When he retired, the ultra-conservative Pope Benedict XVI was expected to disappear from view, clearing the way for his liberal successor, Francis, to clean house in the notoriously corrupt Vatican. Instead, he stayed, setting the stage for a de-stabilizing brawl over morality, theology, and the Church’s horrific legacy of sexual abuse.
Over a plate of double-egged fettuccine and two bottles of Antinori Chianti at our usual trattoria in Rome’s old city, the Vatican monsignor is gossiping about the late Pope John Paul II: how he wore Penhaligon’s aftershave from Harrods of London; how, as a bishop in Poland, the future Pope camped out with his philosopher friend Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Now he’s showing me how John Paul mockingly gave a discreet Nazi salute toward the backs of a departing group of German bishops.
“When I raised my eyebrows disapprovingly at his antic,” says the monsignor, “he punched me hard on the arm. It hurt!”
He’s my Deep Throat, my Sotto Voce, purveyor of unattributable whispers in Vatican cloisters. A middle-echelon member of the Vatican bureaucracy, known as the Curia, he gestures smoothly with his wrists, showing off pure-white cuffs and gold links. “This place,” he says with a smile of self-conscious irony, “floats on a sea of bitchery!”
Before long he’s bitching about Pope Francis: “He’s soft on the homosexuals, the lesbians, and the transsexuals. And how dare he criticize the Curia? . . . Accusing us of spiritual Alzheimer’s . . . just because his papacy is unraveling.” Sotto Voce is angry about the tongue-lashing Pope Francis gave the curial cardinals four years ago for the “serious disease” of gossip. The Pope had said, “Brothers, let us be on our guard against the terrorism of gossip.”
It stands to reason that Pope Francis would excoriate the gossip-mongers, for he is often the object of their sharp tongues. Today, the Catholic Church is riven by an internecine power contest between conservatives and liberals that rivals the battle of the angels in Milton’s epic Paradise Lost. Who are the powers of light? Who are the powers of darkness? It depends whose side you take in the onslaughts of texts, tweets, and blogs, as well as the trumpetings of the Catholic media. In the conservative National Catholic Register, the prominent Catholic writer Vittorio Messori accused Francis of creating a Church in which “everything is unstable and changeable.” In the liberal National Catholic Reporter, Catholic-studies scholar Nancy Enright observed that Pope Francis resembles “Jesus in conveying the gaze of mercy to millions in great need of it.”
What makes this prospect of a division within the Church more severe, and far riskier, than the usual bickering is the presence of two Popes, both resident in the Vatican, each with his own loyal and vociferous following. The liberals have Francis, but the conservatives have his predecessor, Benedict XVI. If Francis is the living, reigning Pope, Benedict is his shadow, the undead Pope emeritus.
In 2013, Benedict unexpectedly resigned his papacy. He was the first Pope to do so in nearly 600 years. Afterward, he did not, as many expected, depart for an obscure Bavarian monastery. He stayed put, still accepting the title “His Holiness,” still wearing the pectoral cross of the Bishop of Rome, still publishing, still massaging his record, still meeting cardinals, still making statements, still involved. His very existence provides encouragement to conservative critics who want to undermine Francis’s reign.
Take Matteo Salvini, the populist deputy prime minister of Italy and head of the right-wing Lega Party. Salvini has called for immigration control and the barring of illegal immigrants, and deplores Francis’s exhortations to welcome all refugees. Salvini, who is friendly with Steve Bannon and the anti-Francis cardinal Raymond Burke, has been photographed holding a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase IL MIO PAPA È BENEDETTO (“My Pope is Benedict”) and an image of a desperate-looking Francis.
Maria Viganò, the formal papal nuncio to Washington, D.C., and a prominent conservative, issued a letter accusing Francis of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse and calling on him to resign as Pope. Viganò’s most serious charge is that Francis reversed sanctions that Benedict had placed on the American cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who has been accused of sexually abusing adult seminarians as well as an altar boy. (McCarrick denies this.) It took the Vatican six weeks to respond to the letter, though Viganò was sure Francis was talking about him when he asked Catholics to pray to Mary and St. Michael the Archangel to “protect the church from the devil, who is always looking to divide us from God and from one another.” By the time the Vatican issued a statement condemning Viganò’s allegations as “false,” “blasphemous,” “abhorrent,” and politically motivated, Francis’s popularity in the U.S. had dropped to 51 percent, 19 points below where it had been in January 2017.
It’s hard to blame Francis’s defenders for taking a skeptical view of conservative outrage over the papacy’s handling of sexual abuse. Francis has gone much further than John Paul II and Benedict ever did to acknowledge that the Catholic Church bears shameful responsibility for the sexual-abuse scandals that have erupted around the world in recent decades. Still, Francis’s instinct for empathy—and, perhaps, his hatred of gossip—has led him to make a series of unforced errors. In August, a Pennyslvania grand jury reported evidence of a widespread cover-up of sexual abuse by Church leaders, including Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the Archbishop of Washington, D.C. Francis responded by accepting Wuerl’s resignation, yes, but also praising Wuerl for his “nobility” and asking him to continue running his archdiocese until a replacement could be found. Earlier this year, Francis had rushed to the defense of Chilean bishops accused of covering up sexual abuse, only to reverse himself after a 2,300-page report he had commissioned painted an unmistakable picture of misconduct.
Disentangling this legacy of shame would be challenging enough for a Pope who wasn’t looking over his shoulder at a predecessor.
To what can this two-Pope circumstance be compared? We are in the realms of archetypes and myth. Think King Lear, who gave all yet stayed to control, disastrously, or Hamlet’s Ghost. The mere presence of a former Pope has been enough to test the mettle and independence of Francis from day one.
Would the jolly John XXIII have initiated the reforming Second Vatican Council had Pius XII, his autocratic predecessor, been watching lugubriously from a neighboring window? And would John Paul II have shaken the rotting tree of the Soviet Union had the anguished, hesitant Paul VI, who had contemplated a Vatican accord with Moscow, been lurking at his elbow? Whatever the direction of the papacy, left or right, for better or for worse, it’s the unique, exclusive primacy of one Pope at a time that lends supreme authority and power to his office. Loyalty through thick and thin to the single living Supreme Pontiff is the open secret of Catholic unity.
Instead, the rift between Francis’s loyalists and Benedict’s insurgents threatens to provoke the biggest split in the Catholic Church since the 16th-century Reformation, when Martin Luther and other pious reformers led the Protestant revolt against the Vatican. As Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of Church history at Oxford, tells me: “Two Popes is a recipe for schism.”
A key figure in the twin-Pope rivalry is a handsome archbishop, Georg Gänswein, known for his skiing, his tennis, and his sartorial bella figura. He is popularly known as “Gorgeous Georg.” He is Benedict’s secretary and caregiver, and lives with the Pope emeritus in a renovated, multi-room former convent behind a thick hedge and high fences in the gardens of Vatican City.
On the morning of September 11, 2018, Gänswein gave a talk in the library of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies before a gathering of policy wonks. He promoted Benedict’s vision for the Catholic Church. The occasion was the launch of the Italian-language edition of The Benedict Option, by Rod Dreher, a senior editor at The American Conservative magazine and a self-described “crunchy conservative.” In the book, Dreher praises the sixth-century monk St. Benedict for preserving Christian culture in remote monasteries throughout the Dark Ages. The clerical sexual-abuse crisis, Gänswein explained to the group, is the Church’s new Dark Age—the Catholic world’s 9/11.
Gänswein’s talk was interpreted, not least by Dreher himself, to mean that the savior of the current Dark Age is none other than Pope Emeritus Benedict.
Ever since his years as Catholicism’s chief doctrinal watchdog, starting in 1981, Benedict, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had advocated the formation of a smaller Church, cleansed of imperfections. The papal vision of Francis runs diametrically opposite. He espouses a big-tent church, merciful to sinners, hospitable to strangers, respectfully tolerant of other faiths. He seeks to encourage doubters, console the abused, and reconcile those excluded by their orientation. He has likened the Church to a “field hospital” for the sick and wounded in spirit.
Against the background of a Church at war with itself over clerical abuse, Gänswein has emerged as the promoter of Benedict’s alternative papal agenda. On May 20, 2016, he declared that Francis and Benedict together represent a single “expanded” papal office with one “active” member and one “contemplative” one. Francis rejected that notion out of hand, saying: “There is only one Pope.”
Since then, the Francis-Benedict relationship seems to have deteriorated. In July of 2017, Gänswein read a letter from Benedict at the funeral of conservative cardinal Joachim Meisner, the archbishop emeritus of Cologne. It contained a line that could be read as profoundly destabilizing to Francis’s pontificate. Benedict, via Gänswein, said that Meisner was convinced that the “Lord does not abandon His Church, even if the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing.” The boat of the Church is a powerful, ancient metaphor. The living Pope is the captain of the bark of St. Peter. Benedict appeared to be saying, in other words, that the Church under the command of Pope Francis is sinking.
Pope-watchers noted that Meisner was one of four prominent cardinals who had raised theological doubts about Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), a major pastoral letter written by Francis to the world and published in April 2016. The Pope had sought to encourage sympathy for divorced and re-married Catholics—who, according to Church teaching, are banned from receiving Communion. The four cardinals opposed any change in teaching. Given that some 28 percent of married American Catholics get divorced, and that many seek to re-marry, this means that a sizable proportion are “living in sin.” Francis has pleaded for a change that would bring these Catholics back into the fold. Benedict’s Cardinal Meisner letter could be taken as a sign that the Pope emeritus, too, disapproves of Francis’s liberalism.
The divorce-and-re-marrying issue is one of the most significant points of contention between Francis’s liberals and Benedict’s conservatives. After all, as conservatives point out, Jesus forbade divorce—it’s in the Gospels. A Catholic might seek a civil divorce, but the sin is in re-marrying and having sexual relations. The Church considers that adultery. The Catholic historian Richard Rex, professor of Reformation history at Cambridge, writing in the conservative journal First Things, condemned Francis’s plea for leniency with devastating succinctness: “Such a conclusion would definitively explode any pretension to moral authority on the part of the Church. A church which could be so wrong, for so long, on a matter so fundamental to human welfare and happiness could hardly lay claim to decency, let alone infallibility.”
Another crucial clash is over the causes of clerical sexual abuse. The conservatives declare that homosexuality is to blame. At the outset of his papacy, in 2005, Benedict ordered that gays should be banned from seminaries and the priesthood. Francis has a more tolerant view. When asked about homosexuality during an in-flight press conference in 2013, he famously said, “Who am I to judge?”
That many seminaries have accepted gay men is beyond doubt. The expert on priestly sexuality, the late A. W. Richard Sipe, was a psychotherapist, former priest, and definitive liberal. He was characterized mischievously in the movie Spotlight as “a hippie ex-priest who’s shacking up with a nun.” Sipe reckoned that only about 50 percent of American priests are celibate, that at least a third are gay, and that between 6 and 9 percent of priests are pedophiles.
My Sotto Voce would have me believe that Baltimore’s diocesan seminary, St. Mary’s, scurrilously known as “the Pink Palace,” was the biggest “gay bar” in the state of Maryland. In 2016, Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin stopped sending students to the country’s oldest seminary, St. Patrick’s, Maynooth, after allegations of sexual harassment. It was also reported that trainee priests were using the dating app Grindr to violate their vows of celibacy, and that seminarians who complained were getting kicked out.
I had a personal experience of abuse as a junior seminarian. When I was 17, I was invited by a priest we called Father Rainbow to receive the sacrament of confession—not in the dark confessional box but in the privacy of his room, sitting close together on easy chairs. He offered me a glass of Tia Maria liqueur and a Sweet Afton cigarette, and steered the conversation to the topic of masturbation. He asked if he could inspect my penis, and manipulate it, “just in case” it was malformed and unusually prone to erections. I left the room instantly, unshriven. He was later removed by the bishop—and installed as the chaplain of a prep school for even younger boys.
Nevertheless, there is no evidence to support the conservative view that homosexuality drives sexual abuse. Marie Keenan, author of the authoritative book Child Sexual Abuse & the Catholic Church, wrote that “the combination of data that are now emerging clearly points to the fact that sexual orientation has little or no bearing on sexual abuse of children or on victim selection.” Abusers have targeted both boys and girls, across a spectrum of childhood development: puberty, post-puberty, even infancy.
Liberals lay the blame for abuse within the Church on “clericalism,” a priestly culture that treats clergy as spiritually separate, elevated, entitled, and unaccountable. The process of clericalism, they say, starts in the seminaries, where trainee priests are cloistered off from the world and ultimately infantilized. Francis has said that because of poor training the Church risks creating “little monsters”—priests who are more concerned about their careers than with serving people.
Liberal Catholics want to end the celibacy rule that denies priests the right to marry. They deplore the absence of a woman priesthood. Clericalism, they say, encourages unequal-power relationships that lead to the sexual abuse of minors. When a priest errs, the tendency is to maintain secrecy and suppress any scandal that could further diminish his standing among the laity.
The irony of the traditionalists’ homophobia, according to the liberals, is that it’s often pedaled by closeted clerics whose animosity is impelled by denial and shame. Conservative Catholicism is associated, almost by definition, with old rituals, such as the Latin Mass and a fondness for traditional vestments. In Europe, liberal priests mockingly refer to the Roman collar as “the little préservatif” (French for “condom”) and the cassock as “the big préservatif.”
Benedict, as Pope, went in for ruby-red slip-on loafers and red ermine-trimmed capes. Gorgeous Georg, also nicknamed “Bel Giorgio,” was the inspiration for Donatella Versace’s winter 2007–8 “clergyman” collection. Francis will have none of that. He wears modest black shoes and a white cassock that is said to be made of wool.
Benedict laid the ground for an involved retirement early on. In the early 1990s, John Paul II built a residence in the Vatican gardens, with a chapel attached, to house a community of 12 contemplative nuns who engaged in silent prayer to support his pontificate. Benedict, four months ahead of his resignation, and without signaling the purpose, ordered a renovation of the convent, now cleared of the nuns, to create a suitable Vatican retirement home, office, and chapel—with ample space for his live-in caregiver. People refer to it as a “monastery.” It is more like a palace.
In July 2012, moreover, he appointed the conservative bishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller as the new head of the orthodoxy police, formally known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Benedict must have known, even at this point, that he was planning his resignation and therefore saddling his successor with a hard-line doctrinal watchdog who would be difficult to replace. (Francis replaced Müller last year.) In another striking pre-resignation maneuver, Benedict appointed Gänswein not only to be his personal secretary but also to remain as head of the papal household. This meant that Gänswein would run the new Pope’s apartments and offices in the Apostolic Palace, where Popes have resided and worked for hundreds of years. This would have positioned Gänswein to monitor the conversations and meetings of the new Pope. And since this was one of Benedict’s last big appointments before his resignation, it would be difficult for the new Pope to countermand it without seeming disrespectful.
Francis, in an apparent effort to outsmart Benedict and Gänswein, opted to live not in the papal apartments under Gänswein’s control but instead in Casa Santa Marta, a guesthouse for visiting clergy adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica, where he has a modest apartment and a makeshift office. He allows Gänswein to arrange audiences in the papal apartments with grand figures like royalty and heads of state, but he eats in the self-service cafeteria and gets coffee from a coin-operated machine.
The unassuming lifestyle of Pope Francis, in contrast to the extravagance of some of his cardinals, is legendary. One can only imagine how he felt about the $500,000 that was diverted in 2014 from a Vatican-owned children’s hospital in order to renovate Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone’s 4,300-square-foot apartment and roof terrace in the Vatican. Or the $2.2 million mansion that American archbishop Wilton Gregory built for himself in Atlanta in 2014. (Gregory apologized and the home was later sold.) Or the $43 million in renovations undertaken in 2013 by the German bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, known as the Bishop of Bling. (Tebartz-van Elst resigned in 2014.)
On his election, in 1963, Paul VI penned a note about the unique state of papal solipsism: “This solitary feeling becomes complete and awesome . . . my duty is to plan: decide, assume every responsibility for guiding others, even when it seems illogical and perhaps absurd. And to suffer alone . . . Me and God.”
For Francis, the equation has been more complicated: Me, God, and Benedict. And the intrusion is made all the more painful by the fact that the two Popes couldn’t be more different.
As young men, Benedict and Francis made decisive moves in opposite directions. Both were exceptionally intelligent and rose rapidly within their chosen priestly spheres. Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927 in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria, the son of a police officer. He was obliged to join the Hitler Youth at age 14, but did not attend meetings. He studied for the priesthood and was ordained in 1951. Academic from the outset, his theology was at first progressive. He became a professor at Tübingen University, where the rowdy student demonstrations of 1968 sparked an ideological conversion. He came to believe that youthful rejection of authority leads to chaos and that liberal ideas in the Church would result in religious decline.
In 1981, John Paul II appointed Ratzinger head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—formerly called the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, and before that the Sacred Roman and Universal Inquisition—where he strived to hold the strict line of Catholic teaching. Both John Paul II and Ratzinger were intransigent on sexual morality, which John Paul referred to as “sexology.” Never mind that new generations of young Catholics were living together before marriage, practicing contraception, coming out as gays and lesbians, divorcing and re-marrying. The Pope and his doctrinal enforcer preached the sexual morality of former ages, refusing even to condone the use of condoms for African Catholics with H.I.V. Self-control was their disastrous recommendation. In 2013 alone, AIDS-related illnesses claimed the lives of 1.1 million people in sub-Saharan Africa—74 percent of the global total
During his eight-year papacy, Benedict witnessed with mounting horror what he termed “the filth” in the Curia. Leaked documents exposed financial corruption, blackmail, and money-laundering schemes. News of a Vatican sex ring came to light. In March 2010, a 29-year-old choir member of St. Peter’s Basilica was fired for allegedly procuring male prostitutes, including a seminarian, for a papal gentleman-in-waiting.
In May 2012, Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi published a book titled His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI, which included revealing letters and memos to Pope Benedict, Gänswein, and others. The Apostolic Palace was exposed as a snake pit of envy, scheming, and infighting. There were details of the Pope’s personal finances, including attempted bribes for private papal audiences. In January 2013, Italy’s central bank suspended all bank payments inside Vatican City for the Church’s failure to follow “anti-money-laundering” regulations.
Benedict had commissioned a report on the state of the Curia by three trusted cardinals. It landed on his desk in December 2012, and his resignation followed two months later.
This was the state of affairs that Cardinal Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio inherited on March 13, 2013. When he first appeared on the Vatican balcony, he was wearing just his white cassock: he had declined to wear the traditional scarlet, ermine-trimmed cape, and wore the papal stole for only a few moments. He waved to the crowd and said a simple “Buona sera.” He then asked the throng to pray for him and to sleep well. Later, he went to the hotel where he had been staying to collect his bags and pay the bill. This was a new style of papacy, and the Curia would not like it.
Jorge Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires in 1936, the son of migrants from the Piedmont district of Northwest Italy. His grandmother had come off the boat in the heat of an Argentinean summer wearing a fur coat lined with the cash proceeds from the sale of the family’s Italian home and business. Jorge was a boy during the dictatorship of Juan Perón, a regime that bordered on fascism while regarding itself as socialist. After graduating technical school with a degree in chemistry, Jorge thought of studying medicine. But after a Damascus moment during the sacrament of confession, he entered the Jesuit novitiate, embarking on the 15-year training for the priesthood.
At age 36, he was appointed head of the Jesuits in Argentina. In a reversal of Benedict’s shift from progressive to conservative, Francis started out as a martinet, insisting on correct clerical dress and narrow traditionalist studies in Latin. The “dirty war,” in which the Argentinean government was pitched against dissidents and suspected subversives, changed him. Many priests were imprisoned and killed, and many of his parishioners disappeared. He has been accused of not doing enough to combat the regime, yet his defenders assert that he was living a double life, helping where he could in secret. He became known for his unconventional pastoral style, traveling by public transport, living simply, cooking for himself. He was close to the poor and marginalized. He was seen sitting on a bench counseling prostitutes in the red-light district at night. Asked to describe himself after his election as Pope, he said, “I am a sinner.”
Thanks to the opposing visions of the two Popes, Catholics face a choice between pursuing an ardent orthodoxy, of the kind advocated by Benedict, or accepting a kinder, more humanistic version of their religion, as preached by Francis. As the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor has argued, religious conservatism carries the tendency of all fundamentalisms: to wound and self-harm. Religious liberalism carries the danger of relativism. The contrast between the two Popes’ spiritual approaches is demonstrated by Benedict’s chosen exemplar of clerical excellence: St. Jean Marie Vianney. A priest of the post-French Revolution era, Vianney scourged himself at night until blood ran down the walls. He slept with a rock for a pillow and lived on cold boiled potatoes. He turned his parish into a spiritual bootcamp, banning alcohol and dancing
Francis’s favorite saint is St. Francis of Assisi, with his insistence on caring for the poor and living in harmony with all living creatures. Pope Francis has frequently preached against the destruction of the environment. He has respect, not mere tolerance, for other religions. At the foot-washing ceremony on the first Maundy Thursday Mass of his pontificate, in 2013, Francis included two Muslims and two women, to the horror of his critics.
At the time of his resignation, in 2013, Benedict cited his diminishing strength, but he showed, and continues to show, no sign of incapacity. In fact, at age 91, he looks remarkably spry. In The Last Testament, a 2016 book with journalist Peter Seewald, Benedict said that his doctor had cautioned him against making the long trip to attend World Youth Day in Rio in 2013—hardly a reason to take such a historically momentous step as vacating the papacy. In October 2017, Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, a close confidant of Benedict’s, said in an interview that the status “Pope emeritus” was an invention with no precedent. In recently leaked correspondence, Benedict responded testily to Brandmüller’s comments on November 9, 2017, writing that Popes had retired in the past, albeit rarely: “What were they afterward? Pope Emeritus? Or what else? . . . If you know of a better way, and believe that you can judge the one I choose, please tell me.”
In a subsequent letter to Brandmüller, dated November 23 of that same year, Benedict writes of the “deep-seated pain” that his abdication caused for “many,” which he “can well understand.” So what must he feel now?
What led to Benedict’s resignation? What was he thinking?
I liken him to Thomas à Becket, the 12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury depicted in T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, who encounters four temptations to be a martyr. Perhaps Benedict faced four temptations to resign. First, the temptation to avoid sudden death through overwork and anxiety. Second, to enjoy a brief period of well-earned retirement at age 85, petting his cat and tinkering on the piano. Third, to pass on the task of cleaning up the Vatican’s “filth” to a successor.
The fourth and final temptation is that of the sublime egotist. His recent predecessors, great men such as Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, lie entombed in the vaults under St. Peter’s. None of them lived to see their successors, the judgments passed on their pontificates, who is in and who is out. Was Benedict tempted to resign by an overweening curiosity to witness what would happen after he had left the scene?
Benedict has witnessed Francis attempt to clean up the Vatican’s finances, making the Vatican Bank and its investments accountable. He has seen Francis implement reforms in the Vatican bureaucracy, shutting down whole departments. He would have read the harsh words Francis used in a 2017 Christmas address to the top members of the Vatican, accusing them of creating “cliques and plots,” which are “unbalanced and degenerate,” and of suffering from a “cancer that leads to a self-referential attitude.” Francis said that “reforming Rome is like cleaning the Sphinx of Egypt with a toothbrush.” Now Benedict sees Francis’s increasing isolation from the Curia, while fresh revelations of clerical sex-abuse scandals expand with no signs of abating.
Could he be thinking, The more they dislike him, the more they will love me?
The Times of London recently published a blurred image of Francis walking alone in the Vatican, unaccompanied by security or attendants. Catherine Pepinster, former editor of the authoritative international Catholic weekly The Tablet, declared in The Guardian that the image was symbolic of Francis’s isolation: “Here is a man struggling to find allies or support from the Catholic faithful in his stalled efforts to reform the church and failing attempts to tackle the abuse crisis.” Many liberals, already disappointed with Francis’s tepid treatment of errant priests, were further disillusioned by his recent comments comparing abortion to the act of “hiring a hit man.”
And then there is the question of money. Archbishop Paul Casimir Marcinkus, controversial head of the Vatican Bank for 18 years, once famously quipped, “You can’t run the Church on Hail Marys.” The Catholic treasury is vast but threatened by potential future crises. According to an investigation by the National Catholic Reporter, the U.S. Catholic Church has paid nearly $4 billion in costs related to clerical sex-abuse cases over the past 65 years. And as a result of the scandals, lost memberships and donations have amounted to a prodigious $2.3 billion a year over the past 30 years. By apologizing on behalf of the Church, and openly accepting responsibility for the abuse, Francis risks being sued along with the Vatican on an international scale.
Francis’s travails are severe enough that a few conservative Web sites have joined Archbishop Viganò in calling for him to step down. How could this be brought about?
One tactic would be to argue that Benedict had been unduly pressured to quit, which could make his resignation invalid by canon law, meaning that he is still Pope and Francis is a mere cardinal. Another might be to declare Francis an anti-Pope. Between the 3rd and 15th centuries, there were about 40 anti-Popes—rivals for the papacy who attracted followings without being recognized by Rome. For this stratagem to advance, a conservative group of cardinals and bishops would have to call a conclave and elect a new Pope. Unless Francis resigned voluntarily, there would be two Popes, and if Benedict was still alive, three. Schism would be inevitable.
A 21st-century schism could unleash chaos: litigation and perhaps even violence over money and property ownership, involving churches, schools, seminaries, and even colleges and universities.
Once released from doctrinal constraints, bishops in one liberal area might ordain women, while such priests would be unrecognized in another. Dissident bishops might deny Church teachings on contraception, divorce, abortion, and the supreme authority of the Pope. The great orders of the Church—monks, friars, and nuns—might splinter.
The saddest, most frightening aspect of a schism would be the consequences for clergy, sisterhoods, and the ordinary faithful. It’s easy to imagine splits within parishes and even families over the conservative-liberal divide: conflicts between parish priests and their curates, divided religious communities, parents and siblings taking sides, all aided and abetted by social media.
It is tempting to lay the blame for this impasse on Benedict, the rigid moralist and advocate for a smaller, purer Church. He is the one who resigned without leaving the scene, and he is the one whose very existence undermines Francis’s authority. But there is reason to believe that Francis has his own reasons for wanting to provoke a crisis.
From the very first days of his papacy, Francis has spoken in ways that suggest he is seeking, prompting, even urging on, a massive change within the authoritarian, dogmatic, stubbornly unchanging Church that has shown its bitter fruits in the thousands of abused young faithful across the Catholic world. A drastic purging of the obstinate entitlements, the secrecy, the unaccountability, the wealth, the self-satisfied traditionalism, could be the necessary condition of making a fresh start.
