The Trial of Pope Benedict: Joseph Ratzinger & the Vatican's Assault on Reason, Compassion, & Human Dignity by Daniel Gawthrop (Arsenal Pulp Press $15.95)

While his term as pontiff may be over, the evil perpetuated by Joseph Ratzinger will be difficult to undo.

This year Benedict XVI became the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign. Before he became Pope, Joseph Ratzinger, as a Cardinal, forbade the use of condoms by heterosexual couples, even in AIDS-ravaged Africa (although later, as pope, he would allow their use by male prostitutes) and described women's liberation as "the antechamber to disaster."; Here Shane McCune responds to Daniel Gawthrop's overview of Ratzinger's brilliant and nasty ascendancy.

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Well, you can't say you weren't warned.
You don't even have to get to the subtitle of The Trial of Pope Benedict to know that "gay lapsed Catholic"; Dan Gawthrop is about to make a meal of the ex-Benedict.

But why bother?

We already know that Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, was a reactionary pontiff who swatted down any attempt at liberalizing the church, further marginalizing women and homosexuals.

And we know that countless sexual crimes among the clergy were concealed or muted under what was supposedly his watch. But that was also true of John Paul II, the guy who wore the dress and pointy hat for 27 years before him.

So why go after a former pope? And should any of this concern those of us with no ties to Roman Catholicism?
Gawthrop anticipated these questions when he wrote a February 2012 profile of Benedict in the online magazine The Tyee, some of which is reworked in the book's prologue.

"Does the Pope even matter,"; he writes, "given that so many millions of Catholics have not only tuned him out but abandoned their faith altogether?";

Of course, the answer has to be yes.
For starters, on purely pragmatic grounds the church is too powerful to ignore. Apart from the moral suasion wielded by popes, the Vatican is a sovereign state with observer status at the United Nations (and voting power on some important committees, as Gawthrop notes in his book).

And there remain far more visceral reasons for probing this particular pope's crimes and misdemeanours. While some of the latter (Ratzinger's vendettas with other clerics and his arid theology) are, frankly, of little interest to this lapsed Protestant, the crimes in question were horrific and widespread - the stuff of high-profile criminal trials just about anywhere but Vatican City.

Ratzinger is not just some well-meaning but out-of-touch priest, or even an overly paternalistic disciplinarian. As Gawthrop portrays him, "God's Rottweiler"; is a truly nasty piece of work, misogynistic, pitiless and power-mad.

According to Gawthrop, Ratzinger played a key role in enabling and protecting participants in what amounted to the biggest pedophile ring in the world.
(In July, Pope Francis announced a new law that makes it a secular crime to abuse children sexually or physically on Vatican grounds. Previously child abuse was only a violation of church law.)

The former pontiff wasn't always so bloody-minded. Surprisingly, Gawthrop paints Ratzinger as a dazzling university lecturer who held his students spellbound - that is, until the campus upheavals of the late 1960s. While liberals within the church applauded or even joined student protests against the Vietnam War and social injustice, Ratzinger was appalled and shaken. He and a coterie of conservative theologians began to work to undo much of the progressive advances of Vatican II.

Gawthrop has meticulously researched Ratzinger's rise through the church hierarchy, noting the allies and enemies he made, his various postings and achievements.
(Catholics, lapsed or observant, may be intrigued to learn that Ratzinger was awarded the chair in dogmatics at Tubingen University by Hans Kung, a liberal theologian he had befriended at Vatican II. The rest of us may simply be intrigued to learn that there is such as thing as a chair in dogmatics.)

Gawthrop portrays the Ratzinger of the 1960s and early 1970s as a priest in title only, more interested in theological scholarship than ministering to the poor, the sick, or anybody else. He beavered away on treatises defending the old-line precepts of the church and launched a conservative magazine to counter a liberal quarterly that sprang up during Vatican II, the cleansing and liberalizing council launched by Pope John XXIII in the early 1960s.

In 1977 Pope Paul VI named him Bishop of Munich, and his long march to the top job began. The pace picked up in 1981, when Karol Wotyla, aka Pope John Paul II, named Ratzinger prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) - the Pope's enforcer.

At this point The Trial of Pope Benedict starts to live up to its title. Although Gawthrop opens and closes his book by inviting the reader to imagine Joseph Ratzinger in the dock at the International Court of Justice, he wisely does not try to sustain this metaphor throughout.

But if the book is not a trial transcript it certainly is an indictment, prosecuted with the zeal and attention to detail only a disillusioned former believer can bring to bear.

Gawthrop rolls out a chronology of Cardinal Ratzinger's campaign to extirpate every trace of the liberal theology that came out of Vatican II, even turning on old friends.

Ratzinger especially wages war against "liberation theology"; personified by the likes of Oscar Romero, the archbishop of El Salvador, who was conveniently assassinated before Ratzinger could remove or discipline him. But other leftist bishops were spied on, silenced or even hounded out of the church.
One of Ratzinger's charges against Peru's Gustavo Gutiérrez, the brains behind liberation theology, was his "selective reading of the Bible, overemphasizing the poor.";

He was equally ruthless in snuffing out any hope for the ordination of women, or any role for women in the church beyond service to men. When English theologian Lavinia Byrne produced a book called Women at the Altar, the CDF prefect actually had it burned.

In 2012, as Pope Benedict, he targeted U.S. nuns for not speaking out strongly enough against gay marriage, abortion and women's ordination. He specifically called out Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group for American nuns, for supporting - in defiance of their bishops - U.S. President Barack Obama's health care reform, which mandated insurance coverage for birth control for employees at religious institutions. Ratzinger sent in a posse of bishops to clean house at the organization.

But it is in his words and actions on homosexuality that Ratzinger/Benedict has been the most extreme, and the most cunning, says Gawthrop.

Here is an excerpt for a letter Ratzinger wrote as CDF prefect to bishops on "the pastoral care of homosexual persons"; issued in 1986, at the height of North America's AIDS epidemic and its attendant homophobia:

"The proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behaviour to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.";

In other words, whatever happens to gays, they brought it on themselves.

In the same letter he warned that making it illegal to discriminate against gays "can easily lead, if not automatically, to the legislative protection and promotion of homosexuality.";

So it was better to let gay-bashing run rampant than to make it a crime, because that might somehow promote homosexuality.

Again and again Gawthrop notes that Ratzinger would always put rigid adherence to his dogma ahead of making the lives of the faithful better, or even at least safer.

Early in his papacy Benedict approved a document declaring that homosexuals - whether practising or not - were unfit for the priesthood.

"The Church . . . cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practise homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called 'gay culture,'"; it said.

Not much new there: a continuation of a toxic culture designed to ward off honest, self-aware gay men and to attract closeted and/or self-loathing ones. But Gawthrop maintains Benedict saw in that wording the basis of a defence against the coming storm of lawsuits.

"He was preparing to blame homosexuality for a problem the church had willingly enabled for hundreds of years,"; Gawthrop writes. "He was creating a climate to scapegoat gay men for a scandal that had less to do with sexual orientation than with medieval taboos on all forms of sexuality.";

Gawthrop also deals with the Vatican's banking scandals, its interference at the UN and Benedict's propensity for alienating other churches. He brushes aside the more hysterical accusations that the young Ratzinger was a Nazi.

But the dark heart of The Trial of Pope Benedict is "Bewitched, Buggered and Bewildered,"; the chapter on sex crimes.

Space does not permit even a partial list of the crimes and cover-ups, but the most widespread documented abuses by far occurred in Ireland, where a report capping a 10-year civil inquiry revealed that tens of thousands of children had been abused in church-run schools, and that "the sole concern of the church was to protect against scandal.";

In 2011 Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Enda Kenny stood in the nation's legislature to blast the Vatican for not only failing to confront child sex abuse, but also for trying to interfere with criminal investigations into these crimes.

Pope Benedict XVI's response? The Holy See briefly recalled its ambassador, and an official tut-tutted Kenny's "excessive reaction"; to the report. But the church had lost Ireland, for centuries its most obedient fiefdom.

Now an atheist, Gawthrop, in an afterword, urges Pope Francis to "clean house,"; open sex abuse files to civil authorities, convene Vatican III, decentralize the Vatican's power and give up its statehood.

In view of all he has laid out in the preceding pages, I believe it is more realistic to hope that more people will join the millions abandoning this corrupt, hypocritical and increasingly irrelevant institution.

Shane McCune is a former Province columnist now living in Comox.

[BCBW 2013]