Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 28 February 2013

Eight years ago I was in Rome for The Spectator to write a piece about the election of a new pope after the death of John-Paul II. Within two days, and after only four ballots, some wispy white smoke emerged from the little chimney on the roof of the Sistine chapel. The College of Cardinals had made its decision and chosen the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to be the 265th occupant of the throne of St Peter. He was already 78 years old and said to be longing for speedy retirement from his taxing job as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the oldest of the great Vatican departments (once popularly known as the Holy Office or the Inquisition). But when he appeared, beaming, on the balcony of St Peter’s basilica to acknowledge the cheers of the vast crowd gathered in the square below, he looked delighted to have been chosen for the much more demanding position of supreme pontiff.

It was, after all, his great chance to try to restore much-needed order and harmony to a Church in disarray. In his previous job, he had been confronted daily by depressing evidence of its fragmentation and demoralisation; and in a homily in St Peter’s just before the Conclave that elected him he had called for ‘a clear faith, based on the creed of the Church’ as opposed to ‘relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed or swept along by every wind of teaching’. This ‘relativism’, he said, ‘looks like the only attitude acceptable by today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognise anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.’

Pope Benedict’s misfortune was that he was constantly diverted in his crusade against doctrinal ‘relativism’ by having to deal with issues of sexual morality; and it seems likely that his pontificate will be best remembered for the exposure of child-abuse scandals in which thousands of Catholic priests had been involved.

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