In a society where God and the Bible are often ridiculed, if not vilified, the Vatican’s ability to win fawning praise and adulation from a mostly secular news media is truly astounding. Prior to Benedict’s U.S. arrival last week, Time magazine dubbed him “The American Pope.” According to its feature article, “Benedict has a soft spot for Americans and finds considerable value in his U.S. church, the third-largest Catholic congregation in the world. Most intriguing, he entertains a recurring vision of an America we sometimes lose sight of: an optimistic and diverse but essentially pious society in which faiths and a faith-based conversation on social issues are kept vital by the Founding Fathers’ decision to separate church and state” (emphasis mine throughout).

The major media usually relies on the separation of church and state to shove religion out of the picture. But here, Time sees the clause as a key ingredient to keeping faith-based arguments in the public discourse. This is why the pope likes what America stands for, Time says. It’s why we are an “essentially pious” nation.

Yet, while in America, the pope repeatedly and profusely apologized for the church’s grotesque record of pedophilia in the priesthood, blaming much of the scandalous behavior on America’s broken society. “Pope Benedict xvi has berated U.S. bishops for their poor handling of the child sex scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church,” Agence France Presse wrote last week, “but also laid part of the blame on the breakdown of values in U.S. society.”

He can blame America’s immoral society for sexual perversity in the priesthood. He can label Protestants as “defects”—saying they can’t possibly be designated as a church. He can imply that Mohammed’s followers are “evil” and “inhumane.”

But he still won’t criticize Germany’s role in slaughtering 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. After a visit to Auschwitz in 2006, the Observer said Benedict “sparked bewilderment when he made no mention of anti-Semitism, or the fact that the Nazis killed millions of people because they were Jewish …. He also failed to acknowledge that there might be some degree of collective responsibility of the German people” (July 8, 2007).

Last week, Benedict became the first pope to visit a Jewish synagogue in the United States. The night before the Jewish Passover, in Manhattan’s Park East synagogue, the pope had another golden opportunity to help heal the breach between Germans and Jews. He side-stepped the topic once again, urging Jews to build bridges of friendship with other religious groups.

Earlier this year, the pope angered many religious Jews when he revised the “Good Friday Prayer for the Jews” to read: “Let us also pray for the Jews: That our God and Lord may illuminate their hearts, that they acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the Savior of all men.” Many critics saw this alteration as a not-so-subtle declaration to target Jews for conversion to Catholicism.

Choosing “Peter’s Successor”

Describing a recent open-air mass at St. Peter’s Square in Rome, columnist Peggy Noonan effusively wrote, “It was festive, sprawling, and as they cheered, for a moment St. Peter’s felt like what Benedict said it was in the days after John Paul’s death, the beating ‘heart of the world.’ It was rousing, but also comforting. Afterward I thought: Nothing is ended, something beautiful has begun, we just won’t understand it for a while.”

Maybe Benedict’s first visit to the States can help us understand what his papacy has begun—and whether or not it’s beautiful. Before 60,000 people at Yankee Stadium on Sunday, the pope twice referred to himself as the “Successor of Saint Peter.” Church unity, the pope continued, is God’s “indefectible gift to His church.” That unity is “apostolic,” he said, pointing to the apostles’ “imposition of hands” on the first-century deacons. His God-given, unifying authority, in other words, comes from God down through Peter and the rest of the original apostles.

Yet, the process by which Joseph Ratzinger became pope in 2005 was quite unusual. Ratzinger’s predecessor, John Paul ii, embraced a more traditionalist role as pontiff during his long reign as pope. He rejected many of the sweeping changes the church initiated during the 1960s. Ratzinger was John Paul’s right-hand man—hard-line right, you might say. Known as “God’s Rottweiler” by his critics, the Bavarian-born Ratzinger headed up the church’s powerfully influential Doctrine of the Faith, the modern-day incarnation of the Holy Inquisition. As a fierce defender of traditional Catholic dogma, Ratzinger worked alongside John Paul ii to stock the College of Cardinals with right-wing electors. By the end of his 27-year papacy, John Paul ii had appointed a generation of new leaders in the Vatican hierarchy. All but three of the 115 cardinals who voted at the 2005 papal enclave were appointed by John Paul ii.

Besides promoting those who reflected his own traditional views, to guarantee Ratzinger’s position as his successor, John Paul ii made an unprecedented change in the way the cardinals would choose his successor. In his 1996 apostolic constitution Universi Dominici Gregis (God’s Universal Flock), the pope wrote, “If the balloting does not result in an election … the cardinal electors shall be invited … to express an opinion about the manner of proceeding. The election will then proceed in accordance with what the absolute majority of the electors decides.”

In other words, rather than a two-thirds majority, his successor would only need a simple majority to be elected. As Jesuit scholar Thomas Reese noted in his 1996 book Inside the Vatican, this change increased “the likelihood of a more radical and ideological candidate being elected pope. It means that a pope can be elected who was opposed by just under half the cardinals.”

We wrote about this monumental change in Vatican voting procedures several years before John Paul ii died. In 2002, we outlined the objectives of John Paul’s papacy this way: “Re-establish Vatican authority, clear out the liberals, reiterate Catholic doctrine and install a curia (papal court) that would carry on the doctrinaire approach in the next papacy. All this is now largely achieved ….” John Paul’s successor, we wrote, would come from the right wing.

Then, right after John Paul’s death on April 2, 2005, we wrote that he would be replaced by an arch-conservative. Here is what we wrote on April 4, two weeks before the College of Cardinals cast their ballots: “There is one powerful man within the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy who has the perfect credentials. … It just so happens that he appears to be one of the primary contenders for the job: the ultra-conservative German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.”

On April 19, 2005, after a quick four rounds of voting, the College of Cardinals selected Joseph Ratzinger as the 265th pope, in what turned out to be one of the shortest papal enclaves in history. Major media outlets immediately interpreted the Vatican’s quick decision to mean that Ratzinger had near-unanimous support within the College of Cardinals. “Pope Benedict swept to victory in this week’s Vatican conclave, winning the election by a landslide and receiving probably the most votes of any papal race in history,” wrote the Daily Telegraph.

What no one reported, or seemed to realize at the time, is that the provision John Paul put in place in 1996 would actually remove the possibility of gridlock, even if the cardinals were deeply divided, which it now appears that they were. As we reported last year, according to the Catholic news website Chiesa, “Ratzinger obtained 47 votes in the first round of voting, 65 in the second, 72 in the third, and 84 in the fourth, out of a total of 115 electors.” Thus, after allegedly beginning the rounds of voting with only 41 percent of the ballets in his favor, Ratzinger needed just 11 more cardinals to lock in a simple majority.

The above figures, however, are based on unconfirmed leaks from Vatican insiders. According to Cheisa, at a press conference last July, Ratzinger’s secretary of state, Tarcisio Bertone, said the figures obtained by the media were wrong. When asked if Ratzinger had been voted in by a fewer number of cardinals, Bertone’s response was telling: “I don’t remember anything anymore; we burned the ballots.”

It was the Vatican’s first conclave in 27 years, with only 115 cardinals casting their ballots, and lasting for only four rounds—and he can’t remember the final tally.

In June of last year, Pope Benedict xvi quietly reversed John Paul’s 1996 provision, returning to a two-thirds majority vote to elect his successor. According to a brief report by Associated Press, one that was virtually ignored by the international media, Benedict said John Paul had “received a number of requests to return to the former system after he issued his 1996 document.” The article quotes a senior Vatican spokesman, whose remark is also telling: “It would seem that Pope Benedict wants to ensure that whoever is elected pope enjoys the greatest possible consensus.”

Benedict, it is safe to assume, was not a consensus pick.

Obedience to Authority

At Yankee Stadium on Sunday, the pope stressed obedience to his apostolic authority as a building block for unity in the Catholic Church. “Authority. Obedience,” he said, pausing between both words. “To be frank, these are not easy words to speak nowadays. Words like these represent a ‘stumbling stone’ for many of our contemporaries, especially in a society which rightly places a high value on personal freedom.” But the gospel, he went on to say, teaches that true freedom “is found only in the self-surrender which is part of the mystery of love.”

It’s hard to imagine any other traditional Christian leader speaking like that without receiving harsh criticism from news commentators. But coming from the “infallible” head of a billion-member church, the “vicar of Christ,” words like that are evaluated differently. As the New York Timeswrote the day after the Bronx homily, “In his writings before and since becoming pope, Benedict has stressed the importance of a strict adherence to orthodoxy, and opposition to a wide array of modern cultural trends, including feminism, gay rights, and demands—especially among American Catholics—for greater democracy and administrative transparency within the church.”

Almost 30 years ago, also at Yankee Stadium, John Paul ii urged his adoring followers to forsake the ways of selfish consumerism and to give more to the needy. Last week, his virtually hand-picked successor expounded on the central tenet of Catholic faith—obedience to the church-appointed authority.

Peggy Noonan says the difference between these two popes is that while John Paul made you weep, making him the perfect pope for the age of television, Pope Benedict makes you think, which is ideal for the Internet age. Benedict is a man of the word, Noonan wrote. “You download the text of what he said, print it, ponder it.” Indeed—think about what this pope says.

Pope Benedict condemns Islamism, Judaism, Protestantism, secularism and liberalism. Just how will he use his papal authority to combat these movements?