ever sent a similar signal to his Polish birthplace in Wadowice.
The final resting place of popes is the crypt beneath St. Peter's Basilica. Around John Paul II's tomb, the crowd is so dense and the heat from packed bodies so stifling that even breathing is difficult. The yells of security guards, “ Avanti! Avanti!”— move along, move along! — fall largely on deaf ears.
Women of a certain age shout, push and elbow their way to the velvet rope stretched across the alcove in which the tomb sits. Scores of hands hold out rosaries, crucifixes, pieces of cloth for a black-suited attendant to rub on the tomb's white marble slab. Strewn across the alcove floor are flowers, notes, photographs and . . . a blue paper airplane?
Closer inspection shows the airplane to be a note of petition to the late pontiff. The logical explanation is that its author, unable to get near enough to place it on the floor, inventively folded it into a projectile to launch it over the heads of the crowd. It lacks, nonetheless, a certain iconic respectfulness. Perhaps it can be construed as serving notice that no mythology lasts forever.
The epoch of this Pope — of whom it was once said with certainty that he would acquire the appellation “the Great” after his name — is passing into history, and not exactly with the narrative his hagiographers would wish. Here in the Vatican, at the heart of the church he ruled for 26 years, John Paul II's legacy is being prodded and poked.
In the Vatican's public declarations, John Paul II remains the towering “beloved pontiff,” as Benedict called him a few days ago after watching a new film on his life. Seventy-five thousand people stood in St. Peter's Square on the first anniversary of his death — at the precise hour and minute on April 2 — to hold candles in his memory. The kitsch shops in Rome's touristy Borgo Pio district in the shadow of the Vatican continue to robustly peddle John Paul II T-shirts, calendars and myriad other late-pontiff commemorative knick-knacks.
But in the neo-Baroque offices and anterooms of the Curia and surrounding pontifical universities, the conversation is about darker souvenirs. The language is careful; it never approaches denigration. But the nuances, the rhetorical questions asked and left unanswered — “Why are they there?” — speak volumes.
Beyond doubt, say officials and scholars, John Paul II was the consummate showman. He placed his church in the global public sphere as no pope before him has come close to doing.
“John Paul put faith on front pages of newspapers at a time when it wasn't. He gave Catholics self-confidence,” says Professor Diego Contreras, a church communications analyst at Rome's Pontifical University of Santa Croce.
“He was the evangelizing pope,” says the Curia official not fond of Bavarian bands.
But what did the evangelizing pope leave behind that is built upon a rock? In the course of several days of conversations in and around the Vatican, there is no solid answer.
There is, however, a firm response from Hans Küng, the priest and theologian barred under John Paul II's papacy from teaching at a Catholic university because of his dissident writings: “He evangelized against the Pill, against divorce, against abortion, and nothing changed. In fact, it got worse. Young Catholics simply didn't follow his advice.”
In Rome a year after John Paul's death, conversation quickly focuses on his legacy of a Curia ignored and left to slide into dysfunction while the pope travelled the world, haphazardly attempting to manage the church through an incoherent welter of overlapping jurisdictions and churning out lackadaisical busywork — documents upon documents never read or acted upon.
John Paul II's homilies and encyclicals are called impenetrable. His wholesale beatifications and canonizations of saints — more than created by all his predecessors combined — are termed profligate. He is criticized for autocratic imperiousness, his lack of collegiality and consultation and his appointments of weak and ineffective bishops — yes-men whose only discernible merit was their obedience to John Paul.
“Nobody is perfect,” mildly observes Prof. Lluis Clavell, a philosopher at Santa Croce who teaches journalists how to understand the Vatican.
The sharpest jab comes from a Curia bureaucrat: “This Santo Subito business, I find it a bit jarring,” he says, referring to the plethora of banners and placards demanding “Sainthood Now” that appeared among the huge throngs at John Paul's funeral mass last April on St. Peter's Square.
“All those nicely painted signs. You don't just paint a sign like that during communion. It was all a bit” — he searches for the word — “orchestrated.”
All of this critical thinking about the last Pope has the byproduct of bringing his successor into clearer focus. The image being crafted of Benedict says: Here is what was lacking in John Paul.
Rev. Thomas Frauenlob is about to answer the summons from the top.
The 43-year-old is the director of St. Michael's Seminary, the sturdy white building on a hilltop overlooking Traunstein where Benedict spent his Christmas seasons relaxing in seclusion before becoming head of the church.
Now, he has received a letter from the Pope asking him to take a job in the Curia's Congregation for Catholic Education, the Vatican discastery (government department) overseeing Catholic seminaries and universities. He leaves for Rome in a few weeks.
“It is always a bit problematic to be a prodigy of the boss, but I'll be just another modest worker in the vineyard of the Lord,” he says, smiling, echoing the words that Benedict used to describe himself after being elected pope.
For nine years, Father Frauenlob was Cardinal Ratzinger's host on those Christmas breaks. They ate together, went on walks together and watched the nightly news together on television. “His running commentary on the news was very entertaining, but I'm not going to say anything more about it than that,” he says.
Father Frauenlob is discreet, a must-have employment qualification for where he is going — so different from the former era.
John Paul II had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, mainly Poles. Everyone in the Vatican knew who they were and who he had to lunch at The Apartment, the seven-room papal suite on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace.
As Prof. Contreras, the church communications analyst, explains, they provided an important “informal flow of information.” In a word, they leaked.
“We don't have that at all with this pope.”
The Poles in The Apartment have been replaced by Germans, and the new inner circle is small. “They are people who know how to keep their mouths shut,” Prof. Lluis Clavell says.
Adds the Curia official not fond of Bavarian bands: “The back door has been shut.”
It is another contribution to the Vatican's edginess: As its officials grapple with re-evaluating John Paul's pontificate, they have precious little idea where Benedict's pontificate is going to go.
They don't even have that much of a fix on who the new boss really is — the cat- and Mozart-loving Bavarian intellectual (he turns 79 tomorrow) who, since last April 19, has been the church's 265th Vicar of Christ and Servant of the Servants of God.
His 12 months in the spotlight have revealed little more about him than what seeped to the surface through the 24 years he spent as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's watchdog of theological orthodoxy. Or, earlier, as archbishop of Munich, and before that as a professor of theology. That is, not much.
“There are no pictures of Benedict around kayaking,” says a Vatican bureaucrat — again making the comparison to John Paul.
As Pope, Benedict has been photographed wearing a baseball cap and a 12th-century camaulda — kind of a Santa Claus hat — pulled down over his ears. He favours red Prada shoes, and has turned up publicly in an ermine-trimmed shoulder-cape, a mozetta, that no one has seen on a living pope since Paul VI's death in 1978.
The Italian and British press have debated whether the sunglasses he sports are by Gucci or Serengeti. And Rocco Palmo, an American pope-blogger who also writes for the British Catholic journal The Tablet, claims several sources have told him that, when the Pope is home alone in the Apartment, he puts on a blue tracksuit.
It is tempting to say, “Wow, here is a Joseph Ratzinger we never knew.” The clothes clues, however, are not solid. The camaulda and mozetta are rumoured to be gifts from two European princesses. His optician says someone probably also gave him the sunglasses. Father Frauenlob laughs off the tracksuit report.
After addressing a recent meeting of the Curia's 1,500 bureaucrats, Benedict shook the hands of those seated in the first row, and then left. John Paul II, a Curia official noted, would have shaken the hands of everyone in the first 200 rows.
John Paul, the former actor, was a man of dramatic gestures. “I can't imagine Benedict going like this with his hands,” says the Curia official, imitating the late pope. “I'd be embarrassed.”
Indeed, when Benedict does make a gesture with his hands, it looks as if he has read it in a script.
John Paul never saw a mass audience he didn't love. Benedict thoroughly dislikes them, Father Frauenlob says.
Pope John XXIII, within the first 100 days of his papacy, had decided to convene the Second Vatican Council that overhauled the church. Paul VI, within his first 100 days, had made an unprecedented trip to the Holy Land. And John Paul II, in his first 100 days, had made a triumphant visit to his Polish homeland and declared his support for the Polish free trade union, Solidarity — helping to crack the foundations of the Communist Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe.
Benedict moved his library of 20,000 books to the Apartment from the Borgo Pio flat in which he had lived for 24 years.
He has written an encyclical on love, to mixed reviews. Scarcely anyone in the Vatican knew what it was about until it was being translated — “which already offers you a very different framework from how things were done before,” Prof. Contreras notes.
And he has, as predicted, walked steadfastly in John Paul's footsteps in his moral and theological pronouncements, as is the convention.
Contrary to predictions, he has not torn the Curia apart. He has merely tinkered with it. He has merged four minor departments into two and reassigned Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald to be papal ambassador to Egypt.
Archbishop Fitzgerald, a Briton, is the Vatican's Islamic expert. He had been president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue — until it disappeared in the departmental shuffle.
In the Vatican's current climate, the tinkerings have been seen darkly: They're considered the harbinger of Benedict's long-awaited Curia axe, with Archbishop Fitzgerald's transfer taken as a demotion for being “soft” on Islam.
But a senior bureaucrat, who knows the Pope well from his own Curia days, dismisses the speculations.
“This so-called Curia revolution, how could it be a No. 1 priority? It is, after all, the smallest bureaucracy in the world. It is not what the papacy is about. He's not a CEO. He's spiritual leader of 1.1 billion Catholics.
“As for Fitzgerald? They don't punish people like that in public. It would put the Holy See in an embarrassing position. Besides which, the Pope has never been a vindictive man.”
So how to assess Benedict's first year in charge? One hears ubiquitously that the tradition in Germany is for a new pastor of a church to do nothing in his first year other than walk the same path as his predecessor — observe, analyze, but make no changes.
It is said that this is what Joseph Ratzinger did in his first year as archbishop of Munich, and what he did in his first year as prefect of the CDF. It is also repeatedly pointed out that he is a scholar, and that scholars never take precipitate actions: First they study, then they assess, and only then do they act.
Says the official not fond of Bavarian bands: “He hasn't had a defining event land in his lap yet. They're not created. They land. What will it be? I don't know. It might be Islamic, but I don't know. There's got to be an event that provokes.”
Or something broader, grander, something that takes us back to the Vatican official looking at the crowds on St. Peter's Square, and asking: “Why are they there?”
The crowds at Benedict's weekly audiences are puzzling. As one academic at a Roman university observes, the novelty of a new Pope should have worn off by now. The crowds have been called the biggest surprise to date of Benedict's papacy.
People came to see John Paul. But perhaps, speculates Congolese theologian Juvénal Illunga Muya, a professor at the Pontifical Urbaniana University, they come to hear Benedict.
But hear what? His workaday homilies are more comprehensible than the dense philosophical circumlocutions of John Paul, but hardly dramatic departures from past papal idiom.
However, there is the sermon he preached at his papal inauguration — presenting the world with a dark portrait of humanity lost in a desert of corruption, loneliness, abandonment and destroyed love.
And there is also the homily he preached to his fellow cardinals in St. Peter's before they filed into the Sistine Chapel to elect him Pope — an eloquent warning: “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires.”
These are messages Hans Küng notes. He taught with Prof. Ratzinger many years ago at the University of Tübingen. It was Archbishop Ratzinger of Munich who was the first church official to publicly rebuke him. And there seems no doubt that Cardinal Ratzinger was involved in the decision to revoke Prof. Küng's licence to teach Catholic theology.
When Pope Benedict XVI's election was announced, Prof. Küng called it a disappointment for Catholics who had hoped for change from John Paul.
Still, in the interview this week, he said he is happy that Benedict has chosen not to be “a media pope” — that he is not travelling, that he is reflecting and that he has prudently not followed an aggressive policy of evangelism.
The two former colleagues met last September in Rome, their first meeting in years. It was later spun by the Vatican as a sign that Prof. Küng's differences with the former Prof. Ratzinger were eroding.
“That's too simplistic,” Prof. Küng said. “There was an agreement [beforehand] that we exclude from conversation our very different opinions — on the Pill, on celibacy of priests, on Eucharistic unity with Protestants — and concentrate on the big problems, like Christian faith and science, the evolution of the cosmos, on life and humanity.”
They also spoke at length — the meeting lasted four hours — on what Prof. Küng called “the best way of pushing the ethical imperatives” in a secular world.
He said of his old adversary: “He sees better than his predecessor the façade of the church.”
Benedict's first year assessed.
As for the façade of the Benediktweg, and the Bavarian cash registers waiting for pilgrims, elementary-school teacher Hubert Gschwendtner — who has been mayor of Marktl Am Inn for the past 10 years — sits at his dining-room table one afternoon and tells the story of his efforts to rein in excessive commercial enthusiasm.
Choosing his words carefully, he says the initial euphoria in the village over Benedict's election rather quickly led to what he described as a decline in the quality of merchandise being offered in local shops, and the quiet warning from the Vatican about papal personality cults.
“We had no control over what was being sold,” Mr. Gschwendtner says. “We are not the police. We have a free-market economy. So it was a question of appealing to retailers to sell only what would be in good taste.”
Asked for an example of bad taste, he responds: “Everything marketed by the butcher.”
One almost doesn't want to know.
In any event, pope sausages came off the market. And the brewers of papst-bier agreed to remove Benedict's face from the bottle labels and replace it with something saying simply, “Greetings from Marktl.”
Still, a few hundred metres from the village square, Otto Brandstetter stands serenely amid his souvenir-shop stock of Benedict busts, Benedict umbrellas and Benedict flowerpots.
He declares business to be “very satisfactory.” The crucifix cookies and mitre pastries are selling well in the bakery.
And Mayor Gschwendtner tells the story of his personal Pope coup — pulled off flawlessly last summer, when Benedict went to Cologne for Catholic World Youth Day.
Learning the Pope would be flying back to Rome aboard the German national airline Lufthansa, Mr. Gschwendtner had a town official call the airline to see if the plane could do a low dip over Marktl as it went by. Lufthansa readily agreed.
Mr. Gschwendtner then organized a media-publicized street party in the square beside the Pope's birth house. He arranged for the whole of the central village to be lit up brilliantly, and he brought in a sound truck.
As the Pope's plane neared Marktl and lowered its altitude, Mr. Gschwendtner put in a call to the pilot. He put Benedict on the phone, and the Pope gave a blessing to the town that was broadcast through the truck.
The payoff was a visit to the village several days later by the Lufthansa crew. They arrived bringing the aircraft seat on which the papal posterior had reposed. It is now bolted onto the floor in the mayor's office.
He says, “I don't want it turned into a relic.”
Michael Valpy is a senior writer for The Globe and Mail.
[Modificato da benefan 15/04/2006 16.49]