Papal voyages are rarely about the pope alone. They hold a mirror to the societies he visits, coaxing rare debate about spiritual matters in distinctly secular lands; they offer the body language, the tantalizing hints, the sideways glances that give tangible expression to theological nuance; they provide the scripted symbols, the ecclesiastical theater, that the Vatican presents as the choreography of faith.
Pope Benedict XVI’s just-completed visit to Britain was all those things and more: at a time when the Roman Catholic Church is submerged under a sexual abuse scandal, the pilgrimage gave a sense of just how much Rome relies on reflexes honed over centuries to defend itself, to display power and cohesion in its quest to revive credibility.
A few snapshots from the papal album:
At Mass in Westminster Cathedral — the late-Victorian basilica just down the road from the Anglicans’ much older Westminster Abbey — a phalanx of scarlet-robed senior clerics gathered not just in prayer but as the emblem of a Vatican hierarchy held in place by the pope’s divine authority.
Then there was the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, bowing to the pope in a gesture of respect despite his church’s five-century break with the papacy in Rome.
On another occasion on the packed, papal schedule, at Westminster Abbey, the pope himself shook the hand of Canon Jane Hedges, a senior Anglican cleric who is both female and married — anathema twice over to Roman Catholic orthodoxy. “Perhaps,” Archbishop Williams said, “we shall not quickly overcome the remaining obstacles to restored communion.”
Yet, encountering the turbulent Anglicans, with their fractious debate over the ordination of openly gay and female clergy, the pope might well have felt vindicated in his long-standing vision of his church as a monolith that prizes dogmatic certainty above change, that plays a very long game indeed.
If, after all, a pope could finally be received in the inner sanctums of Anglicanism after so many centuries since Henry VIII broke with Rome, then, surely, the church could survive its latest travails to restore its frayed authority among the faithful.
The Vatican, of course, has long been a master of symbols. Since the days of the peripatetic John Paul II, papal handlers have perfected a form of ecclesiastical spin — shrewdly defining and massaging the messages, the sound bites and the images that will dominate the headlines surrounding each day of the voyage.
Again at Westminster Cathedral, the pope smiled broadly in the presence of young Britons, bowing to him in adoration and zeal — the kind of visual antidote to the associations that have come to prevail of priests acting with impunity to abuse those who placed innocent trust in their pastors.
But the symbolism also reflected a steely commitment to the cohesiveness of the church and the continuity of its message. Long ago, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict was the point-man of a previous pope in opposing confusion of the faith with political messages, of setting the markers of belief in times of turmoil in Europe and Latin America.
“The faith is never automatically present,” the cardinal told me in an interview in 1992, when the context was simpler, before the sexual abuse scandal had come to claw at the church leadership (although cases of it had been reported to the Vatican). “A mental, intellectual, spiritual battle is always necessary to evoke it and, in this sense there is a battle going on even now,” he said speaking of what he saw as troubled and perilous era after the fall of Communism.
Those words now seem oddly prophetic, illuminating both the pope’s strategic vision, and his fundamental quandary as the abuse scandal crowds the whispering corridors of the Curia. The church’s role, Cardinal Ratzinger told me, is to “on the one hand maintain an open attitude toward the development of the faith, but also defend the foundations.”
With the sexual abuse scandal, that dilemma has become more acute and many critics have found the pope badly wanting in establishing some form of balance between his defense of those “foundations” and his handling of the crisis.
Too often, the argument goes, he has erred in favor of defending the church hierarchy. But if he were to open an ecclesiastical Pandora’s box, purging errant priests, how far would this latter-day inquisition spread through the base of his temporal power?
Taking a charitable view — as did many British analysts — Peter Stanford, a columnist in The Observer, wrote that Benedict had convinced skeptics “that he sincerely wants to tackle the ‘unspeakable crimes’ of pedophile priests which were covered up for so long by the church.”
But, Mr. Stanford said, “the true success of his visit will ultimately be judged not only by greater openness in our society to the voice of religion, but also in Pope Benedict’s own willingness to listen and learn.”
Throughout his career, first as the Vatican’s dogmatic enforcer and then as pope, Benedict has been associated, by outsiders at least, more with laying down the law rather than listening.
But can those authoritarian instincts, nurtured during the papacy of John Paul II, be softened without further jeopardizing his own authority?
That was one question awaiting the pope when he returned to Rome (not to mention the matter of the Vatican bank being embroiled in a money-laundering investigation).
As papal biographer John L. Allen Jr. wrote in the National Catholic Reporter, the “declarations of papal contrition” for clerical abuse have become “almost routine.”
But, “if he keeps issuing roughly the same apology, he’ll aggravate his enemies and may frustrate a growing share of his allies.”
So either Benedict must “figure out something new to say” or, as his critics demand, embark on measures “which would lend his words new significance.”
“Otherwise,” Mr. Allen wrote, “the risk is that something that was initially hailed as an important moment in solving the sexual abuse crisis could become, with time, another force in keeping it alive.”
SIC: NYT/EU
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