ITALY:The 'Benedict effect' is drawing in money and pilgrims, writes Paddy Agnewin Rome
Down there in Piazza San Pietro, something unexpected is happening. Two years after his election, Pope Benedict XVI is attracting big crowds. Those lucky enough to live in and around St Peter's Square confirm what the Holy See has been saying for some time. Namely, that the number of pilgrims and others attending Benedict's weekly general audience and his Sunday homilies in St Peter's have risen significantly, probably doubled.
This is partially a knock-on effect from the relative boom currently being enjoyed by Roman tourism which so far this year has recorded an 11.04 per cent increase in hotel guests, representing almost four million more tourists than last year.
However, the "Benedict effect" is about something more than tourist data. Last month the Vatican reported a huge increase in the 2006 donations to Peter's Pence, the fund donated by Catholics all over the world and placed at the disposal of the pope. The Council of Cardinals entrusted with the organisational and economic affairs of the Holy See reported that the Peter's Pence contributions in 2006 had risen to €74.41 million, €30.96 million up on 2005.
Vatican senior spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi acknowledged the Peter's Pence figures included some (unidentified) "exceptional donations", adding that he did not expect a similar rise in 2007.
For all that, though, and even allowing for the increased contributions being made by Pope Benedict's compatriots in Germany (German Catholics are second only to US Catholics in donations to the Vatican), Pope Benedict has had a hugely positive effect on the Vatican's coffers.
So, what does all this mean? Two years ago, many of us (including your correspondent) were predicting grim days ahead for the church, forseeing a possible distancing between the Holy See and the faithful. Many commentators, inside and outside the church, felt that, in Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the cardinals had come up with a disappointing and deeply conservative choice.
We all knew, or thought we knew, Cardinal Ratzinger from his 24 years as prefect of the Vatican's Congregation For the Doctrine of the Faith, the former Holy Office. In that time, he had earned a daunting reputation as a hardliner, the Vatican's Rottweiler, the doctrinal watchdog, ready and willing to pounce on what he and his department saw as false, inaccurate, misguided or confused Catholic teachings.
In the 80s, he earned himself international celebrity - of a sort - by coming down hard on liberation theologians, men like the ex-Franciscan Leonardo Boff in Brazil and the Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez.
During the pontificate of John Paul II, he played a fundamental role in reiterating church teaching that homosexual acts are "grave sins" and that homosexuality is an "objective disorder". In 2000 he oversaw a highly controversial document, Dominus Jesus which reaffirmed Catholic teaching that there is "a single Church of Christ, which subsists in the Catholic Church", adding that Protestant churches are not "churches in the proper sense". In the summer of 2004, he had gone on record with French daily Le Figaroto express his opposition to Turkish entry into the EU, saying that Turkey came from a "different continent, always in contrast with Europe".
Without reviewing his entire 24 years at the Doctrine of the Faith, it suffices to say that by the time of his election as pope he had earned a serious reputation as an uncompromising theologian and as a tough enforcer of doctrinal orthodoxy.
Then came his pontificate and one or two surprises. He went to Cologne on his first foreign trip and went out of his way to meet both the Jewish and Islamic communities there. One of his first dinner guests at Castel Gandolfo two summers ago was the dissident theologian Hans Kung, someone who had consistently criticised both Cardinal Ratzinger and the late pope John Paul II.
His first encyclical, at the end of 2005, was Deus Caritas Est, God is Love, focusing on the primary role of love and charity in the lives of the faithful. When he was in Turkey last November, he made a telling, inter-religious gesture when praying alongside Turkey's Grand Mufti in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, thus seeming to smooth the troubled waters stirred by remarks he had made about "violent Islam" in Regensburg, Germany last year.
To some extent, however, rather than heading off in a new, less hardline direction, Benedict was merely conforming to the different requirements of a different job, one where political savvy and diplomatic finesse counted rather more than at the Congregation For the Doctrine of the Faith.
Two Vatican documents in the last month - one lifting restrictions of the use of the Tridentine or Latin Mass and the other reaffirming Catholic primacy over other religions - underline quite clearly that Cardinal Ratzinger and the pope are quite definitively one and the same person. Indeed for some, these two documents bear the hallmark of quintessential Benedict-style Christianity, one based not only on the teachings of Jesus but also on observing the letter of ancient church traditions as the only effective bulwark against rampant relativism.
Even if Pope John Paul II was a "hard act to follow", Pope Benedict appears to have inherited something of his unquestioned moral authority.
One long-time Vatican observer recently described him as an absent-minded professor somewhat taken aback that so many people had turned up for his lecture. As he settles into the "job", the absent-minded professor will be less and less taken aback, but more and more listened to.