Image-conscious John Paul II always kissed the tarmac; Benedict never did. (AFP/Getty Images)
(EPA)
Constant power struggles shake the Vatican, Thavis writes.
The Vatican Diaries
A Behind-The-Scenes Look at the Power, Personalities and Politics at the Heart of the Catholic Church
by John Thavis
Viking
For years, Pope John Paul II hosted an annual Christmas concert at the Vatican where performers like Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie and even Bob Dylan would not only regale his holiness, but help reach out to young people.
But while John Paul II enjoyed this pop-culture crossover — even going so far as to once try on Bono’s sunglasses — one of his more prominent cardinals, Joseph Ratzinger, felt no such connection. He thought that pop music performers were “false prophets,” writes longtime Vatican correspondent John Thavis, and that showcasing them at the Vatican was “the ultimate folly” for how it served as a harmful digression from the focus and message of the church.
With the shocking news of the resignation of Ratzinger — known today, of course, as Pope Benedict XVI, who this week became the first pope to willingly resign the papacy since Pope Celestine V in 1294 — journalist Thavis officially becomes the world’s luckiest author.
The former Rome bureau chief for the Catholic News Service covered the Vatican for 30 years and had already scheduled this coming week for the release of “The Vatican Diaries,” an inside look at the bureaucratic travails of the Catholic Church and a personal examination of the outgoing pope.
While Americans often view the Vatican as a mysterious, well-protected and well-run city-state, Thavis shows that it’s as disorganized — and political — as any government.
First, though it may appear opulent, Thavis tells The Post that the center of Catholicism is close to broke, and runs its departments on skeleton staffs.
“The Vatican is living off the patrimony it received when it conceded territory to Italy in 1929, but the patrimony has been shrinking,” Thavis says. “They’ve had a string of budget deficits. There’s not a lot of extra cash lying around.”
The financial mismanagement got so bad that in 2003, the Fabbrica of Saint Peter’s, which handles administration for the basilica, lost millions of dollars due to “massive stock investments” made “just before the dollar crashed against the Euro.”
Thavis writes that Pope John Paul II was well aware of mismanagement at various Vatican agencies, but took only minor, barely consequential steps to improve the situation, since at the Vatican, “political ties were always stronger than economic arguments.”
Security, meanwhile, has at times been remarkably lax, as impostors and scammers have had little trouble getting within feet of the Holy Father.
Thavis profiles one of the pope’s ceremonial ushers, Massimo Sansolini, a former fashion designer whose knowledge of proper vestments have helped him remove “false nuns, priests and even bishops” from the pope’s presence.
Sansolini sensed a “counterfeit air” about one supposed South American prelate, but his dress seemed immaculate — including “a buttoned black cassock with the violet piping and waistband proper to his rank” — until Sansolini caught the impostor’s fatal flaw: “He was wearing white socks!”
So common were the sacrilegious that Sansolini caught four fake bishops that same day, all betrayed by their attire — one wore “dark gray instead of black”; another had sleeves so long they seemed more appropriate for a kimono than a bishop’s cassock.
Vatican ushers needed to think on their feet. When a woman “demanded a front-row seat” for an audience with the pope, shouting, “I am the mother of the baby Jesus!” they avoided a potentially ugly scene by informing her that the baby was hungry and needed her at home for a feeding. She thanked them and quickly left.
There’s a stark contrast between Pope John Paul II, who captivated the masses, and Benedict, who often seemed lacking in personality and inspiration.
Thavis attributes Ratzinger’s election as pope to his being well known among, and much trusted by, the other cardinals, and to a speech Ratzinger gave one week before John Paul II’s death. Subbing in for the ailing pontiff, Cardinal Ratzinger laid out a fiery, aggressive agenda to clean up the church.
“How much filth there is in the church . . . ,” he said. “Lord, your church often seems like a boat about to sink, a boat taking on water on every side.” Many considered this an unambiguous statement of purpose — that, Thavis writes, “if elected pope, he would conduct a much needed housecleaning.”
But once Ratzinger was elected, the speech was forgotten, and Pope Benedict began a far less open and engaging papacy than his predecessor’s.
When John Paul II first became pope, he held a “freewheeling press conference,” inviting journalists from throughout the world to pepper him with questions. At his first press conference, by contrast, Benedict spoke to 3,000 international journalists for just a few minutes, and took no questions.
John Paul II spent much of his tenure visiting far-flung countries, Latin America, Africa, India. Benedict, Thavis writes, looked to “shore up the base,” spending most of his time in Europe, which has become more secular with each passing decade. But even the way they traveled showed a difference in style. John Paul II was a rolling photo op, kissing the tarmac of every nation he visited. Benedict never kissed the ground, instead rushing off the plane with hardly anyone looking.
As Thavis takes us through Benedict’s past, however, one possible explanation comes into play. Reading about his childhood, it’s easy to conclude that rather than being simply unemotional or anti-social, Pope Benedict XVI is — to put it in modern terms — a nerd.
Forever secluding himself as a child, young Ratzinger was a spindly, scrawny bookworm who preferred the company of the printed page.
“As one of the smallest and weakest boys in the class, he especially hated the two hours of sports each day, which he described as ‘true torture,’” writes Thavis, adding, “his best friends were his books.”
Ratzinger spent much of his life thereafter in academic or seminary settings. By contrast, Pope John Paul II had lived as “a factory worker, an actor, a poet and a university student, and fought continued political battles as a bishop under communism.” Whereas John Paul II had always engaged the world around him, Benedict “shied away from the world. To him, it was a dangerous place.”
Pope Benedict communicated with the public less and less as his tenure wore on, and Thavis writes that his failures as a charismatic leader became so grave that he put “the celebrity status of the pope . . . in jeopardy.”
The massive molestation scandals also undermined the Church’s reputation during his tenure.
Thavis points to a recent speech that made it sound like Benedict had simply “given up hope on the sorry state of earthly affairs.”
“If we look around the modern world, where God is absent,” said the Pope, “we have to say that it is dominated by fear and uncertainty: Is it good to be a human being or not? Is it good to be alive?”
In the face of all this, it’s easy to assume that for Benedict’s successor, the College of Cardinals would hope to elect someone with a touch of John Paul II — someone with a charismatic presence who exudes optimism for the future.
But in electing their leader, cardinals of today face a challenge that their predecessors did not.”
At one time, the vast majority of cardinals resided in Rome. Therefore, they all knew each other.
With modern-day cardinals spread all over the world, some African, Asian, and Latin American cardinals, especially the newer ones, have only been to Rome once or twice in their lives. So the cardinals will be selecting a pope from a pool consisting of relative strangers, including some who cannot even communicate in the same language.
“They elected Benedict because he was the man they knew the best and trusted most completely,” Thavis tells the Post. “As Cardinal Ratzinger, he had met every single one of those cardinals at least once, and spoken to them many times over. It’s an open secret of the last conclave that when the cardinals came together, they didn’t know each other that well.”
The result of this will be several weeks of furious activity amongst the cardinals, including non-stop discussions about the future of the Catholic Church, and a far lesser possibility that the next pope will be Asian, African, or Latin American than recent public speculation might indicate.
“They have about two weeks to get to know each other better, and then they vote. That’s a pretty short time to form opinions about who should be pope,” Thavis says. “In my view, that makes it less likely that a newcomer or non-European pope will be chosen, simply because they are not as well known.”
Given the chaos of recent years, Thavis also thinks the cardinals are most likely to choose a pope who they believe can make the Vatican a tighter bureaucratic ship.
Meanwhile, many hope that, post-Benedict, the next pope will be someone who can not only appeal to and uplift the world’s approximately 1.2 billion Catholics, but maybe even add a layer of enjoyment to the worship and devotion he inspires.
“[Benedict] has often spoken about ‘friendship with Jesus’ as the source of true happiness in life,” writes Thavis. “Given his own deep faith, the pope should be able to say, ‘Just look at me.’ But that’s part of the problem: Whatever his inner peace and harmony, Benedict rarely looks as if he’s having fun.”