the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt twenty-five)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Francis went ahead with the border Mass, drawing almost two hundred thousand worshippers, and said nothing about Trump. On the flight home, however, he was sharply critical of the Republican candidate: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”

The next day, Trump counterattacked. It was “disgraceful” for the pope to question his religious faith, said Trump, who was raised a Presbyterian. He insisted Francis did not speak for most Americans of the faith: “The Catholics love me.” Several conservative evangelical leaders who were Trump backers said it was the pope, not their candidate, who crossed a line by meddling in American politics. “Jesus never intended to give instructions to political leaders on how to run a country,” said Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, an evangelical school in Virginia.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt twenty-four)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

The furor came at a time when enemies outside the church—far-right, xenophobic populist politicians who kept winning elections around the world—were organizing against Francis. None would prove more menacing than Donald Trump, who made Francis a target on the campaign trail as he sought the presidency in 2016.

Anti-Catholic bigotry had been common in American politics since the country’s founding, but there had never been anything like the 2016 campaign, when a leading presidential candidate and the bishop of Rome openly traded insults. Their battle began in February, when the pope was on a pilgrimage to Mexico and organized a Mass on the banks of the Rio Grande, along the US border. He intended to show solidarity with migrants attempting to cross illegally into the United States. Trump, whose call to build a border wall was a centerpiece of his campaign, denounced Francis on television: “I think the pope is a very political person. I don’t think he understands the danger of the open border that we have with Mexico.” The Mexican government was “using the pope as a pawn.” (The audaciousness of Trump’s attack on the pope was seen as shocking, although he had said uglier things about Benedict. “He should just give up and die,” Trump said of Benedict in a radio interview in 2013. “He looks so bad.”)

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt twenty-three)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

The remainder of Benedict’s papacy was consumed by the sex-abuse crisis and by his inability or unwillingness to grapple with it. For many Catholics, especially in Germany, the disclosures tying him personally to the cover-up of abuse cases had shattered his credibility. He was reminded constantly of the Vatican’s historic failure to protect children from pedophiles. In 2010, the Dutch hierarchy announced that a decade-long investigation had determined that as many as twenty thousand Dutch children had been abused by priests and other church workers since the 1940s. The following month, a Dutch newspaper revealed that ten boys were castrated in the 1950s on orders from Dutch bishops, either to “cure” their homosexuality or as punishment for accusing clergymen of molesting them. The castrations were carried out in church-affiliated psychiatric hospitals.

With no end to the crisis in sight, Benedict appeared increasingly frantic to find others to blame, including the devil. In a widely mocked speech in 2010 the pope said Satan was ultimately responsible for “the abuse of the little ones.”

The final undoing of his papacy began in March 2012, when he made a three-day pilgrimage to Mexico. The trip was plagued by constant reminders of the scandals of Father Maciel. Days ahead of the pope’s arrival, a Mexican magazine published excerpts of a new book by one of Maciel’s victims, a former Legion priest who said he could document how Benedict had ignored evidence of Maciel’s pedophilia. Benedict, who regularly met with victims of priestly sex abuse in his travels, refused to do so in Mexico.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt twenty-two)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

After returning to Rome, Sodano took cash gifts from a third prominent churchman, another successful fundraiser, who was also a pedophile: Cardinal McCarrick. In 2001, McCarrick established a personal charity fund that over the years distributed more than $6 million. The “Archbishop’s Special Fund” was separate from the Papal Foundation, the much larger charity McCarrick founded in the 1980s. Years later, ledgers from his “Special Fund” were leaked to news organizations and identified McCarrick’s donors. His largest contributor was a federal appeals court judge in New Jersey, Maryanne Trump Barry, sister of future US president Donald Trump. The judge, a convert to Catholicism, donated at least $450,000 to the charity.

McCarrick knew he had a reputation as a man with easy access to cash: “I think some people thought I was a millionaire or something.” Much of the money from his personal fund went to legitimate charities, but at least $600,000 went directly to individual churchmen in Rome. John Paul II received at least $91,000 over the years, the ledgers show, while Sodano received at least $19,000.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt twenty-one)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

By 2002, the 1.8 million members of the Catholic archdiocese of Boston had grown used to regular scandals involving pedophile priests. None was more horrifying than that of Father James Porter of Fall River, Massachusetts, who pleaded guilty in 1993 to molesting dozens of children and was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Prosecutors revealed that local bishops had known since the 1960s that Porter was a pedophile yet, rather than defrock him, tried to hide his crimes by moving him from parish to parish. At the time of the guilty plea, Cardinal Law of Boston decried the “media circus” in the case and called for heavenly retribution against news organizations, especially The Boston Globe, the city’s largest newspaper. “By all means, we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.”

A decade later, frustration over the church’s failure to grapple with the crisis of clerical sexual abuse finally boiled over around the world, beginning in Boston. In January 2002, the Globe published the first of a series of articles, based on court documents, that revealed how Cardinal Law and his deputies covered up for dozens of child-molesting clerics in the Boston archdiocese, shielding them from law enforcement. The records showed that Law routinely tried to comfort pedophile priests and silence their victims. Several articles centered on the cardinal’s effort to protect Father John Geoghan, who had a well-documented history, inside the church, of child rape. The documents showed that shortly after Law arrived in Boston in 1984, he granted Geoghan’s request to move to a new parish, even though the cardinal knew Geoghan was a sexual predator who had been removed from other parishes for child abuse. In one earlier assignment, Geoghan acknowledged molesting seven boys from a single family. Archdiocese records showed that Law often sent bizarrely affectionate notes to Geoghan and other priests who admitted their crimes. In 1996, the cardinal told Geoghan, who by then had already confessed to molesting scores of boys, that “yours has been an effective life of ministry,” even if it had been “sadly impaired by illness.” In 2003, Geoghan was murdered in prison after his conviction the year before for molesting a ten-year-old boy.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt twenty)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

In 1998, Ratzinger launched an investigation that, more than any other in his years at the congregation, would outrage the world’s theologians with its heartlessness. It targeted a revered professor at the Gregorian, Father Jacques Dupuis, a seventy-four-year-old Belgian Jesuit who had spent much of his career working with refugees in India. He had just published a book, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, in which he argued that since God existed before Jesus, there would be evidence of God in other, even more ancient religions. He urged Catholic missionaries in the developing world to focus less on converting souls and more on dialogue. He cited Vatican II documents championing the idea that other religions had wisdom to offer Christians.

In a review, O’Collins, Dupuis’s colleague at the Gregorian, described the book as a “genuinely magisterial work” that reflected the “profound shift in the Christian understanding of other religions.” Cardinal König of Vienna, who had taken on several Vatican assignments in retirement to promote interfaith dialogue, declared the book a “masterwork” that reflected views he often heard from John Paul. The Catholic Press Association of the US named it Book of the Year.

Ratzinger, however, condemned the book—and was prepared to destroy Dupuis’s career. The congregation opened its investigation of Dupuis in the spring of 1998. He knew nothing about it until October, when Father Kolvenbach, as head of the Jesuits, received a nine-page letter from Ratzinger that cited “errors and doctrinal ambiguities” so serious that the book “cannot be safely taught.” The letter contained a list of purported examples of heresy throughout the book, along with a demand that its author respond in writing.

Dupuis, chronically ill throughout his life, was so physically sickened by news of the letter that he immediately checked himself into a hospital. He looked back on it as the day his life ended. “The joy of living has gone,” he said. “I feel like a broken man who can never fully recover from the suspicion that the church—a church which I love and have served during my whole life—has thrust upon me.”

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt nineteen)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Some of Ratzinger’s friends guessed that 1992 was the year he began seriously to consider the idea he would succeed John Paul. In July, the pope, then seventy-two, underwent radical abdominal surgery. A large, benign tumor on his colon was removed, along with his gallbladder, and his surgeons predicted the recovery would be long and painful. That summer, the pope’s health problems prompted major international news organizations, for the first time since the assassination attempt in 1981, to speculate in earnest about his successor.

Over the years, Ratzinger waved away speculation that he might be a candidate for the papacy, although friends knew he was offended when his name was left off the popular lists of those considered papabile. He recognized that some cardinals would strongly oppose his candidacy because of his conservative views, and others would want a younger candidate. He turned sixty-five in 1992 and had his own serious health problems. He suffered a stroke the year before and, as a result, could effectively see out of only one eye. Although he had never admitted it publicly, he had heart surgery years earlier to install a pacemaker. He said he cited his failing health when he asked the pope in 1991 for permission to retire: “I said I can’t do this anymore. His response was ‘no.’ ”

It was at about this time that Ratzinger took steps to soften his public image. His insistence that he ignored his critics had never really been true. He was stung by the insulting nicknames that newspapers continued to apply to him, especially in Germany. “The Panzer-Kardinal nickname really got to him,” said Peter Seewald, a German journalist who became central to Ratzinger’s campaign to polish his image. The cardinal was also alarmed by how often newspaper and magazine profiles noted his boyhood membership in the Hitler Youth and his service in the German army, as if the Nazis had given him any choice.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt eighteen)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Sipe had concluded that the church’s determined portrayal of the priesthood as a brotherhood of men who readily accepted celibacy had always been a myth. He estimated at least half of all American priests were sexually active during some or all of their careers. At any given time, he said, at least 20 percent of the nation’s priests were engaged in a sexual relationship with a woman. He believed another 20 percent were gay or inclined to homosexuality, and that at least half of them were having sex with other men. Only 2 percent of the priests he studied achieved happy, celibate lifestyles. His most frightening finding was that 4 to 6 percent of the nation’s priests were pedophiles and molested children, mostly boys. Because the church had never dealt honestly with the problem, the priesthood had been turned into a perverse “secret society” in which these men kept each other’s secrets, even if that meant covering up for sexual predators.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt seventeen)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Both Curran and Häring said later they were astonished when Ratzinger argued that, whatever the “fantasies” of some church scholars, the Vatican had the right to demand obedience from them on all controversial teachings, even those that had never been declared infallible. There could be no dissent on any significant doctrinal matter in which John Paul—and by extension, Ratzinger—had expressed an opinion. At heart, that meant the end of free speech for the world’s Catholic theologians.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt sixteen)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

As Ratzinger’s power grew, so did his arrogance. Not everyone saw it. His closest deputies insisted he was always civil and open to debate. For churchmen who worked outside the congregation, however, the cardinal was increasingly high-handed. For years, he had used harsh rhetoric in defending church doctrine, and now it was matched by insensitivity and plain nastiness with people, especially in his written communications. (He almost always wrote to the congregation’s targets instead of dealing with them face-to-face, even those who worked a few blocks away in Rome.) A respected American journalist, John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, the author of three authoritative biographies of Ratzinger, attested to the cardinal’s increasingly obvious “mean streak.” He proved himself “capable of being petty when his full emotional energies were engaged in a fight.”

Ratzinger’s critics thought there was an early display of that in 1983, when he abruptly rescinded a policy—approved a decade earlier by Paul VI, at the urging of American bishops—that allowed priests who were recovering alcoholics to use unfermented grape juice instead of wine during Holy Communion. Ratzinger was adamant that Paul’s policy could not stand, since the Gospels state explicitly that the apostles drank wine at the Last Supper. American bishops protested, warning it might condemn many priests to return to their addiction. After more than a year, Ratzinger revised his order, but only in part. He agreed to allow alcoholic priests to use grape juice but required them to apply to the congregation for permission. It was a bureaucratic process that many priests resisted since it meant creating a detailed paper record in Rome of their alcoholism.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt fifteen)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Ratzinger offered a similar defense. He said that for years after his arrival in Rome, he did not suspect that clerical sex abuse was a significant problem anywhere. When it erupted into a global scandal in 2002, Ratzinger insisted that it came as “an unprecedented shock.”

He claimed the events of 2002, when news organizations led by The Boston Globe exposed the cover-up of thousands of child-molestation cases around the world, stunned him because he had never suspected that “so much filth, darkening and soiling everything,” existed within the priesthood.

As a blizzard of once-secret Vatican records would later prove, however, his claim of “shock” never made any sense. Evidence from his own files showed that within weeks of arriving in Rome in January 1982, he received detailed briefings about priestly sex-abuse cases in several countries, many involving the molestation of children. From public news reports alone, he should have been aware of hundreds of cases in the early 1980s, especially in the United States.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt fourteen)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Ratzinger faced one important, possibly insurmountable obstacle in his campaign against liberation theology: the pope he served. During the cardinal’s first year in Rome, John Paul kept waffling on the subject, offering comments one day in support of the movement, only to back away the next. In March 1983, however, Ratzinger had reason to hope that the pope’s indecision was finally over. John Paul had just returned from a grueling seven-nation tour of Central America, which included a stop in El Salvador, where he made amends for his initial, callous response to Archbishop Romero’s murder. He prayed over Romero’s tomb and offered seemingly heartfelt praise for “a pastor who always tended to his flock.” His public events drew a joyous outpouring from hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans. That was in stark contrast to the hostile reception he had received two days earlier in neighboring Nicaragua. The leaders of that country’s newly installed socialist government, former leftist guerrillas who called themselves Sandinistas, came to power in 1979 after overthrowing the corrupt dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled over Nicaragua for four decades. Somoza’s ouster had been widely celebrated by the public, and the senior ranks of the Sandinista government included four priests who were champions of liberation theology. One of them, Father Ernesto Cardenal, the culture minister, was a proud, self-declared Communist. “Christ led me to Marx,” he said. The decision by priests to accept government appointments infuriated Nicaragua’s conservative church hierarchy. It also alarmed the United States, which protested to the Vatican that Nicaragua was an example of liberation theology run amok. The Reagan administration was then arming right-wing anti-Sandinista insurgents known as contras.

There was a sour expression on the pope’s face throughout his twelve-hour stay in Nicaragua. He did not hide his agitation during a welcoming ceremony in which Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega announced that “Christian patriots” were central to “the popular Sandinista revolution.” At a Mass for hundreds of thousands in the capital city of Managua, the pope was heckled by Sandinista supporters chanting “Power to the people!” and “Liberation!” Infuriated, he yelled back, “Silence!” At a reception line with cabinet ministers, Cardenal dropped to one knee to kiss the pope’s ring. John Paul pulled his hand back and wagged his finger at the priest, telling him to “straighten out your position with the church,” a public scolding caught on camera.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt thirteen)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

The end of the Dirty War, and the junta’s collapse, began in earnest on April 2, 1982, when the military launched an ill-fated invasion of the Falkland Islands, a tiny archipelago in the South Atlantic about three hundred miles off Argentina’s eastern coast. A British territory since the early nineteenth century, it had a population of about eighteen hundred English-speaking residents. Argentina had always claimed sovereignty and knew the islands by a different name, the Malvinas. The invasion by ten thousand Argentine troops was a poorly disguised effort to divert attention from the country’s disastrous economy and civil unrest. It quickly turned into humiliation. The British launched a naval armada to retake the islands and seized them again in June, at a cost of 907 lives—649 of them Argentine soldiers and sailors.

The invasion initially had popular support among Argentines, including church leaders. Bergoglio praised soldiers who died in “the Malvinas war”—he would never call them the Falklands—as heroes: “They went out to defend the fatherland, to claim as theirs what had been usurped.” The invasion led to an abrupt decision by John Paul II to visit Argentina in June; it was the first pilgrimage to the country by any sitting pope. The awkward two-day trip, which came in the final days of fighting, was an attempt by the Vatican to appear even-handed. Aides said the pope went largely because he did not want to cancel a long-planned visit that same month to Britain. On arrival in Buenos Aires, he called for negotiations to end the war, a plea that came too late, since Britain was only days from victory. Still, the junta was eager to exploit the visit to suggest a papal endorsement, and military leaders were delighted when the pope said virtually nothing during his time there about human rights.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt twelve)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

There was always one glaring exception to the pope’s demand that the church stay out of politics: Poland. In August, weeks after the pope returned from Brazil, Poland was seized by labor unrest tied to the Communist government’s decision to raise food prices. Workers went on strike in the shipyard in Gdansk. The strike committee was led by a thirty-seven-year-old electrician, Lech Wałęsa, who went on to lead a national opposition movement. The city’s archbishop announced his support for the workers, whose rallies were often held at a shrine they created at the front of the shipyard gates, covered with images of the Virgin Mary and photos of John Paul. The strike was immediately recognized within Poland as not simply a challenge to the shipyard managers but, as it grew, a threat to the survival of the Communist government in Warsaw.

The pope would not wait long to take a side. On August 20, during an address in St. Peter’s Square, he noticed a group of several hundred Poles. Many were waving Polish flags, while others carried banners expressing support for the shipyard workers. Unexpectedly, the pope burst into song in Polish—an emotional hymn often heard at the Gdansk protests. Many Poles in the crowd wept openly and began to sing along. After the last verse, the pope called for those in the square to join him in a “prayer for my homeland.”

Days later, he dispatched telegrams to Poland’s bishops to offer his backing for the Gdansk protests and organized a special Mass in St. Peter’s in support. The situation in Poland continued to deteriorate, with Wałęsa’s trade union growing increasingly militant. The pope’s deputies said he monitored the news minute by minute. There were some days, they said, when he would talk about nothing else.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt eleven)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

In January 1980, Archbishop Romero was in Rome for a second audience with the pope, and it did not go much better. In a diary entry, Romero wrote he was grateful that John Paul “received me very warmly and told me he perfectly understood how difficult the political situation of my country is.” Still, rather than give full backing to Romero’s brave protest against the savagery of El Salvador’s military, the pope once again urged caution. He said Romero should be worried about the possibility of “score-settling” violence by the government’s “popular Left opponents, which could be bad for the church.” Even more than the year before, Romero returned home convinced he would soon be assassinated. In February, the church radio station was bombed, as was the library of the Catholic university. He stopped sleeping in his own home, hoping to make it more difficult for the death squads to find him. He had taken to driving alone. “I prefer it this way,” he wrote. “When what I’m expecting to happen, happens, I want to be alone. So it’s only me they get. I don’t want somebody else to suffer.”

More than nine hundred Salvadoran civilians were killed in political violence in the first three months of the year. In a sermon in March, Romero warned that the nation was “in a prerevolutionary stage,” with worse to come. He wrote in his diary that he could not understand why the pope, who regularly condemned Mafia violence in Italy, did not say more about political violence in Central America. He was puzzled that John Paul would “speak out about the cruel killings in Italy” but remain mostly silent about the “many killings in El Salvador every day.”

In his final speeches, Romero said he was comforted that, in defending the poor and oppressed, he had done the work demanded by the Savior. In his last radio address, he said: “I know that many are scandalized at what I say and charge that it forsakes the preaching of the Gospel to meddle in politics. I do not accept that accusation.” His diaries show he was unaware at the time that the pope had formally decided to strip him of his authority. In March, senior Curia officials met to plan his ouster from his archdiocese. “He was acting without responsibility,” said Cardinal Silvio Oddi, who then led the Congregation for the Clergy. According to Oddi, Romero had to go because the government in El Salvador “interpreted Romero’s doctrine to be in favor of communism.” Before he could be ousted, however, Romero was dead. On March 24, he was assassinated as he said Mass in a small hospital chapel in San Salvador. The assassin, later identified as a member of a government-backed death squad, fired a single bullet into Romero’s chest, just as the archbishop was raising a chalice to begin Communion. A photographer captured the moment, as Romero gasped for breath, blood pouring from his mouth. A week later, his funeral descended into chaos; twenty-six people were killed and hundreds injured when gunfire broke out on the steps of the Metropolitan Cathedral.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt ten)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

In 1980, no misconduct case before him was more troubling than that of Peter Hullermann, a thirty-three-year-old priest who had been transferred to Munich for psychiatric care after he admitted molesting an eleven-year-old boy in the northwest German city of Essen. Church authorities there eventually accused him of “indecent advances” toward several other boys. Ratzinger’s staff accepted responsibility for supervising Hullermann during his treatment by a Munich psychiatrist. Archdiocese records confirm that on January 15, 1980, Ratzinger led the meeting in which Hullermann’s transfer to Munich was approved. In accordance with church policy at the time, there was no consideration in either Essen or Munich of referring Hullermann to the police. Nor was there any thought of forcing him to leave the priesthood, even though Ratzinger’s staff was explicitly warned that Hullermann was likely to continue molesting boys. One document described him as a “clear danger” to children.

Despite those warnings, church records made public decades later showed that just days after arriving in Munich, Hullermann was allowed to resume his full priestly duties, with no restriction on his access to children. He went on to molest at least a dozen more boys across Germany. Years later, Ratzinger would claim ignorance of the details of Hullermann’s case, but his top deputies could not. The cardinal’s records showed that his chief personnel officer, Father Friedrich Fahr, had been determined to find a way to preserve Hullermann’s career despite his confession that he was a child molester. Fahr wrote in 1980 that while the young priest required urgent psychiatric care, he should be treated with “understanding,” since he was a “very talented man.”

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt nine)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

The pope’s six-city US visit in October 1979, which began in Boston and included stops in New York and Washington, was perhaps the most anticipated event in the history of the American Catholic Church, and the excitement was shared by non-Catholics. The evangelical preacher Billy Graham described John Paul as “the most respected religious leader in the world.” President Jimmy Carter, a devout Southern Baptist, welcomed him to the White House: “God blessed America by sending you to us.”

For many of the nation’s fifty million Catholics, there was disappointment, however. In advance of the pope’s trip, the Associated Press conducted a poll of the nation’s Catholics and found 66 percent wanted the Vatican to lift the ban on birth control, 53 percent believed priests should be allowed to marry, and 50 percent believed women should be granted abortion on demand. In the pope’s speeches in the US, he made clear he would compromise on none of those issues. He often adopted a scolding tone, suggesting Americans were out of step with the church’s moral teachings, especially about sex.

Catholic women had special reason to feel slighted during the trip. Since Vatican II, nuns had been allowed in many US dioceses to join priests at the altar and handle communion wine and wafers. It was seen by bishops as a way of dealing with a shortage of priests. In advance of the pope’s trip, however, the Vatican announced that women would be barred from any role in worship services that he attended. When he gave a speech in Philadelphia to twelve thousand clergy from around the country, priests were invited to sit in the audience on the main floor of the auditorium, while nuns were moved to the balcony. In that address, the pope made his most explicit statement to date of his conviction that women could never be priests: the all-male priesthood was “a tradition that cannot be altered.”

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt eight)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Throughout his youth, Argentine politics centered on one man: Juan Domingo Perón, first elected president in 1946, when Bergoglio was nine. Even after Perón was ousted in a 1955 coup and sent into exile, his fanatical supporters remained. For decades to come, political debates centered around the populist movement—Peronism—founded by Perón and his equally charismatic first lady, Eva Duarte, better known by her nickname, Evita.

Years later, Bergoglio was coy about his views on Perón, although as a young man he had been an enthusiastic supporter. His adversaries in the Jesuits would later draw comparisons between the two men. They saw Perón’s influence in Bergoglio’s personality-driven, sometimes cold-blooded style of leadership. Bergoglio credited his early fascination with Argentine politics to the woman who, outside his family, was the most influential in his life: Esther Ballestrino, a feminist and self-declared Marxist who ran the chemistry lab where he worked as a teenager. She did not force her leftist views on him but instead “taught me to think about politics,” he remembered.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt seven)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Cardinal Spellman of New York, the city’s archbishop from 1939 until 1967, was for years the target of credible allegations that he violated his celibacy vows with men. Clarence Tripp, a respected psychologist associated with Indiana University’s Institute for Sex Research, the pioneering research center founded by Alfred Kinsey, tracked down a Broadway dancer who was the subject of the most persistent rumors. Tripp was convinced that the male dancer, who was regularly chauffeured around Manhattan in the cardinal’s limousine, had been in a long-term sexual relationship with Spellman. The American journalist Lucian Truscott IV reported that, when he was an army cadet at West Point in the 1960s, he was groped when he and two other cadets interviewed the cardinal for a student magazine. “Spellman put his hand on my thigh and started moving it toward my crotch,” Truscott wrote. “He was just about to reach my private parts when a monsignor, who was standing behind him, reached over his shoulder, grabbed his wrist and put his hand back in his lap, as if this was a common occurrence.” Allegations about Spellman’s sexuality were due to be published in 1984 in a biography by a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The New York archdiocese pressured the publisher to remove the material. The pressure campaign was led by Spellman’s longtime secretary, Monsignor Eugene Clark. There was no little irony when Clark, who went on to become rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, was forced to resign from that post after New York tabloids revealed his affair with a female secretary.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt six)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Among American Catholics, the birth-control debate grew more heated that year, becoming part of a larger struggle over women’s rights and sexual freedom. In June, the US Supreme Court overturned state laws that banned artificial contraception, including birth-control pills, and decreed that Americans enjoyed a “right to privacy” in family planning. For many Catholics, the ruling was logical and humane. Several bishops said the government should never have been in the business of regulating women’s fertility. “Catholics do not need the support of civil law to be faithful to their religious convictions,” said Cardinal Cushing in Boston. “And they do not seek to impose by law their moral views on other members of society.”

At the time, American priests complained they were being bombarded with questions from parishioners about why taking oral contraceptives was a sin. The Pill did not kill a living being or interfere with the physical structure of sperm and eggs, so how was that sinful? Many priests were forced to relearn the scriptural justification—the Old Testament story about a minor biblical character named Onan, who refused to impregnate his sister-in-law after his brother’s death. (Many twentieth-century theologians were convinced the story was meant to condemn Onan’s supposed lack of family loyalty, not birth control. Many also found it strange the Vatican wanted to remind Catholics of an otherwise distasteful scriptural passage about a man pressured to have sex with his brother’s widow.)

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt five)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

In the debate, many bishops said they wanted the document to go further and call directly for an end to the birth-control ban. Patriarch Maximos of the Melkite Church was, as always, direct—outrageously so for many in the Curia. He urged the pope to realize that millions of Catholic women around the world already used artificial contraception in defiance of the church because they had no other choice if they wanted to feed the children they already had. He raised a question other bishops were too diplomatic to ask: Why should married couples allow their sex lives to be regulated by a group of aging celibate men in Rome? The ban, he said, had always reflected a “bachelor psychosis.”

Suenens followed, and his speech created another uproar. He called for an end to secrecy in the deliberations of the birth-control commission. He left no doubt he believed artificial contraception was no sin. He warned that if the council failed to address the issue, it would invite the sort of scandal and mockery that the church had not known since the Holy Office condemned Galileo in the seventeenth century.

“I beg of you, my brothers,” Suenens said, his voice rising. “Let us avoid another Galileo affair! One is enough for the church!”

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt four

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

The church faced another important debate about sexuality. Many priests around the world dared not say it out loud, but their greatest hope for Vatican II was that the world’s bishops would rewrite church law to allow them to marry. The Vatican had always portrayed the so-called doctrine of priestly celibacy as eternal and irreversible, but it was neither. It is not demanded in the Gospels, nor was it a way of life followed by the twelve apostles. There is a traditional understanding among Christian theologians that Jesus was celibate and unmarried, but the New Testament does not state that explicitly. There is, by comparison, compelling evidence in scripture to show that most of the apostles, as well as most of Jesus’s larger band of disciples, were married. The apostle Peter had a wife whose ailing mother was healed by the Savior, as recorded in three of the four Gospels. For a thousand years after the Crucifixion, priests almost always took wives and experienced both the comfort and the chaos of a family. Like Peter, other early popes were married. That changed in the eleventh century with the election of a strong-willed pope, Gregory VII, who rewrote church law to demand lifetime celibacy for all priests and bishops, including those already married. Historians believe the decision was motivated in part by Gregory’s disgust over the scandals of a group of shockingly promiscuous Roman bishops. Other accounts suggest he was equally motivated by money—by the struggle to balance the Vatican’s budget. By demanding celibacy, he guaranteed the estates of dead priests—their homes and anything else of value—were turned over to the church. Since churchmen were often drawn from families of great wealth, including royalty, his decision promised a vast new source of income. Nine centuries later, the doctrine was blamed for a worldwide shortage of priests, which had become a crisis for the church by the 1950s, when thousands of men left the priesthood each year, most to marry. In many countries, there were not nearly enough new priests to replace them, in part because so many millions of young men died in battle in World War II, which emptied out seminaries. The situation was especially dire in South America, a continent where virtually every man and woman was born Catholic. The centuries-old migration of European-born priests to serve parishes in Latin America largely dried up. In some urban areas of Brazil, the world’s most populous Catholic nation, there was a ratio of one priest to every twelve thousand people. Brazilians born deep in the Amazon rain forest might see a priest only a few times in their lives. It was well-known inside the Vatican, but never acknowledged publicly, that South American bishops turned a blind eye to the fact that many priests in rural areas had common-law wives and children.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt three)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

John, seventy-six on the day of his election, knew he was seen as a caretaker pope, but he had no intention of being one. In fact, from the moment he pulled on those white robes, he delighted in upending the common wisdom that his would be a dull, uneventful papacy. Instead, he wrote, “I have an immense program of work in front of me to be carried out before the eyes of the whole world, which is waiting and wanting.”

His most momentous decision came three months after his election. On January 25, 1959, he announced in a speech that he would summon all the world’s bishops to a meeting in Rome—a so-called ecumenical council—to plot the church’s future. It would be the first such gathering since the First Vatican Council adjourned in 1870. The idea occurred to him, he said, after he noticed that his desk was “piling up with problems, questions, requests, hopes”—all tied to issues that the world’s bishops should be empowered to resolve for themselves. In his speech to a group of cardinals, he offered no date for the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, as it came to be known, although he hoped it could be organized within two or three years. He said he wanted the church to approach the gathering with a spirit of aggiornamento—an Italian word meaning “bringing up to date.” He dreamed the council could bring about reconciliation between Catholics and other Christians. In that hope, he said, the Vatican would issue a “friendly invitation” to representatives of the “separated churches”—Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, as well as the fast-growing evangelical communities of the United States and South America—to send observers. When his speech was finished, he expected to hear applause, maybe even cheers, from the cardinals. “But they did nothing of the kind,” he wrote in his diary, remembering his disappointment. “There was only silence.” L’Osservatore Romano, which the Curia controlled, buried news of the speech deep inside the paper. It censored the pope’s remarks about his “friendly invitation” to non-Catholic Christians—“friendly” was removed, and the reference to “separated churches” was replaced with “separated communities,” reflecting the Curia’s view that there was only one true church. Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro of Bologna was incensed by John’s announcement: “How dare he summon a council only three months after his election.” The new pope, he said, was proving to be “rash and impulsive, lacking in experience and culture.” As John’s friend Cardinal Montini put it: “This holy old boy doesn’t seem to realize what a hornet’s nest he’s stirring up.”

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt two)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Humani Generis was a landmark in Küng’s life. He thought it was so wrongheaded that it convinced him the pope, hailed by most Catholics as error-free in his every word and action, was in fact fallible. “For the first time, I was convinced that Pius XII was wrong,” Küng remembered. Then in the middle of his graduate studies in Munich, Ratzinger had reached the same conclusion: This bishop of Rome, like all of his predecessors, was capable of making terrible mistakes. How else to explain so many bad, bloodthirsty popes—“men who would obviously not be picked by the Holy Spirit”—throughout history? It was a parlor game among his classmates: Who was the worst pope ever? Was it Sergius III, elected in 904 after assassinating two of his predecessors and whose favorite mistress gave birth to a son who succeeded him as pope? Or Innocent IV, the thirteenth-century architect of the Inquisition, who approved the use of the rack and other instruments of torture? Or maybe it was Alexander VI in the fifteenth century, reported to have had an incestuous relationship with an illegitimate daughter. He also had a fondness, it was said, for drunken orgies that ended with naked prepubescent boys jumping out of cakes. Popes from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries mounted the Crusades, in which mercenary armies slaughtered more than a million Muslims and Jews.

Power-loving popes had always tried to create the perception that, because they were the successors to St. Peter, they were infallible. But Küng and Ratzinger—and anyone else familiar with the New Testament—knew that this was a misreading of Peter’s biography. The Gospels portray Peter, a Jewish fisherman who abandoned his life on the Sea of Galilee to join the Savior’s wandering band of disciples, as lovable but deeply flawed. Jesus mocked him for his weak character and, as the Savior predicted, a terrified Peter denied his loyalty three times in the hours around the Crucifixion. Besides, as Küng and Ratzinger also knew, the doctrine of papal infallibility held that the bishop of Rome was error-free only in limited circumstances, when issuing the most rare sort of proclamation, known as an ex cathedra decree. And far from being ancient teaching, the doctrine dated back only to 1870 and the First Vatican Council. At that council, many bishops rejected the doctrine but were overruled by the bullying Pius IX, who insisted he needed sweeping new authority because the Vatican was then under threat of invasion by the Italian army. To his credit, after demanding the right to claim infallibility, Pius IX never once invoked it in his teaching documents. In the century that followed, it was invoked by only one pope and on only one occasion—by Pius XII in his widely ridiculed 1950 decree on the Virgin’s assumption into heaven.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt one)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

The Holy Office had been responsible for many of the Vatican’s worst historical embarrassments, including the imprisonment of the great Italian scientist Galileo in the seventeenth century because he rejected the church’s view that the sun rotated around the earth. The congregation played an important role for centuries in maintaining the Index of Prohibited Books, a list of works banned as blasphemous. The writers whose books appeared on the Index included Voltaire, Hugo, Descartes, Milton, and Copernicus. In the twentieth century, the French thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre and André Gide were added for works that won them the Nobel Prize. In 1906, in an obvious effort to distance itself from its past, the congregation removed the word “inquisition” from its name. Whatever it called itself, Küng wrote in his memoirs, it was clear to him as a student that the spirit of the Inquisition had never died: “They may no longer be able to burn dissidents at the stake, but they can burn them psychologically.”

As a young theologian, Ratzinger shared the harsh criticism of the Holy Office. The Vatican under Pius XII, he wrote in the early 1960s, was a place of small-minded “baroque princes” who believed that they alone should decide how Catholics lived. He was reminded of the Curia’s indifference to the faithful every time he went to church and watched parishioners struggle with the Latin liturgy. Since the fourth century, the Vatican had insisted that the Mass be offered throughout the world only in Latin, the formal language of the faith since the Roman Empire. In the twentieth century, many theologians urged the church to allow the Mass to be said in the vernacular—in local languages—so everyone could appreciate a ceremony meant to re-create the poignancy of the Last Supper. But Pius, while open to other liturgical reforms, would not abandon Latin. Ratzinger thought the Vatican’s insistence on the ancient language had always exaggerated its importance, since Latin was not the language of Jesus and his apostles. The Savior addressed his disciples in Aramaic, a language related to Hebrew. After Aramaic fell into disuse, the principal language of the church for nearly three hundred years was Greek. In writings early in his career, Ratzinger blamed Latin—“a language in which the living choices of the human spirit no longer found a place”—for the “sterility to which Catholic theology and philosophy has in many ways been doomed.”

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt ten)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

25. When it was time to play and my doctor was already striding with high, springing steps in the direction of the number-three court, the fat blond man, who had not moved from his chair, said to his sister that he was not going to play. She was obviously taken aback and asked why not; he answered that he did not have to give a reason. There was an exchange of rather hard looks, the sister started talking at high speed, making numerous gestures. He was imperturbable, did not move an inch; he listened calmly, cleaning a molar with a toothpick. A few minutes later my doctor came jogging back, head high, gaze questioning. Having been informed of the situation he squatted down in front of his brother-in-law and, speaking in a low voice, slapped him lightly on his fat thighs and pinched his fleshy cheeks between two fingers, to convince him to come play. Still cleaning his teeth, and looking more and more out of sort, the fat blond man shook his head. At least he stood up, removed the toothpick from his mouth, and said, with a long drawl, before walking away, that we could go to hell.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt nine)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

63. I bought a pad of stationery from the shop that sells newspapers and, sitting at the big round table in my room, drew two columns on the paper. In the first I entered the names of five countries—Belgium, France, Sweden, Italy, and the United States—and next to them, in the second, I recorded the results of my darts games. After this initial knockout phase, I organized a match between the two national teams with the highest number of points. In the finals, it was Belgium against France. From the very first throws my own people, concentrating intently, easily outdistanced the butter-fingered French.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt eight)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

62. When I played darts I was calm and relaxed. I felt pacified. Little by little, emptiness would creep over me and I would steep myself in it until the last trace of tension vanished from my mind. Then—in one blazing movement—I would launch the dart at the target.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt seven)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

57. We had left the café and were going back to the hotel. Hands in my coat pockets, I walked head down, pressing my feet down hard on the pavement to push the city under water. Every time I came to the bottom of a staircase I jumped unobtrusively to the ground with both feet together and, waiting for Edmondsson at the bottom of the steps, asked her to do the same. With the town sinking at the rate of thirty centimeters a century, I explained, or three millimeters a year, or point zero zero eighty-two millimeters a day, or point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one millimeters= a second, one might reasonably hope, by pressing our feet down hard on the pavement as we walked, to play some part in the drowning of the town.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt six)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

46. Leaning toward the plate-glass window with my hands cupped around my eyes, I looked into the Standa department store, which was still closed, and tried to attract a saleswoman’s attention by tapping on the glass with a fist. When one of them finally looked my way I waved a greeting respectfully and pointed to my watch to ask what time the store would open. After one or two unproductive exchanges in sign language, she shuffled over to me and, stretching her fingers wide apart, showed me nine of them. Then, coming still closer, her chest and stomach pressed against the pane of glass so slightly separating us, her mouth almost against mine, she articulated lasciviously, Alle nove, creating a little cloud of steam between us. I looked at my watch: it was half past eight. I turned away, started walking through the nearby streets. In the end I found tennis balls somewhere else.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt five)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

22. Little by little, I began to make friends with the barman. We exchanged nods whenever we met on the stairs. Occasionally, when I went for my late-afternoon coffee, we’d have a conversation. We talked about soccer, automobile racing. The absence of a common language did not bother us; on cycling, for example, we could go on forever. Moser, he’d say. Merckx, I’d remark, after a little silence. Coppi, he’d say, Fausto Coppi. I’d stir my spoon in the coffee, nodding, thoughtful. Bruyère, I’d murmur. Bruyère? he’d say. Yes, yes, Bruyère. He seemed unconvinced. I thought the conversation at an end, but just as I was preparing to leave the counter, he grabbed me by the arm and said, Gimondi. Van Springel, I replied. Planckaert, I added, Dierieckx, Willems, Van Impe, Von Looy, de Vlaeminck: Roger de Vlaeminck and his brother, Eric. What could anyone say to that? He gave up. I paid for the coffee and went upstairs to my room.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt four)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

17. When leaving the hotel, I seldom went far. I’d stick to the streets nearby. Once, however, I had to return to the Standa department store: I needed shirts; my new underpants were getting dirty. The store was full of light. I walked slowly down the aisles, like an inspector, occasionally patting a child’s head. I lingered in front of the clothes racks, selected shirts, felt the wool of the sweaters. In the toy department I bought a set of darts.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt three)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

34. The rain had become a downpour, as though all the rain were going to fall: all. Cars slowed on the drenched roadway; sheaves of dead water rose on each side of the tires. Except for one or two umbrellas fleeing horizontally, the street looked immobile. People had taken refuge outside the post office door and, huddled together on the narrow stoop, were awaiting a lull. I turned around and went to open the clothes cupboard; I pawed through the drawers. Underwear, shirts, pajamas. I was looking for a sweater. Was there no sweater anywhere? I came out of the bedroom and, using my foot to push aside the cans of paint that cluttered the passageway, opened the closet door. Leaning forward into it, I began shoving at crates, opening suitcases, in search of a warm garment.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt two)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

7. Twice a week I would listen to the radio broadcast of the day’s play for the French soccer championship. The program lasted two hours. From a studio in Paris the announcer would orchestrate the voices of the reporters covering the matches in the different stadiums. Believing that soccer gains in the imagining, I never missed these dates. Lulled by warm human voices, I would listen to their reports with the lights off, sometimes with my eyes closed.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt one)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

1. When I began to spend my afternoons in the bathroom I had no intention of moving into it; no, I would pass some pleasant hours there, meditating in the bathtub, sometimes dressed, other times naked. Edmondsson, who liked to be there with me, said it made me calmer: occasionally I would even say something funny, we would laugh. I would wave my arms as I spoke, explaining that the most practical bathtubs were those with parallel sides, a sloping back, and a straight front, which relieves the user of the need for a footrest.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt fourteen)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Despite this progress, Apple is only in the earliest phases of diversifying iPhone production. As Morgan Stanley analysts estimated in mid-2023: “90-95% of Apple’s production is still in China; we believe a full decoupling would likely require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment at least, which would prove an outsize burden for the supply chain.” Indeed, the pace of growth in Apple’s operations in India is nothing like that of China a decade earlier. From 2016 to 2023, iPhone production in India grew from zero to around 15 million units, accounting for 7 percent of global shipments. China, between 2006 and 2013, ramped production from zero to 153 million units. So, at best, India is taking on iPhone orders at one-tenth the rate China did a decade earlier.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt thirteen)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

When Trump entered office in early 2017, Cupertino was on high alert. Executives were far more concerned about Trump than they ever were about Xi Jinping. Beijing’s ruler was a despot, sure, but he was a rational actor whose interests, broadly speaking, neatly aligned with Apple’s. Neither Beijing nor Cupertino wanted iPhone product to be shifted out of China. But that’s precisely what Trump wanted. “Tim, unless you start building your plants in this country, I won’t consider my administration an economic success,” Trump said he told the Apple CEO, in July 2017. Cook, according to Trump, had promised Apple would build “three big plants, beautiful plants.” Clearly understanding the risks of the insurgent presidency, Cook made a point of calling Trump, even visiting the president every four to six weeks. “Cook, this big southerner, was calling Trump all the time—he was nice to him,” says Margaret O’Mara, tech historian and author The Code. “He was so savvy navigating the broader currents of global trade.”

His diplomatic overtures climaxed in November 2019 when Cook personally gave President Trump a tour of a Texas factory churning out Apple’s Pro lineup of Macs. After the event, Trump tweeted: “Today I opened a major Apple Manufacturing plan in Texas that will bring high paying jobs back to America.” The tweet was patently false. The owner of the plant was contract manufacturer Flex, not Apple; it had been assembling Macs for six years; and rather than representing some milestone, the factory had been demonstrating just how difficult it was to make computers in America.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt twelve)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

What Apple didn’t tell investors in November 2018, or say in its January 2019 revenue warning, was that sales of the XR weren’t simply attributable to a cooling Chinese economy. Instead, Chinese consumers were choosing to buy phones from Huawei. Apple had dealt with copycats since the earliest days of the iPhone, but most Chinese rivals could be ignored—they catered to the low end of the market. Huawei was different. It competed with Apple in the top tier, and in 2018, Apple executives began observing that Huawei’s latest Mate phone was awfully good, outshining Apple in features rather than just price.

Four days before the November 1 earnings call, Cook had held a Sunday meeting with other executives. “In China, we’re worried about the new Mate devices,” he told the team. He was right to be concerned. Just a few years earlier, the gap in quality between iPhones and Chinese handsets was stark. But Apple had brought up quality across the region, and the gaps were closing. Within a year, Huawei would be outselling Apple not just in China but globally.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt eleven)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Every supplier knows that if it can’t meet its commitments to deliver a defined number of units, it faces a legal fight with Apple or risks not being chosen for the next product. So when push came to shove, suppliers knew what to prioritize. “They were always willing to do the right thing until it wasn’t economically feasible to continue to do the right thing,” says an Apple engineer who managed product launches. “If you make an organization choose, they will choose profits.”

Another Apple executive referred to the statistic that iPhone account for less than a fifth of global smartphone shipments but garners 80 percent of industry profits. “To do that, you need to be creating competition at every level in the supply chain. You need to be ruthless,” this person says. “But you can’t do that and also be compliant.” A manufacturing design engineer at Apple recalled a day when Cook sent a note about the importance of corporate social responsibility. Such notes were meant to convey something important: We care about this at the highest level of Apple. But that same day his more direct bosses were demanding improvements to output. “The two messages were opposed to each other,” he says. But there was no genuine recognition of that. Apple as an organization was a living, breathing manifestation of cognitive dissonance.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt ten)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

The risk of this approach is that it gives too much power to the supplier. So under Tim Cook’s leadership, Apple had built redundancy into the supply chain, teaching multiple vendors how to do the same thing to mitigate risks of overdependence. “Every year there’d be discussion about our huge reliance on a small number of companies. What would happen if one of these companies were to stumble?” says one manufacturing design engineer. “Certainly at the component level,” this person adds, “even Foxconn didn’t have the space for the machines to make the components we needed, so we were kind of forced to find second sources, third sources.”

Given Apple’s scale and manufacturing concentration, the result of this strategy is that Apple spawned the formation of major industrial clusters in which engineers from Cupertino would teach multiple factories how to, say, shape glass for the iPhone. So instead of being beholden to Len Technology—the company that cut and tempered Corning class for the first iPhone—Apple would constantly send engineers form Cupertino to train its rivals. That kept Lens on its toes, lest Apple choose a different supplier for the next-generation iPhone—a potential catastrophe as Apple, by 2015, was producing a quarter billion iPhones per year. Moreover, it kept Lens from raising its prices. So any company supplying Apple with some component was preemptively thwarted from believing it had any power to exert, because Apple made it known it had options.