Pope Benedict XVI's wrong-headed personnel decision

The appointment of an unremarkable American archbishop from the Catholic wasteland of California (a confrere of Roger Mahony no less) with light scholarly credentials to the most important post in Rome, Ratzinger's old job as prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. San Francisco's William Levada came from nowhere to get that post. Leftist Jesuit chaplains of the Democratic Party groaned, naturally.

But who is Levada, and why should they be upset?Press reports that he is an old friend of Benedict's or that he is a clone of the new Pope are as usual imprecise. Friend? He did work for Ratzinger 24 years ago, as a secretary, for less than two years. Comrades in arms? Certainly Levada is a company man, yes. But he gave the game away at a press conference after his appointment when he said that he would be more like God's "cocker-spaniel" than his "rottweiler," the nickname the press gave Ratzinger in that post.

Indeed, it is impossible to imagine Ratzinger as archbishop of Munich compromising on the question of giving benefits to homosexual couples under diocesan employ. Levada as archbishop of San Francisco cut a deal with Willie Brown on that issue. He weakly cast his capitulation to the city as an endorsement not of homosexuality but of wider health-care coverage. Nor is it thinkable that Benedict would have allowed the rector of his seminary in Munich to write scandalously about homosexuality. Levada's rector, whom he had inherited from his disastrous predecessor John Quinn, did.

"Some homosexual persons," wrote Gerald Coleman, "have shown that it is possible to enter into long-term, committed and loving relationships, named by certain segments of our society as domestic partnership...I see no moral reason why civil law could not in some fashion recognize these faithful and loving unions with clear and specified benefits."Benedict XVI has already mapped out what he predicted would be a short pontificate. He has done so with his many books (Ignatius Press has them all in English, and they're not dull), with several new addresses, and, not least, with personnel choices like the old team and William Levada.

Joseph Ratzinger is a man of many parts, a powerful mind with an astonishing memory and an ability, say friends, to listen to a group for an hour, then synthesize their points in whatever language they happen to be speaking. He is probably the most-credentialed pope in 1,500 years, with a far better resume than his predecessor at the time of his election in 1978. So it may come as a surprise that, as the Levada choice has illustrated, the best description of Benedict from the political lexicon is a rather standard moderate, by which is meant that he is more than capable of factoring Church politics into his decisions.

THIS DOES NOT MEAN HIS pontificate will be like the presidency of Richard Nixon, full of half-measures, bobbing and weaving. But it is how to explain the Levada choice, which has baffled some who expected a tougher man. My theory: during the conclave, Cardinal Ruini of Rome, said to have been the kingmaker, suggested to the crucially important American cardinals that the time had come for one of their own to be in one of Rome's top two dicasteries. Naturally, Ruini would go on, the new Holy Father had to decide the details and it would be wrong, very wrong, for him to even mention this to his man during the conclave.

Were this arrangement to have taken hold in the imaginations of the American cardinals, they could well imagine that Ruini would also deliver the Italian vote. Not being a dumb man, Cardinal Ratzinger would have caught wind of these thoughts without ever speaking to Ruini and without ever feeling bound in conscience to implement any such plan. And as long as none of those involved in the recent conclave felt bound or pressured, such arrangements are human and perfectly proper.
(Thanks to The American Spectator)