Philip Shenon
Appearances
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
But the commission continues to meet, and on this commission are some of the most respected theologians in the church, lots of very prominent lay people, lots of important bishops, influential bishops. And in 1966, it recommends to the pope that the ban be lifted.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
So here we have a group of the most important theologians, some of the most influential churchmen, lots of prominent laymen from around the world who debated for four years this question and overwhelmingly conclude that birth control is not a violation of the church's teachings, that Catholics around the world should be allowed to engage in family planning.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And the pope simply refuses to accept it. And that decision just horrified lots of very prominent churchmen. It horrified all of the members of that commission. And really, for the rest of his papacy, he was under siege for what people considered a disastrous mistake.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And you've got to say the last several years of his papacy were painful for him because he just felt that he had lost the support of much of the church.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Well, not only did people protest, opinion polls showed that Catholics around the world were just ignoring the papal decree, that they used birth control. They thought they wanted to control the size of their families. You know, in those days, in the 1960s, there was a great concern about, you know, worldwide poverty and overpopulation and the population bomb.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
It's clear from opinion polling at the time that millions of American Catholics continue to use birth control.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, there's that famous aphorism about how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That was said in reaction to the First Vatican Council. It was said in reaction to the power of the pope that when these men were offered absolute power, they were determined to hold on to it. And
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, so many of the reforms that Vatican II was supposed to inspire, so many of the reforms that the world's Catholics had sought, the move to openness and tolerance, meant popes had to give up power. And what we've learned is that popes are very resistant to giving up power. They want to They appreciate the fact that they are essentially absolute monarchs.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And as a result, many of the reforms that a lot of Catholics consider just sort of common sense have never been enacted.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
After the 1968 decree on birth control, where he keeps the ban in place, he really feels under siege for the rest of his papacy. He feels sort of openly mocked and defied. He sort of becomes fixated on the idea of this wanton sinfulness going on all around the world, much of it tied to the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
He asks the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is the doctrinal agency of the Vatican, to prepare a document that will sort of establish once and for all the church's views on sexual morality. The document is produced in 1975 and is a condemnation of masturbation and promiscuity, and much of it is focused on homosexuality and what the Vatican sees as the sinfulness of homosexuality.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Actually, I think it declares that homosexuals are intrinsically disordered. I think that was the wording. And I don't think Paul foresaw the sort of chain of events that would follow. But very quickly, he became engulfed in a scandal in Italy in which people were talking openly about rumors that he himself was gay. An Italian news magazine published an article by a prominent gay French writer.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
in which the writer said he was well aware of the fact that the Pope was gay, that he had a boyfriend in Milan, and this became a huge sensation in Italy and I think mortified Paul VI. He was apparently just catatonic with fear that he was going to be involved in this humiliating scandal over his own sexuality.
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Well, you know, the priesthood in many ways is a brotherhood in which, you know, priests and bishops look upon these other men as essentially their family. They have no wife and kids. They have no partner and kids. These other men are their family, and they need to protect their family members. And, you know, I think...
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
the research that's available to us shows an awful lot of priests do violate their celibacy vows. A lot of bishops and cardinals violate their celibacy vows, and they are eager to cover up for one another.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And I think there was a concern that Paul and other popes, you know, concerned that their own sexual histories might be questioned, went out of their ways to try to protect other churchmen from revelations about their own sexual activity.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
I think it's fair to say that Pacelli loved Germany more than he loved his homeland, Italy.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
The American church hierarchy really ignored questions about sexual misconduct or sexual crimes by priests for generations. But in the 1970s, the American Bishops Conference in the U.S. produced a study that found that American priests, a large percentage of them were emotionally stunted, that they had sort of the emotional development of a teenager.
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And, you know, there was concern that this was linked to the doctrine of priestly celibacy, that priests became so obsessed with suppressing their sexuality that they weren't developing into fully formed, emotionally healthy human beings.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Right. And he is the Vatican's diplomatic representative to Bavaria and later to Germany for a dozen years after World War I. And he, in Germany, becomes much more alarmed about the potential rise of Marxist than fascist.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
I think the single most eye-popping document I came across in all my years of research is was a letter written in 1999 by Cardinal John O'Connor of New York, arguably the most powerful churchman in America, to Pope John Paul II. And to back up a bit, Cardinal O'Connor had just been informed that he was about to die. He just had brain surgery. He had only weeks to live.
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And one of his final acts on this earth was was to write this letter in late 1999 that was a dire warning to the pope that he must not promote Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, who was then based in Newark, New Jersey. He must not be promoted to any higher office in the church because of widespread, well-known evidence that he was a sexual predator. And O'Connor
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offers quite explicit information about McCarrick, including the fact that he liked to invite young men to his home for dinner and then insists that they sleep with him in his bed. Even though this letter is presented at the boat by a respected senior churchman in the United States, Pope John Paul ignores this warning from Cardinal O'Connor.
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and ignores warnings from lots of other senior Vatican officials who also know about McCarrick and still promotes him to a membership in the College of Cardinals and makes him Archbishop of Washington, D.C. And McCarrick then goes on for decades to continue to be involved in sexual misconduct with young men and boys.
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This has been going on for centuries, that bishops and cardinals in Rome can accept large cash gifts. And there's always been concern that essentially this is a form of bribery, that you could buy the favor of a bishop or cardinal by giving him a big gift or by giving him a trip or by giving him the renovation of his apartment, as often happened. And McCarrick was well known in Rome for
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Matthew Feeney, Jr. to prevent any sort of investigation of his sexual misconduct. He has a personal charity fund that raises millions of dollars. And the single largest check ever written from his personal charity account was a check for a quarter million dollars to Pope Benedict shortly after Pope Benedict was elected in 2005.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And the story told by his former housekeeper is that he meets with Hitler in the diplomatic residence in Munich and hands him an envelope stuffed with cash that he wants Hitler to use to campaign against Marxists in Germany.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And this comes at a particularly important moment for McCarrick because he's now facing mandatory retirement age of 75. He wants to remain in his post. And so the concern is that he made this big secret gift to the pope in hopes of staying in place in Washington. And in fact, that's what happened. He was then allowed to remain in his post for another couple of years.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
I should point out that Benedict and his aides denied that was any sort of a quid pro quo. But McCarrick remained in place in Washington, a decision made by the pope shortly after McCarrick presents the pope with a quarter million dollars.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And the housekeeper and certainly others around Pius over the decades believed that his love of Germany affected much of his decision-making and led to this decision throughout World War II to remain silent about the Holocaust.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
The comparison was made pretty early on that Francis was much like John XXIII in that he was talking about sort of an end to the closed fortress authoritarian church. He wanted to move the church toward, you know, declarations of mercy and tolerance, that he wanted to put the church out of the business of heresy hunting.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And he also, I think, delighted millions of Catholics by sort of rejecting all the sort of pompous trappings of the papacy. He refused to and continues to refuse to live in the papal palace. He lives in a small guest house. He refused the big Mercedes sedan that popes had traditionally used.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
By giving up the trappings of power, he's got a moral legitimacy that has a lot of appeal to millions of Catholics.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Little has changed in terms of formal doctrine. And I think one great concern about Pope Francis is since he hasn't made these sort of substantial changes in church teachings, a future pope could just reverse them as easily as Francis put them into place. But Francis has gone out of his way to reach out to gay Catholics, to divorced Catholics.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
He's made it much easier for divorced couples to get annulments that allow them to remarry. He's also allowed them to receive communion, which had been denied to divorced Catholics for centuries. He made it possible a couple of years ago for priests to offer blessings at gay weddings, even though that decision created an awful lot of scandal among conservative Catholics around the world.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
In the course of his career in the church, Francis has often talked of abortion as being a sin, but he's also talked of the need to offer the women seeking abortions a sense of mercy and forgiveness. In terms of birth control, I must say, given what I now know of this history, I find it remarkable he didn't lift the ban on birth control because it would be easy to do.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
It would be embraced by most of the most influential theologians in the church. But for whatever reason, it remains in place to this day.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
After Pope Benedict died a couple of years ago – Francis moved quickly to move out a lot of churchmen who were seen to be associated with Benedict, you know, arch conservatives. And, you know, Francis selects everybody. He is the absolute monarch. He can choose all of the personnel around him.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Over the course of his papacy, he has remade the College of Cardinals, which is the body that will choose his successors. You know, 80% of the cardinals who will vote in the next conclave to choose the next pope are men who were put there by Francis.
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So I think there's a feeling that even if Francis hasn't been the dramatic reformer people had hoped he would be, he's put in place in the College of Cardinals a group of men who will choose a successor who may have had the same agenda as Francis and may feel empowered to do much more to achieve it.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
I think he faces a lot of justifiable criticism for having not done nearly enough about the child sexual abuse crisis. He had a checkered record on that in Argentina. I think we have several instances now when it's clear he was very slow to act. against churchmen known to be sexual predators, including men who would be described as his friends.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And I think there's been a general sense of disappointment that he hasn't done much more on that front.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
It's fascinating to discover her because there's reason to believe that this nun, Sister Pascalina Leonard, this sort of tough-willed barbarian nun, may have been one of the most influential women in the history of the Catholic Church. She was very close to Pius for decades. She was his housekeeper, but she also seems to have been a close advisor. And she tells the story.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You can tell that the screenwriter had a lot of fun because there are several cardinals who seem to be based on real cardinals. And elements of their battling in the film reflect real battling that has gone on within the Vatican bureaucracy in recent years. And of course, you know, a centerpiece of the film is the question of sexual abuse and sexual misconduct and violence.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, we know those are battles that are fought. Those are debates that are held within the Vatican all the time.
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That's all true. I say they got the pageantry. They got the logistics right. When the cardinals gather for a conclave, their cell phones are taken away from them. There's electronic jamming equipment so they can't communicate with the outside world. The shutters are sealed. They really are supposed to have no communication with the outside world.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
It appears they often are able to establish some sort of communication, but they are supposedly forbidden from doing it.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Absolutely. It's a bit like any Congress or parliament you've ever heard of. You know, there's lobbying, there's pressure, there are factions that square off against one another. You know, it's a political place. The Pope is an absolute monarch, but he is elected through a democratic process of debating among the world's cardinals.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Whatever your position. religious background, you have to admire much of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The message of mercy and tolerance is a noble one. You don't have to be a Christian to see the wisdom of what Jesus Christ offered to the world 2,000 years ago.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
That there is this institution that claims to act in his name, I think would surprise the Savior and would surprise his disciples and apostles. And I think they would be enormously disappointed by how often the Roman Catholic Church fails to live up to the message of the gospel and how often it has allowed itself to be corrupted by very human weaknesses.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Absolutely. And, you know, 1.3 billion people will wake up tomorrow to identify themselves as Catholics, and they will continue to have their lives influenced in all sorts of ways by the message that the Vatican offers.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
There are still, though, many millions of Catholics, and especially Catholic women who really have no say in their church, who are desperate to see the church continue to open up and be a more tolerant and merciful place. in line with the message of the Gospels.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
There's some dispute about Pius. what she says about Pius, but she tells a Boston newspaperman that throughout the war, she pressed Pius to speak out against Nazi Germany, to protest the Holocaust, and Pius would not give in to her pressure. There's also reason to believe that she had a hand in saving thousands of lives in Rome, the lives of Roman Jews.
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Because when Nazi Germany marched into Rome in 1943, she pressured Pius to shelter thousands of Jews in Vatican City. And her role in the Vatican has largely gone untold because there's been an effort to make sure it's not told. There was a fear that the disclosure of her influence on Pius would be scandalous.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Certainly the thought that a woman had this much influence on a pope would have been seen as scandalous at the time.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Over the centuries, popes had left wills. They left documents that sort of established how their earthly belongings would be divided up and to thank their aides and advisors and to sort of highlight the accomplishments of their papacy. When Pius dies, there's a frantic search for his will, which is eventually found at the bottom of a locked desk drawer in the papal apartment.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And his deputies are stunned by it because it's so short and it's simply a bleak plea for mercy. It's eight sentences long. He says nothing about his earthly belongings. He says nothing about his gratitude towards his aides and advisers. No mention of the accomplishments of his papacy. It's a plea for mercy from God.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And he talks about the need for forgiveness from those who he has sinned against or scandalized. There's a fierce debate after his death about why he would feel the need to make this bleak plea for mercy.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
There's certainly a theory offered that he knew that when the truth about his actions or inactions during World War II in terms of not speaking out against the Holocaust became known, it would forever tarnish his legacy, that he needed God's mercy for his failings during World War II.
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Well, he's really the hero of this book, but he is this roly-poly Italian man, balding, treasures his peasant roots, who suddenly finds himself thrust into the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. And he makes clear from the very start that, as you say, the grim sobriety of Pius's reign is over. He loves telling jokes. He loves mocking the idea of an infallible pope.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
He is really a blank slate when he's elected in terms of doctrinal matters. But he quickly makes clear that he's ready to overhaul the Catholic Church. He's ready to invite the world's bishops to come to Rome to remake it as they see fit without his interference.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And this leads to the Second Vatican Council, where the world's bishops are invited to Rome and told they can remake the church as they wish without his interference.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, going into this project, I think I had in the back of my mind the idea that, you know, the doctrine of priestly celibacy, that the priest couldn't marry and have families and all the rest of it. That this was sort of eternal and had been decreed in the Gospels. Well, that's not true at all. It's not in the Gospels.
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In fact, most of Jesus' apostles and the larger band of disciples, they were married. The apostle Peter, the first bishop of Rome, had a wife and a mother-in-law. And in three of the four Gospels, Jesus heals his mother-in-law. What happens is after the first thousand years after the crucifixion, a thousand years in which priests got married and had kids,
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and knew the comfort and the chaos of a family. A strong-willed pope in the 11th century by the name of Gregory decreed that from that moment on, priests and bishops could no longer marry. They had to be, in fact, fully celibate. And that included men who were then already married.
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Gregory's motivation, historians will tell you, had something to do with the scandals of a group of shockingly promiscuous bishops in Rome. But there's also reason to believe it had something to do with money. that if priests were allowed to marry and have children when they died, their estates, their homes or anything else of value would be turned over to their survivors.
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Well, if you decree that priests can't marry, they can't have kids, the money goes to the church. And over the history of the church, many priests, many bishops had come from families of great wealth or royalty, in fact. And if you decree that they can have no family to leave their wealth to, That wealth comes to the church.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
So Gregory's decision promised a vast new source of income for the church.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Certainly in the last 150 years, there's been a true crisis created by the shortage of priests. Many priests, especially beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, decided they couldn't live this life of celibacy and they left to marry and have families. And there are stories told about huge stretches of South America, for example, where
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where there simply were no priests, that Catholics who wanted to make a confession or who needed to organize a funeral or a christening, there was no priest to help them. And there was pressure at the Second Vatican Council to eliminate the doctrine of priestly celibacy, to allow priests to begin to marry, to encourage more men to enter the priesthood.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Well, for generations, for centuries, you know, Catholics understandably wanted to control the size of their families. But the church opposed birth control and put that into writing in the 1930s, the pope at the time. decreed that birth control was a sin and therefore was banned for all Catholics.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And that was issued in response to what was the sudden availability of reliable birth control in the form of latex condoms. And priests at the time were And in the decades that followed, commonly heard from women and from married couples that this was a terrible burden on them. They needed to be able to control the size of their families. They needed to be able to feed the kids they already had.
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And theologians will tell you there's actually not much justification for the ban. The New Testament says almost nothing about birth control. And by the time the Second Vatican Council was underway, there were many priests who intended to make sure that the ban on birth control was lifted. It remains in effect today, remarkably enough.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
There were several. I mean, the Vatican II, it really was a revolutionary gathering, even though I think to this day, most devout Catholics, including lots of devout Catholics I know, can't really tell you what happened at Vatican II, in part because it was conducted in Latin. There's still a lot of confusion about exactly what happened and when. But since the 4th century,
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The church had decreed that all worship services be conducted in Latin, even though over the centuries, Latin became sort of a dead language to the world. Certainly by the 20th century, most Catholics didn't speak it. Even most bishops didn't really understand it.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And there had been an effort over the centuries, and certainly in the 20th century by many theologians, to try to convince popes to allow the mass – to be said in the vernacular, in local languages. And popes had resisted that aggressively. Second Vatican Council, this question came before the world's bishops.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And it was clear that most of them were eager to see an end to the Latin mass, at least an end to the exclusive use of Latin. And something that I learned in the course of this that I hadn't really understood before is that, you know, Jesus did not speak to his disciples in Latin. He spoke to them in Aramaic, which was similar to Hebrew.
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And then for 300 years after the crucifixion, the language of the church was Greek. And it's only in the fourth century when church power moves to Rome that Latin is introduced. So you can argue that Latin really hasn't been the appropriate language for hundreds of years. And this move to the vernacular becomes very popular.
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And today, all Catholics can see and hear the changes of Vatican II for themselves by hearing the Mass performed in languages they understand.
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The church until the early 1960s, as I said, was a closed fortress. It wouldn't really have dialogue with other faiths. It was seen as sinful, blasphemous to have communication with other faiths. As a result of Vatican II, the church sort of embraced the modern world again and embraced dialogue with other faiths, and especially with Judaism. In the 2,000 years since the crucifixion,
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The Vatican sort of, its formal doctrine was that all Jews, those ancient Jews who were responsible for Christ's crucifixion, Jews of the 20th century and Jews yet to be born, were all held responsible for Jesus' death. And it took John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council to end that, to exonerate Jews and to open dialogue with them, really, for the first time in 2,000 years.
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Peter Robinson In 1962, Pope John sets up a secret commission that will determine whether or not the church should lift the ban on birth control. He is open to the idea of lifting the ban. He dies shortly after the opening of the councils.