On Benedict's Election

This is a very interesting piece in light of the recent papal visit to Britain. Odd to look back on how strident the reactions to his election were:

Unexpectedly, the first person I saw hurrying out of St Peter's Square on Tuesday morning was the grand old man of the American Catholic Left: Fr Andrew Greeley, a Vaticanologist whose account of the 1978 conclaves, The Year of the Popes, is as racy as the thrillers he also writes. Greeley has slicked-back white hair and spookily blue eyes. Twenty-six years ago, he twice failed to predict who was going to be pope. Not this time. "It's Ratzinger," he groaned. "That sermon he gave before the conclave wasn't a manifesto - it was a victory speech."

He walked away, then turned round. "By the way," he called out, "I hear your Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor is against Ratzinger."

The following morning, Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor gave a press conference in an airy salon at the Venerable English College. The room was full of BBC journalists who, now that John Paul II was safely buried, seemed relieved to drop the mask of impartiality. "The turkeys have voted early for Christmas," said one.

The Cardinal declared himself "content" at the outcome. "Thanks be to God that we have a good man who is going to be a good pope," he said. But there was no hint of his predecessor's jubilation after the first conclave of 1978. ("This was God's candidate," Cardinal Hume announced - ill-advisedly, as it turned out, since God's candidate had a fatal heart attack 33 days later). Murphy-O'Connor's media performances have improved spectacularly since he acquired his sharp-as-nails press officer, Dr Austen Ivereigh. Even so, he made a revealing slip of the tongue - "They voted… we voted for this man" - and few listeners were convinced by his argument that Pope Benedict will be a changed man. Karol Wojtyla did not moderate his views on acquiring the keys of St Peter; why should Ratzinger?

After the press conference, I had lunch with Fr Joe McManus, a young English priest, in the Piazza Farnese. Blazing sunlight bounced off the peeling ochre-coloured stucco of the square; it matched my companion's mood. "Ambitious clergy are going to be rushing to Gammarelli's [the papal outfitters] to exchange their grey suits for black soutanes," he predicted happily. (A soutane is a sweeping cassock with many buttons. They are currently museum pieces in the English Catholic Church - but Pope Benedict thinks all priests should wear them.)

Perhaps it is a breach of professional ethics to report this, but at the next table sat a trio of liberal journalists noisily discussing "what went wrong". They, too, assumed that Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor had been one of the anti-Ratzinger lobbyists, but that monoglot Third World cardinals had been too disorientated when they arrived in Rome to coalesce around a progressive candidate. Fr McManus, grinning widely, leant across and offered "my sympathy in your grief". We shall probably never know how active the English Cardinal was in the attempt to defeat Ratzinger; there is no reason to believe that he will offer the new Pope anything but unswerving loyalty - but, as one Vatican commentator puts its, "We would be surprised if Cormac's resignation isn't accepted when he reaches 75."

..Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor used an interesting phrase at his press conference: quoting Newman, he said Benedict "has eyes for all the company" - meaning that he shows a gentlemanly consideration for everyone. But it is true in another sense. Unlike John Paul II, Benedict already keeps an eye on the English Church, and does not like everything he sees.

In 2003, Monsignor Kevin McDonald, a super-bright former Vatican official, was installed as Archbishop of Southwark. Yet his name had not been on the terna, the list of three candidates submitted to Rome by the Pope's (liberal) representative in England. "A senior Left-leaning bishop was just about to pack his library and call in the removal men when the news came through that he wasn't going to Southwark after all," says a priest close to the Vatican. "And guess who struck through his name? Ratzinger."

The Southwark story confirms a point made by John Allen in his 1999 biography of Ratzinger. In the last chapter, having dismissed a Ratzinger papacy as a virtual impossibility, Allen lists what the Catholic Church could expect if the unthinkable did happen. And near the top of the list is "better bishops". Benedict recognises that the low quality of episcopal appointments was one of John Paul's few failures. Nowhere was this more obvious than in England and Wales, where a succession of socialist prelates allowed themselves to be manipulated by Left-wing advisers. (Fr Frank Turner, until recently the bishop's foreign affairs adviser, rarely lost an opportunity to advance the Palestinian cause, and also threw his weight behind the proposed EU constitution.)

Benedict hates unnecessary bureaucracy; if he ever became pope, wrote Allen, he would relish "deconstructing bishops' conferences" and replace them with highly intelligent diocesan bishops who were not afraid to declare war on secular orthodoxy. Such men exist in this country; they have just not been promoted. One thinks of Fr Aidan Nichols, the world's most brilliant Dominican theologian; Fr Alexander Sherbrooke, a former confidant of Diana, Princess of Wales, handicapped by his Etonian background; Dom Antony Sutch, the expansive, cigar-chomping former headmaster of Downside.

These priests are Benedictine in the new sense of the word: intensely holy, while not in the least worried about upsetting cultivated opinion. Even they, however, would stop short of describing the campaign for women priests as "driven by radical feminists, especially lesbians" - one of the new pope's aperçus - or compiling a list of infallible Catholic teachings that includes "the nullity of Anglican orders". (Benedict has said that the Anglican tradition of entrusting doctrinal decisions to national churches is "nonsensical", though he is keen to welcome more Anglo-Catholics to Rome and there may be further moves in that direction.)

"Pope Benedict will be a man of surprises," Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor predicted last week. That seems a safe bet, though most of the surprises are likely to be unpleasant ones for the self-admiring circle of Tablet-reading activists who have set the English Church's agenda for the last 40 years. Who, for example, will Benedict choose to replace Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor in three or four years' time? Until last week, the liberals were confident that the decision would be taken by a radical South American pope. Now, they are once again hoping forlornly that death will intervene.

In the lovely shaded garden of the Venerabile last Wednesday, one of the most distinguished writers in the English Catholic world was keeping his spirits up with this thought. "Ratzinger's heart isn't that good, you know," he said. "He's 78, and he was coughing like blazes at his first Mass this morning. We could be back here in a year."

One wonders, then, how the English reception of Benedict manifested itself behind the scenes.