VATICAN CITY (AP) – Honorary Pope Benedict XVI turned 95 last weekend, an important event in itself, but even more so given that he is now a retired pope longer than the reigning one.
To mark the occasion, a new book aims to examine the current state of affairs in the Vatican, not so much through the prism of Pope Francis’ nine-year papacy, but through Benedict’s nine-year retirement. And it’s not beautiful.
Italian veteran Massimo Franco’s “monastery” published in Italy on Thursday shifted the focus of most books on the Holy See, using Benedict’s retirement home in a converted convent in the Vatican Gardens as a prism to see the unprecedented anomaly of two popes. one ruler and one retiree living together in the Vatican.
In real-life scenes appropriate to the Netflix drama The Two Popes, the book paints a picture of two papal courts that began in an excellent relationship: Francis called Benedict a “wise grandfather” to whom he turned for advice, and Benedict referred to Francis with the respect due to the Pope.
But recounting the last nine years with unusual access to Benedict’s team and allies, Franco notes that the wars over the Vatican and the progressive relocation of the church to places like Benedict’s native Germany have essentially made the Monastery the Franciscan symbolic headquarters. And Benedict, he writes, has become an involuntary and involuntary starting point for right-wing, Catholic traditionalists who hate Francis.
“The monastery is the place where people injured by Francis go to be healed,” Cardinal Gerhard Müller told Franco, who himself had been fired by Francis as head of Vatican doctrine.
The book takes as its starting point Benedict’s groundbreaking 2013 decision to retire, the first pope in 600 years to do so. Benedict withdrew because he said he no longer had the strength to continue. But the book traces many of the problems affecting the church today to an unhealed “trauma” caused by his abdication and an unexpectedly long retirement.
“The problems are not the fault of Francis or Benedict,” Franco said in an interview. “This is the by-product or the inevitable, unavoidable product of the Resignation.
For a church that values unity and sees in the figure of a pope, vicar of Christ on Earth, confusion about who the pope really is or the ghost of a parallel papacy is no small feat. And most Vatican observers agree that Benedict’s resignation experiment will have to be corrected and regulated by a set of norms before any future pope decides to follow suit.
Franco, a columnist for the leading daily Corriere della Sera, recounts some of the key issues of the past nine years, beginning with Benedict’s refusal to approve an 11-volume set of books on Francis’ theology in 2018 because it includes authors who have criticized their own papacy. Benedict’s approval was sought by Francis’s then guru of communications, Monsignor Dario Vigano, to show the continuity between the two popes and the quiet traditionalist critics who thought Francis’ theology was insufficient.
A scandal erupted because Vigano manipulated a photo of Benedict’s letter refusing to approve the project to make it appear to be on board. Francis reluctantly accepted Vigano’s resignation afterwards.
The other major tension in the relationship came two years later, when Benedict co-authored a book criticizing Francis, reaffirming the need for priests to observe celibacy, just as Francis was considering allowing married men to be ordained to alleviate shortages. of priests. in the Amazon.
A former pope-theologian who is considering an issue currently being studied by the current pope was the nightmarish scenario of a “parallel master’s degree” predicted by canonical lawyers and theologians in 2013. They blamed Benedict’s decision to retire then and especially his choice. to keep the white robe of the papacy and call himself an “honorary pope” instead of returning to his birth name.
The episode of the book, Franco writes, was something of a last resort and epilogue to the failure of Vigano, in both cases Archbishop Georg Hanswein, Benedict’s longtime secretary, was a key player behind the scenes. Hanswein served as a bridge between the two popes and was head of the papal house of Francis. But after the book crash in 2020, Francis removed him as prefect of the papal household, although he retained the title and remained at the head of the Monastery and Benedict’s team.
“Francis, understandably irritated, was prompted by his allies to cut the ambiguous umbilical cord with that Monsignor (Hanswein), who moved as easily in the Vatican halls as in the halls of the aristocracy,” Franco wrote.
Benedict had said he was retiring to a life of prayer because he no longer had the strength of body or mind to continue the rigors and journey of the papacy of the 21st century. Hanswein told Vatican News on his birthday on April 16 that Benedict “is in a good mood, naturally relatively weak and fragile, but rather clear.”
His 95th birthday is coming to an end, as Francis, who turned 85 in December, is slowing down: Francis’ bad knee is causing pain when walking, climbing stairs and getting up from his chair, and he can no longer stand for long. However, he has a grueling travel schedule planned for the coming months and has shown no signs of planning to retire soon.
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