Read All the Pope's Men Online
Authors: Jr. John L. Allen
In this mix, the European contribution is one factor that produces a foreign policy tilted toward the Palestinian cause. In extreme form, this tendency can lead the Church into embarrassing situations. Witness the case of Auxiliary Bishop Hilarion Cappucci, a member of the Syrian Greek–Melkite rite who served in Jerusalem in the 1960s and 1970s and who holds the personal title of patriarch. He was arrested by Israeli security forces in 1974 on his way back from a trip to Lebanon, after his Mercedes sedan was found loaded with TNT and rifles headed for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. At the time Cappucci belonged to Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s main faction, and was a member of the PLO’s parliament-in-exile. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison, but released in 1977 after a personal appeal from Pope Paul VI. Now in his eighties, Cappucci has lived since 1977 in a private apartment in Rome. He was supposed to keep away from the limelight, but that did not stop him from being at the right hand of Tarik Aziz, Saddam Hussein’s deputy, when Aziz visited Assisi in February 2003.
Within the internal debates in the Holy See, there are relatively few voices that challenge the pro-Palestinian consensus, because virtually all the senior officials who are at the table when decisions are made come from a European cultural milieu in which this orientation is conventional wisdom.
UNITED NATIONS
Those aware of the titanic battles the Holy See waged at United Nations conferences in Cairo and Beijing in the 1990s, or the criticism the Vatican directs at United Nations agencies on issues of family planning, sometimes find the Holy See’s strong pro-UN bias on most other matters puzzling. In 2000, for example, the Holy See accused the United Nations system of “utilitarian" and “Malthusian" values in connection with a manual on birth control in refugee camps. The fact is, however, that in concert with other European governments, the Holy See has been among the leading supporters of a strong role for the United Nations in international affairs. As papal nuncio to France, Angelo Roncalli—later to become John XXIII—was active in behind-the-scenes work on the drafting of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When the General Assembly took up the declaration in 1948, observers from the Holy See were present. In later years, the Vatican was the fifth nation to ratify the UN convention on the rights of the child and was among the first to ratify the anti–land mine treaty that won for its supporters a Nobel Peace Prize.
This stance was clearly on display during the buildup to the Iraq war, as one of the grounds upon which the Vatican criticized the proposed U.S. action was precisely the lack of an international warrant. “A single member of the international community cannot decide: ‘I’m doing this and you others can either help me or stay home.’ If that were the case, the entire system of international rules would collapse. We’d risk the jungle," said French Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, at the time the Vatican’s top diplomat. Then Archbishop Renato Martino, an Italian who heads the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and who is now a cardinal, made a similar point January 4, 2003. “Evidently, unilateralism is unacceptable," Martino said. We cannot think that there is a universal policeman who takes it upon himself to punish those who act badly. . . . The United States, being part of the international assembly, has to adapt to the exigencies of others."
The Holy See is uniquely positioned to speak about the need for global governance, since it has been exercising a kind of planetary responsibility for the Catholic Church for two millennia. The Catholic worldview is by definition supranational, which is what has always made the Church dangerous to totalitarian states. In part, this concern for a meaningful international order is born of the sense that in a globalized world, only an international body will be able to ensure that economic, social, and political transformations are channeled in directions that promote the common good. Without an international political entity in which citizens can exert influence over their own destiny, the global stage is left to commercial and military actors that do not have the same motivations to pursue the welfare of all.
Yet the European cultural subtext to the Vatican is also part of this picture. Europeans tend to be among the most enthusiastic supporters of the United Nations system based on their own twentieth-century history, which painfully illustrated the bankruptcy of nationalism. This was an especially telling point for John Paul II, who was nineteen when the Nazis invaded Poland and spent much of his adult life under the Soviet system imposed on Poland after the Second World War. The same instinct that led Europeans to be willing to surrender chunks of sovereignty in order to make the European Union work is also behind the push for a beefed-up UN. For most Europeans, support for the United Nations falls into the category of common sense, outside the bounds of most political debate. It’s a policy upheld by both left and right. Inside the Vatican, therefore, with the exception of personnel concerned most directly with issues of family and sexual morality, the bias in favor of the United Nations, and other international bodies such as the International Criminal Court, is strong. We’ll return to this point in chapter 7, in the context of flashpoints in the relationship between the Holy See and the United States.
5
VATICAN THEOLOGY
One night during the October 1999 Synod of Bishops,
National
Catholic Reporter
publisher Tom Fox and I had been out for dinner with colleagues, and afterward, shortly before 11:00 P.M., we began to make our way across St. Peter’s Square. It was a cold autumn evening, after the peak of tourist season, and the square was virtually deserted. From a distance, I caught site of a tall figure wearing a long black coat, with a briefcase perched at his feet, standing alone near the obelisk in the center of the square. It took me a moment to realize it was Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna. At the time he was just fifty-four, the second-youngest cardinal in the world, and an ecclesiastical wunderkind.
Schönborn comes from a distinguished Bohemian family, with nineteen priests, bishops, and archbishops among his ancestors. A Dominican, Schönborn did his postgraduate work in theology under Joseph Ratzinger at the University of Regensburg in Germany. John Paul II tapped him in 1988 to serve as editor of the
Catechism of the
Catholic Church
, published in 1992. He was named auxiliary bishop of Vienna in 1991, archbishop in 1995, and entered the College of Cardinals in 1998. Many Vatican watchers have treated Schönborn for years as Ratzinger’s crown prince, the favorite to succeed him at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Others think he may be destined for still higher office—the papacy itself.
Seeing Schönborn standing there alone, my first impulse was to try to wrest some insight from him about the synod. As we approached, I noticed he was staring up at the windows of the papal apartments. My cynical side prevailed, so I walked up and jokingly asked: “Thinking about what kind of drapes you want when you move in?"
Schönborn was startled, then, as he placed who we were, he had the good manners to fake a sort of quiet amusement. I broke the silence that followed by asking what he was doing.
“You want to know why I’m really here?" he asked, in his polished English. I waited.
“Because Peter is here," he said.
What?
“Peter is here," he repeated. “He was crucified alongside this obelisk when it was in the Neronian circus, just over there," he said, pointing beyond the Palazzo di Sant’Ufficio. “But Peter is also up there, in the papal apartment, watching over the Church, just as he has been doing for two thousand years. It’s an awesome sensation, standing in the space that has been the focus of a tradition that goes back to Christ himself, and to the prince of the apostles. This is Peter’s house."
Schönborn was not making a speech; he spoke softly, almost not caring if we heard. The words obviously came from deep within his personal spirituality, his devotion to the papacy and the person of the Pope. The journalistic side of me realized that some Catholics might find his piety troubling, since it has the potential to shade off into an uncritical approach to papal authority. Yet it was an emotional moment, because it brought home how deep the feeling for the papal office runs among those for whom Christ’s words, “You are the rock and upon this rock I shall build my Church," remain the expression of a living spiritual ideal.
Schönborn is not, at least as of this writing, a member of the Roman Curia, but that moment of prayer before the successor of Peter, and his exposition of what it meant, offers an excellent window onto the theology of many Vatican officials. Serving the Holy Father in the Roman Curia is, through the eyes of those who do this work, in the end a spiritual experience, a
vocation
. This is not to say that Vatican officials float angelically through their days on wings of prayer. Office politics and the drudgery of the work get to them as much as anyone else. Still, when you press them on why they do it, what they get out of it, the bottom line is usually a theological response focusing on their share in the ministry of Peter.
Pope Paul VI, who served in the Secretariat of State for thirty-two years before becoming archbishop of Milan and eventually Pope, had a similarly exalted notion of curial service. He liked to refer to the Roman Curia as a “permanent cenacle," a reference to the “upper room" described in the gospels (Mark 14) where Jesus and the disciples celebrated the Passover seder, and where Christian tradition believes the sacrament of the Eucharist was instituted. It was a room “totally consecrated to the good of the Church," as John Paul II wrote during the Holy Year of 2000, when he announced a Jubilee of the Roman Curia on the occasion of the Feast of the Chair of Peter. Paul VI also described the Roman Curia as “an instrument of immediate adhesion and perfect obedience." He had in mind not the mindless obedience of a police state, but the heart-and-soul obedience of a group of people acting together on the basis of love.
Anyone seeking to know the mind of the Vatican cannot do so solely through the lens of political science, sociology, and the principles of organizational dynamics as worked out by Max Weber. Without appreciating the faith convictions held by the men and women of the Roman Curia about themselves, their work, and the role of the papacy in the universal Church, the picture would be seriously distorted. It would be like attempting to understand socialism without reference to Marx and
Das Kapital
, or insisting that one should analyze the Romantic poets exclusively from the perspective of linguistic theory. Of course, not everyone in curial service shares the same theological perspective. Nevertheless, the bulk of Vatican officials take quite seriously a few basic theological concepts about the papacy, its role of service to the universal Church, and the mission of the Roman Curia in supporting that role. Without a grasp of these concepts, observers of the Holy See are lost.
Church officials often complain that journalists try to understand the Catholic Church as if it were merely a corporation or a political society, using the models familiar to them from secular culture. In fact, these officials insist, the Church cannot be properly understood apart from a theological frame of reference. Journalists tend to be skeptical of these protests, sensing that they’re designed to mask ecclesiastical power plays. Certainly the Church has a political dimension that is open to analysis and critique. There is, nevertheless, a degree of merit to the Church officials’ point. Every organization deserves to be evaluated according to its own self-understanding. CEOs of major companies often lament that critics expect them to operate like a public trust when their mission is to maximize shareholder profit. Politicians likewise argue that their function is not to pursue a personal agenda, but to reflect the interests and desires of their constituents. If we accept such reasoning in the corporate and political realms, we ought to accept it for the Church as well.
THE PAPACY
Contemporary Roman Catholic theological discussion features a vast literature on the papacy, some of it stimulated by Pope John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical
Ut Unum Sint
(That they may be one). The Pope invited other members of the Christian family to join him in considering how the papacy might be reshaped in order to make it more acceptable ecumenically, without losing its essentials. Catholic theology today reflects a wide range of views, from those who argue in favor of a strong papal office to those who prefer to situate the Pope within the College of Bishops, with much real authority elsewhere—in a Synod of Bishops or with the local churches. In this section, we cannot do justice to the complexity of this discussion. Instead, we will present a traditional vision that is most prominent within the Roman Curia, without any pretense that this is the only or even the best perspective on offer. The view described here must be seen as an ideal type that individual Vatican officials will be closer to or further away from depending upon their personal outlook, training, and dispositions.
The biblical basis for the office of the papacy, its powers and its role, comes in two New Testament texts, Matthew 16:17–19 and John 21:15–17.
In Matthew, Jesus has asked the disciples who they believe he is, and Peter replies, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." Jesus says: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father. And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." In St. Peter’s Basilica, inside the cupola that rises above the tomb of St. Peter and the main altar, these words are written in Latin letters almost two yards high. It is the very heart of how Catholics have traditionally understood Peter’s role.
In the Gospel of John, the risen Jesus notes the other disciples and asks Peter: “ ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?’ He said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.’ He said to him, ‘Feed my lambs.’ He then said to him a second time, ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’ He said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.’ He said to him, ‘Tend my sheep.’ He said to him the third time, ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’ Peter was distressed that he had said to him a third time, ‘Do you love me?’ and he said to him, ‘Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.’ ( Jesus) said to him, ‘Feed my sheep.’ " Several Church fathers argued that this text should always be bundled together with Matthew’s in thinking about the papal office. Over the years, in fact, this passage from John has sometimes been interpreted as the fulfillment of the promise in Matthew 16. Where the traditional interpretation of Matthew’s text emphasized the
power
of the office, John presents its nature as one of
service
. This is why among the traditional titles of the Pope is “Servant of the Servants of God." Power in this understanding is real and absolute, but it is never an end in itself. It is ordered to the service of others.
Traditional theological reflection developed the image in Matthew’s gospel of the papacy as the rock, finding three layers of significance. First, the papacy is intended to guarantee the
unity
of the Church, since the entire structure is erected on the basis of this one foundation. In the Creed recited each Sunday in the Catholic Mass all over the world, the marks, or distinguishing characteristics, of the Church are listed as being “one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic." The guarantor of the “oneness" of the Church is its center of authority in Rome, in the Pope. John Paul II was keenly aware of this aspect of his role. In a rare interview on the papal plane in 1989, David Willey of the BBC asked the Pope to respond to criticism that he shouldn’t travel so much. He replied: “The problem about the universal Church is how to make it more visible. There are tendencies in theology and above all in the Orthodox Church to reduce everything to the level of the local church. But the Church was born universal from the moment it began in Jerusalem. Saint Paul’s travels, Saint Peter’s coming to Rome, the Apostolic tradition, everything confirms the Petrine tradition of giving the Church its universal dimension, and making all the local churches feel this universal dimension. And it seems to me that my travels help to make it more visible."
The second sense of what it means to be the rock is that of ensuring the
endurance
of the Church, despite the historical storms that rage around it. This theological conviction is reinforced by the experience that a weak papacy has tended to correspond with times of crisis for the Catholic Church, while successful reforms generally unfold in periods of strong papal leadership. It has been the experience of local churches suffering persecution or harassment that a strong papal office is often the only force that sees them through. The experience of the Greek Catholics in Ukraine during the Soviet era, for example, or of underground Chinese Catholics today, is that the Pope’s capacity to rally world opinion and to mobilize resources to assist them is vital in keeping their struggling communities afloat. Members of these communities often regard Western proposals to hem in the papacy as the luxury of theologians who do not have to worry about knocks on the door in the middle of the night.
Finally, tradition sees in the papacy a guarantee of
growth
, since the rock is intended to be the foundation for a much larger structure. It is the Pope who impels the Church to carry the gospel message to the world, fulfilling the mandate of Christ to “make disciples of all the nations." In a time when the Catholic Church is questioning the meaning of the very concept of mission, John Paul attempted to revitalize this role of the papacy as well. He repeatedly spoke of the need for a “new springtime of evangelization" and called Catholics to boldly “set out into the deep" (duc in altum). From this point of view, it is of the nature of the papal office to prevent the Church from closing in upon itself, to keep it directed toward ceaseless proposal of the Gospel.
Implied in this brief synthesis are two core values cherished by believers in a strong papacy. The first is
fidelity
, the notion that Christ entrusted his revelation to Peter and asked him to keep it safe. “Will the Son of Man find the faith upon the earth when he returns?" Jesus asked rhetorically. From the point of view of traditional Catholic theology, it is ultimately up to the successor of Peter to ensure that the answer to that question will be yes. This responsibility weighs heavily in the consciousness of Vatican officials and implies first of all a duty to integrity in the transmission and presentation of the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus when the Vatican intervenes against a theologian, they see such action not in terms of a corporation protecting a copyright, or a police state exercising thought control, but a doctor protecting a patient from harm.
Before he became Pope, Benedict XVI expressed this idea. “When a doctor errs and, instead of patiently accommodating himself to the laws of anatomy and life, risks a ‘creative’ idea, the consequences are readily apparent," Ratzinger said at a press conference in Menlo Park, California, in February 1999. “The patient suffers. Although the damage is not so immediately noticeable in the case of a theologian, in reality even here too much is at stake for him to trust himself simply to his momentary conviction. He is dealing with a matter which affects man and his future and in which every failed intervention has its consequences."
Many theologians would argue that the danger in this image is that of ignoring creative ideas that are not mere momentary convictions, but that emerge from decades of study and thought and discussion, ideas that can be fruitful for the whole Church—medical breakthroughs, if you like. As always, the question of whether a given new idea is a wonder cure or a dangerous toxin is a subjective one, and analysts will draw divergent conclusions. The point here is to understand the psychology involved when the Curia concludes that a given theological proposal has to be corrected. They understand themselves to be acting to preserve the health of the community, because ultimately the happiness of the human person is conditional upon knowing and accepting God’s truth about human destiny. Anything that distorts or obscures that truth is ultimately harmful, so it is no act of kindness to simply let it go.
The second core value which arises from what has been said is
accountability
. Critics often complain about a lack of accountability in the Vatican, by which they mean that popes do not stand for reelection, are not subject to recall, and are not otherwise answerable to public opinion as expressed in modern democracies. This is correct so far as it goes, and it’s a fair matter of debate whether the undemocratic character of the Holy See leaves it too far removed from the sensibilities of the people whose spiritual welfare it is intended to serve. Yet it is a terrible misconception to believe that Vatican officials do not regard themselves as accountable. In fact, the sense of the Petrine role as described above, focusing on Christ’s mandate of fidelity, creates an almost overwhelming sense of accountability within those who take the tradition most seriously.
For Vatican officials, this accountability is first of all to Peter, in terms of how faithfully they collaborate in his threefold mission of teaching, sanctifying, and governing. Ultimately, accountability is to God. Vatican officials are accountable to the tradition, to the faith, to truth, and to Christ himself. Most of them sincerely believe they will stand before the bar of judgment someday to answer for their performance. This concept is hard for the modern mind to accept, because most of us believe with Lord John Acton that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," a remark Acton coined precisely in reference to the 1870 declaration of papal infallibility at Vatican I. Power without checks and balances is, from a democratic point of view, unaccountable, and unaccountable power is another expression for tyranny. But in the traditional Catholic theological framework being described here, power does not corrupt, it ennobles, because it flows from the sacramental grace of Holy Orders. Leaders in the Church thus do not represent the people; they represent Christ to the world. Some people will suspect that this is rhetoric designed to protect clerics from challenges to their authority, and that suspicion may sometimes have a foundation, but one will misunderstand the Holy See unless it’s appreciated how deeply this understanding of accountability shapes its culture. To call the Church undemocratic is within the realm of fair debate, but to call Church leaders unaccountable does not do justice to their theology or their psychology.
Veteran
Newsweek
correspondent Robert Blair Kaiser challenged Belgian Cardinal Jan Schotte at a press conference in October 2001 about what Kaiser saw as the lack of accountability during a Synod of Bishops, which Schotte heads within the Vatican. The cardinal responded, as Kaiser records the exchange, that bishops are “accountable to no one but the Holy Father, and the Holy Father is accountable to no one but Jesus." The comment came across as arrogant, and anyone who knows Schotte realizes that despite his erudition and good humor, he can in fact be rather imperious. At the same time, if one assumes the remark was not flippant but intended to be in earnest, it is consistent with the theological principles described here. Accountability in this rather traditional understanding runs up, not down, and, ultimately, those who serve the Church are accountable to its founder. This does not mean they are insensitive to the concerns of the faithful, but rather that they believe the range of options to satisfy those concerns is circumscribed by the deposit of faith, which must always be their principal concern.