The Pope’s Role Has Changed in Our Time. But Has the Church?

“Gandhi’s Scant Garb Bars Audience with Pope.” So read the headline of a New York Times report, from December 13, 1931, that the Vatican had cancelled a meeting between Pius XI and “the Indian nationalist leader” because the Pope thought he might be criticized “if he received the visitor in his usual scanty clothing.” Last December, ninety-three years later, the Times published an excerpt from Pope Francis’s autobiography titled “There Is Faith in Humor,” which related jokes told by and about the clergy, and was meant to show that they are not merely “bitter, sad priests.”

That the papacy has changed over the past century almost goes without saying. John XXIII, who was elected Pope in 1958, called an ecumenical council, only the twenty-first in the nearly two-thousand-year history of the Church. Paul VI left the Vatican for trips to Bombay, Jerusalem, New York City, and Bogotá. John Paul II stood shoulder to shoulder with the Dalai Lama and the chief rabbi of Rome during an interfaith prayer for peace held in Assisi. Benedict XVI resigned, the first Pope to do so in six hundred years.

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Those acts betoken a more significant change. The Second Vatican Council, held from 1962 to 1965, was expected to diminish the Pope and foreground ordinary Catholics, by defining the Church as “the people of God,” rather than Roman Catholicism as the one true faith, led by the Pope. But, in the developed world, the Pope has become more rather than less central to Catholic life: a monarch, a cleric, a celebrity, and a fellow-believer all in one. This shift was brought on by John XXIII’s charm and the drama of Vatican II, and was deepened by an unexpected run of events in 1978—when Paul VI died, an August conclave elected the affable Venetian prelate Albino Luciani as John Paul I, and then Luciani died after just a month in office, prompting the conclave that elected the first non-Italian pope since 1523, Karol Wojtyła of Krakow, who took the name John Paul II. Meanwhile, the everyday lives of ordinary believers became less distinctly Catholic. Parish life thinned out as urban Catholics moved to the suburbs; Catholic schools withered as the underpaid labor of nuns and priests became less available.

Into the denuded spaces of Catholic life came the figure of “JPII”: featured on the cover of Time magazine, celebrating Mass in stadiums and parks, denouncing a “culture of death.” John Paul drew on his personal charisma to re-root Church authority in the Vatican and the Pope. He made use of the mass media, which amplified the authentic drama of his journeys and of the conflicts stirred up by his pronouncements en route (about the ordination of women, say, or divorce, or liberation theology). This pattern, established across his nearly twenty-seven years in the papal office, has borne on his successors, Benedict and Francis. In consequence, the papacy has become the center of both Catholic vitality and Catholic controversy. Where once Catholics focussed on the spectacle of Mass, led in Latin by a priest whose back was turned, now we focus on the spectacle of the Pope and the contretemps involving him, set against the background of Vatican glamour and inscrutability. Brick-and-mortar Catholicism is a diminished thing, and yet even the lapsedest Catholics, and people generally, remain curious about the Pope.

I read “Jesus Wept,” a fleet and vivid new history of the papacy in the mass-media age, with all this in mind. The author, Philip Shenon, a former investigative reporter for the Times who has written books about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the 9/11 Commission, introduces the book as “an investigative history of the modern Roman Catholic Church.” The topics are familiar—disputes over sexual mores, war and peace, church and state, money, and the reach of Vatican authority—and so are the author’s assessments of them: the problem is that the churchmen who run things are corrupt, secretive, hypocritical, and illiberal. But the depth of Shenon’s reporting, combined with his narrative’s strict observance of chronology, gives fresh emphasis to material lost in the churn of the news cycle.

Shenon draws deftly from the vast public record, and also relies on, by his account, “hundreds of interviews,” with sources “who took the risk of speaking to me . . . most on the understanding that I would not reveal their names.” The presence of anonymous sources inside the Vatican is everywhere implied, as he adopts the points of view of his protagonists (“Walter Kasper, so rare to show anger, was fed up”), sums up the collective mood of the Roman Curia (whose members are “shocked” and “outraged”), and relates encounters in melodramatic paraphrase (“Levada rushed to Benedict to tell him what was in the files, and the pope instantly realized that it had been a terrible mistake to keep McCarrick in place in Washington”). Often, the never-before-told quality of the material is undermined by the standard-issue telling—there are “battles” over doctrine and authority, “clashes” between theologians, and deskbound clerics inciting “terror” through this or that “crusade.” But the narrative is alive, intricate, and reliable, and it suggests a comprehensive insight about Catholicism in our time: since the nineteen-sixties, the interplay of spectacle and controversy involving the papacy, and the striking changes in the ways the Popes comport themselves, has diverted attention away from grave matters such as clerical sex abuse, and all the surface agitation about what the Pope says and does has masked the Church’s stubborn resistance to change.

Shenon’s book begins not with the Second Vatican Council, which John XXIII characterized as “opening the windows” of a self-enclosed Church, but with the pontificate of Pius XII, who was elected twenty years earlier, in 1939. This setting-off point serves as a reminder that the council wasn’t prompted by secular modernity or the emerging sexual revolution but by a need for the Church to revise its approach to other churches and other religions. The Holocaust, and Pius XII’s decision not to speak out directly against the Nazis’ extermination of Jews, forced the Church, after the Second World War, to take a critical view of its long history of treating the Jewish people as collective enemies of itself and of Christ—a position expressed in the Latin Mass, which, on Good Friday, referred to “perfidious Jews” who had turned over Jesus to the Roman authorities, and alleged that the “blood of Jesus falls . . . on all generations of Jews up to the end of the world.”

That outlook was a basis for centuries of civic and institutional antisemitism in Europe and elsewhere, but many individual Catholics saw things differently. Archbishop Angelo Roncalli had worked to save Jews while serving as nuncio, or ambassador, to Turkey, early in the Second World War, and had spent much of his time there in the company of Orthodox Christians and Muslims. After Pius’s death, in October, 1958, Roncalli was elected Pope and took the name John XXIII. He called the council three months later, and invited Protestant and Orthodox churches to send representatives. He also tasked the German Jesuit and Biblical scholar Augustin Bea with drafting a document that would mend relations with other Christians and, Shenon writes, help “to end the most ancient rupture of all—between the church and the Jews.”

The transition from the Latin Mass to a new rite in local languages began in 1964. By then, John had died, and a new Pope, Paul VI—the former Archbishop of Milan, Giovanni Battista Montini—had gone to Jerusalem, seeking symbolic expression of the new Catholic-Jewish amity. Bea’s draft document on the Church’s relations with Judaism and other non-Christian religions, completed in 1965, was met with “ferocious opposition from a handful of archconservatives,” Shenon writes. It was saved only after a protest—led by the charismatic Swiss theologian and priest Hans Küng—became a news story in Europe, shaming Pope Paul into supporting it.

The document, titled “Nostra Aetate” (“In Our Time”), was ratified during the council’s final session, in December, 1965. Whereas the Vatican had long maintained that “outside the Church there is no salvation,” and that “error has no rights,” now it granted that “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers” and insisted that the Church “rejects nothing that is true or holy” in other religions. “Nostra Aetate,” then, stands as a sign that Catholicism really can change, and the controversy over it suggested that media attention could compel a Pope, in Küng’s words, to “do the right thing.”

In Central and South America, Paul is associated with the 1967 encyclical “Populorum Progressio” (“On the Development of Peoples”), which placed the Church nominally on the side of the poor and sparked populist Catholic activism across the region. In Europe and the United States, Paul is remembered for rejecting, in 1968, a papal commission’s recommendation that the Church authorize the use of birth control, prompting many Catholics to ignore the ban or leave the Church altogether. “By 1975,” Shenon writes, “the pope was so angry about defiance of his teachings that he directed the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith to prepare a document to state—authoritatively, for all time—the church’s views on sexual morality.” The resulting document, “Persona Humana” (“The Human Person”), drew particular attention for its declaration that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.”

That declaration, Shenon writes, led Pope Paul to be “plunged into the gravest, most humiliating crisis of his life.” Paul had long been subject to rumors that he’d had intimate friendships with a film actor and other men while Archbishop of Milan, and, in 1976, the Italian magazine Tempo published a long article about the rumors, prompting the Italian police to impound the magazine from newsstands. Ignoring the advice of subordinates, Paul decried what he referred to as “horrible and slanderous insinuations” during his weekly address from an open window of the papal apartment, which overlooks St. Peter’s Square—an act equal parts dramatic and vague, which yielded an Associated Press story with the headline “POPE PAUL VI DENIES HE IS HOMOSEXUAL.”

John Paul II’s pontificate played out even more emphatically in the public eye. He transformed the role and visage of the Pope through his “apostolic journeys”: in the course of a hundred and four trips, he travelled to a hundred and twenty-nine countries, each visit typically involving Masses, parades, speeches, press events, photo ops, and the canonization of local saints. And he placed the figure of the Pope at the center of controversies over priestly ordination, divorce, contraception, the Church’s history with Jews in Poland, and its present dealings in politics there and in Latin America. The press covered those conflicts doggedly, and focussed on the outsized role played in them by the Bavarian theologian Joseph Ratzinger, who was brought to the Vatican in 1982 to head the doctrinal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Ratzinger, though often depicted as shy and abstrusely professorial, was an expressive speaker, and, as Shenon tells it, once in Rome he began to “court publicity—and, at times, outrage.” Breaking with precedent for curial officials, he “granted hours of interviews to a little-known Italian journalist, Vittorio Messori, for what would be a book-length profile,” “The Ratzinger Report,” published in 1985 in Italian, German, and English. Shenon calls the book “a declaration of war on virtually all progressive thinking,” and relates, without giving a source, that “many assumed that Ratzinger had been grossly misquoted, since the comments attributed to him were so outrageous. In fact, he read the manuscript in advance—and approved it.”

Across the next quarter century, Ratzinger’s strict and straight approach to Catholic doctrine and teachings on sexual morality drew intense media coverage. But the attention paid to his campaigns against progressive Catholic thought served to distract attention from a criminal scandal—the thousands of acts of clerical sexual abuse of minors committed in the postwar decades. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Ratzinger, had responsibility to address all reports of clerical sexual abuse, past and recent, that reached the Vatican—and the power either to deal with them or to do nothing. Shenon emphasizes that “within weeks of arriving in Rome,” Ratzinger “received detailed briefings about priestly sex-abuse cases in several countries, many involving the molestation of children.” Three years later, in 1985, the trial and conviction of the Reverend Gilbert Gauthe, who had sexually abused several dozen boys in Louisiana, made headlines in the U.S. and internationally. In 1988, Shenon notes, Australian bishops set up a commission to look into clerical sex abuse, and the Irish bishops had taken out joint-liability insurance the previous year. Ratzinger, however, later maintained that “for years after his arrival in Rome, he did not suspect that sexual abuse was a significant problem anywhere.”

One instance of sexual abuse in a Catholic institution was so near to Ratzinger that any claim of ignorance on his part strains credulity. A report published in 2010 revealed that at least sixty-seven members of the Regensburger Domspatzen, a boys’ choir led by Ratzinger’s elder brother Georg, were abused across the three decades he was in charge. By then, Ratzinger had become Pope Benedict XVI, succeeding John Paul II, who died in 2005. A German abuse-survivors’ group, Shenon notes, posed the obvious question: How could Ratzinger, who had lived in Regensburg for most of the nineteen-seventies and who spent time with Georg regularly then and afterward, not have known “ ‘what was happening to these innocent boys who were under his brother’s care?’ The pope insisted that he had never suspected any mistreatment.”

In retrospect, Ratzinger was manifestly the wrong man for the top job: too old, too retiring, too rigid, too sapped by past controversies to make a fresh start. So the question of why he was elected Pope arises—a question Shenon deepens but doesn’t resolve. Drawing on memoirs and reports published since the 2005 papal election, he reconstructs a midnight quandary of the kind evoked in the current film “Conclave.” After the first vote, Ratzinger was the front-runner, trailed by two Jesuits: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, of Buenos Aires, and Carlo Maria Martini, of Milan. Martini was a key figure in a group of churchmen who met annually in St. Gallen, Switzerland, to ponder how best to blunt John Paul and Ratzinger’s reactionary thrust. But he was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, and he’d made it clear that if elected he would stand aside. To whom, then, should the votes in his support go? To his friend Bergoglio—a fellow-Jesuit, cerebral and affable, sixty-eight and healthy? No: evidently, the votes went to Ratzinger, who was elected Pope the next day.

Shenon speculates that Martini made a deal with Ratzinger, pledging him the votes but forcing Ratzinger to promise that if elected he would reform the Curia and would resign if he failed to do so. This is made plausible by Benedict’s resignation, in 2013, after crippling scandals in the Vatican. But Martini’s distaste for John Paul’s and Ratzinger’s leadership—and the traditionalism they espoused—was surely deeper than his concern over a Curia run amok. The Catholic Church “is 200 years out of date,” Martini told the Italian daily Corriere della Serra, shortly before his death, in 2012. “Our churches are big and empty. Our rituals and our cassocks are pompous. The church must admit its mistakes and begin a radical change.”

Especially since Benedict’s death, in 2022, I have often wondered: What if the man now known as Pope Francis had been elected in 2005, not in 2013, and had taken office at age sixty-eight, with the backing of a group of cardinals committed to change? That is the great counterfactual of the papacy in this century. But it’s far from clear that Francis, in any circumstances, would have brought the “radical” change that Martini called for. His humble persona might not have captivated the press had he succeeded the dynamic John Paul rather than the rigorist Benedict. And, although the casual and flexible style he adopted early on led him to be cast as a “revolutionary” by progressives and traditionalists alike, he is a moderate man.

Shenon writes, of Francis’s first decade as Pope, “He had dramatically changed the tone of Vatican debates, with an emphasis always on promoting mercy over punishing sin. But little had changed in terms of formal church teachings. Francis’s promise to reconsider the doctrine of priestly celibacy had gone nowhere . . . the church’s ban on birth control remained in place, even if it was more widely mocked and ignored than ever. Despite his vow to promote women to the Curia, there was still only token representation of women at the highest reaches of the Vatican. He had shown mercy to divorced Catholics by allowing them to remarry more easily through annulments and to receive Communion, but a future pope could erase those initiatives as easily as Francis had put them into place.”

The recent history that Shenon has brought together suggests that the next Pope will be a figure of consequence, like his predecessors, and a symbol of change. But it also suggests that the very forces of tradition, ritual, loyalty, and secrecy that empower the Pope also stand in the way of any thoroughgoing renewal of Catholicism. In the circumstances, then, the succession from one Pope to the next—the Italian, the Pole, the German, the Argentinean; the kindly uncle, the man of action, the scholar, the Jesuit; the liberal, the conservative, the traditionalist, the moderate—is a simulacrum of more substantive change. ♦