The Roman Catholic Church defines itself as the “people of God,” a community of all the baptized — lay women and men, the clergy, prelates — and not as a monarchical line of popes.
Yet with sharp portrayals of the last seven men who have served as supreme pontiffs, Philip Shenon’s “Jesus Wept” delivers a compelling recent history of the 2,000-year-old institution whose leaders reach for heaven but often fall spectacularly, sadly, into the morass of mortal fallibility.
Popes grapple with heinous waves of clerical sex abuse. Bishops and laity grapple for control of papal agendas, and all grapple with the watershed reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), known as Vatican II.
With 1.3 billion members, growing in Africa and Asia, and a fifth of the U.S. population (Catholics have invariably voted for the winner in presidential elections since 2004), the church is fabulously wealthy, its bishops and diplomats on the front lines of political events. The Catholic Church is “easily the most important institution in the history of Western civilization,” Shenon writes. Raised as a “not particularly observant Protestant,” now an agnostic, the author (a former longtime New York Times reporter) covered the clerical sex abuse scandal for The Daily Beast. He measures the popes partly by how they carried out the “spirit of Vatican II” but, most harshly, by how they mismanaged the monstrous crisis of abuse, especially of children.
The book’s title is taken from the two-word verse in the King James Version that describes Christ’s reaction to seeing the corpse of Lazarus. “Surely,” Shenon writes, “the Savior’s tears would be justified today by the catastrophic failings of a church that claims to act in his name.”
He begins with a biting picture of Pius XII, an ascetic-looking Italian from a semi-noble family whose diplomatic skills saved Rome from destruction during World War II, but who failed to denounce Hitler even though he knew of the genocide, as Vatican archives confirm. On Pius’s death in 1958, the papacy went to the plump, joyous Angelo Roncalli, a brilliant peasant who had climbed the ranks to become a Vatican diplomat and who took the papal name John XXIII.
This is where the book hits its stride. At age 76 when he was elected, John XXIII was presumed to be a place-holder pope. But he quickly astonished the world by convening the church’s 2,000 or so bishops to effect change and let the fresh air in, shedding the fortress mentality the church had maintained since the Protestant Reformation. Shenon correctly sees Vatican II as the coming out of the modern church.
The charisma of John, and the recent invention of satellite TV, created global audiences that followed the moving seas of miters, red-cloaked bishops with crosiers like precious shepherds’ crooks, the jeweled crowns of Eastern Rite patriarchs. My school headmaster in Rome managed to get tickets for our class to a session and I can attest that even as a very young student on the fringe of events, I had the impression that something grand and important was happening and that I, as a Catholic, was a part of it.
Out went Latin, replaced with the vernacular — the faithful would worship in their own languages. Ecumenism was encouraged; not only Catholics might be saved. The war with democracy, waged since the French Revolution, was largely over; now bishops stood for separation of church and state. Jews must no longer be regarded as Christ killers. God’s “providence, evident goodness and saving designs extend to all humankind,” a key document said.
Underscoring the urgency of John’s opening message — on the need for reconciliation among people, and engagement with history as it unfolded — the Cuban missile crisis broke out less than a week after the council’s start, threatening nuclear war.
But a minority wanted no change in the church, and here lies the tension of “Jesus Wept.” Behind the scenes, powerful dissenters like the archconservative Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, head of the Curia’s doctrine watchdog department once known as the Inquisition, maneuvered to sidetrack reformers. Joseph Ratzinger started as a gifted, progressive young peritus, or council expert, but with time and experiences in his German homeland became a fierce traditionalist known as “God’s Rottweiler,” a severity he maintained as Pope Benedict XVI (2005-13). Today, Pope Francis, an Argentine Jesuit who regards his papacy as a continuation of Vatican II, gets pushback from conservative U.S. bishops because he welcomes gays and the divorced, and, in their eyes, refuses to consider abortion “pre-eminent” among pro-life issues such as capital punishment.
Shenon writes that he is “relieved” to find heroes, too, in modern church history, and he points to blazingly smart theologians like the Swiss thinker Hans Küng and the Spaniard Pedro Arrupe, superior general of the Jesuits from 1965 to 1983, who turned the order around: Formerly known chiefly as educators of the elite, Jesuits are now committed to working on behalf of the poor and vulnerable.
Much of the pit through which the popes in this book slog is fed by the sex abuse crisis, a journey through contemporary circles of hell for victims and their advocates. Shenon writes that Francis’ greatest failure — like that of Benedict and his Polish predecessor, John Paul II (1978-2005) — has been his refusal to engage the crisis. Priests and bishops abused the sacred trust of children and others for years with impunity. Nothing is spared in recounting their odious criminal acts and the cowardly machinations of the church’s leadership to hide them.
If the abuse crisis darkens much of this book, it is because the crisis has darkened the church, causing millions to leave. Disputes over homosexuality, priestly celibacy and birth control also appear so often that the reader might think that sex (the word or derivatives appear some 400 times in 514 pages of text) is the main preoccupation of the modern church. Weary Catholics may agree.
Pope John wanted the Vatican council to recognize Roman Catholicism as a “church of the poor,” but John Paul II and Benedict did everything in their power to crush the post-council spiritual movement called liberation theology, with its centerpiece “option for the poor” and millions of followers; they connected it to Marxism and communism. Shenon highlights models for those who embraced the theology’s work, however, like Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, assassinated by a right-wing death squad as he said Mass.
He also recognizes the weight of papal teaching documents meant to guide Catholics — but goes too far by categorically proclaiming “Humanae Vitae” (1968), Paul VI’s prohibition of birth control, “the most consequential encyclical of modern times.” What of “Populorum Progressio” (1967), which declared that the economy of the world should serve all people and became a touchstone for government authorities, seminarians and political dissidents aiming for structural change in impoverished Africa and Latin America? Or John XXIII’s “Pacem in Terris” (1963), which definitively positioned the church in the modern debate on human rights that helped end the Cold War? Or Francis’ “Laudato Si’” (2015), which made climate change a central issue of church social teaching and helped bring forth the Paris Accords?
Shenon repeats a story about Jorge Mario Bergoglio (later Francis), that during the Argentine junta’s repression against presumed leftists in the 1970s, he denounced two slum worker priests who were captured and held in a torture center. He fails to add that one of the priests, Franz Jalics, issued a statement in 2013 saying that they “were not denounced by Father Bergoglio” and the suspicion was ”unfounded.” (The other priest, Orlando Yorio, died in 2000.)
Pope Francis is 88. Whether the next conclave will elect a candidate committed to Vatican II or swing back to traditionalism is unknowable. Francis, for one, appears sanguine, occasionally referring to an aspirational successor, Shenon notes, who would take the name John XXIV, honoring the pope who let the fresh air in 60 years ago.
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