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One of the keys to understanding Benedict is his brutal assessment of the immediate future of the Church. John Paul, with the cheers of crowds of bused-in ‘young people’ ringing in his ears, predicted a ‘springtime of Christianity’. His successor believes that the Church will grow smaller, and that this is by no means a bad thing. (One of the joys of reading Ratzinger is spotting how often he subtly tiptoes away from John Paul’s obsessions: it would be surprising if we were to hear any more about Fatima during this pontificate, and there will be no more talk of Mary as ‘Co-Redemptrix’ of humanity.)
Benedict’s apparent pessimism should be welcomed by Catholics, since it can only be to their advantage to have a pontiff whose view of the Church corresponds to sociological reality. The number of practising Catholics in the developed world is shrinking and will continue to shrink. The conventional view of Benedict has him planning to do battle with the diabolical materialism that has caused this decline. In fact, he grasps the complexity and irreversibility of the social forces involved. ‘The historical hour isn’t turning around,’ he said in an interview in 1996. ‘It would undoubtedly be false to expect that a sort of historical shift could take place, that the faith will again become a large-scale mass phenomenon that dominates history.’
You might imagine that the Pope would be upset by this state of affairs, which his predecessor refused even to acknowledge. He isn’t, because he thinks that a smaller Church could be a better Church, offering the world a superior product and therefore eventually increasing its market share. Benedict himself does not employ this commercial analogy, but it works surprisingly well — not just for Roman Catholicism but also for religion in general.
One of the discoveries in the sociology of religion in the last 25 years has been the extent to which, mutatis mutandis, patterns of religious allegiance in a pluralist society resemble those of consumption in the marketplace. People are attracted to strong brands that protect their identity; they enjoy products that suspend the boring reality of everyday life; and they demand near-infallible standards of professionalism.
Judged by these criteria, post-Vatican II Catholicism has failed miserably, and Pope Benedict — unlike certain smug bishops’ conferences — is aware of the fact. When the clerical bon viveur Brian Brindley resigned his Anglican orders, he said he felt like a commercial traveller who had been selling vacuum cleaners for 25 years, only to discover that they didn’t work. Benedict would not claim that Catholic vacuum cleaners don’t work; but he doesn’t think they do their job efficiently, and he wants to strip them of their fancy but useless attachments.
This Pope is a CEO, not a chairman, and as such has two priorities. The first is to make sure that staff and services bearing the label ‘Catholic’ are what they say they are. Benedict is not offended by liberal Catholic theology, and welcomes its insights; but, if it conflicts with the Church’s magisterium, he feels no compunction about peeling off the label. To use his own metaphor, ‘pruning is a condition of fruitfulness’.
Liberal American Catholics heard the snip of his secateurs when Fr Thomas Reese was invited to step down as editor of the Jesuit journal America last month; from the fuss they made, you would think there had been an auto-da-fé. This pruning will continue; we shall have to wait and see whether it has the desired effect, which is to stop the Church getting stuck in the mire of relativism that is swallowing Rowan Williams. (Incidentally, Fr Patrick Burke, editor of the conservative magazine Faith and an arch-enemy of the lofty British Tablet, has just joined the CDF. That could be fun.)
Writing in 1991, the then Cardinal Ratzinger warned European Churches that they ‘must not allow themselves to be downgraded to a mere means for making society moral, as the liberal state wishes; still less should they want to justify themselves through the usefulness of their social work’. But that is precisely how the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales and its ‘agencies’ spend their time, issuing self-justifying reports and consultation documents that pathetically try to reconcile Catholic teaching with the latest Islingtonian piety.
This dreary culture could be eradicated instantly if Benedict were to take an axe to the bishops’ conferences. Alas, that is a practical impossibility, so he will probably take the slower route of instructing the conferences to dismantle their sillier committees. He will also appoint brighter bishops. (That shouldn’t be difficult in England and Wales: sticking a pin in the Catholic Directory would produce a better hierarchy than the present system of consultation.)
Benedict’s other priority is to improve the quality of the Church’s greatest service, the liturgy of the Eucharist. This is a project far closer to his heart than, say, various sexual prohibitions (about which he thinks ‘perhaps too much has been said and too often’). Because he is an unusually frank writer and interviewee, we already know the drastic nature of the reforms he has in mind. Whether he will be able to implement them is another question, since they amount to the overturning of the post-conciliar culture of the Church, and the Pope is so old (78) that — as his brother thoughtfully pointed out — he cannot even be sure of waking up in the morning.
Here is a list of the changes Benedict would like to see introduced in dioceses around the world: the lifting of all restrictions on the celebration of the Tridentine rite; the replacement of toe-curling folk hymns by plainchant and polyphony; a return to the congregational rituals of bowing and breast-beating; the occasional Tridentine-style recitation of the canon of the modern Mass sotto voce; and — where architecturally feasible — a revival of the practice of the priest facing eastwards, away from the people, as he celebrates the Eucharist.
This literal reorientation is crucial because it captures the essence of Benedict’s theology. Orthodoxy, he argues in his masterpiece The Spirit of the Liturgy, should recover its older meaning of ‘the right way to glorify God, the right form of adoration’. And this means priest and people facing the risen Lord together, rather than facing each other and talking complacently about ‘the people of God’ (a phrase whose overuse irritates Benedict).
In the conclave following the death of Pius XII, the cardinals elected a 77-year-old pope, John XXIII, who by the time of his death four and a half years later had set in motion an aggiornamento, a turning towards the world. That process produced some positive results, but also created a cringing acceptance of liberal orthodoxy and services of such spectacular ugliness that they repelled the very people they were supposed to attract. John Paul II should have reformed the liturgy, but did not. As a result, too many Masses are as soul-destroyingly banal as they were in the 1970s. Now the cardinals have elected a pope even older than John XXIII who wants to turn the Church towards ways of thinking and worshipping that transcend rather than accommodate the world. It is a wonderful ambition — but Benedict will have to live a lot longer than John if he is to achieve it.
Damian Thompson is editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald.
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