Clear mind was a gift to the Church

A FEW years ago, on Dec 23, I got a morning call from RTÉ.

Reuters news service had just reported that Pope Benedict had compared the threat posed by homosexuality to humanity as similar to the destruction of the rainforests. Would I come on air to discuss it?

I wasn’t free, as it happened, but I did tune in to the media coverage that followed. There was widespread scorn, outrage, and free-ranging criticism of the Pope. It took ages for the truth to emerge — Benedict had spoken about the “ecology of the person” and the importance of recognising the difference between the sexes. A criticism of certain gender theories, it was. A swipe at homosexual persons, it was not.

A lie, Mark Twain once said, “can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”. The truth of what the pope said never really got out. Benedict-haters were confirmed in their prejudice. Admirers of the Pope checked more reliable news sources and soon realised the deception. The majority in the middle perhaps shook their heads sadly and regretted that the Church had got so out of touch.

The relationship between the pope and the wider world, and to some extent his connection with the faithful of the Catholic Church, frequently suffered from this kind of misreporting. As a result, the world probably never got to know the real Pope Benedict. He was radically different from his predecessor, John Paul II. Millions of people had grown up to the beat of the JPII pontificate, and at his death legions of young people, not all of them Catholics or even religious, mourned the passing of a grandfather figure. Pope John Paul also had dramatic gifts and, for most of his reign, boundless energy.

Compared with such a gigantic personality, a shy scholarly pope was never going to shine in the media or in the popular mind. But to Pope Benedict’s credit, he didn’t try. If he was anything, he was a “thinking person’s pope”, whose clear mind and frank approach were a gift to the Church but were not, in themselves, a recipe for short-term popularity. If this was “a man with a deep love of truth”, nobody knew more than Benedict that the world isn’t always interested in the truth, or even the search for it. We live in an age when feelings and images, rather than thoughts and words, dominate. And Benedict had said, before he ever became Pope, that the Church should not be afraid to grow smaller, relinquishing some of its education and health institutions rather than compromise on the truths of the faith.

That’s not to say the Pope didn’t reach out. For years the Church will face accusations over its past failures to act speedily and rigorously against abusing clergy. Benedict was part of the solution, not the problem here. “As a pastor feeling pain in a stirring, private meeting at the Vatican nunciature in Washington, he brought a listening heart to victims of sexual abuse by clerics,” New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan said yesterday. Where it mattered, Benedict was active. Cardinal Ratzinger, in his role as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, inaugurated a new era of zero tolerance of what he described as the “filth” in the Church and he gave it more efficient laws on dealing with complaints.

As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith he had the job of protecting the integrity of Catholic teaching, and this sometimes meant challenging theologians who sought freedom to undermine Catholic doctrine, even while remaining Catholic teachers themselves. But recent controversies involving some Irish clergy underscore the fact that the Vatican has been patient and measured in these matters.

And so he retires to obscurity, but not before his thoughtfulness and temperament have led many to respect and love him.

* Rónán Mullen is an Independent senator representing the National University of Ireland and is a former communications officer with the Dublin archdiocese.