On a bookcase in my study hangs a watercolor done by my father during a visit to Rome in 1950. He had gone for the Jubilee Year and was traveling with his mother, Jane, and his Aunt Kit. The watercolor was painted quickly in St. Peter’s Basilica, and it shows Pope Pius XII being carried by footmen on his sedia gestatoria, blessing the crowd to the right and left.
Another memento from that same trip has gone missing, but it used to be displayed among family photos in my father’s studio, and I remember it vividly: a black-and-white picture of Jane and Kit with the Pope. Pius stands facing the camera in a white cassock, two fingers of his right hand raised in benediction, his gaze penetrating and implacable. Jane and Kit stand on either side, looking dowdy in black dresses and veils (not really an Irish thing). The photographer has managed to catch both of them just as their eyes blinked shut.
In my own mind, those two images—so much on show, so much unseen—symbolically bookend the story told by Philip Shenon in Jesus Wept. Shenon, a longtime New York Times correspondent, presents a critical study of the papacy—and the Church—from Pius XII through Francis I. This isn’t a work of theology or spirituality or grand pronouncements, though Shenon has a point of view. It’s a work of reporting.
From Pius to Francis and Back Again
Shenon’s crisp account takes the Popes in order.
Pius XII, ascetic and doctrinaire, his reputation forever tarnished (at best) by his wartime silence in the face of the Holocaust.
The jolly and rotund John XXIII, who stopped using the royal “we” and launched the reformist Church Council known as Vatican II.
Paul VI, the former cardinal of Milan, a fastidious manager and worldly intellectual who helped keep Graham Greene’s novels off the Index of Forbidden Books; as Pope, he opened the Church to dialogue with Jews, but his condemnation of birth control deeply undermined the Holy See’s authority.
John Paul I, the so-called smiling Pope, whose death after a single month gave rise to half-baked conspiracy theories that have yet to run their course.
Poland’s John Paul II, the first non-Italian Pope in centuries and a key figure in the collapse of the Communist bloc, but also a force of reaction against Vatican II and a force of inaction when it came to dealing with the Church’s accelerating sexual-abuse scandal.
German-born Benedict XVI, the former Joseph Ratzinger—“God’s Rottweiler,” as he was known—an arch-conservative with a library of 20,000 books. He would become the first Pope in modern times to resign.
And Francis I, a Jesuit from Argentina with question marks over his record during that country’s so-called Dirty War. He seemed at first to wish to reclaim the spirit of John XXIII but soon faced strong headwinds—from hostile voices inside the Church, and from his own ambivalence.
John’s papacy and the contentious debates after Vatican II—over sexuality, the role of women, abortion, liberation theology, Cold War politics—give Shenon a lens and an orienting framework. Running through the book is an account of the relationship—and eventually the bitter contest—between Ratzinger and the liberal theologian Hans Küng. As young men they had been improbable friends: shy, bookish Joseph, who rode a bike and played classical piano; dashing Hans, in his blue jeans and Alfa Romeo. Both served as periti, or theological experts, at the Council, and it was there that their viewpoints began to diverge. In time, Küng would be stripped by Ratzinger of his license to teach Catholic theology.
Transcending theological disagreements is the sex-abuse scandal—known to be an issue as far back as the papacy of Pius XII, and unaddressed or actively covered up by subsequent popes. Sexual abuse in the Church was an open secret, the perpetrators found at the highest levels. The journalist Lucian Truscott IV recalled how, as a cadet at West Point, he had once interviewed New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, friend of presidents, for a student publication. The cardinal, he wrote, “put his hand on my thigh and started moving it toward my crotch.” A monsignor had to intervene, discreetly redirecting the cardinal’s hand.
John’s papacy and the contentious debates after Vatican II—over sexuality, the role of women, abortion, liberation theology, Cold War politics—give Philip Shenon a lens and an orienting framework.
Jesus Wept—the words come from the Gospel of John—has the point of view you’d expect (censorious about papal failings; not ready to give up hope). But it’s lively, not lachrymose. We see a newly elected John XXIII, asked by reporters how many people work in the Curia. “About half,” he replies. Later, John refers prophetically to the cardinal who will become his often indecisive successor as il nostro Amleto di Milano—“our Hamlet of Milan.”
Shenon describes the secret deal that allegedly gave Ratzinger the papacy, and then the new Pope Benedict’s developing taste in fashion—the white robes from Gammarelli, the red slippers by Antonio Arellano—and in music: Benedict arranged for an album of his own renditions of sacred hymns to be produced by Geffen Records.
For all the backstage glimpses, Shenon never forgets that the Church is not a real-time, globalized version of Conclave. It is, rather, “the most important institution in the history of Western civilization,” and it sways countless people: their values, their ambitions, their behavior. Its decisions change lives.
A door to the left of the altar of the Sistine Chapel gives access to a private chamber known as the “room of weeping,” where each newly elected Pope repairs to reflect on the weight he now carries on his shoulders. And also to get dressed: white cassocks of various sizes hang in wardrobes. (John XXIII—five foot six and upward of 250 pounds—famously had trouble finding one that would fit.) The cassocks of previous Popes are displayed in Plexiglas vitrines.
A friend at the Vatican once brought me there, smiling as he opened an antique, dark-wood cabinet to reveal an ovoid seat in red leather—a commode. Popes are people, too, and one strength of Jesus Wept is that it shows them as such.
Except for Francis, all of these men now lie beneath St. Peter’s. Visitors to their marble sepulchres may think of them as departed, but in ways great and small they are not.
Cullen Murphy is an editor at large at The Atlantic and the author of several books, including God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
