The Trial of Pope Benedict

Joseph Ratzinger and the Vatican's Assault on Reason, Compassion, and Human Dignity

Daniel Gawthrop

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781551525280
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Instituciones y organizaciones religiosas

In this persuasive new book, Daniel Gawthrop examines how Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) systematically steered the Catholic Church to the far right, and what his shocking resignation means for the Church as it navigates a new world. By doing so, it reveals one of recent history's most astonishing tales of institutional power, religious bullying, and systemic abuse.

Prologue

Imagine this scenario: Inside the packed main chambers of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, all the world’s news cameras are fixed on a white-haired, white-suited figure seated at the witness stand. The object of everyone’s attention, the old man is staring straight ahead—his dark, beady eyes betraying none of their usual manic energy, his stony expression giving nothing away as he faces interrogation before a global audience. Standing in front of him, an ICC prosecutor spins around and gestures to the front of the gallery, pointing at a man in his mid-forties. He identifies the man as Wilfried Fesselmann. A German, like the witness, Fesselmann is an adult survivor of clerical sex abuse and one of several complainants whose cases have led to this very moment.

At age eleven in 1979, says the prosecutor, Fesselmann was attending a church-run vacation camp in Essen when Father Peter Hullermann invited him to his room. There, the Catholic priest gave the boy an alcoholic beverage, stripped him naked, and forced him to perform oral sex. Because of this, and complaints regarding three similar cases of abuse, Rev. Hullermann was sent for counseling in Munich. On January 15, 1980, the prosecutor tells the court, the witness chaired a meeting as Archbishop of Munich and Freising in which he formally approved the priest’s transfer to his archdiocese. The witness also provided Rev. Hullermann with accommodation, at a parish house in Munich, while he underwent his therapy. Shortly after the therapy began—and against the advice of his psychiatrist, who told the church that the priest should not work with children—Reverend Hullermann was assigned to an unrestricted pastoral ministry at a Munich parish, which included work with children.

The prosecutor turns to the witness. “Now, you have since declared that you approved Father Hullermann’s transfer to Munich for therapy but not his diocesan assignment; that it was your deputy, archdiocesan Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, who assigned him to a new parish, and without your knowledge. Father Gruber has confirmed as much. The question is: does this fact absolve you of responsibility?” A hush descends over the gallery as the prosecutor recounts how Father Hullermann went on to abuse boys for another six years before his arrest; how he served no jail time but was fined 4,000 deutsch marks and given an eighteen-month suspended sentence, for which he served five years’ probation; how he continued working in various church posts, including for more than twenty years as a curate and parish administrator where he had regular contact with children and supervised 150 altar boys; and finally how, when he was suspended from his last religious post in March 2010, the archdiocese of Munich and Freising issued a statement saying that there had been “no evidence of recent sexual abuses, similar to those for which he was convicted in 1986”—only to retract this statement later the same month, when officials revealed a further allegation of abuse dating from 1998.

The prosecutor clears his throat and turns to the witness: “With the utmost respect to a pope emeritus, I am afraid I have no alternative but to ask you, in the presence of this court: Why, as Cardinal of Munich, did you approve Father Hullermann’s transfer to your jurisdiction, rather than defrocking him? Why, when you knew that he was a serial abuser? When you should have foreseen that, should he continue his ministry, there was a strong possibility—indeed, a likelihood—that he would abuse again, as subsequently proved to be the case? Why did you allow the vicar general to determine Father Hullerman’s future, instead of taking the file yourself, thus failing to protect the young and innocent in your archdiocese? Why, Your Holiness? Why?”

At that moment, all eyes turn to the white-suited figure. In a sequence that will draw record viewing numbers on YouTube after recording the largest television audience in history, the cameras turn from the prosecutor to the witness, and then to Fesselmann in the gallery. The victim, leaning forward in his seat and folding his hands on his chin, stares straight at the witness. Eagerly anticipating his words, Fesselmann is hoping for some kind of penance that will finally bring closure to this sorry chapter in his life more than three-and-a-half decades after the fact. The cameras turn back to the witness stand, where Joseph Ratzinger, the retired Pope Benedict XVI, raises a glass of water in trembling hands, takes it to his lips, and then puts it down.

“We … we … I … ,” the pope emeritus stammers into his microphone, before falling silent. Then, to the general amazement of everyone, the former leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics sits back in his chair and shakes his head, a single tear rolling down his left cheek.

Improbable? Yes. In the minds of many, the man who spent nearly eight years on the throne of Saint Peter was as likely to find himself in the dock at The Hague as was the much-reviled Henry Kissinger. Few can imagine a former pope being cross-examined in such a manner: the reality of Vatican statehood—including Permanent Observer status at the United Nations, and the diplomatic immunity extended to popes—precluded such a possibility. But if the ICC chief prosecutor ever saw grounds to proceed, or—failing that—if a convincing legal challenge arose elsewhere, it technically could happen. More importantly, many believed that it should. Whether or not it did, a case could be made that Joseph Ratzinger had much more to answer for than his own handling of the clerical rape of children.

I: Fear and Obedience

The past is never simply the past. It always has something to say to us; it tells us the paths to take and the paths not to take.

—Pope Benedict XVI, on a visit to Auschwitz, May 2006

“After the great pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me, a simple and humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord … ”

With these words on April 19, 2005, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger greeted the world for the first time as newly elected pope. “A simple and humble worker”? The former Cardinal of Munich, and the all-powerful prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, must have been caught up in the moment to have allowed himself the luxury of such ironic cheek. For, thanks to his giant body of published work to date—and more than two decades of media coverage, which had earned him a global reputation as “God’s Rottweiler” and “The Grand Inquisitor”—most of the Catholic world knew that Ratzinger was anything but “simple.” And thanks to an endless reserve of self-esteem, which had allowed him to publish two memoirs before assuming the throne of Saint Peter (in contrast to his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who produced none despite the second longest pontificate on record), he didn’t seem all that “humble,” either. Possibly the most opportunistic cleric ever to become pope, his name was more instantly recognizable and cringe-inducing to a larger number of people than that of any other cardinal in modern times. Ratzy the Nazi. Joseph the Rat. What had the world, never mind its 1.2 billion Catholics, done to deserve him?

By ascending to the throne of Saint Peter, Ratzinger had earned the right by antiquity to shed his troublesome surname and replace it with a venerable nickname, attached to a Roman numeral, more befitting his new stature. His choice of Benedict, Vatican observers said, was an inspired one: apart from the intrigue of ending a lengthy gap between himself and the fifteenth of his predecessors with that name, there was the fact that benedictus is Latin for “blessing,” and “Benedict” means “the blessed.” And indeed, Ratzinger appeared to have been “blessed” from the very beginning: born on a Holy Saturday, to parents named Joseph and Mary, he was baptized with the newly blessed Easter water. His long and eventful journey to the papacy also appeared blessed: while publishing his way into prominence, he had won good jobs in academia and church hierarchy alike, gained unparalleled power and influence over his peers, and had his way in just about everything. By naming himself after the patron saint of Europe—the seat of his power and the base of his influence—Joseph Ratzinger, the new pope, was placing a cherry on top of all his sweet “blessings.”

It could also be said, however, that Ratzinger’s choice of “Benedict” implied an indifference to public perception of him. Without a doubt, the world already knew he was “blessed” with an encyclopedic knowledge of canon law, a certain knack for making enemies, and flawlessly Machiavellian instincts. But since these could hardly be described as virtues, “Benedict” as a papal name came off at best as pretentious, at worst like parody. Eight years later, after a pontificate battered by negative headlines in the Western media—the foot-in-mouth statements offending other religions, the out-of-touch critiques of modernity, the sex abuse lawsuits and the damage control exercises to contain them, the “Vatileaks” scandal and the atmosphere of chaos surrounding it, the distasteful witch-hunt of US nuns, and even a filing with the International Criminal Court accusing His Holiness of crimes against humanity—how “blessed” could Ratzinger truly have felt as he became only the second pope in nearly six hundred years to voluntarily relinquish the throne of Saint Peter?

Just Following Orders

A native of Bavaria, Joseph Ratzinger was born in a part of Germany untouched by the Reformation: an idyllic farmer’s paradise where Roman Catholicism was the foundation of community life. But when he came into this world on April 16, 1927, Ratzinger also landed in the middle of one of history’s most unfortunate confluences of religion and politics: Marktl-am-Inn, the village where he was born, on the German side of the border with Austria, was only ten miles from Braunau-am-Inn, a little village on the Austrian shore of the Inn River, where Adolf Hitler was born. Despite the abundance of religious trivia about Marktl-am-Inn he provides in his memoirs, Ratzinger never does mention this little coincidence. It seems an odd omission, given the enormous implications it would have in his life.

Ratzinger was the youngest of three children of the country policeman Joseph Ratzinger Sr., a social progressive who regarded the growing presence of Nazi militias in Bavaria with increasing alarm. By 1932, with the Weimar Republic on the verge of collapse and the first persecution of Jews beginning in Munich, the Nazis had become the dominant political force in Bavaria. Ratzinger refused to spy or inform on priests who behaved as “enemies of the Reich”; on the contrary, he helped those he knew were in trouble. But the family was under increasing pressure because of his open criticism of the fanatics. At one point, Ratzinger got into an impossible confrontation with a priest who had become an ardent Nazi: the priest wanted to erect a Maypole in the village square, which Ratzinger rightly saw as a deliberate attempt to wipe out Christian influence and bring back a nostalgically patriotic sort of Germanic pagan worship. In 1937, the family moved to Traunstein and settled on a nineteenth-century farm in Hufschlag, on the outskirts of town. This is where young Joseph would spend the rest of his childhood, though it would hardly provide shelter from the coming Nazi onslaught. Before long, signs went up in the central square in Traunstein calling for citizens to boycott Jewish businesses.

Here is a brief chronology of the younger Joseph Ratzinger’s teenage years, which coincide with World War II:

• • 1939: At age twelve, just as the war is beginning, he enters the minor seminary of Saint Michael, joining his older brother Georg who started two years earlier.
• • 1941: At fourteen, he is recruited into the Hitler Youth but gets a waiver allowing him not to attend the meetings because he is in the seminary.

• • 1943: On August 2, his presence is required at a combat post. At sixteen, he is given a Wehrmacht uniform and the assignment of defending a BMW factory in southern Bavaria.

• • 1944: In September, he is assigned to a labor camp between the borders of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. One night, he and his group are pulled out of bed and gathered outside. An SS officer has each of the boys step forward to be humiliated with “voluntary” recruitment into the SS. Ratzinger and a few others say they are planning to become Catholic priests; after being insulted, they are sent on their way.

• • 1945: On his eighteenth birthday, he is required to report for basic military training with the German infantry. With the Third Reich only days away from total collapse, he decides to desert. Although serving the German infantry is virtually an act of suicide by this point, his decision does suggest some courage: summary executions for desertion are still common, right up to the bitter end. Luckily, the only two soldiers he encounters on the road are as sick of the war as he is; noticing that his arm is in a sling, they let him go. He makes it home to Traunstein, and the loving arms of his parents, safely enough. But shortly afterward the US forces arrive, and he is arrested. He is marched down the road in full uniform to a prisoner-of-war camp, where he remains for several weeks. On June 19, 1945, he is freed. When his missing brother Georg is returned in mid-July, and both brothers are back in the seminary by November, the war may be said to be well and truly behind him.

When Pope Benedict’s critics referred to him as “Ratzy the Nazi,” they were speaking less about his wartime experiences than of his management style at the Vatican.2 Most people are less interested in the moral decision-making abilities of a teenager in World War II than in the same person’s decisions as a post-war adult with real power. One of Ratzinger’s contemporaries, Günter Grass, has admitted in recent years that he was a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II. But his life after the war took a different turn from that of the Bavarian seminarian. Much of Grass’s literary output is concerned with German guilt over the war...