Joseph Ratzinger will go down in history as the Pope who resigned from the pontificate. And this will be so, to a large extent, because he was not able to go down in history with the mission that he himself had entrusted to himself when, in 2005, before the cardinals from all over the world who came to Rome to bury John Paul II and elect his successor, exclaimed: “So much dirt in our Church!”. Cardinal Ratzinger was, at that time, a first-rate intellectual figure, with an overwhelming training in theology, and the person who could most authoritatively support such a serious accusation and lament, since since 1981 he had been the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, dedicated to monitoring the purity of the Catholic religion and the rectitude of its works, and where it belligerently imposed its deeply conservative criteria against liberation theology, to the point of expelling Leonardo Boff from the Church, or against secular movements of a progressive sign. It is assumed that that call to clean up the Church, beginning with the Vatican, had a decisive influence on his election as Pope, and already under the name of Benedict XVI he promoted some gestures that gave rise to some hope. The most notorious, without a doubt, took place in February 2012, when, under his patronage, the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome organized a symposium so that the hierarchs of the Catholic Church could look face to face with the victims of pedophilia.
The Vatican seemed willing to put an end to “complicit silence” and to that slogan of John Paul II so that dirty laundry should be washed at home. For the first time, the superiors of some thirty religious orders and the representatives of 110 episcopal conferences heard the voice of the victims recounting the atrocities suffered. What happened next is already known: nothing, practically. The princes of the Church continued to systematically ignore the allegations of abuses that were made in their dioceses, downplaying them, attributing them to hidden interests or sensationalism in the press, and when there was no other choice, as in the case of the United States United, they covered them under mountains of money. Ratzinger, a prestigious theologian and man of great culture—he spoke six languages fluently, read ancient Greek and Hebrew, played the piano—was gradually realizing that the power of the Pope was not enough to straighten out the ecclesiastical hierarchy, nor was it enough to clean up another of the great sources of filth: the Vatican bank.
His first attempts to investigate the finances of the Church were quickly neutralized, and the proxy wars —which had already started during the long agony of John Paul II— ended up coming to light after the theft, with his own help. camera, from his private correspondence. The one who was called Vatileaks case demonstrated, in expression of L’Osservatore Romano, that Ratzinger had become “a shepherd surrounded by wolves.” More than sickness or old age, Benedict XVI was a (late) victim of the Vatican itself. To his credit, in addition to the attempt to put a stop to the abuses, is that of not having become a nuisance to his successor, Pope Francis, after his resignation, despite the fact that —especially at the beginning— there were plenty of people from his own Church tried to confront them. At the time of his death, and after almost 10 years of silent retirement, the words he pronounced in Saint Peter’s Square when his resignation became effective continue to be valid, as an epitaph: “There were sunny days and a light breeze, but also others in which the waters fell rough, the wind blew against it, and God seemed asleep”.
#Ratzingers #failures