A drama that beats any Dan Brown plot

The Vatican is awash with conspiracy theories about why the Pope is resigning, but Benedict has had the last word

After the initial shock came the speculation. Pope Benedict XVI surprised even his closest advisers on Monday by announcing that he was standing down, but within hours the Vatican was awash, not just with the inevitable talk of who would succeed him, but also with whispers about the “real story” behind the first papal resignation in over 600 years.

Once the curia – or Vatican bureaucracy – started chewing it over, the theories it spat out were quickly flying around what the papal historian John Cornwell has characterised as “a palace of gossipy eunuchs”. And from there it is one short step to finding their way into the Italian press.

Dan Brown couldn’t have made it up. The ecclesiastical earthquake of a pope resigning has been attributed, variously, to Benedict nursing a fatal illness; to a head injury during his trip to Mexico last March that convinced him to abdicate; to being forced out after an acrimonious meeting with a group of senior cardinals two days before he announced his resignation; to his looming disgrace over either dodgy deals done by the Vatican Bank, past cover-ups of paedophile priests, or an “explosive” forthcoming report by a team of cardinals on a tendering scandal; and to a strategy to secure the succession for his favourite.

All of which at first glance makes me and many Catholics seem hopelessly naive for taking as read Benedict’s explanation in his resignation speech – namely that he was too old, physically and spiritually, to continue to be chief executive of a multinational church of 1.3 billion souls. Given that he is 85 and has always carried himself like a piece of delicate china, that sounded perfectly reasonable in worldly terms, even if it was a radical move in the history of the papacy, tantamount in some eyes to betrayal. (“One doesn’t come down from the cross,” Cardinal Dziwisz, former secretary to John Paul II, has remarked disapprovingly.)

But then, in what was hastily rebranded his “farewell mass” in Saint Peter’s Basilica on Ash Wednesday, Benedict appeared to add fuel to the fire of claim and counter-claim when he appealed to his Church to move beyond “individualism and rivalry”. Could these be the coded final words of a deposed pope?

Let’s assume for a moment the mantle of Robert Langdon (or GK Chesterton’s Father Brown for those with longer memories and better taste in literature) and examine the evidence offered by the conspiracy theorists. Back in November, they point out, Benedict was busy reconfiguring his private office so it could better support him in bearing the burden of being pope as advancing years took an ever heavier toll.

His good-looking secretary, Mgr Georg Gänswein (known as “the Black Forest Adonis” and “Mgr Clooney” in the Italian press, which has elevated him to the front cover of Vogue), was promoted to be Head of the Pontifical Household, and effectively gatekeeper to Benedict. Why bother going to all that trouble – and the inevitably scurrilous headlines about “Gorgeous George” becoming the Pope-in-waiting – if two months later you are going to resign?

And yet, simultaneously, the Benedictine nuns at the Mater Ecclesiae Convent in the gardens of the Vatican were moving out while their building – which will now house Benedict in retirement – was renovated. It suggests the Pope may have been in two minds about his future, but that hardly constitutes a scandal. This instinctively conservative figure, with a strong sense of history (he has a penchant for wearing the colourful hats once sported by medieval popes), was contemplating a radical decision. No wonder he needed time to think and pray about it.

Then there is the pacemaker. The way the Italian press told it, Benedict had been having secret treatment for a “mystery ailment” for months. The reality, though, appears to be that he had a routine procedure to replace a pacemaker (or its batteries) that he’d had since his days as a cardinal, and didn’t want any fuss. He has nothing specific wrong with him, the Vatican press spokesman has insisted, while a thousand medical experts worldwide have donned their virtual stethoscopes to offer diagnoses based on recent papal photo opportunities.

What, though, of that rumoured showdown with an inner cabal of plotting cardinals – the equivalents of the fictional Preferiti of Angels and Demons? Is that what did for Benedict?

There is certainly ample evidence that the senior figures in his Vatican have been jostling for position. Last year’s “Vatileaks” scandal – when the Pope’s butler, Pablo Gabriele, was found guilty of stealing his master’s papers – drew back the veil on a culture of character assassination in the corridors of power in an independent state that answers to a higher moral code.

The principal target was Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the 78-year-old Vatican Secretary of State (Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary run into one). He was number two when Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, ran the old Holy Office. Supporters of the man Bertone replaced in 2006 as Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, complain loudly of his lack of the diplomatic experience usually required for the post. They accuse him of building his own power base as a future pope by packing key Vatican posts with fellow members of his religious order, the Salesians. Ironically the two men – Bertone as camerlengo (or chamberlain) and Sodano as dean of the College of Cardinals – will now be jointly in charge of running the Vatican in the interregnum between Benedict’s departure on February 28 and the election of a new pope some time in March. That should test their collegiality – the ecclesiastical equivalent of cabinet collective responsibility.

But the internal rumblings go further than a personality clash. They even stretch to money. The Vatileaks papers revealed that Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the cleric Benedict had appointed to turn the Holy See’s annual deficit into a profit, felt he had been ousted in 2011, possibly at the behest of Bertone.

And there have also been repeated suggestions that the Vatican Bank – which has a murky recent history of alleged involvement in financial dodgy deals and the mysterious death of the Italian financier Roberto Calvi – has once again been getting itself into unholy waters of money laundering in its dealings with a troubled Italian bank, Monte Paschi di Siena.

So all is not divine harmony within the Vatican, but a cursory reading of the 2,000-year history of the papacy suggests it was ever thus – schisms, factions and even, some stories go, a woman in disguise on Saint Peter’s throne. Yet it is a very big leap indeed from “individualism and rivalry” to the Pope having been forced to resign.

As we discovered when British author David Yallop produced In God’s Name, an international bestseller alleging that John Paul I, who lasted only 33 days in 1978 and died in mysterious circumstances, had been murdered by a group of cardinals who feared that he was about to expose them. Yallop’s evidence was subsequently blown out of the water. The truth was much more mundane. Running the Catholic Church as absolute monarch had proved too great a strain for the 65-year-old former Patriarch of Venice.

His is a cautionary tale in every sense – about the wisdom of appointing men near retirement age to such a taxing job, and of lapping up every whiff of scandal and hypocrisy attributed to the Church. Which, sorry to disappoint you folks, brings us back to Benedict’s own explanation of his resignation.

For all that it is extremely rare (though perhaps it may now become the new norm), his choice to stand down is absolutely in line with canon (church) law. Indeed, an ailing John Paul II is said twice to have penned resignation letters as Parkinson’s disease reduced this once athletic figure to immobility and made even speech slow and painful.

Perhaps it was the sight of his long-time boss struggling and eventually dying in public that convinced Benedict such a course wasn’t for him. He will have seen what we didn’t – those same turbulent cardinals jockeying for position around the Polish pontiff and, reportedly, blocking the then Cardinal Ratzinger’s efforts to start getting to grips with the paedophile priest scandal.

Recent history is full of “lame duck” popes. Paul VI spent his last years in the mid-1970s locked away from view while the crew took charge of the ship of state. And in the case of Pius XII, the wartime pope, his household, headed by the formidable Sister Pascalina, ran the Church. She was, Benedict once remarked of his compatriot, “the most powerful Bavarian ever in the Vatican”.

He was being too modest. If there were ever any doubt that he has claimed that particular crown, the events of this week have nailed them. By resigning Benedict has ensured his own place in history – but not in the annals of infamy.

This article originally appeared in : Pope Benedict XVI's resignation : A drama that beats any Dan Brown plot