Pope Benedict XVI: The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love

Pope Benedict XVI left the Chair of Peter amid debate about what his decision meant for the Church. Above all else, it was an act of fatherly love and sacrifice.

December 31, 2022

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: The Holy Father, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI entered Eternal Life at 9:34AM Rome time (3:34AM EDT) on the last day of the Year of Our Lord 2022. I wrote the following post in February 2013 in the weeks following his decision to leave the Chair of Peter. It was a time of great confusion for the Church, and great sorrow for those who loved this Pope. Upon the death of Pope Paul VI in 1978, Archbishop Fulton Sheen said that he offered a ‘Hail Mary’ for him, and then another ‘Hail Mary’ in his honor asking for his intercession before the Divine Presence. I offer these same prayers today for Benedict XVI and in the same way.

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February 2013

We are all prisoners of our own perception. We come to just about every concern and deliberation from the perspective of our own unique limits, circumstances, and points of view. The more fair and just among us practice varying degrees of empathy which is, in part at least, the ability to place ourselves in the shoes of another.

One truth became crystal clear to me on February 11, 2013. No matter how well honed our skills for empathy might be, none of us can ever adequately imagine ourselves in one pair of shoes — the Shoes of the Fisherman.

It was that very title that helped plant and cultivate my early thoughts of priesthood when I was 15 years old in 1968 — the same year Msgr. Charles Pope once wrote of in “1968 – The Year the Church Drank from the Poison of this World.” My friend, Father Louis Antonelli took me to see The Shoes of the Fisherman, the film starring Anthony Quinn as Pope Kyril I. It was scripted from the great novel of the same title by Morris West. In the end, the fictional Pope Kyril — who as a priest spent 20 years in a Soviet prison — sacrificed his papacy to avert nuclear war looming in the Communist stranglehold on the Soviet Union and China. The long, ponderous film deeply moved me at age 15 as Pope Kyril’s acts of love and sacrifice mollified the world at the expense of the Church. I left that film resolved to pray for the Pope, who in my sudden awareness became the most important man on Earth, and the most targeted man for the world’s wolves and the powers of evil.

Priesthood did not take me to where I had hoped back then to go. Like Kyril himself, it took me to prison. So it was from the perspective of my confinement in a prison cell that I learned the heartbreaking news on Monday morning, February 11, 2013, that our beloved Pope Benedict XVI would resign the Chair of Saint Peter effective February 28. Like so many of you, I found that news to be deeply disappointing — even devastating. That day felt as though someone had cast a pall over the entire Church.

The news footage soon to follow the Holy Father’s bombshell — the scene of a bolt of lightning striking the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica — did nothing to ease the sense of oppression that day wrought. Like so many of you, I was filled with dread that the wolves had won — the very wolves the Holy Father referred to in his first homily as Pope in April 2005: “Pray for me that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.”

After eight years of his pontificate, I could not imagine this Pope fleeing from anything. In the ensuing weeks, I have slowly come to see his decision not only as agonizingly painful in its making — for us, but most especially for him — but also as a courageous act of sacrifice motivated by love for the Church and the 1.2 billion souls who come to Christ through Her.

Not in His Own Best Interest

By the end of the day on February 11, 2013, I asked a friend to post a comment from me on BTSW’s Facebook page. My comment focused only on the Holy Father’s brief statement and avoided much of the media spin launched within minutes of it — most of which I was unaware of anyway, and could only imagine. Pope Benedict’s own words left little room for spin, and they are worth hearing again as he abdicates:

“After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry. I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering.

“However, in today’s world, subject to many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to steer the boat of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”

My immediate reaction to these words was one of great sorrow. I believed that Pope Benedict, who would soon turn 86 years of age, was convinced by those around him not to allow age and infirmity to become the media’s face of the Church. I believed such advice to have been rooted in the last years of Pope John Paul’s pontificate as his obvious infirmity became its own news event.

And so my brief comment that February 11, though well intentioned, assumed that the Holy Father was simply convinced, as he himself stated, that his “strengths and advanced age are no longer suited to the Petrine ministry” — especially so in a world in which every papal tremble, stumble, and foible is caught on camera for instantaneous global news.

I thought the Holy Father had agonized over this and concluded simply, and understandably, that age and infirmity taking center stage in the future years of his papacy were neither in his best interest nor that of the Church. I thought wrongly.

There was absolutely nothing in this decision that the Holy Father considered to be in his own best interest. Like so many of the loving fathers I know, his own best interest never entered the equation at all. On the morning after the Pope’s announcement, The Wall Street Journal  published a superb and influential commentary by Catholic writer George Weigel that helped to give me some perspective on this development. “Catholics Need a Pope for the ‘New Evangelization‘ ” (February 13, 2013) was a service to the Church calling upon us to look forward to consider the urgent challenges to be faced by the successor of Pope Benedict. George Weigel pointed out something that the Holy Father himself was deeply aware of as “we widen the historical lens through which we view this papal transition.” Pope Benedict XVI will be the last pope to have participated in the Second Vatican Council.

By ending his papacy, he had ended an ecclesiastical era. The question George Weigel asks us to ponder is not “What wolves brought this about?” but rather “To what future has Pope Benedict led Catholicism?” I believe the answer to that question is the urgent issue of the coming conclave, and I believe the Holy Father is convinced of the necessary timing of this as the Church summons forth a Pope for the New Evangelization.

And Not without Precedent

In the Western world, and especially in the Americas, it’s difficult for some to factor the Catholic Church as an ancient structure, the sole institution in human history to have survived — to have even thrived — for 2,000 years. In “The Canonization of Pope John Paul II,” I wrote of a History Channel presentation on the papacy. Hopefully, we may see it again before the coming conclave.

With reverence and historical accuracy, the cameras took us from the tomb of Saint Peter to the tomb of Blessed John Paul II. Between them, two millennia had past — 2,000 years of war, scandal, all manner of human debacles, and countless assaults on the Church and Holy See. And yet at the tomb of Saint John Paul II the Church stood. The gates of hell had not prevailed against Her — and not for lack of trying.

That trial continues. A pope’s resignation is rare, but not unheard of. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Saint Louis University history professor Thomas F. Madden unveiled some of this history in “The Pope Joins a Fine but Rarely Seen Tradition” (Feb. 15, 2013). For the first 1,200 years in the life of the Church, Professor Madden explained, it was assumed that a pope could not resign except under extreme conditions such as being thrown into prison — a fate that befell three popes in the first millennium.

The last resignation of a pope was six centuries ago in the year 1415. Eight decades before Columbus sailed to the New World — 360 years before the United States even existed — Pope Gregory XII resigned the papacy to end the Great Schism. In so doing he was praised throughout Europe for placing the interests of the Church above his own interests and ambition.

But the real precedent was set in 1294 when Pope Celestine V, now Saint Celestine, resigned for reasons very similar to those now put forward by Pope Benedict. A conclave had been unable to arrive at a consensus for two years when Pietro del Murone was elected to resolve it. Already in his 80s when he became Pope Celestine V, he quietly established in canon law a tenet allowing for the resignation of a pope, and then applied it to himself with the support of the College of Cardinals.

The Prayer to Saint Michael

The Church canonized Saint Celestine in 1313. In the 2010 book, Light of the World (Ignatius Press), based on Peter Seewald’s extensive interviews with Pope Benedict XVI, the Holy Father cited the precedent set by Saint Celestine, and even hinted — then at age 84 — that if ever a pope’s reserves of strength no longer served the Church, that precedent could be repeated.

But there is still the matter of the wolves circling from both without and within. They have always been here. George Weigel pointed out that the Second Vatican Council’s deep reforms in the Catholic Church actually began in the previous century in 1878. According to Mr. Weigel, “Pope Leo XIII made the historic decision to quietly bury the rejectionist stand his predecessors had adopted toward cultural and political modernity.” George Weigel ended his article with a reflection about the current state of disunity in the Roman Curia, calling upon the coming conclave to elect a pope who will address the Curia’s “disastrous condition . . . so that the Vatican bureaucracy becomes an instrument of the New Evangelization, not an impediment to it.”

Pope Benedict XVI cited a similar concern in his Ash Wednesday homily from the pulpit of Saint Peter’s Basilica: “The face of the Church is at times disfigured by the sins against the unity of the Church and the divisions of the ecclesial body.” It is of interest that in 1888, Pope Leo XIII also cited this while composing his famous Prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel, only a small part of which has become the common prayer we know. In its original form, Pope Leo wrote:

“In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the pastor is struck, the sheep may be scattered.”

Pope Benedict XVI has never had to earn our deference, but earn it he did, many times over, as our Holy Father in a time of great trial for the Church. We owe him the benefit of our fidelity, unity, and prayers, and I know he has those. By abdicating at this time, and by calling the Church’s focus to what comes next at this moment in history, Pope Benedict is engaging in an act of love and sacrifice for the Church.

What remains heartbreaking is that so many of us have come not only to reverence and respect this Pope for his gifted mind and great personal holiness, but we have come to love him. Even in life, this Holy Father’s long-serving predecessor was given another title in his last years. My friend, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus and others deservedly dubbed him “John Paul the Great,” and it stuck.

Pope Benedict XVI also stands to have a new name. Springing from the hearts of millions, no matter what role he plays or what the Church comes to call him, this Holy Father will forever be for us, “Benedict the Beloved.”

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Prologue — December 31, 2023: As cited above, in 1888 when Pope Leo XIII composed the prayer to Saint Michael, he added in the original version, “In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the pastor is struck, the sheep may be scattered.”

For so many faithful Catholics the world over, history sometimes repeats itself.

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Pope Francis in the Dock by Archbishop Carlo María Viganò

Described as “an atomic bomb dropped on the Roman Curia,” a former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States accused Pope Francis of covering up some Cardinal sins.

I was just sitting on my bunk in my prison cell on Sunday night, August 26, after a tiring day on multiple fronts. I went through the day without a single message on the GTL tablet I was holding. It was unusual, the calm before the storm. I spent a few minutes at night playing one of its solitaire games that I can never seem to win. Several minutes later I exited the game to find a surprise. In that brief ten minutes, l9 messages had come into my GTL inbox. Before the night was over, there were nine more.

The summer of Catholic scandal had just detonated its third and most explosive bomb, and several readers sent me alerts and commentary. Archbishop Carlo María Viganò (pro. “vee-ga-NO”), a former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, published an 11-page letter on two Catholic websites.

The published letter charged that Pope Francis, six months after assuming the papacy in 2013, revoked restrictions placed by Pope Benedict XVI on the ministry of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick when Pope Benedict learned of his history of sexual abuse of seminarians. Archbishop Viganò claims that he personally made Pope Francis aware that Cardinal McCarrick had been restricted to a life of prayer and penance, but simply ignored it.

The letter also claimed, among other charges, that Pope Francis ignored it as well, restoring Cardinal McCarrick to a position of power and influence as a papal advisor. Cardinal McCarrick, according to the letter, thus became instrumental in the naming of two other American prelates, Cardinal Joseph Tobin in Newark and Cardinal Blase Cupich in Chicago.

On the day this all exploded, it made for dismal reading long into the night. You need a scorecard to sort out the details of this three-strike story. First in the summer of Catholic scandal came revelations that Cardinal McCarrick, age 88, stands accused of groping a 16-year-old boy in the sacristy of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City in 1971, long before he became a bishop and then a cardinal.

The claim has been presented as both credible and substantiated, but in a post, on Beyond These Stone Walls (linked below) I described this to be a matter related more to expediency than evidence. “Credible” simply means that both McCarrick and the 16-year-old lived in New York City in 1971. “Substantiated” is another matter and, absent evidence, eyewitness testimony, or an admission of the accused — and there were none of these — it defies belief. As I have pointed out, the 16-year-old is now 63.

But this bombshell has morphed into a bigger one that is far more credible and substantiated. A barrage of sordid stories has emerged about Cardinal McCarrick engaging in a decades-long pattern of homosexual predation of seminarians and younger priests. He became notorious for this, the current disclaimers of bishops notwithstanding.

These tales, and those of his now infamous beach house were familiar to many former seminarians and priests east of the Mississippi in the 1980s and 1990s. I was one of them. Meanwhile, every bishop and fellow prelate has either feigned ignorance or kept silent. In “Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix,” I speculated upon three questions:

• Who knew what and when did they know it?

• What did they do once they did know it?

• Why is this all coming up now?

The central point of that post was something that each of the polar camps seldom considers as this story heightens a debate about the moral prerequisites for priesthood:

“I have encountered another condition among many, but certainly not all, homosexual seminarians and priests. I found the prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder among them to be inordinately high. Perhaps it is inordinately high in the wider ‘gay community’ as well.

I believe it is this disorder, and not simply same-sex attraction, that is the real impediment to Holy Orders. It is this that must be detected and treated as an impediment for seminary candidates. Narcissistic personality disorder is one of the most difficult personality disorders to treat and modify. One of its symptoms is the objectification of others for one’s own gratification.”

In other words, there is a developmental and psychological difference between a person who experiences same-sex attraction but remains celibate, and one who becomes a predator. Behaviors such as stalking and grooming are inherently narcissistic.

But before anyone launches a Catholic witch hunt, narcissism is a pathology not at all related to sexual orientation, although I and others have cited a higher presence of narcissistic behavior among homosexual men than heterosexual men. This was supported in a subsequent article by Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons, MD, on LifeSiteNews.

I did not intend to analyze Cardinal McCarrick in the above post, but if the behaviors with seminarians now attributed to him are true, then one could legitimately conclude that he became a manipulative, narcissistic predator. Some of what Archbishop Viganò now alleges in his 11-page bombshell letter lends credibility to this. He wrote that McCarrick was privately disciplined for these behaviors by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, but the Cardinal “openly flouted the papal sanctions.”

The Second Bombshell: Pennsylvania

The news media, for the most part, looked the other way during the Cardinal McCarrick bombshell, and the reasons for that were political. I examined them in “The McCarrick Report and the Silence of the Sacrificial Lambs.” Then another bomb dropped, this time in Pennsylvania but with reverberations across the country and around the world.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro published a Grand Jury report that exposed 300 Pennsylvania priests accused of sexually abusing 1,000 victims over a period of seventy years. Nothing in this report is new, some of it is untrue, and much of it is politically motivated. I wrote about this report in detail in “Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Joseph Goebbels In ‘The Reckoning’.”

I think I speak for many conscientious Catholics when I say that we have grown tired of upwardly mobile political careerists like AG Shapiro who allude that questioning claimants or asking for evidence “re-victimizes the victims.” Claims in the Pennsylvania report date back as far as World War II and most of the priests accused are long deceased. Many others who are still living were denied any opportunity to defend themselves. There are serious flaws, and multiple injustices, associated with this report. (Note: In the elections of November 2022, Josh Shapiro was elected Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania.)

The news media that ignored or minimized the Cardinal McCarrick story pounced on the Pennsylvania story ignoring its many flaws, lack of due process and substantiation, and the fact that it was a grotesque abuse of the grand jury system. It served a purpose for the leftist media by momentarily moving the spotlight back onto the moral panic about child abuse and off a politically less desirable truth: that homosexual predatory behavior has been the real ground-zero of the crisis.

That crisis is manifested in a 50-year history of narcissistic homosexual inclination and behavior among a significant number of seminarians, priests, and bishops. And according to Archbishop Viganò’s published letter, it is a reality with tentacles that have reached deeply into Vatican affairs.

The hypocrisy it has borne along with it never ceases. In light of the third and biggest bombshell, the accusations brought by Archbishop Viganò, USCCB President Daniel Cardinal Dinardo had this to say:

“Archbishop Viganò’s letter raised questions that deserve answers that are conclusive and based on evidence. Without those answers, innocent men may be tainted by false accusations and the guilty may be left to repeat sins of the past.”

I agree. But with all due respect, Your Eminence, there are many accused U.S. priests who deserve answers that are conclusive and based on evidence. Innocent men have been tainted — imprisoned even — by false accusations, and Cardinal McCarrick is evidence that some of the apparently guilty have been left to repeat the sins of the past. The U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter applied only to priests while exempting bishops.

The “Atomic Bomb” and Its Fallout

Now, with the revelations of Archbishop Carlo María Viganò, it seems that some who feigned shock over Cardinal McCarrick already knew, and had known for years, about his history of luring seminarians into a homosexual Catholic subculture of predation, compromise, and secrecy.

Archbishop Viganò’s document alleges that he personally informed Pope Francis of the above in Rome shortly after the conclave of 2013. Without apparent consultation with Pope Emeritus Benedict, Pope Francis met with McCarrick, appeared to revoke the canonical sanctions imposed by Pope Benedict, and restored Cardinal McCarrick to a position of power and influence. The media coverage of this story has been amazing. A lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal (“Pope Francis in the Dock,” August 29, 2018) chided the left for downplaying the story:

“The archbishop’s charges have split the Catholic community. Some defend [Acb. Viganò’s] reputation for honesty and professionalism while others suggest he is motivated by dislike for Pope Francis. Some secular defenders who like the pope’s politics, and are stalwarts of the #MeToo movement, want to excuse the episode… But motives are irrelevant here, or at least should be. The question is whether the archbishop’s claims are true.”

In an op-ed in The New York Times (“A Catholic Civil War?” August 27, 2018) First Things senior editor Matthew Schmitz described the fallout of the bombs of the summer of 2018 and Archbishop Viganò’s letter to be evidence of our polar ideologies:

“No matter what Francis does now, the Catholic Church has been plunged into all-out civil war. On one side are the traditionalists, who insist that abuse can be prevented only by tighter adherence to church doctrine. On the other side are liberals, who demand that the church cease condemning homosexual acts and allow gay priests to step out of the closet.”

I do not at all agree with this assessment of the state of affairs in the Holy See. This is not a matter of simple polarity, but of truth. Getting at that truth is something owed to the Church. How best to do this is the next big question. Some more conservative commentators have cast a series of doubts about the integrity of Pope Francis in the light of what is presently alleged. Others on the left attack Viganò.

Those in the media, often of a more liberal mindset, have suggested that Archbishop Viganò should be treated with a degree of skepticism. John Allen, formerly Rome Correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and presently president of Crux Catholic Media wrote that “The proper attitude is to take [the Viganò letter] seriously but with a large grain of salt [and] healthy skepticism.”

Mr. Allen cited as a reason for “healthy skepticism” Archbishop Viganò’s “unsubstantiated” accusations against other church leaders in the same document, and the Archbishop’s history as an emphatic critic of the pope’s liberal views on divorce and homosexuality. The Rev. Robert Imbelli, emeritus professor of theology at Boston College — in the epicenter of the 2002 abuse scandal — suggested that the pope “leaves it to journalists and their professional competence to evaluate the truth.”

I am sorry, but “journalists and their professional competence” may seem a cruel joke to anyone who has been victimized by the news media’s total lack of John Allen’s “healthy skepticism” when it comes to coverage — and the most basic truth-telling — about Catholic scandal. For the best commentary on the media’s lack of “healthy skepticism” see JoAnn Wypijewski’s courageous media comeuppance: “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film.”

Vigano: Impeccable Integrity or Caped Crusader?

Despite some of the aspersions against his integrity and motives, any honest assessment of Archbishop Viganò’s Vatican-based career can lead to only one conclusion. He has been a servant of the Church of the highest caliber, exhibiting moral fortitude and integrity — sometimes at great cost to himself.

In 2012, the Vatican’s most powerful powerbroker under Pope Benedict XVI, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, engineered a plot to move Acb. Viganò out of Rome. He was transferred against his will from his position as Deputy Governor of Vatican City to a post as Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, a position that Viganò interpreted as “exile.”

America is not normally considered a place of exile, but it’s easy to understand why Viganò saw it that way. His reforms in the financial structure of Vatican City halted the scourge of nepotism and corruption. His department went from a 10 million Euro Debt to a 30 million Euro surplus in one year. He ended corrupt contracts and replaced them with legitimate ones. In the ordinary course, this would be a good reason to keep him around.

So his “exile” was perplexing. His letter of appeal to Pope Benedict was never answered when he was sent to Washington DC. It was from this move that Acb. Viganò was unwittingly placed in a position between the affairs of Rome and the Archdiocese of Washington where, he says, Cardinal Donald Wuerl also became keenly aware of censures placed on Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict, but chose not to enforce them. Cardinal Wuerl denies this, a position that grows weaker by the day.

This is not the last word. Without doubt, there is more to come. Until it does, I am a loyal and steadfast supporter of the pope until clear evidence loosens that knot. Nonetheless, every visible and credible source measures Archbishop Carlo María Viganò as a man of great integrity and courage. We would all be fools not to listen.

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Editor’s Note: This article and others like it can be found in our “Inside the Vatican” category in the BTSW Public Library. Please share this important post. And please consider these other related posts from Father Gordon MacRae and Beyond These Stone Walls:

• Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy

• The Chief Priests Answered: “We Have No King But Caesar”

• Pope Francis Suppresses the Prayers of the Faithful