The first pope to resign was Celestine V,
born Pietro Da Morrone, who was living the life of a pious hermit when he was
elevated to the papacy in 1294, in his 80s, to break a two-year deadlock in the
College of Cardinals. Feeling overmastered by the job, he soon resigned in the
expectation that he could return to his monastic existence. Instead, he was
imprisoned by his successor, Boniface VIII, who feared that some rival faction
might make Celestine an antipope.
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The former pontiff died after about a year
in captivity; his successor, one of the most ambitious of medieval popes,
eventually fell into a disastrous struggle with the king of France that ended
with Boniface temporarily imprisoned in the weeks before his death.
The strange afterlife of Pope Benedict
XVI’s pontificate, which ended with his death Saturday at 95, was not quite so
wild or dramatic. But like Celestine’s experience it was not exactly an
advertisement for papal resignations. For almost a decade the former Joseph
Ratzinger played a peculiar and poorly defined role as “pope emeritus”, neither
fully secluded nor formally active, even as his successor, Francis, sought to
dismantle important parts of his work.
For almost a decade the former Joseph Ratzinger played a peculiar and poorly defined role as “pope emeritus”, neither fully secluded nor formally active
The former pope promised to live out his
days “hidden from the world” and presumably expected to see his legacy secure.
Instead, he conducted a post-papacy of ambiguous gestures in response to a
Vatican that had been delivered, by the mysteries of God’s providence, to his
longtime foes.
Looking back to what I wrote upon his
retirement in 2013 is a strange experience, because much of that analysis
ceased to apply within just a few years of the resignation. At the time, I
argued that Benedict, as pope and earlier as John Paul II’s doctrinal chief,
had worked tirelessly to prevent the ruptures that followed the Second Vatican
Council — the collapse of Mass attendance in the Western world, the wars over
liturgy and sexual ethics — from breaking up the Roman Catholic Church.
A great theologian, part of the brilliant
generation that advised the bishops at Vatican II, he put his brilliance in the
service of continuity — offering a sustained reassertion of the church’s core
beliefs, a defense of traditional piety against academic revisionists, a lifelong
argument that the Second Vatican Council had not simply overwritten the church
that existed for centuries before.
The Francis era has certainly returned the church to a state of open theological division. The liberal churches of northern Europe, with the German bishops in the lead, are pushing hard for revolution
This work made him an intellectual
inspiration to many Catholics, especially converts seeking a synthesis of
reason and supernatural religion; the influence of his writings — from his
“Introduction to Christianity” to the trilogy on the life of Jesus that he
wrote as pope — is likely to outlast the celebrity of both John Paul and
Francis. It also made him many enemies, especially among liberal Catholics who
felt that his enforcement of orthodoxy was punitive, and that the church needed
ongoing revolution to fulfill God’s purposes in the modern world.
But until his resignation, it appeared that
his quest for stability and continuity had provisionally succeeded, that he was
handing on a real synthesis (certain tensions and difficulties notwithstanding)
of the church before and after Vatican II, and that his efforts had preserved
Catholicism from the schisms that divided other global Christian communities
(Anglican, Methodist) after the social revolutions of the 1960s.
What the resignation yielded, though, was
not what Benedict had presumably expected. The assembled cardinals chose an
unpredictable outsider as his successor rather than another conservative. And
the Francis pontificate was quickly defined by a sweeping push for
liberalization, a striking shift of personnel and policy and a reopening of
many of the 1970s-era debates that Benedict had tried to settle.
This agenda has not yet succeeded in
achieving the church of liberal Catholicism’s desires — again and again,
Francis has seemed to push toward an explicit change on some controverted
issue, from Communion for the divorced and remarried to the rule of priestly
celibacy, only to choose a more ambiguous course instead. And in certain cases,
as part of his strange post-retirement role, Benedict made intellectual
interventions that seemed to operate as warnings to his successor not to go too
far.
But the Francis era has certainly returned
the church to a state of open theological division. The liberal churches of
northern Europe, with the German bishops in the lead, are pushing hard for
revolution — meaning progressive positions on sexual issues, lay leadership,
and intercommunion with Protestants.
The vision of continuity and stability that Benedict championed is being pulled apart from both sides — from the left by the idea of Vatican II as a continuing revolution… and from the right by a mixture of pessimism and paranoia
The more conservative hierarchy in the US
is regarded by some of Francis’ allies as dangerously rebellious, accused of
tolerating a spirit of rupture on the right. And after all of Benedict’s
efforts to reconcile the church’s traditionalists with Vatican II, to create
space for the Latin Mass within the modern church, Francis has reimposed stark
restrictions on its celebration, deliberately pushing traditionalists back
toward schism.
Under these pressures, the vision of
continuity and stability that Benedict championed is being pulled apart from
both sides — from the left by the idea of Vatican II as a continuing
revolution, a council whose work will never end, and from the right by a
mixture of pessimism and paranoia, a very unconservative alienation from papal
authority whose endpoint is difficult to foresee.
It seems very hard for any admirer of
Benedict to look at the events that followed his resignation and see a
vindication of his decision to retire, a simple working out of the Holy Spirit’s
will.
At the same time, his full legacy will be
felt across decades or even centuries. All we can say from his strange years as
pope emeritus is that the way that Pope Benedict XVI sought to govern the
church, to hold it together institutionally and theologically, has been
challenged and partly reversed.
But Joseph Ratzinger the scholar and
theologian and writer, Joseph Ratzinger the champion of a certain idea of
Catholic Christianity — well, he has only just begun to fight.
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