UNITED STATES
Boston Globe
James Carroll
For most people, the reckoning with the infirmities of advanced old age is a poignant but mundane part of the life cycle. Not so for popes, as this week’s global astonishment suggests, for they are thought to hover over human affairs just as the church itself does. “The church is distinguished from civil society,” Pope Leo XIII solemnly declared in 1885. “It is a society chartered as of divine right, perfect in its nature.” This perfect society, Leo wrote, cannot “be looked on as inferior to the civil power, or in any manner dependent upon it.” This manifesto hints at the larger significance of Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to resign his office: If a pope can come and go so easily, then how is the church different from a country or a company?
After Benedict’s surprise announcement Monday, much has been made of the nearly 600 years since the last papal “resignation” — a misnomer, since Pope Gregory XII, one of multiple claimants to the Chair of Peter, was, in effect, fired by a reforming church council. But for far longer than that the papacy has been the linchpin of the Catholic Church’s claim to transcendence. That popes are human has always been clear (St. Peter, the first pope, denied Christ three times), but popes have also been living signs of the sacred. In modern times, the boundary separating the Roman pontiff from all other humans is reinforced by his mode of dressing, his rhetorical style, and his isolated splendor. He is himself a sacrament of what “distinguishes” Catholicism, in Pope Leo’s word. …
From his point of view, Benedict has seen only a solemn obligation to defend the church, and that explains his failure to address the abuse scandal forthrightly. It also explains his protection of the cover-up bishops, beginning with Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law. In May 2001, seven months before the Globe first revealed Law’s enabling of the Rev. John J. Geoghan, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a letter to every Catholic bishop defining crimes “perpetrated with a minor by a cleric” as falling under his jurisdiction — a mandate widely interpreted as requiring strict confidentiality and cutting civil authorities out. “Cases of this kind,” Ratzinger declared, “are subject to the pontifical secret.” When asked about the letter upon Ratzinger’s election as pope, a Vatican spokesman said, “This is not a public document, so we would not talk about it.”
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