http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 60,00.html
The Sunday Times April 16, 2006
Behind the throne of the iPod pope
After a year in office, Benedict is proving a surprise, both in his relaxed politics and in the exotic couple he relies on to control his private life, writes John Cornwell
Meeting the late Pope John Paul II in his heyday I was transfixed by his sturdy tan shoes. Popes traditionally wear scarlet slippers fit for the sanctuary. Papa Wojtyla went heavily shod for the outdoors. A year ago we saw him laid out in death in St Peter’s Basilica still wearing those scuffed clodhoppers, the toes pointing heavenwards. His would be hard shoes to fill.
John Paul was a superstar pope, credited with prompting the downfall of the Soviet system and pressing home staunch values to combat global moral decline. Yet he bequeathed to his successor a church in disarray: not least the aftermath of the paedophile priest scandal. Dwindling congregations of Catholics in the prosperous north, moreover, have for years been at each other’s throats. Conservative Catholics, for example, insist that even Aids victims should not use condoms: liberals argue that such strictures are lunacy. Meanwhile, the preponderant Catholic populations, 70% of the 1.1 billion faithful, reside in the south where their preoccupations are survival amid conflict, poverty and natural disasters.
What cardinal would actively seek to inherit the vast global headache called the Catholic church? Yet it is amply argued in a recent book, A Church in Search of Itself, by the veteran vaticanologist Robert Kaiser, that Cardinal Ratzinger, 79 today and the ultra-orthodox Bavarian theologian, known for two decades as “God’s rottweiler” and once a member of the Hitler Youth, was enthusiastically up for it. A year ago he rallied his brother cardinals to choose him at the conclave. He even had his acceptance speech written three days before it began. So how is he doing? Bookish and retiring, he is not given, like John Paul, to grandstanding or kissing the tarmac. Timid of flying, he aims to travel seldom — to Turkey this year, and again to Germany.
His chosen name invokes the great 9th-century monk-saint who preserved Christian civilisation through the Dark Ages. Benedict XVI similarly sees himself confronting a moral collapse in Europe: which explains, perhaps, why he wanted the job so badly.
He is, of course, still dwarfed by John Paul. Beneath his windows Benedict views daily the pilgrims queuing to pray at John Paul’s tomb. “Santo Subito!” (make him a saint today) they chant. Hence he is taking a softly, softly approach. Amazingly he listened last summer for a whole day to one of the Catholic world’s most notorious dissidents, Father Hans Küng, the Swiss theologian, whom John Paul refused to entertain for one moment. He has also received in private the journalist Oriana Fallaci, atheist, feminist and critic of Catholicism. Many have seen in this a change of heart. They could be wrong.
In the meantime there have been remarkable changes behind the arras. The former papal household, the so-called “Polish mafia”, led by John Paul’s gnome-like secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dwiwisz, has vanished as in a dream. The new papal secretary is a tall, athletic Bavarian called Monsignor Georg Gänswein, very close to Ratzinger for 12 years.
Gänswein, 49, mischievously dubbed homosexual-Org by the Vatican denizens, is an expert skier and champion tennis player. He used to teach church law at the Opus Dei university in Rome. Opus Dei, the self-flagellating extreme conservative Catholic group, has been receiving adverse press lately due to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, but Gänswein’s closeness to the pontiff signals that the movement is in favour. As Ratzinger, Benedict brought Gänswein into the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which enforces the orthodoxy of Catholic teaching worldwide. Now Gänswein has joined Benedict in the papal apartment and rarely leaves his side when he ventures out.
He lends a dashing public image to the new papacy, being said to be immensely sociable, a trophy dinner guest around Rome, but discreet as the grave.
Curiously, Gänswein — who likes flying private planes — seems to have fallen out of the sky. There is no record of his earlier education. Has it been expunged, ask the Vatican gossips (try the website Whispers in the Loggia, www.whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com, for a taste of Georg-fever and pin-up pics).
No less fascinating is Benedict’s “housekeeper”, a tall 56-year-old Bavarian woman called Ingrid Stampa. She is an expert on the viola da gamba, an ancient form of cello. Stampa has been known to play duets with Papa Ratzi, who has bought a baby grand for the papal apartments. He loves Mozart and has an iPod for his repertoire of sacred music. Stampa controls entry to the papal apartment, and access has been drastically cut. Unlike John Paul, Benedict does not welcome guests at his early morning mass, which he says with Gänswein. Nor does he invite, as did John Paul, outsiders to meals. In the afternoon he takes the air in the Vatican gardens where the workmen are ordered to hide discreetly in the bushes as he passes.
Like the other “domestics” in the papal household Stampa is a lay person who has taken a vow of celibacy. Although not a nun, she is what is known in the trade as a “consecrated virgin”. Catholic optimists have speculated that she symbolises Benedict’s introduction of laywomen at the very highest levels in the church.
So Benedict has settled in, and even looks comfortable. But his most notable achievement is what he hasn’t done: which is to purge the Catholic “liberals”. On the day of Benedict’s election I heard conservative Catholics crowing that his papacy spelt the expulsion of Catholics who adopt an à la carte approach to the faith. Damian Thompson, editor-in-chief of Britain’s Catholic Herald, even foretold that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, could be for the chop for his liberal tendencies. Yet hardliners have been profoundly disgruntled by Benedict’s failure to date to send the dissidents packing.
An influential and vociferous hardline Catholic conservative is Father Richard John Neuhaus, who pontificates like an alternative pope from the pages of First Things, an acidulous international journal. He was aghast at Benedict’s early decision to appoint William Levada to the vacant post of Catholic orthodoxy watchdog (Benedict’s former job). While Archbishop of San Francisco Levada failed, in Neuhaus’s view, to confront the decision of the city to encourage single-sex unions. Nor had Benedict taken the earliest opportunity, according to Neuhaus, to lambast those liberals who protested the Vatican instruction banning gays from the priesthood.
The issue of gays in the priesthood connects with the paedophile crisis. The hardline view, endorsed by the late pope, is that paedophilia finds its origin in homosexuality. Yet Benedict has so far not pursued the implications by endorsing a witch-hunt of homosexual clergy. It has been claimed by some sociologists that 50% of American seminarians are homosexual.
Instead there has been more focus on personnel changes in Rome. Eclipsed is the once supremely powerful Cardinal Angelo Sodano, secretary of state in the Vatican, a kind of ecclesiastical prime minister and foreign secretary rolled into one. Benedict’s close “kitchen cabinet” is composed of three trusty, moderately conservative cardinals.
Two of them — Angelo Scola, the Italian patriarch of Venice and the American Levada — are former pupils of Benedict’s; the third, the Austrian Christoph Schonborn, was the new pope’s chief supporter at the conclave which elected him. All three enjoy expansive girths; like Caesar, Benedict does not favour “lean and hungry” prelates about him.
If Catholic conservatives are disappointed, the liberals are wary. During his time as orthodoxy watchdog Ratzinger was responsible for excommunicating the mild Indian theologian Tissa Balasuriya for suggesting that the virgin birth was a kind of symbol rather than a hard fact, and for withdrawing the teaching licence of the French Jesuit Father Jacques Dupuis, who dared to hazard that all religions, including Christianity, fell short of absolute truth. Ratzinger had also intimated in his notorious 1999 document Dominus Iesus that non-Catholic churches were not “real” churches, implying, to the fury of the former primate George Carey, that the Archbishop of Canterbury is a non-ordained layperson.
A year on, most liberal Catholics remain moderately optimistic. Both sides of the liberal-conservative divide, moreover, were surprised when in January Benedict delivered his first encyclical. Titled God Is Love, it is a low-key academic sermon on Christian selfless love, known as agape, and how it progresses, ideally, from sexual love, eros. Thus love between a man and woman can become an epitome of human and divine love. The second half of the letter advocates Christian aid to the poor. This is in tune with the aspirations of young Catholics focused on making poverty history.
To profess charity, however, is not necessarily to practise it. Despite Benedict’s almsgiving rhetoric he has gone silent on the issue. At his first consistory of cardinals late last month (a meeting at which new cardinals are given their red hats), there was only one new cardinal for Africa, and he was 87 and in a wheelchair.
Benedict is set to be tough on Islam, unlike John Paul, who favoured an occasional visit to a mosque or toting a copy of the Koran for the cameras. “We’ll be nice to you,” he is saying, “if you stop burning down our churches and killing our missionaries.” In Cologne last summer he declared that “any country which claims not to respect other religions is not worthy of the name civilisation”.
But can he heal the absence of respect between the liberals and the conservatives which still threatens a centrifugal break-up of the church? The expectation, a year ago, was that Benedict would favour the traditionalist interpretation of Catholic belief and practice, a path that could have led to internal conflict such as the church has not seen since the reformation.
It seems, though, that he is attempting to bring his divided flock together, stressing the basics of what should unite rather than divide them. By concentrating on unconditional love in his first encyclical, he appears to be invoking an image of the church as a big tent with room for all perspectives.
