There is nothing as intriguing as Vatican politics. On February 11, 2013, the then pope, Benedict XVI, stunned the Catholic Church by announcing that he would step down a fortnight later, the first papal resignation in 600 years. Although the world was shaken by the news, it also brought home to the Catholic faithful the Vatican’s long history of infighting and politics and the all-important human and historical contexts.
Three previous popes who abdicated were all forced out.
Martin I was pope for four years until 653, when he was charged with treason.
Benedict V held the position for only a month until June 964, when the Holy Roman Emperor demanded his resignation in favour of Leo VIII.
Benedict IX was in his early 20s when elected in 1032. Violent and debauched, his papacy was bought by his father. He was forcibly removed after 16 years.
When Celestine V was elected pope in 1294 he was in his 80s. Five months later, he resigned after changing the rules to allow him to do so. That voluntary resignation was a first. The happier precedent set by Celestine V helped Gregory XII. He ended his nine-year papacy by resigning in 1415 under pressure, as part of a deal that ended the Great Western Schism in the Church, which had followed a contested papal election in 1378.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s abdication two years ago, therefore, seemed relatively peaceful and uncannily echoed Celestine’s, which was “because of my desire for a more perfect life, my great age and infirmities”.
Two years ago, it was thought that Benedict XVI’s extraordinary decision to resign would probably be his main legacyto the Church. Shakespeare’s words in Macbeth: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,” seemed to capture his contribution to the Papacy admirably since this wasthe only great reform of his lacklustre pontificate, which had been largely troubled by sex abuse scandals.
But this legacy may be about to change. The charismatic Pope Francis, who has just been greeted “like a rock star” during his tour of Latin America (which accounts for 40 per cent of the world’s Catholics), faces a defining battle over the future of the Church when reformers and conservatives meet for the second synod on the family in October. Benedict XVI’s presence not one mile away from the synod, and his overt support for his conservative vision of the Church, is like a spectre at the feast.
When Benedict suddenly vacated the papacy in 2013, he announced that he would live out his days in silence in the nearby Vatican monastery of Mater Ecclesiae. However, last year, notwithstanding his promise not to back seat drive, the Pope Emeritus slapped down his old adversary, Cardinal Walter Kasper, for suggesting that when the former pope was still Professor Joseph Ratzinger he supported Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics.
By calling himself “Benedict XVI”, dressing in white and keeping the word “pope” in his title, he reminds the world that he is a living successor to St Peter. Quite what authority that bestows on him is debatable.
Benedict XVI’s presence not one mile away from the synod, and his overt support for his conservative vision of the Church, is like a spectre at the feast
But when he warns the Church against “any wavering from the Truth” – comments directed at Cardinal Kasper, a mentor to Francis – and tells traditionalists that the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass “now lives in full peace in the Church, with celebration by great cardinals”, he is saying in plain language “my vision is not dead and nor am I”. In praising “great cardinals,” he had in mind arch-conservative Raymond Burke, sacked by Francis as head of the Vatican’s legal tribunal. He clearly feels entitled to reach out to members of the conservative faithful.
Liberal Catholics will dismiss Benedict’s comments as the bitter musings of a disappointed 88-year old and point instead to Pope Francis’s global popularity and the hope which he has engendered throughout the Church of a belated “new beginning” to Vatican II.
Vatican politics have not been this cut-throat since the bleakest days of Benedict XVI’s reign, when the papal butler leaked sensitive letters to the press. It is hard to exaggerate the passions unleashed by last year’s synod. The battle between reformers and conservatives will reach a bruising climax when cardinals and bishops convene in Rome in three months’ time for a second synod on the family.
The question of Communion for remarried Catholics has come to symbolise the conflict. It is one of a number of issues pitting reformers, who want to bring the Church into line with modern social mores, against conservatives, who are unwilling to sacrifice a key tenet of traditional Church teaching.
Pope Francis is believed to side with the modernisers. Although he has never explicitly endorsed Communion for the remarried, many think he views it as a legitimate “development of tradition,” rather than a break with 2000 years of doctrine. He has declared a jubilee ‘Year of Mercy’, beginning on December 8, in case he is unable to carry the synod with him.
The passions underlying the debate were illustrated recently in interviews by leading German cardinals, the progressive president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Reinhard Marx, and Gerhard Muller, the traditionalist head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog.
When Cardinal Marx declared that German bishops were not prepared to wait for the outcome of the synod, his compatriot replied that autonomous national Churches were an “anti-Catholic” and “heretical” idea. Talk of an outright split would no doubt horrify Pope Francis. But he enjoys creative tension – the concept of stirring things up (!Hagan lio! In Spanish).
How likely is a schism? The majority of German bishops support the introduction of Communion for the remarried. But just over the border, in Poland, the Polish episcopate has implied that it could never be accepted. This makes consensus at the synod highly unlikely.
Francis will then have a difficult decision. If he permits Communion for the remarried, he will face uproar in the Catholic powerhouse of Poland and elsewhere (including, behind the scenes, from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI). If he rejects it, he will alienate the Croesus-rich German Church.
In any case, the Germans have hinted they may go it alone. “We are not just a subsidiary of Rome”, said their leader, Cardinal Marx. “We cannot wait until a synod states something, as we have to carry out marriage and family ministry here.” If Germany breaks away, Francis will have to bring it back in line, or risklooking weak.
The autumn synod will be seen as a referendum on Francis’s pontificate. If traditionalists – backed, whether surreptitiously or not, by Benedict XVI – reject the Communion proposal, it will be presented as a crushing papal defeat.
The truth is that Pope Francis remains spectacularly popular. Polls show that two thirds of the world’s population like him. His popularity among Catholics in the US, a country he will visit for the first time in September, has risen to 90 per cent. The Pope’s countless admirers would regard the idea that he is undermining – or even splitting – the Church as bizarre in the extreme.
But the Byzantine politics of the Catholic Church which has survived and flourished by an unlikely combination of ruthlessness, holiness and power-politics must never be underestimated.