THE TRAGEDY OF POPE BENEDICT XVI
Five days before his death in 2005, Pope John Paul II came to his window overlooking St. Peter’s Square to deliver what would have been his final Easter Sunday message. But when he opened his mouth, nothing came out. Many in the square, and millions more watching on television, were moved to tears as he repeatedly attempted, in palpable pain, to deliver his Easter blessing before finally sinking back into his chair, banging his fist in frustration.
In that instant, carrying on through his agony, John Paul stood as a rebuke to a utilitarian world that increasingly embraces a culture of death that discards the weakest among us — from the unborn to the elderly — treating them as a burden and inconvenience. With his silent witness, John Paul affirmed the intrinsic value of every human life, including those who are infirm, isolated and abandoned by society. As his suffering intensified in his last years, he had been asked: Why do you not simply resign? Because, he reportedly said, “Christ did not come down from the cross.”
His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, chose to come down from the cross.
As his own health worsened in 2013, Benedict relinquished the chair of St. Peter “for the good of the church.” No doubt Benedict, who died Saturday at age 95, did it out of a selfless love for
God’s people, whom he felt he could no longer adequately serve. But nearly a decade later, we know his abdication was a terrible, tragic mistake.
Benedict never wanted to be pope. In fact, he wanted to resign during John Paul’s papacy but could not abandon his longtime friend and close collaborator. He said his election by the college of cardinals felt “like a guillotine.”
But God had other plans — so Benedict became one of the greatest theologians ever to be named pope.
Throughout his papacy, he preached the Gospel of love in truth — teaching that “to defend the truth, to articulate it with humility and conviction” is an indispensable form of charity because “only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived.” He embraced tradition, and restored access to the pre-Vatican II liturgy, while continuing John Paul’s ecumenical outreach and leading the church in the modern world.
But Benedict’s extraordinary papacy is blemished by his fateful decision to resign. His abandonment resulted in the election of a new pope, Francis, who has sown confusion instead of clarity.
The papacy of Francis is in so many ways the antithesis of Benedict’s. Benedict was like the good doctor who, out of love, tells his sick patient the hard truth: You need to change your life — stop smoking, drinking and sinning — or you will die. Francis is like the bad doctor who won’t tell the sick patient the depth of his illness, allowing him to persist in his self-destructive ways — and thinks his silence is an act of mercy. It isn’t. In our deeply confused world, where we are urged to reject truth in the name of love, we need the church to teach boldly, as Benedict did, that “truth and love coincide in Christ.” In the wake of Benedict’s resignation, this teaching has been absent — and the dictatorship of relativism has taken an even deeper hold over society.
Just as Benedict did not follow the example of his predecessor, who showed in his continued service the salvific power of suffering, Francis has not followed the example of his predecessor, who warned us of the dangers of separating truth from love. The church and the world have been impoverished as a result.
Benedict will be remembered with deep affection and gratitude by millions across the world. We give thanks for his far-too-brief pontificate, and pray for the repose of his soul. But the tragedy of his papacy is that he has passed, at age 95, as pope emeritus, rather than the supreme pontiff.