Catholics across the tired old left-right spectrum — a
dichotomy much disdained by sophisticated observers, yet somehow
apropos — were astounded at the election of Joseph Cardinal
Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI last month. Yes, one or two
optimists predicted this. But we who knew better humored them
indulgently, and prepared ourselves for a centrist Italian who
smiled a lot and called himself John Paul III.
As Benedict emerged from the balcony of St. Peter’s, stricken
liberal clerics were actually seen by friends of this writer
turning on their heels and shaking their heads in disbelief.
Meantime, jubilant conservative bigwigs like Rev. Richard John
Neuhaus and George Weigel celebrated that same night at Armando’s
Ristorante on the Via Plauto, just down the street from Ratzinger’s
old Vatican apartment. The new Pope had dined there himself the
week before. Armando and his wife jested with their famous customer
that he would be elected. “If I am,” he jested back in fine German
style, “I won’t ever be able to come here again.”
Okay, let’s be frank: he’s not Jackie Mason.
Neither is he Pius XIII. A tone has already been set by Benedict
— plus a giant hint of the substance of his pontificate, too. And
it varies from the expectations of both left and right, no matter
what the clueless Big Media types tell you (here we exempt Delia
Gallagher of CNN from any criticism).
Let’s step back a second. First: the elation and sheer relief of
the Catholic right at the sight of Benedict belied a tad their
praise of John Paul II and all he was said to have “done.” The
plain truth is that we all worried that despite John Paul’s
personal goodness and media magnetism, the Church had been
rudderless and tilting to port. Cardinals complained privately
about this drift all the time.
Until the moment Benedict XVI emerged, the shock most of us were
prepared to handle was a Third World pontiff. Not a Bavarian who
spent the months before the conclave throwing down the gauntlet
with rebukes about clerical abuse of children and the moral
relativism killing Western society. Not a Bavarian just after a
Pole.
So when Ratzinger himself emerged, we sensed (did we not?)
dramatic changes to come — and curiously welcome changes, to those
conservative Catholics who seemed so immensely pleased with John
Paul II. That meant at a minimum some new faces in the papal
entourage, for sure.
We are 30 days into Pope Ratzinger’s reign, and he has not been
indecisive. Quick appointments, bearing out the cliche that
personnel is policy.
So who is new, under Benedict? No one. It is the same team we
had under John Paul. Everyone was asked to stay, the rough
equivalent of a new president asking pre-election cabinet officers
to stay on.
OH, BUT THERE IS ONE lone fresh face. The appointment of an
unremarkable American archbishop from the Catholic wasteland of
California (a confrere of Roger Mahony no less) with light
scholarly credentials to the most important post in Rome,
Ratzinger’s old job as prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith. San Francisco’s William Levada came from
nowhere to get that post. Leftist Jesuit chaplains of the
Democratic Party groaned, naturally. But who is Levada, and why
should they be upset?
Press reports that he is an old friend of Benedict’s or that he
is a clone of the new Pope are as usual imprecise. Friend? He did
work for Ratzinger 24 years ago, as a secretary, for less than two
years. Comrades in arms? Certainly Levada is a company man, yes.
But he gave the game away at a press conference after his
appointment when he said that he would be more like God’s
“cocker-spaniel” than his “rottweiler,” the nickname the press gave
Ratzinger in that post.
Indeed, it is impossible to imagine Ratzinger as archbishop of
Munich compromising on the question of giving benefits to
homosexual couples under diocesan employ. Levada as archbishop of
San Francisco cut a deal with Willie Brown on that issue. He weakly
cast his capitulation to the city as an endorsement not of
homosexuality but of wider health-care coverage. Nor is it
thinkable that Benedict would have allowed the rector of his
seminary in Munich to write scandalously about homosexuality.
Levada’s rector, whom he had inherited from his disastrous
predecessor John Quinn, did. “Some homosexual persons,” wrote
Gerald Coleman, “have shown that it is possible to enter into
long-term, committed and loving relationships, named by certain
segments of our society as domestic partnership…I see no moral
reason why civil law could not in some fashion recognize these
faithful and loving unions with clear and specified benefits.”
Benedict XVI has already mapped out what he predicted would be a
short pontificate. He has done so with his many books (Ignatius
Press has them all in English, and they’re not dull), with several
new addresses, and, not least, with personnel choices like the old
team and William Levada.
Joseph Ratzinger is a man of many parts, a powerful mind with an
astonishing memory and an ability, say friends, to listen to a
group for an hour, then synthesize their points in whatever
language they happen to be speaking. He is probably the
most-credentialed pope in 1,500 years, with a far better resume
than his predecessor at the time of his election in 1978.
So it may come as a surprise that, as the Levada choice has
illustrated, the best description of Benedict from the political
lexicon is a rather standard moderate, by which is meant that he is
more than capable of factoring Church politics into his
decisions.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN HIS pontificate will be like the presidency of
Richard Nixon, full of half-measures, bobbing and weaving. But it
is how to explain the Levada choice, which has baffled some who
expected a tougher man.
My theory: during the conclave, Cardinal Ruini of Rome, said to
have been the kingmaker, suggested to the crucially important
American cardinals that the time had come for one of their own to
be in one of Rome’s top two dicasteries. Naturally, Ruini would go
on, the new Holy Father had to decide the details and it would be
wrong, very wrong, for him to even mention this to his man during
the conclave.
Were this arrangement to have taken hold in the imaginations of
the American cardinals, they could well imagine that Ruini would
also deliver the Italian vote. Not being a dumb man, Cardinal
Ratzinger would have caught wind of these thoughts without ever
speaking to Ruini and without ever feeling bound in conscience to
implement any such plan.
And as long as none of those involved in the recent conclave
felt bound or pressured, such arrangements are human and perfectly
proper.
Ten years ago I had a long conversation with Cardinal Silvio
Oddi, a power in the Vatican during the 1980s whose career was made
by John XXIII and Paul VI. Oddi had participated in both 1978
conclaves and left little doubt that in the end he voted for Karol
Wojtyla — but little doubt that he had others he voted for in
previous ballots too. By the time we spoke, Oddi had retired, and
among other things expressed his displeasure at having been frozen
out of the next conclave (he was nearing 80). As long as we were
being so frank, I put it to him bluntly about his mentor John
XXIII’s election: had a deal been brokered whereby John would name
X as his secretary of state?
“It is not forbidden,” Oddi replied in that wonderful Italian
deadpan, confirming everything.
It is not forbidden. It is not terribly inspiring, either. But
Benedict still is. More anon.
