All the Pope's Men (15 page)

No one has articulated this view more forcefully over the years than Pope Benedict XVI, even well before he arrived in the Vatican in 1981 as Cardinal Ratzinger. In 1970, for example, Ratzinger and his Bavarian friend and colleague Hans Meier put out a volume called
Democracy in the Church
. In it, Ratzinger accuses advocates of democracy in the church of posing as populists, but in reality harboring a snobbish disdain for the simple faith of the great mass of believers. “Those circles which talk especially loud about democratization of the Church," Ratzinger wrote, “manifest the least respect for the faith shared by the community." To those who claim that he has strained the relationship between the Vatican and theologians, Ratzinger replies that keeping theologians happy is not his main concern. Above all, he must protect the right of simple believers to have the faith preserved in each generation. “Those who can’t fight back intellectually have to be defended against intellectual assault on what sustains their life," he said in 1998’s
Salt of the Earth
, a book-length interview with German journalist Peter Seewald. Elsewhere in that book: “This is His Church [meaning Christ’s], and not a laboratory for theologians." In a 1988 interview with the Austrian daily
Die Presse
, Ratzinger said his role was to defend those Catholics “who do not write books or learned articles." The point is clear: Ratzinger sees himself not as an inquisitor but as a tribune, protecting ordinary Catholics from intellectual abuse by self-appointed elites. To varying degrees, this attitude, perhaps expressed in different language, would characterize many officials in Vatican service.

One way this concern for the little guy shows up is that few institutions on earth take their mail more seriously than the Holy See. Every letter that comes into the Vatican is registered and processed, even if the decision is eventually made not to respond, because it would be a waste of time, because no one’s quite sure what to say, or because the writer is too wacky. As one American Vatican official put it in an interview: “Letters do make a difference. People underestimate the capacity of the Holy See to evaluate these things. The mail gets taken seriously." Curial officials describe heartbreaking letters from mothers whose children lost their faith because of what was being taught in the local Catholic school, or grown men who say they will never darken the door of a church again because of a sacrilege they saw during the Sunday Mass. Some of these accounts are of course exaggerated, or overly sensitive. It is also true that letters complaining about various abuses or difficult pastoral situations will elicit more sympathy from Vatican officials when those letters express a point of view that coincides with their own. Since in general most Vatican officials tend to be theological conservatives, the populism of the Holy See tilts to the right.

Still, one will misunderstand the psychology of the Roman Curia by believing that they send faxes around the world dictating details for liturgical celebrations, or ordering a halt to the publication of theological journals, simply for the thrill of issuing orders. We should be under no illusions, of course, that sometimes people do act out of arrogance. One curial veteran puts it this way: “Narcissism in this world is a real danger. We have a certain power and influence, and there’s an absence of foils to a strong will." At the same time, even granting these issues of power and control, it’s not true to the psychological reality to believe that many people in the Holy See consciously make decisions simply on this basis. Far more often, they perceive themselves to be defending the rights of Catholics around the world to have the faith transmitted in its integrity, to have the Mass celebrated according to the rules, to be sure that Catholic schools are in synch with the Church, and so on.

In that sense, and despite the incredulity such language is bound to provoke, one could say that from a Roman point of view, the men and women of the Holy See regard themselves as the real “Voice of the Faithful" in the Catholic Church.

Realism

Though Vatican officials may have a high-minded sense of service to the Holy Father, they also believe in having their feet on the ground when it comes to how things work in the real world. This realism applies first of all to the Church, and the very human qualities of the men and women who serve it. Vatican officials generally have spent most of their lives inside the institutional Catholic Church, and are under no illusions that the mere fact of ordination or having taken religious vows makes people more generous, or honest, or patient, or forgiving. They know that people in the Church can be petty and mean-spirited, and sometimes can fail in spectacular ways. If the official works in a congregation with responsibility for discipline in some area of Church life such as liturgy, doctrine, clerical life, or education, he or she may spend a good part of each day dealing with case files documenting just such instances of moral or theological corruption. Indeed, one could probably make the argument that no one is in a better position to understand and appreciate the imperfect character of the Catholic Church than the personnel of the Holy See. Italians tend to be especially realistic in this sense about the Church, having seen it all over the centuries.

This ecclesiastical realism was clear during the American sex abuse crisis, when many Vatican officials initially had a hard time grasping just what it was that American Catholics were so upset about. That a Catholic priest might break his vows of celibacy is disappointing, of course, and that he might do it through the sexual abuse of a minor is horrifying. Yet two thousand years of Church history teaches that priests are capable even of the most despicable acts. Being human, some of them will fail. What, many Vatican officials wondered, is the revelation? Are Americans just discovering in 2002 that priests too are marred by Original Sin? They wondered if the outrage in the American press related to the Catholic sex abuse scandal was a reflection of the same Calvinist hysteria about sex that was on display during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky farce. It took time for many Vatican officials to grasp that the real source of American anger was not so much the sexual misconduct of a small percentage of priests, but the moral (and perhaps criminal) failure of the bishops to intervene when they should have known better.

This realism also applies to the way the institutional Church relates to the world, and it’s in contrast with a kind of ecclesiastical docetism that would like to see the Church move through history uncontaminated by contact with sin. An episode from the fall of 2001 illustrates the difference. Pope John Paul II had called Christians to a day of fasting on December 14, the last day of Ramadan, as a post– September 11 gesture of solidarity with Islam. He suggested that people donate the money they would have spent on food that day to the poor. The Vatican’s charitable arm, called Cor Unum, opened a special account with the Bank of Rome to collect contributions for this purpose. The idea was sufficiently important to Vatican officials that they installed a special pop-up window on the Vatican website explaining how to transfer money into this account. The respected Italian Catholic missionary journal
Missione Oggi
, however, swiftly called for a boycott of the Vatican account, on the grounds that the Bank of Rome is a major player in the global arms market. The journal, published by the Xaverian Missionaries, charged that the Bank of Rome financed $106 million worth of arms deals in 2000, earning $8 million in transaction fees. When I called an official at Cor Unum for comment, I was rather wearily told that the Xaverian stance, while laudable, was also unrealistic, given that most banks are engaged in some kind of ethically debatable commerce. “If you want to get anything done, sooner or later you will find yourself doing business with someone who’s got dirty hands in one way or another," the official said. “But our account is certainly not an endorsement of the arms trade." This was not intended as surrender in the face of evil, but a realistic appraisal of what it means for the Church to be in history.

Vatican realism also applies to international relations. When John Paul II visited Chile in 1988, for example, he administered communion to then-president Augusto Pinochet, and appeared with him on the balcony of Moneda Palace to the cheers of Pinochet supporters. The imagery scandalized some human rights activists, given that 3,191 people were confirmed either killed or disappeared under Pinochet’s regime, while unofficial estimates put the total at several times that number. Yet Vatican officials argued that the Pope cannot nominate the rulers of the countries he visits, and the price of bringing his message to the world is sometimes “doing business" with unsavory regimes. It was the same logic, for example, that justified the visit of Cardinal Roger Etchegaray to Saddam Hussein in the lead-up to the American-led war in Iraq, and the visit of Tarik Aziz to the Vatican and to Assisi during the same period. The argument is that this philosophy of “doing business" bears more fruit in the real world than a morally satisfying, but largely ineffective, disengagement. Defenders of this approach say that Chile offers a prime example: John Paul made it clear on the papal plane that he saw the Pinochet regime as “transitory by definition," and in fact a plebiscite marking the transition to civilian rule took place a few months after the papal trip.

When President George W. Bush succeeded Bill Clinton in the United States, many analysts believed the Holy See would welcome the transition, since the Church had more in common with the Bush administration on issues such as abortion, cloning, and the role of religion in public life than with Clinton. Toward the end of Bush’s first year in office, before 9/11 or the war in Iraq, I interviewed a senior Vatican diplomat on what seemed the warm rapport between Bush and the Holy See. His response was illuminating: “Yes, we like this man better. He at least seems to be a genuine religious believer, a sincere person of faith. But at the end of the day, business is business. We’ll be able to work with him on some things, like cloning, but on other issues that are important to us, such as the International Criminal Court and globalization, it may be that Clinton was actually better. Diplomacy is the art of the possible, and you have to see what you can do together case by case. The attitudes of individuals only get you so far." When the Holy See and the Bush administration found themselves at loggerheads over Iraq, few in the Vatican were surprised by the standoff.

Finally, Vatican realism also applies to the internal management of the Church, especially how far and how fast one can move at any given time. Many Vatican officials, when pressed for their own ideas about how things in the Church ought to work, will offer a vision that is quite different from current realities. When pressed as to why they don’t do more to try to shake things up, they will smile and patiently explain a few of the thousand and one political, sociological, and institutional reasons why doing so, for now, is impossible. It’s a bit like Michelangelo’s analysis, as Irving Stone described it in
The Agony and the Ecstasy
: In any given hunk of marble, there’s only one statue inside. The trick is to find out which is “the statue in the stone," and remove everything that is superfluous. Try to force that block of stone to produce a statue that’s not inside it and, however beautiful the idea, the result will be disaster. Vatican officials have been taught by their experience to be realistic about utopian ecclesiastical proposals that sound great, but whose actual impact is anyone’s guess.

Rule of Law

At first glance this value may seem in contradiction with the
bella figura
understanding of law described above. To some extent that may be right, since nowhere is it written that a culture’s value system has to be perfectly consistent. Yet the seeming contradiction is more like two sides of the same coin. The
bella figura
means that Vatican officials can have a surprising tolerance for human failure, but they will defend the law tenaciously at the level of principle. That’s the essence of their insistence on the “rule of law"—however difficult application of the principles of the
Code of Canon Law
may be in practice, it must always remain the norm and goal of Church life. In that sense, Vatican officials often come across as “sticklers" for the law, with a strong by-the-book approach.

Law is, from this point of view, the translation of the Church’s principles of justice into the practical realm. A high percentage of Vatican officials are by training canon lawyers, rather than theologians, philosophers, or biblical scholars. Even personnel whose background is in other fields will usually have a working knowledge of the
Code of
Canon Law
, because much of what the Holy See does is the application of the
Code
to specific situations in local churches. From the Vatican’s point of view, the
Code of Canon Law
and its parallel
Code of Canons of
the Eastern Churches
, governing the twenty-one Eastern Rite churches in communion with Rome, are foundational texts for understanding how the Church is supposed to work.

Vatican officials become annoyed when critics oppose canon law to “pastoral" instincts, as if the law isn’t itself pastoral. In a February 2003 address to Brazilian bishops in Rome on an
ad limina
visit, John Paul made this point. “It is necessary to remember that pastoral action cannot be reduced to a certain ‘pastoralism,’ understood in the sense of ignoring or attenuating other essential dimensions of the Christian mystery, among these the juridical," the Pope said. “The pastoral truth can never be contrary to the truth of the Law of the Church."

It is frustrating to curial personnel that many Catholics have never bothered to so much as crack a copy of the code. Even many of the world’s 4,563 Catholic bishops have, at best, a rudimentary understanding. This was a frequent complaint inside the Roman Curia at the peak of the American sex abuse crisis. For many Vatican officials it has become an article of faith that the American bishops were wasting their time by drafting a new set of norms and procedures for the removal of abuser-priests. The existing
Code of Canon Law
, these officials said, already gave the bishops all the tools they needed, had they been serious about applying them. The problem, from their point of view, was never the absence of law, but the absence of nerve.