A brilliant theologian with a very conservative reputation, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died this Saturday, December 31, at the age of 95, in the monastery in the Vatican gardens where he had retired. Born in 1927, Joseph Ratzinger taught theology for 25 years in Germany, before being appointed Archbishop of Munich. He then became the strict guardian of the dogma of the Church for another quarter of a century, in Rome, at the head of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith.
The one who succeeded Pope John Paul II for eight years (2005-2013) took the whole world by surprise in 2013 by renouncing his functions, unheard of in modern history. For the journalist and writer Bernard Lecomte, author of All the secrets of the Vatican (Perrin, 2019) and biographer of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, this revolutionary act came to close a pontificate marked by multiple crises.
L’Express: What legacy did Benedict XVI leave after his eight years of pontificate?
Bernard Lecomte: Benedict XVI was a pope of transition between two periods of the Church. The period which ends with him is that embodied in a hair-raising way for 27 years by John-Paul II, that of the Church of the Vatican Council II, centered on Europe. It is no coincidence that today we speak of the “John Paul II generation”: the Polish pope left a deep mark on his era. However, the period which begins after Benedict XVI is a Church carried towards new horizons, managed by a pope from the South, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, less of a centrist European. The latter invites Christians “to no longer keep their steeple and to go to the peripheries of the Church, to the peripheries of the world”. We feel the swing. Joseph Ratzinger was his predecessor’s main adviser, and probably the man closest to him. Let us not forget that at the time he presided over the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, the policeman of the Church which sees to it that it remains faithful to its dogma and its doctrine, hence its conservative reputation.
This reputation is far from having achieved unanimity within the Church…
Yes, she almost hurt her election. In 2005, many cardinals thought Ratzinger was too conservative. He was, however, one of the greatest theologians of his time and probably the most apt man, despite his conservative inspirations and his advanced age – he was already 78 – to put the Church back on its feet after the hair-raising pontificate. of John Paul II. In reality, when he was elected, there was continuity. It was not at all a conservative break, as some say. Basically, Benedict XVI has acted like John Paul II.
His first trip to WYD in Cologne (the World Youth Days invented by John Paul II to renew the youth of the world in the Catholic Church after May 68, editor’s note) is the symbol of this. The current passes, the young people make him a very good reception. On the other hand, on a personal level, he was the opposite of the Polish pope: he was shy, liked neither crowds nor travel… He was a man of reflection, a theologian, an intellectual, whereas Jean-Paul He was a political pope and a prophet.
His reactionary positions on abortion, homosexuality or even euthanasia have earned him numerous criticisms.
He embodied a real split in the Church of the world between those who wanted to go further than the Second Vatican Council, who are called a little hastily the progressives, and those who, on the contrary, refused the developments of the Council, who are also a little hastily called the fundamentalists. Benedict XVI has always been convinced of the unity of the Church. He fought to defend it, to the point of wanting to reintegrate the fundamentalists, those who had caused the Lefebvrist schism of 1988. The unfortunate man contributed to this opposition within the Church. Today we see the consequences. Instead of closing, the gap has widened between the Church heir to the Council of John Paul II and Benedict XVI and the one that has completely refused to move forward. Pope Francis is also struggling to manage it. Benedict XVI is the last to have tried to bring these people together, before finally admitting that the task was impossible.
In addition to this rupture, his pontificate was plagued by numerous crises within the Church…
He said it himself: he didn’t want to be pope, he wasn’t made for it. He was quite overwhelmed by the bureaucracy of the Church, by the intrigues within the Roman Curia (in 2012 a leak of confidential documents, codenamed “Vatileaks”, orchestrated by his butler, exposed the intrigues and the absence of financial rigor from the Vatican government, editor’s note) and by the technological and media evolution of the contemporary world. He was therefore caught up in a series of scandals and affairs that both weighed him down and exhausted him. Weighed down because his credibility was in question, and exhausted because this pope was already old. He will stun the whole world in 2013, when he announces his resignation.
He is the first pope in modern history to make this choice. What was the magnitude of this decision?
The paradox is that this conservative, even reactionary pope (for example, he waited until 2010 to admit the idea that the condom was useful in the fight against AIDS), will provoke a revolution in the Church by resigning. He will change the course of this tradition which wanted a pope to remain in office until his death. Benedict XVI put forward a problem: maybe tomorrow there will be a pope aged 110 or 115 thanks to advances in medicine. However, can such an old pope lead a community of 1.3 billion faithful? Obviously, the answer is no. This conservative pope will therefore have made a rather astonishing revolution in the Church by recognizing the fact that a pope is a man like the others, a leader who must be able to govern and therefore to resign. You will see that all the popes of tomorrow will resign when they feel their strength is waning.
In early 2022, a report on sexual abuse in the Church commissioned by the diocese of Munich, of which Benedict XVI was archbishop between 1977 and 1982, implicates the pope emeritus. What can be said of his handling of pedophilia scandals in the Church?
Benedict XVI saved the Church from a much greater crisis than the one it is experiencing today. He had an extremely positive place in this story. In 2001, when he was still called Joseph Ratzinger, he took up the file of pedophilia in hand against the advice of the other cardinals of the Curia. It was he who convinced John Paul II to take up the case, and it is thanks to him that the Church centralized all the files. In the last years of John Paul II, Benedict XVI accumulated more than 6,000 files on his office as prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith. Then when he became pope, he led the fight against pedophilia.
In February 2012, Benedict XVI convened a very large international symposium in Rome to try to understand what pedophilia was. He summoned psychiatrists from all over the world to answer this question: can pedophilia be cured? When he resigned in 2013, the first steps were taken. Looks like we’ve pretty much settled this case. Except that an actor who had not yet revealed himself will soon appear and who will tip the case into another dimension: the victims. It is from the Barbarin affair, the film by François Ozon and the handling of the subject by the victims of pedophile priests, that the affair will rebound and that Pope Francis will in turn have to manage this file. tragic.
What link did Pope Benedict XVI keep with the Church after his resignation?
He innovated boldly. His resignation was such a shock that no one dared contradict him when he said he wanted to remain pope emeritus. He therefore remained pope emeritus, that is to say, he remained in Vatican City, in its gardens. He kept an alb and a pope’s skullcap. We continued to call him Benedict XVI. This created an extremely embarrassing ambiguity to the point where one sometimes wondered if there was no pope, which is absolutely contrary to the tradition of the Church which, since Saint Peter, is only conceived with a single pope at its head. This idea was therefore very embarrassing because logic and tradition would have wanted Benedict XVI to once again become the bishop emeritus of Rome, and to take back his name Ratzinger.
In your opinion, what impact can the announcement of his death have in the Catholic world, and more broadly in the whole world?
The non-Christian world doesn’t care at all. The Catholic world, that is to say the southern hemisphere – 80% of Catholics today live in the southern hemisphere, in particular Brazil, Nigeria, the Congo and the Philippines – will be moved by the death of this sympathetic and timid old pope. Finally, the world of our old European Catholic countries will probably welcome the disappearance of its last true representative. Because I really believe that if we look at history, there is only one conclusion to draw: Benedict XVI will have been the last European pope.