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Pope Benedict: Not Rottweilerish Enough?

Paul Elie wonders what it must be like for Pope Benedict to watch from the sidelines while Pope Francis dismantles his legacy. Excerpt: For all his simplicity, [Pope Francis] is part bureaucrat, an executive at a desk with a computer and a telephone and an aide—Georg Gänswein, the priest whose services he shares with Benedict. […]

Paul Elie wonders what it must be like for Pope Benedict to watch from the sidelines while Pope Francis dismantles his legacy. Excerpt:

For all his simplicity, [Pope Francis] is part bureaucrat, an executive at a desk with a computer and a telephone and an aide—Georg Gänswein, the priest whose services he shares with Benedict. There is plenty of paperwork to get through before the audience, which begins at 10:30. “The irony,” a well-placed Jesuit at the Vatican told me, “is that this pope, great agent of decentralization in the Church, is personally the most centralized pope since Pius the Ninth. Everything has to cross his desk.”

More:

[Benedict] was exhausted when he took office. A joke making the rounds in Rome these days goes like this: Question: Is Benedict interfering in Church governance? Answer: Are you kidding? He didn’t interfere even when he was pope!

And:

Like John Paul, Martini suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Shortly before he died, in 2012, at the age of 85, he gave an interview to a fellow Jesuit. “The Church is tired, worn out in bourgeois Europe and America,” he said. “Our culture has aged, our churches and monasteries are big and empty, the Church bureaucracy is bloated, our rites and vestments are pompous … Prosperity drags us down.” He called for “the pope and the bishops to seek out 12 people from outside the system for administrative positions, people … who will try new things.” He called on the Church to open itself to nontraditional families and poor people. He took the long view. “The Church,” he said, “is 200 years behind the times.”

At the conclave of 2013, Bergoglio was elected pope—and if his pontificate has an agenda, it is the one Martini spelled out from his deathbed. Did Benedict see this coming? Assuredly not. In 2005, Martini, at 78, was considered too old to be elected. It would follow that in 2013, Bergoglio, at 76, should have also been considered too old. But Benedict’s renunciation changed the calculus. Now no older man can be ruled out. Now an older man can be elected pope and work hard for a few years, knowing he is free to resign when his energy flags or when he reckons that he has done all he can.

That’s what Francis is doing—and Benedict knows, better than anybody, that his renunciation of the papacy is what made Francis’s freestyle, judgment-averse pontificate possible. The thought is enough to keep him awake at night. For it is his firm belief that the willingness to suspend judgment is the core of the dictatorship of relativism.

Read the whole thing. It sounds like “God’s Rottweiler” was a pushover as Pope, and the happy hippy Pope is the real tough guy. Fascinating reporting. This quote, from a Vaticanista, is, to me, chilling: “He’s a communicator in the league with Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama. They say he’s being unclear, but we know exactly what he means.”

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