2007 Ad

Every society has its shorthand ways of signaling what it considers important. At the level of pop culture, Americans know something registers when David Letterman or Jon Stewart pokes fun at it; more seriously, however, we grasp that something matters if it lands on the front page of The New York Times.

By that standard, one can only conclude that for the United States in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI was no big deal.

As incredible as it seems for a figure regarded as a major global newsmaker, the pope appeared on the front page of the Times only twice this year (discounting any mention after mid-December, when this article was written): on Jan. 8, in a piece about the resignation of his nominee as archbishop of Warsaw, Poland, amid charges of collaboration with the communist-era secret police; and a May 7 look ahead to his trip to Brazil, focusing on the continuing strength of liberation theology in Latin America.

Otherwise, the major papal events of 2007 all finished well inside. (Benedict was, however, the subject of a lengthy profile in the Times magazine on April 8.)

This year was basically Benedict's third as pope. By comparison, in the third year of John Paul II's papacy, he finished on A1 of the Times on 25 occasions, roughly twice a month. Granted, John Paul was shot in 1981, and 13 of those front-page stories were related to the assassination attempt. Nonetheless, 12 concerned other matters--John Paul's comments on nuclear disarmament, his interventions in Poland, his encyclical on work (Laborem Exercens), and four straight days about his trip to the Philippines.

At a comparable stage of his papacy, in other words, John Paul was roughly six times the newsmaker that Benedict is today. The contrast seems to capture an essential difference between the two popes. John Paul was interested in wielding the social capital of Catholicism to change the history of his day; Benedict is more an "insider's pope," looking to solidify the spiritual foundations of Catholicism to weather what he considers the long-term storm of secularism and a "dictatorship of relativism." Such an approach is not well-suited to capturing headlines.

Traditionally in mid-December, I compile a list of the year's "Top 10 neglected Vatican stories." In 2007, however, such an exercise feels a bit silly, given that almost every Vatican story was covered with benign neglect. Instead, I'll offer capsule summaries of the year's Top 10 stories, briefly suggesting dimensions that perhaps didn't get the attention they deserve.

10) Benedict in Austria: When the pope visits a country that was once the capital of Christendom, which still claims a Catholic population of some 5 million in a small geographic area, and the biggest crowd he draws is roughly 30,000, that alone says something. The Sept. 7-9 Austria trip offered a snapshot of Catholicism as what Benedict calls a "creative minority" in today's highly secularized Western European milieu.

9) The pope is coming: Benedict's April 15-20, 2008, trip to the United States was announced in November. Two bits of drama to watch: First, how will he address the sexual abuse crisis, and will he meet with victims? (No pope has yet done so.) Second, how will organizers prevent political exploitation of the trip in view of looming elections? That could be tricky if, as in 2004, one presidential candidate is pro-life and the other pro-choice.

8) Scandal in Poland: Polish Catholicism was rocked by charges that several important clergy, including Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus, Benedict's pick to succeed Cardinal Jozef Glemp in Warsaw, had collaborated with the communist secret police. Among other things, the scandal reinforced questions about decision-making in the church. Lay Catholic researchers in Poland had unearthed files concerning Wielgus and other clergy years ago, but apparently were not consulted in making appointments.

7) New cardinals: By appointing new cardinals, popes influence the choice of their own successor. The consensus on Benedict's Oct. 24 consistory, in which he created 23 cardinals, including 18 eligible to vote (among them, two Americans), is that it offered no slam-dunk new papabile, or papal candidate, nor did Benedict appear to stack the deck politically. It did, however, reinforce European and North American dominance, as two-thirds of the cardinals are from the Global North, while two-thirds of the Catholic population is in the Global South.

6) A Catholic shade of green: Benedict sharpened his environmental message in 2007, calling in September for greater ecological responsibility "before it's too late," and OK'ing the installation of solar panels atop his audience hall and planting trees in a Hungarian forest to offset the Vatican's carbon output. Yet Benedict isn't quite ready to join Earth First; for him, the environmental movement is more about a broad recovery of natural law, meaning the idea that creation itself carries moral laws written by the Creator.