Once he was Pope, Ratzinger’s different line led him, in 2009, to lift the excommunication of the traditionalist cleric Richard Williamson, a notorious Holocaust denier, sparking a controversy he now dismisses as “stupid,” and to denigrate Islam just after the fifth anniversary of 9/11, repeating a medieval slur that led to worldwide protests by Muslims, and about which Benedict now seems cavalier. (“I just found it very interesting to bring up this part of a five-hundred-year-old dialogue for discussion,” he says.) Benedict should get credit for defrocking four hundred sexually abusive priests during his papacy, although, again showing a present failure to appreciate the moral scale of past mistakes, he describes to Seewald his dread of “premature intervention” in abuse cases and the need to “go about it slowly and cautiously.” More to the point, he seems utterly disconnected from the consequences of his instruction, as Cardinal Prefect in 2001—just as the Boston Globe was laying bare the scandal—that priestly sex-abuse cases “are subject to the pontifical secret,” a ruling that prompted bishops to quietly bring such matters to the Vatican, not to civil authorities. That, of course, was the bishops’ essential failure. [...]
The true meaning of Benedict’s resignation did not become clear until the unrelentingly positive spirit of his successor began to show itself. He pays full tribute to Francis, expressing how “beautiful and encouraging” it is that the Church is “alive and full of new possibilities.” But he seems not to grasp that the Francis phenomenon runs far deeper than the Argentine’s personal charisma. Benedict is one of those who perceive Francis as a maestro of style, not altering the substance of belief, when, in fact, style and substance are inseparable. Benedict’s approach—not mainly his reticence, but his detachment—stamped his era with belief removed from real life, a moral perception so partial as to be immoral, with drastic consequences for the Church and all whom the Church was called to serve. Francis is anything but detached, and his perceptions are rooted in a visceral preference for experience over ideology. While the white-robed Pope Emeritus retreated to the seclusion of Castel Gandolfo, Pope Francis, only this month, opened it to the public.
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