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.