Chapter and (re)verse
How did the Catholic church go so wrong?
A little-remembered gathering might have changed everything, a new book argues
The moment when Pope Pius XII’s nose fell off was awkward, both because the pope’s body had been put on public display and because the embalmer was none other than Pius’s own doctor.
Many had been suspicious of Pius’s choice of medic: he was, they felt, a quack.
Pius ignored them.
A pope, after all, is infallible.
Pius might have been.
His doctor clearly was not.
Quickly Pius’s skin turned blue-green.
Then it ruptured.
Then his nose fell off.
The smell became so bad the body had to be covered in cellophane.
A Swiss Guard watching over the corpse collapsed.
Pius was buried in 1958.
But the suspicion that something was rotten in the Vatican remained.
It still does, argues a new book by Philip Shenon, formerly a reporter for the New York Times.
To critics the Catholic church, which claims over 1.3bn followers, is irony incarnate.
It was founded by a man who advocated poverty; yet its last pope, Benedict, wore filigree gold crosses and tailor-made shirts at several hundred dollars a pop.
The Catholic church long declared homosexuality a “depravity”, yet a study published in 1990 estimated that perhaps a fifth of American priests were gay.
It is run by celibate men, yet its priests find time to rule, in Latin, on everything from whether one should use condoms (non) to whether masturbation is a sin (ita vero).
What it did not find time to do was to stop the abuse of children by Catholic priests.
A church founded by a man who instructed his followers to “suffer little children” is therefore now better known for making children suffer: in France alone an estimated 200,000 children were abused by priests between 1950 and 2020.
This much is familiar.
But Mr Shenon chronicles these failures through the history of the last seven popes, which is unusual.
Medieval histories make much of popes, with good reason: bad popes are good copy.
The classmates of Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), who died in 2022, used to play a parlour game: who was the worst pope?
Was it Sergius III, who assassinated his predecessors, or Alexander VI, who held orgies at which prepubescent boys jumped out of cakes?
Modern histories pay less attention, for many reasons.
Partly it is because popes matter less.
Partly it is practicality: many Catholic documents are locked away not merely in Vatican archives but also in Latin (yet another barrier).
The exception was statements on the cold war, which were drafted in French because Latin lacked a term for “nuclear war”.
It has since been coined: bellum nucleare.
It is also a matter of taste: secular, modern histories tend to focus on secular, modern powers and on rulers whose reach is geographical rather than spiritual.
Popes may also be ignored because they sometimes seem so silly.
They wear dresses and funny hats.
They travel in a popemobile.
Until relatively recently the pope’s minions included two men whose job it was to follow him and fan him with ostrich feathers.
Besides, the Vatican is tiny.
It has a population of just 600-odd citizens.
It does not have an army (and certainly no arma nuclearia); instead it is guarded by Swiss Guards, with their toy-soldier pikes and plumed helmets.
The entire place is a mere 108.7 acres.
Many Legolands are larger.
But this toy-town is no game.
Though its bureaucracy might not be as riveting as misbehaving medieval popes, it matters.
At the heart of the book is an ecumenical council, which convened in the 1960s, at the behest of a liberal and reformist pope, John XXIII, to consider “updating” the church.
It was known as Vatican II.
To non-Catholics, that title sounds slightly comic: a film sequel, not serious theology.
But it was deeply serious.
Had it succeeded it would have revolutionised the church’s attitudes to everything from birth control to divorce, homosexuality and heresy.
John died.
The reforms that followed were footling, not revolutionary.
Latin mass was ditched.
New musical choices were allowed.
As Tom Lehrer, a satirist, observed, Catholics could now “Do whatever steps you want if/ You have cleared them with the pontiff”.
Though, as Mr Lehrer said, if the church “really wants to sell the product”, its reforms should have gone further.
This gripping and damning book shows how, over the course of the next five popes, they did not.
It is a long history, well summed up by the shortest verse in the King James Bible that forms this book’s title: “Jesus wept”.
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