A red quarter of a circle with the words ‘The Quarter Mark’ beside it.
A year-long series looking back on the most significant moments of the past 25 years, how they changed our world, and how they will continue to shape the next 25.
Michael W. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College and the author of The Jesuit Disruptor: a Personal Portrait of Pope Francis.
It was not dissimilar from any other consistory or meeting between various cardinals and the pope. They gathered in Benedict XVI’s presence on Feb. 11, 2013, to consider the case of three canonizations when the pontiff, at the conclusion of the meeting, unexpectedly shifted to Latin and read out a brief declaratio in which he told the assembled prelates that he wanted to “share a decision of great importance for the life of the church.”
This in and of itself would not have alerted the attending churchmen that something was about to be delivered that would be nothing less than a sucker punch.
After all, the German pope, Joseph Ratzinger, was given to lengthy digressions on learned if not occasionally arcane provenance, and they would settle into a reverential if soporific wait for what was to come.
But what was to come was nothing they could have divined beforehand. Benedict announced that, having carefully and thoroughly examined his conscience before God, he had concluded that his physical strength was no longer up to the job, so he was stepping down as the Successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome. The “vigour of body and soul” for navigating the Barque of Saint Peter required a new person at the helm.
With high solemnity he intoned: In full liberty I declare that I resign the ministry of the Bishop of Rome, entrusted to me through the hands of the Cardinals on the 19th day of April, 2005, with the result that, from the 28th day of February, 2013, at the 20th hour, the See of Rome, the See of St. Peter, will be vacant; and I declare that a Conclave to select a new highest pontiff needs to be convoked by those to whom the duty belongs.
And so a pontificate, the first since the renunciation of the papacy by Gregory XII in the 15th century, came to an end with more a whimper than a bang. One can’t fault the cardinals for not immediately grasping the enormity of what had just been said. The lingua franca of Vatican deliberations is Italian – rarely do they discourse in Latin, and they might well have been in a semi-stupor given the quiet and undramatic delivery of the pope. Benedict lacked both the drama of John Paul II and the easy informality of Francis.
But when the bang kicked in, the reverberations were global.
Worshippers attend a special evening mass at St. Hedwig Catholic cathedral in Berlin following the resignation announcement. Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Once they understood what had been said, the cardinals knew they were in a situation with few precedents, and that they had a limited time in which to respond to the challenges of a resigning pontiff, the unexpected urgency of addressing the sede vacante or that period when the Seat of Peter is empty, as well as preparing for the election of a new pope. The interregnum – the period between the death of one pope and the election of his successor – was made more complicated by the fact that Rome would now have two men in white, one active and one inactive. Terms and jurisdictions needed to be carefully defined.
In addition, rumours abounded over what made up the full slate of reasons for Benedict’s renunciation of the papacy. Not that the reasons proffered by Benedict were considered disingenuous, only that they were considered incomplete. That the pontiff’s strength was no longer sufficient for the task of leadership we have much evidence for: Although the years of his retirement saw him active, with an outpouring of scholarly undertakings and publications (he lived to the grand age of 95), his administrative duties did take a heavy toll.
More germane are the plethora of missteps, ecclesial crises, media gaffes, dramatic instances of myopic governance, numerous revelations of sexual impropriety and scandal in the Vatican itself, and betrayals by close aides – including his personal butler – all of which combined in the end to seriously hobble Benedict’s effectiveness. He was simply no longer in charge.
When he ran the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – La Suprema, the ever-scrutinizing watchdog of Catholic orthodoxy – there was no doubt who called the shots, for even John Paul II could bend to the Grand Inquisitor’s will. But as the head of the Church and the Vatican City State, he was dealing with different realities, and his management skills were sorely wanting. He knew that, and his resignation speaks to a degree of self-honesty that is edifying.
David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, a Ratzinger biographer and the author of The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World, has a different read on why Benedict opted out of the papacy. Being pope was an unwelcome detour and he wanted a course correction: “The story of his resignation is simpler and much less flattering to Benedict than most speculate,” he recently wrote to me in an e-mail.
“He just didn’t want to do the job any more. He never wanted the job, in fact; he really wanted to retire to his beloved Regensburg, the university and diocese where he flourished unhindered. Being elected as pope was the first time he had no control over his destiny. And when he had enough as pope, he retired, wore the papal white, kept the papal name, and continued to write and speak, despite vowing to remain ‘hidden from the world.’ He was quite something; just couldn’t help himself.”
A helicopter carrying Pope Benedict XVI takes off from inside the Vatican on its way to the papal summer residence on Feb. 28, 2013.Reuters
If his election to the See of Rome was an arresting moment for many, his dramatic departure, especially his Felliniesque helicopter liftoff from the Vatican en route to the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, remains a visual highlight of the last hours of his papacy.
If it is true that he never wanted the job, he sure knew how to leave it with a flourish.
Benedict’s pontificate came to a close with many outstanding issues imperilling the Church’s continued credibility. Battered by various scandals, with allegations and investigations into clerical cupidity and promiscuity primary among them, and with diminished authority in numerous jurisdictions, the papacy of Benedict was collapsing into irrelevance, with the head office retreating into a citadel mentality.
The cardinal electors, those under the age of 80, fretted about a church becoming a historical footnote in Europe, once the cradle of Catholicism, and too occupied with internal factionalism to become a seriously self-reforming global body.
After being summoned to Rome by the dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano, to begin the pre-Conclave meetings of cardinals (called General Congregations), discussions (anodyne in public and forthright in private) began in earnest among all the interested parties. These included cardinal electors, cardinals with no vote because of the age limitation but also present in Rome, journalists, insiders and outsiders with lobbying influence, involving many of the religious orders and ecclesial communities.
Reform of the central bureaucracy of the Church, the Roman Curia, was of paramount interest in these discussions. The language used bordered in some instances on the apocalyptic. The meticulous and respectful Vatican correspondent Gerard O’Connell, in his insider account of the conclave that elected Benedict’s successor, The Election of Pope Francis, reported that Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna spoke about “the clash of light and darkness in the Church and in the world … Benedict had called the darkness by its names: in the Church, the immorality and ambition of clerics, and in the world, rejection of God.”
Time for a radical scouring of the structures, a rigorous purging of the institution’s pathologies. How that was to be achieved, the pastoral and canonical strategies that could be employed to do the necessary reforming, was yet to be identified. First, the cardinal electors needed a primus inter pares (first among equals), a Bishop of Rome who could pull off what eluded Benedict.
Although it took six votes to elect Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires who had been a papal contender in the election that followed the death of John Paul II in 2005, the final tally had him with a substantial lead over the next candidate in line, Angelo Scola of Milan, who was considered by many in senior circles the heir presumptive. Also placing in the top three was the Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet – the hierarch responsible for the Vatican department (or dicastery) charged with the appointment of bishops was a serious contender. Such figures are known as papabile – someone who is considered a candidate for the papacy.
Both Scola and Ouellet were staunch and trusted allies of Benedict’s, so the choice of a prelate like Bergoglio – Latin American, a Jesuit, with markedly little Vatican experience – sent the incontestable message that the cardinals were serious in departing from the old guard and in taking risks for the good of Church governance.
The Benedictine era had ended. Papa Ratzinger had moved house.
The Franciscan era had begun. Papa Bergoglio had moved in.
By taking the name Francis, Bergoglio indicated the direction he was taking Peter’s Barque. As he said to the journalists who had been present for the conclave: “For me, [Francis of Assisi] is the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation; these days we do not have a very good relationship with creation, do we? He is the man who gives us this spirit of peace, the poor man.”
The Poverello of Assisi is a very different figure from St. Benedict of Nursia – the founder of Western monasticism, the very bulwark against the ravages of ignorance and disorder of the Dark Ages – whose name Joseph Ratzinger took on his papal election. The Franciscan friar symbolizes the radical simplicity of the poor, whereas the Benedictine monk symbolizes the inextinguishable light of learning.
The names fit the respective papal personalities, and in no small way they define their papacies. The cerebral Ratzinger and the intuitive Bergoglio might suggest an irresolvable antinomy. But not so.
From the outset, Pope Francis spoke fondly of his predecessor, visiting him in his Vatican digs, the Mater Ecclesia Monastery, referring to him publicly and with affection as the “old man,” and scrupulously avoiding any criticism of his papacy. And Emeritus Pope Benedict never wavered in his loyalty to his successor.
But that doesn’t mean all was amity in this convenient alliance. Followers of Benedict who have seen Francis as a dangerous usurper of traditional Catholicism, a Pope who is downplaying the creed and Catholic history in favour of accommodation with contemporary thinking and lax morality, have often used their devotion to Benedict as a corrective to Francis’s papacy, and not infrequently have opposed him in ways that were never adopted by critics of the Ratzinger papacy.
Certainly, there were differences in how the two popes chose to exercise their power. Benedict’s pleasure in wearing lofty raiment of antiquated origin stands in sharp contrast with Francis’s indifference to finery; Benedict’s aesthetic, with its preference for German high culture and Mozart, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Francis’s love of the tango; Benedict’s writings, with their layered academic resonance, stand in sometimes amusing contrast with Francis’s folksy style. When Benedict talks about evil, he uses the Latin phrase mysterium iniquitatis (mystery of evil), whereas Francis speaks in Spanish of el Diablo (the Devil).
New Zealand playwright Anthony McCarten’s drama, The Pope, and its subsequent film adaptation, The Two Popes, by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, constitute a touching emotional portrait of two adversaries who become allies, two unlike spirits that meld together when serving a common purpose: the unity and witness of the Church. Although they capture something essential in their relationship, the play and the film are more fiction than fact, more fantasy than reality. But as the Italians say: Se non è vero, è molto ben travato (if not true, it should be).
Pope Francis (L) embraces Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI as he arrives at the Castel Gandolfo summer residence on March 23, 2013.OSSERVATORE ROMANO/Reuters
One arresting convergence between the thinking of Benedict and Francis can be found in their shared conviction that the essence of Christianity is found embedded in the simplicity of faith. For all his tomes and erudite expostulations, the Ratzinger impulse was, as he once said, “always to free up the authentic kernel of the faith from encrustations and to give this kernel strength and dynamism. This impulse is the constant of my life.”
When Ratzinger, then-prefect of the Congregation for the Faith, gave his St. Michael’s College presidential address at Varsity Stadium in Toronto in 1986, he underscored the need for constraints and cautions on the thinking by experts that failed to take into account the lived faith of the masses. If somewhat condescending in tone, it was a small masterpiece of argument on behalf of the popular folk. Francis similarly celebrates the fidelity of the laity, championing local devotions, the pious practices of diverse cultures, establishing the primary locus for theology in the life of the people. As Dr. Emilce Cuda, his secretary for the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, rightly points out, for Francis, “theology is mediated by the live wisdom of the people. … Theologians, the current doctors or teachers of the Church, the professors on the balcony or loggia creating their categories of understanding, must come down and live the realities of the poor and marginalized.”
But if both Benedict and Francis shared a wariness toward the professionalization of the theological enterprise, their strategies of pastoral response were strikingly unalike. Benedict was fuelled by his daily commerce with scholars and active in publication on his own part. In contrast, Francis’s disinclination to rate thinking over doing, ideas over realities, has made him vulnerable to the criticism that he is not a thinker like his predecessor. This is a pathetic caricature, however, as he is quite capable of serious thinking when necessary, but his orientation is always to choose things as they are rather than as conceptual entities.
In addition, Francis was never an inquisitor like Benedict. He downgraded the role of the orthodoxy police, and remains supportive of a theology of fidelity that is not incompatible with a theology of dissent; a ministry of exposition that is not irreconcilable with a ministry of exploration. As he boldly said in the apostolic letter Ad theologiam promovendam, “To promote theology in the future, we cannot limit ourselves to abstractly re-proposing formulas and schemes from the past.”
Francis’s greatest theological contribution to the Church lies in his understanding of synodality, a reconceiving of the Church as a functioning institution that places high value on dialogue, reverential listening, silence and discernment. This reconceiving is not a rejection of creed and dogma, or an abandonment of the organic tradition, but a prioritizing of the relational, the personal and the pastoral. As he says in Hope: The Autobiography: “Synodality is not a fashion, nor a slogan to be exploited: it is a way of listening to one another, carried out at all levels.” Because the majority of the cardinals below the age of 80 are his creation, and because he has invested so much in advocating for a synodal church, his successor will be obligated to continue its implementation. Popes don’t overturn the work of their predecessors but will make nuanced changes, and whoever succeeds Francis is likely to do precisely that. After all, the Bergoglio style is unique to him.
Francis would not have been possible without Benedict’s resignation. Francis has called for a “restructuring of the spiritual life,” for new ways of living as a Church, unencumbered by the detritus of institutional failures. And he has marshalled his considerable energy – even if diminished by his struggling physical health – to strip the Roman Church of its settled privileges; humbling it, transforming it into a credible servant of God and humanity.
Francis has written about the 17th-century French mystic and mathematician Blaise Pascal, who recognized humanity’s innate grandeur as well as its misery, and who placed himself in the service of the Infinite Mercy.
That is actually what Francis has done. And it all began with an unanticipated, even providential, resignation in 2013.
