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The relentless leakage went on, not least in his native Germany, where Die Zeit newspaper reported that 180,000 Germans had formally ended their affiliation to the Catholic Church and withdrawn from paying the church tax in 2010, a 40% rise on the previous year, well beyond any mere statistical fluctuation. In the decade to 2011, the numbers of Catholic clergy in Europe as a whole had dropped by 9%, the number of seminarians was down by 22%, male religious by 18%, female religious by 22%. Scandal over money as well as sex contributed to a growing sense of malaise and disenchantment.
The pope suggested in his letter that the wave of abuse might be a consequence of recent secularising trends, in which the softening of zeal since the Second Vatican Council, and the abandonment of traditional practices like regular confession, had played a major part. To his critics, Benedict seemed too ready to blame deep-seated and endemic problems on the liberalisation of Catholicism after the Council, rather than face up to the links between abuse and the Church’s long-standing clericalist ethos and authoritarian structures.
He was to continue such gestures after the Holy Year had ended, for example in his remarkable visit to Greece in May 2001, which initially evoked a storm of protest from Orthodox ecclesiastics, but in the course of which the pope simply and humbly apologized before the Archbishop of Athens for Roman Catholic sins against the Orthodox churches, especially the Sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, an episode which for many Orthodox epitomized the evils of Latin Christendom.
Fatima is a Portuguese shrine where the Virgin was believed to have appeared in 1917. The apparitions and the Fatima cult rapidly became drawn into the apocalyptic hopes and fears aroused by the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist attack on Christianity. During the Cold War years Fatima become a devotional focus for anti-Communist feeling, and the aging Pius XII was rumoured to have received visions of the Virgin of Fatima.
John Paul was convinced that the shot with which Mehmet Ali Agca almost killed him in St Peter’s Square in 1981 was miraculously deflected by Our Lady of Fatima. Agca’s bullet was later presented to the shrine at Fatima, where it was set in the Virgin’s jewelled crown.
The epidemic spread of HIV-Aids in Africa seemed to demand the use of condoms to prevent the transmission of the disease. But for Papa Wojtyla, the use of condoms was never justifiable, even in pursuit of an undoubted good like the halting of disease. The Church recommended chastity as the best and only protection against the disease, while highly placed Vatican spokesmen even harnessed dubious science to query the effectiveness of condoms as protection against the Aids virus. The world beyond the Church, and many within, found such intransigent teaching hard to comprehend – or to forgive.
Much preoccupied with the so-called ‘Church of silence’ suffering under Communism, John Paul set himself to strengthen it in its struggle with materialist regimes. He returned to Poland as pope in June 1979. The nervous Communist regime, against the strongest possible advice from the Kremlin, did not dare to refuse him entry. It was a catastrophic miscalculation on their part. A rapturous one third of the entire population turned out to listen to Wojtyla at meetings up and down the country. The visit focused national confidence in the face of a shaky Communist regime, and was a major factor in the emergence of the independent union Solidarity , the following year. Papal support, both moral and financial, played a crucial role in the success of the Solidarity movement, and Poland’s eventual peaceful transition to self-government and the end of Communism there.
Pope did everything he could to ensure that Communists would not win elections. The Vatican pumped funds into the Christian Democratic party, and promoted links between Italy and America. In 1949 Pius excommunicated anyone who joined the Communist Party or supported Communism in any way. The ruling unleashed a flood of anti-Catholic measures in Eastern Europe.
Controversy revived in the 1980s with suggestions that the ‘ratline’ from Rome to Latin America, down which Nazi war-criminals like Klaus Barbie and possibly even the Gestapo chiefs Martin Bormann and Heinrich Muller had escaped, was a Vatican network. Pius XII dreaded Communism above all, and some at least of these former fascists were viewed in Rome, it was alleged, as defenders of the faith.
After the war, a large number of refugee clerics and others accused of war crimes in Croatia were given shelter on Vatican property. There can be no doubt that pro-Nazi Austrian and Croatian clerics in Rome, and right-wing Catholic circles in France, actively concealed and assisted such war criminals.
As pressure on the Italian Jewish community mounted, Roman religious houses were opened as places of refuge – 5,000 Jews were sheltered there and in the Vatican itself. Historians have recently questioned the pope’s direct involvement in these relief measures, but at the time he was widely credited with having saved tens of thousands of Jewish lives, and after the war, the chief Rabbi of Rome became a Catholic and took the baptismal name Eugenio.
With the Concordat safely achieved, Hitler discarded the mask of cordiality towards the Church, and the Nazi press began a smear campaign. The Archbishop of Baden, it was claimed, had a Jewish mistress, the Vatican was financed by Jews, the Catholic Church was profiteering on inflation. Press attacks gave way to physical intimidation. By 1936 the Vatican had accumulated a vast dossier of Nazi attacks on the Church’s freedom in Germany, which, it was rumoured, it intended to publish. Cardinal Pacelli, on a visit to America, declared that ‘everything is lost’ in Germany.