Meeting the late Pope John Paul II in his heyday I was transfixed by his sturdy tan shoes. Popes traditionally wear scarlet slippers fit for the sanctuary. Papa Wojtyla went heavily shod for the outdoors. A year ago we saw him laid out in death in St Peter’s Basilica still wearing those scuffed clodhoppers, the toes pointing heavenwards. His would be hard shoes to fill.
John Paul was a superstar pope, credited with prompting the downfall of the Soviet system and pressing home staunch values to combat global moral decline. Yet he bequeathed to his successor a church in disarray: not least the aftermath of the paedophile priest scandal. Dwindling congregations of Catholics in the prosperous north, moreover, have for years been at each other’s throats. Conservative Catholics, for example, insist that even Aids victims should not use condoms: liberals argue that such strictures are lunacy. Meanwhile, the preponderant Catholic populations, 70% of the 1.1 billion faithful, reside in the south where their preoccupations are survival amid conflict, poverty and natural disasters.
What cardinal would actively seek to inherit the vast global headache called the Catholic church? Yet it is amply argued in a recent book, A Church in Search of Itself, by the veteran vaticanologist Robert Kaiser, that Cardinal Ratzinger, 79 today and the ultra-orthodox Bavarian theologian, known for two decades as “God’s rottweiler” and once a member of the Hitler Youth, was enthusiastically up for it. A year ago he rallied his brother cardinals to choose him at the conclave. He even had his acceptance speech written three days before it began. So how is he doing? Bookish and retiring, he is not given, like John Paul, to grandstanding or kissing the tarmac. Timid of flying, he aims to travel seldom — to Turkey this year, and again to Germany.
His chosen name invokes the great 9th-century monk-saint who preserved Christian civilisation through the Dark Ages. Benedict XVI similarly sees himself confronting a moral collapse in Europe: which explains, perhaps, why he wanted the job so badly.
He is, of course, still dwarfed by John Paul. Beneath his windows Benedict views daily the pilgrims queuing to pray at John Paul’s tomb. “Santo Subito!” (make him a saint today) they chant. Hence he is taking a softly, softly approach. Amazingly he listened last summer for a whole day to one of the Catholic world’s most notorious dissidents, Father Hans Küng, the Swiss theologian, whom John Paul refused to entertain for one moment. He has also received in private the journalist Oriana Fallaci, atheist, feminist and critic of Catholicism. Many have seen in this a change of heart. They could be wrong.
In the meantime there have been remarkable changes behind the arras. The former papal household, the so-called “Polish mafia”, led by John Paul’s gnome-like secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dwiwisz, has vanished as in a dream. The new papal secretary is a tall, athletic Bavarian called Monsignor Georg Gänswein, very close to Ratzinger for 12 years.
Gänswein, 49, mischievously dubbed Gay-Org by the Vatican denizens, is an expert skier and champion tennis player. He used to teach church law at the Opus Dei university in Rome. Opus Dei, the self-flagellating extreme conservative Catholic group, has been receiving adverse press lately due to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, but Gänswein’s closeness to the pontiff signals that the movement is in favour. As Ratzinger, Benedict brought Gänswein into the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which enforces the orthodoxy of Catholic teaching worldwide. Now Gänswein has joined Benedict in the papal apartment and rarely leaves his side when he ventures out.
He lends a dashing public image to the new papacy, being said to be immensely sociable, a trophy dinner guest around Rome, but discreet as the grave.
Curiously, Gänswein — who likes flying private planes — seems to have fallen out of the sky. There is no record of his earlier education. Has it been expunged, ask the Vatican gossips (try the website Whispers in the Loggia, www.whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com, for a taste of Georg-fever and pin-up pics).
No less fascinating is Benedict’s “housekeeper”, a tall 56-year-old Bavarian woman called Ingrid Stampa. She is an expert on the viola da gamba, an ancient form of cello. Stampa has been known to play duets with Papa Ratzi, who has bought a baby grand for the papal apartments. He loves Mozart and has an iPod for his repertoire of sacred music. Stampa controls entry to the papal apartment, and access has been drastically cut. Unlike John Paul, Benedict does not welcome guests at his early morning mass, which he says with Gänswein. Nor does he invite, as did John Paul, outsiders to meals. In the afternoon he takes the air in the Vatican gardens where the workmen are ordered to hide discreetly in the bushes as he passes.
Like the other “domestics” in the papal household Stampa is a lay person who has taken a vow of celibacy. Although not a nun, she is what is known in the trade as a “consecrated virgin”. Catholic optimists have speculated that she symbolises Benedict’s introduction of laywomen at the very highest levels in the church.
So Benedict has settled in, and even looks comfortable. But his most notable achievement is what he hasn’t done: which is to purge the Catholic “liberals”. On the day of Benedict’s election I heard conservative Catholics crowing that his papacy spelt the expulsion of Catholics who adopt an à la carte approach to the faith. Damian Thompson, editor-in-chief of Britain’s Catholic Herald, even foretold that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, could be for the chop for his liberal tendencies. Yet hardliners have been profoundly disgruntled by Benedict’s failure to date to send the dissidents packing.
An influential and vociferous hardline Catholic conservative is Father Richard John Neuhaus, who pontificates like an alternative pope from the pages of First Things, an acidulous international journal. He was aghast at Benedict’s early decision to appoint William Levada to the vacant post of Catholic orthodoxy watchdog (Benedict’s former job). While Archbishop of San Francisco Levada failed, in Neuhaus’s view, to confront the decision of the city to encourage single-sex unions. Nor had Benedict taken the earliest opportunity, according to Neuhaus, to lambast those liberals who protested the Vatican instruction banning gays from the priesthood.
