VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast
Barbie Latza Nadeau
Pope Benedict is destroying the diary he kept as pope, but not before releasing his tell-all memoir.
ROME—It’s a rare, and indeed, singularly unique opportunity to read what a pope really thinks of the job after it has finished. Pontificates generally end in funerals, not retirements. But in the case of Pope Benedict XVI, who spectacularly retired in 2013, we will soon get that rare glimpse of what it’s really like to be pope when his memoir, Benedict XVI: The Last Conversations, is published on September 9 in Italy and Germany.
Benedict, who has been living in relative seclusion at a convent inside Vatican City, has only been seen a handful of times since stepping out of the limelight. But he has apparently been incredibly busy working with German journalist Peter Seewald on his side of history. Italian national daily Corriere Della Sera obtained rights to excerpt the book, which they announced in a full page spread in Friday’s edition called “My Years as Pope.”
Among what will be the most anticipated nuggets in the memoir are Benedict’s struggle with what he refers to as a “powerful gay lobby” of four or five key people who did all they could to influence key decision makers inside the Roman Curia, according to the paper. The existence of a gay lobby is not surprising since Francis admitted as much when he took the reigns of the Roman Catholic Church in March 2013. But what’s extraordinary is the admission by a pope how much power they truly had.
Benedict, who retired amid the Vatileaks scandal during which his butler was convicted of stealing papers from his desk, apparently writes in great detail how he struggled to “break up the group” but stops short of blaming them for his landmark decision to retire, which he says he did out of sheer exhaustion and his own admission that he was not such a good manager, or, as he puts it, lacked “resoluteness in governing.”
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