In Jesus Wept, investigative journalist Philip Shenon examines the last seven popes, and how efforts to reform the Church with the Second Vatican Council led to power struggles and doctrinal debates that lasted for decades. He spoke with Dave Davies about the theological clashes, scandal, and the accuracy of the movie Conclave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who are the seven popes discussed in 'Jesus Wept'?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. We in the media regularly cover the decisions of powerful leaders in government and business and how they affect our lives. My guest today, veteran investigative reporter Philip Sheenan, has spent much of the last 10 years examining the impact of seven powerful men who've exercised a different kind of authority.
They're the last seven popes of the Catholic Church, whose intense power struggles and doctrinal debates affect more than a billion Catholics in countless ways. Whether they can use birth control or get an abortion or divorce and remain in good standing in the faith,
Whether priests must forever remain unmarried and celibate, a rule with little biblical authority that fuels a drastic shortage of priests and leaves millions unable to regularly attend Mass or receive sacraments. Whether same-sex couples can be accepted in the church. And whether sexual predators will be stopped and held accountable.
Sheenan's book is the story of a bold attempt to reform the church in the early 1960s and decades of backsliding that followed under pontiffs more comfortable with conservative traditions and power concentrated in the Vatican. Philip Sheenan spent more than 20 years at the New York Times covering the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the State Department, and Congress.
His two previous books focused on the 9-11 investigation and unanswered questions about the Kennedy assassination. His new book is Jesus Wept, Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. Philip Sheenan, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Dave, thanks for having me.
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Chapter 2: What was Pope Pius XII's relationship with Nazi Germany?
He is known for not having spoken out against Nazi crimes despite substantial evidence that he was aware of them. But there's even more. You tell a story in the book which was new to me of this Pope Pius before he was pope, when he was an archbishop in Munich, meeting personally with a then rising Adolf Hitler. What happened here?
I think it's fair to say that Pacelli loved Germany more than he loved his homeland, Italy.
Pacelli being the name of the cardinal before he became pope, yeah.
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.
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.
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.
This housekeeper, Sister Pascalina Leonard, it turns out was a very close advisor of Pius and wrote these interesting diaries. And it said that she actually advised him to speak out against the Nazis during World War II when all this was happening, right?
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.
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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Chapter 3: How did Pope John XXIII initiate reforms in the Catholic Church?
So in 1958, after Pope Pius dies, the cardinals in the Vatican gather to select the new pope. We're all familiar with this ritual. They settle on an Italian bishop, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who takes the name Pope John XXIII. He's short, quite overweight, not the most imposing figure visually.
But you say, without saying so directly, he made it clear quickly that things were going to be different from the grim sobriety of the previous pope. What did he do?
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.
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.
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.
All right. Let's talk about some of the issues of potential reform that came up at the Vatican II Council, some issues that the church was confronting. One of them was the longstanding practice of requiring priests to remain unmarried and celibate. Now, there's a fascinating history here, right? This was not always the case, right?
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.
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,
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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Chapter 4: Why was priestly celibacy a controversial issue at Vatican II?
There was another issue involving sexuality and that is birth control. I mean it was against Catholic doctrine. There was thought that perhaps it's time to change that. You write about a Belgian bishop, Leo Joseph Sunans, who talked about his experiences hearing the confessions of women and what this restriction meant for them in their lives.
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.
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.
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.
There was one really significant change, which was it was decreed that they didn't have to – priests did not have to conduct mass solely in Latin, which meant that people around the world could understand more of what was being said. That was really the one enduring change, wasn't it?
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,
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.
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.
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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Chapter 5: What was the Catholic Church's stance on birth control during Vatican II?
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.
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.
Right. And this is fascinating because Pope Paul VI, he issues this encyclical called Of Human Life, which fully rejects the findings of this commission about liberalizing rules on birth control and rejects it completely. What was the reaction in the church among Catholics? How was it received?
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.
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.
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.
Right. Polling showed that Catholics everywhere disapproved of this, and clergy in the Netherlands basically revolted, right?
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.
It's clear from opinion polling at the time that millions of American Catholics continue to use birth control.
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Chapter 6: How did Vatican II change the language of Catholic Mass?
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.
And as a result, many of the reforms that a lot of Catholics consider just sort of common sense have never been enacted.
We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Philip Sheenan. He is a veteran investigative reporter. His new book is Jesus Wept, Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies. This is Fresh Air.
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Chapter 7: What was the Catholic Church's historical view of other faiths?
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I wanted to return to a moment with Pope Paul VI, who was the one after John XXIII. In the 60s and 70s, he was the pope, and he had affirmed the church's ban on birth control despite the recommendation of a commission that had been established, which favored relaxing the rules.
And this happened in the late 60s when there were a lot of sweeping cultural changes including the sexual revolution, which certainly troubled church conservatives. And in 1975, Pope Paul was so angry about the criticism he received about the birth control issue and the rejection of his views.
that he directed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, that's a unit within the Vatican, to release a long declaration on sexual morality, which had hardened condemnations of extramarital sex, masturbation even, homosexuality. That really prompted some revelations in the press about Paul's personal life. What happened?
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.
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.
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.
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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Chapter 8: Why did subsequent popes resist reforms initiated by Vatican II?
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.
You know, the scandal of sexual abuse in the church has been widely reported. And I think it's fair to say from a reading of your book that none of the popes that you write about confronted this terrible problem honestly and forcefully, all of them in varying degrees protected predators. In your research, did you come across any documents on this that really surprised you?
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.
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
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.
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.
Yeah.
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
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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