VATICAN CITY
The New Yorker
BY ALEXANDER STILLE
en you walk in the back entrance to Vatican City, you quickly realize what a small world the center of the Catholic Church is. The hundred-and-nine-acre complex, built largely during the Renaissance, is the spiritual and administrative headquarters of a global institution with 1.2 billion followers. The first building you see is the Santa Marta guesthouse, where Pope Francis lives and works, in a three-room space of some seven hundred square feet, rather than in the traditional, and grander, papal apartments, in the Apostolic Palace.
As you turn a corner, there is a yellow building that houses several cardinals. On one floor is Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was Secretary of State under Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. Cardinal Paolo Sardi, considered to be one of Bertone’s political adversaries within the Curia, occupies the floor just below. A short stroll through the Vatican gardens takes you to the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, where Benedict XVI now lives. When he resigned, in 2013, he flew off in a helicopter to begin a life of retreat and prayer, and many might have thought that he had retired to a monastery somewhere in his native Germany. But he is right here. Just outside the Vatican walls, in Piazza della Città Leonina, there is another apartment building filled with cardinals. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Benedict’s successor as the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, lives in the apartment occupied by Benedict when he was merely Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and above him is Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri.
The neighbors have been feuding: Müller is a defender of doctrinal orthodoxy, while the reform-minded Baldisseri has presided over the Synod on the Family, a council meeting initiated by Francis last year, at which Church progressives have advocated greater flexibility on such matters as the treatment of divorced couples and homosexuals. There has been an ongoing dispute—now, apparently, resolved—over the noise level in the building: Baldisseri, an accomplished pianist, likes to practice after lunch, when Müller takes a nap.
In this compacted world, close friendships, intense rivalries, clashing ambitions, and personal enmities all flourish. Perhaps because members of the Church rarely criticize the Pope publicly, personal differences often take the form of backbiting, corridor gossip, and behind-the-scenes intrigue. It is in this peculiar setting that Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, finds himself attempting to “shake up” the Catholic Church, as he likes to say. Unlike most of his predecessors, he had spent little time in Rome before his election, on March 13, 2013. …
The scandal of sexual abuse in the clergy, which had built up over decades under Benedict’s predecessors, reached its full force under his pontificate, creating the overwhelming impression of a Pope who had lost control of the machinery of government. The year 2010, remembered as the annus horribilis, was dominated by ghastly revelations of molestation and rape. And although Benedict had done far more than previous Popes to discipline priestly abuse, he nevertheless took most of the blame. Then, in 2012, the scandal known as VatiLeaks unfolded: reams of personal documents—letters to the Pope and other high officials at the Vatican—began appearing in the Italian press, revealing a world of financial corruption and vicious infighting. The leaker turned out to be the Pope’s personal attendant, Paolo Gabriele, who claimed that he wanted to sound an alarm and make the Pope aware of the festering problems around him.
As the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Benedict had dealt with the sexual-abuse scandal by doing away with the system of piecemeal responses by individual bishops. In 2004, he pushed for an investigation of Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, the charismatic Mexican who headed the religious order Legionaries of Christ. There is incontrovertible evidence that Maciel abused numerous young seminarians in the course of several decades and fathered several children by women he maintained relationships with. According to an in-depth investigation by Jason Berry, in the National Catholic Reporter, Maciel was a wizard at raising money and recruiting seminarians; he was a favorite of John Paul II and of Angelo Sodano, his Secretary of State. Sodano allegedly deflected Ratzinger from completion of the Maciel investigation, and when the Legion was building a university campus in Rome one of Sodano’s nephews, an engineer, was hired to work on the project.
Benedict, early in his papacy, removed Maciel from the Legion and imposed on him “a reserved life of penitence and prayer, relinquishing any form of public ministry.” Although people at the Vatican are reluctant to criticize John Paul II, whose name was often followed by cries of Santo subito (“Sainthood now”), they quietly point out that during the final years of his papacy, when, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he was severely incapacitated, many things went wrong. Thus, some of the scandals that came to light during Benedict’s papacy were inherited from the previous administration.
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