Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [157]
“The outer purpose always sounds noble, to defend the Church’s teaching office,” Eugene Kennedy comments in The Unhealed Wound. “Holy Mother Church, as it is called, cannot be ‘defiled’ by false teaching or errant behavior, papal teaching authority cannot be ‘violated.’ ” Nevertheless,
the underlying psychological and spiritual reality is not difficult to recognize. Men use power against other men to destroy their masculine potency … Feeling righteous is a totalitarian emotion and justifies wounding men in their manhood, emasculating them in the name of an institution that does not notice the shadow it casts as it focuses on and overwhelms them. Women must also be controlled and called into their place, but men—the potent male—must be incapacitated, ruined as a man, and shamed and humiliated as well.7
Ratzinger voiced his outrage when he substituted for the dying pope at the 2005 Good Friday Stations of the Cross in the Colosseum. The cardinal said scornfully, “How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those … in the priesthood”—words that shot across the international media grid. As John Paul’s body lay in state at St. Peter’s Basilica, the media covered a drama of religious grandeur. Father Tom Williams, a Legionary and a stalwart defender of Maciel, provided commentary on NBC’s Today, suffering not a question from perky Katie Couric on his accused superior. Irony hung like a thundercloud as Cardinal Ratzinger in his sermon at the Mass opening the conclave gave a cri de coeur on Christian values: “We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive.”
The papacy of Benedict XVI opened into a tense drama between moral absolutes and the concessions that come with governing. The moral absolutist, in a speech at his old college in Regensburg, Germany, quoted an ancient Byzantine emperor’s hostile words on Islam. Journalists who saw the advance text warned the Vatican press spokesman “that the talk would cause problems with Muslims,” wrote Marco Politi, a biographer of John Paul and a distinguished correspondent for La Repubblica. “Cardinal Angelo Sodano warned the Pope of the risks he was taking with the lecture.”8 Undeterred, Benedict gave the speech, which inflamed Muslim leaders and provoked attacks on several churches in the West Bank and Gaza; in Somalia, an Italian nun who worked in a children’s hospital was shot and killed. Politi adds:
When I interviewed him in November 2004, just a few months before the conclave in which he was elected Pope, the then Cardinal Ratzinger said: “It is increasingly apparent that a worldwide Church, particularly in this present situation, cannot be governed by an absolute monarch … in time a means will be found to create realistically a profound collaboration between the bishops and the Pope, because only in this way will we be able to respond to the challenges of this world.”
Benedict XVI has done nothing to realize this principle.9
Perhaps the idea of deeper collaboration convinced Benedict to invite the ultraorthodox Society of St. Pius X—a sect excommunicated by John Paul—back into the fold. The groundwork by Cardinal Castrillón collapsed when one of the society’s bishops gave a television interview in Sweden denying the existence of the Holocaust. More embarrassment, another papal apology.
CHARISM IN THE COUNTING HOUSE
Sodano had practical reasons for putting the Holy See’s credibility behind the Legionaries. His own reputation was on the line. The cardinal’s photograph hung in the halls of the Regina Apostolorum