Ivory-tower past adds to pope’s detachment

April 12, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

VATICAN CITY

Long before entering Vatican life, Pope Benedict XVI won renown as a theologian and a German university professor, penning more than 40 books and winning a devoted following of students who respected his prodigious memory and brilliant mind.

One thing absent from his r sum ? Significant time as a parish priest.

Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, only worked 15 months tending to a flock in the 59 years since taking his vows, instead closing himself in the ivory tower of academia — a background that may help account for his troubled handling of the sex-abuse crisis engulfing the church.

For one, it adds to the impression of an out-of-touch pontiff who simply doesn’t grasp the enormity of the fury around the world over mounting evidence of sex abuse by priests, and inaction on the part of the Vatican and Benedict himself.

Benedict’s very legacy will be shaped by whether this aging pontiff, who turns 83 Friday, can embrace a new openness and express remorse in straightforward language free of the stilted defensiveness of many Vatican pronouncements to date.

“Pope Ratzinger, more lucid than many of his defenders, must keep from being suffocated by Professor Ratzinger,” Marco Politi, a veteran Vatican reporter, wrote in a column last week in the daily Il Fatto.

But in his native Germany, the prominent Der Spiegel magazine already has declared his papacy a failure, speaking in its most recent issue of “the tragedy of a man who had set out to write books and, only near the end of his life, was summoned to assume the Herculean office at the Vatican.”

Even the pope’s staunchest admirers say he’s not the best manager.

“Benedict XVI is only infallible as an authoritative teacher of the faith, not as an administrator,” noted the Rev. Joseph Fessio, who wrote his doctoral dissertation under Ratzinger and participates in the annual “student circle” discussions Benedict hosts each summer with his former students.

Some of Benedict’s critics, however, say the pope’s real problems lie mainly with a practice of surrounding himself with unqualified advisers.

“He doesn’t have grade-A types around him — but he picked them,” said the Rev. Richard McBrien, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame and frequent critic of the pope.

McBrien noted that although Ratzinger served only a short time as a parish priest, his five years as archbishop of Munich and Freising gave him ample real-world experience. He said Ratzinger engaged fully with even the small details of administration there and later as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church’s doctrine office.