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One of the most ancient axioms to define the See of Peter’s role in the Church reads: “prima sedes a nemine iudicatur” — no one can judge the first see.
Centuries before papal primacy was defined at Vatican Council I in 1870, the Bishop of Rome already enjoyed a type of immunity in both the religious and the political-secular spheres.
Today we have a more pope-centred Church, where five of the eight popes who served in the 20th century have been beatified or canonized, and a Vatican City State where the pope is the absolute monarch.
The Emanuela Orlandi case
But this theological, political, and legal order protective of the papacy is now under pressure because of the sex abuse crisis.
We have seen this with recent insinuations against John Paul II after the Vatican reopened investigations into the 1983 disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Roman Curia employee who lived with her family inside the walls of Vatican City.
It’s one of the most enduring Italian mysteries I grew up with, and it was brought back in the news by the release late last year of the Netflix series “Vatican Girl”.
Her older brother, Pietro Orlandi, insinuated on Italian national television that Emanuela fell victim to a sex slave ring and that John Paul II was aware of this.
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the late pope’s private secretary from 1966 until his death in 2005, and the official Vatican media responded directly to the allegations, calling them “defamatory”.
This prompted Pietro Orlandi to distance himself from his earlier statements.
At the Regina Caeli prayer on Sunday, April 16, Pope Francis defended John Paul, the man who appointed him bishop and made him a cardinal.
“Certain of interpreting the feelings of the faithful from all over the world, I address a grateful thought to the memory of Saint John Paul II, in these days the subject of offensive and unfounded inferences,” Francis said.
John Paul II has also been under attack from investigative journalists in his native Poland for knowingly covering up sex abuse when he was the archbishop of Krakow.
Those allegations are detailed in a book that is harder to liquidate in a short statement.
This is not just about John Paul II
But it’s not just John Paul who’s come under fire.
In these last few years, Benedict XVI and Francis have become part of the broadening focus on eminent cases of abuse in ways that were not imaginable while the Polish pope was still alive.
What we are seeing is a new form of an offensive against the papacy.
It’s no longer a frontal attack, manu militari, as it was in previous centuries – from Sciarra Colonna and William of Nogaret against Boniface VIII in 1303 to Napoleon Bonaparte against Pius VI and Pius VII five centuries later.
It’s not even the old-style, political anti-papalism similar to the time of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf or the anticlericalism of the elites driving 19th-century European nationalism.
No, this is more subtle and “democratic” – or at least as democratic as conspiracy theories aspire to be.
It’s a different kind of delegitimisation that is taking place manu mediatica, (through the media), despite all the efforts of the modern papacy to be more media friendly.
This is not a conspiracy or an alliance.
Rather, it is part of large cultural changes in our societies, especially in the West.
Secularisation has changed the way in which secular, mainstream journalism approaches Catholicism and the papacy.
The automatic deference that was once granted to the “Vicar of Christ” is no more.
Now there is a more dispassionate, sometimes trashy and gossipy, attention to the private lives of the members of the ecclesiastical elite, which is closer to tabloid coverage of the British royal family. And lately, certain Roman Curia officials have willingly played a role in this current infotainment.
The Catholicism portrayed by “Spotlight” and “The Young Pope”
Of course, the entertainment industry is also involved.
A prime example is the 2015 movie Spotlight.
It narrates the Boston Globe’s investigation into the cover-up of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, portraying the Church as a mafia-like organization that goes all the way up to the Vatican.
The fact that it won the academy award as Best Motion Picture of the Year (and many other awards worldwide afterwards), means something has changed — a certain idea of Catholicism has gone mainstream.
Another example is the 2016 TV series The Young Pope and its 2020 made-for-television sequel, The New Pope.
They have normalised the idea of the papacy as part “Roman holiday” and part ecclesiastical vice, using stylish settings to display corruption of all kinds (beginning with sexual sort), all “typical” of the papal pornocracy of the 9th and 10th centuries to the Borgias in the 15th century.
These are not just money-making operations.
These changes in how the media and the entertainment industry portray the papacy and Catholicism are just the tip of the iceberg.
They are only one small visible part of some massive cultural changes in how Catholicism has been perceived in these last forty years, certainly since the beginning of the current sexual abuse crisis.
One of these changes is the idea of ubiquity of sexual violence and abuse, where the “elite pedophilia” paranoia about the Vatican is just a less sophisticated version of the notion that “the holy proved to be the best hiding place for evil” – as one of the most influential scholars of Catholicism in the United States, Robert Orsi, wrote in History and Presence (Harvard University Press, 2016).
Tectonic shifts
Another is the crisis of the male in a society where the redefinition of gender roles has been mapped in ways that are, at least in theory, much clearer for women than for men.
This crisis for an all-male clergy has prompted Catholic bishops and influencers to offer recipes promoting “Catholic masculinity” that are anything but reassuring. (The internet is a pandora’s box in that regard.)
The abuse crisis has produced tectonic shifts; Catholics – not just the bishops and the Vatican –are struggling to find their footing.
The rise of the #MeToo movement combined with the crisis to create a climate of suspicion against genuine relationships and, in the Church, spiritual direction.
This has instilled anxieties about what our Church leaders and fellow Catholics – but also neighbours, co-workers, even family members – might one day reveal about themselves (or might be revealed by others) as victims/survivors or abusers.
All this is more typical of a totalitarian police state than of a liberal-democratic society and even less of a Christian community.
It’s closer to The Lives of Others than Babette’s Feast.
The Catholic Church’s inability to manage the abuse scandal from a legal and institutional point of view is the symptom of dashed hopes that new laws would result in just punishment and prevention systems sufficient to re-establish our common humanity.
The papacy is paying the price for its historical responsibilities in the deconstruction of that hope, and this has wide-ranging consequences.
The abuse crisis has produced a hard-to-reverse disenchantment (if not contempt or rage) with the magisterium’s attempt to send a positive message about sexuality.
For at least another century, it has tarnished the credibility of Catholicism and the papacy to speak on a whole range of issues.
Can Catholicism weather yet another storm?
Pope Francis accelerated his response to the abuse crisis after scandals emerged in 2018 concerning the bishops of Chile and the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
That was the year when the scandal affected his personal credibility.
And this is now part of the “new Roman question”.
The old one emerged in the face of the collapse of the Papal State between 1860 and 1870.
The new one has come about because of the collapse of something less tangible but not less substantial — the papacy’s (and the Vatican’s) credibility and legitimacy for the Catholic Church, the largest non-governmental provider of social, education, and medical services in the world.
Clearly, the policy of the popes of late 20th and 21st centuries to canonize their immediate predecessors on the Chair of Peter is worse than ineffective.
It is actually counter-effective because it gives the impression of a pre-emptive defence of the papacy and an impediment to an understanding of their sainthood that is not pure apologetics.
What we are witnessing could be just another storm that Catholicism will weather, like many times before, because “the Church thinks in centuries”.
But the abuse crisis and its developments in the last several years have revealed how much has changed in the perception of the Church, papal office included.
The Roman papacy was built both theologically and architecturally in the second millennium. It became an icon of Christian civilisation to the point that pontifical romanitas and catholicity were often seen as synonymous.
John Paul II wrote that the papacy in the third millennium was to serve ecumenical unity.
These last two decades have sent quite a different message.
- Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
- First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.
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