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The media’s mean girls
archived from: 2013-03-08
by: David Mills

Pope Benedict’s retirement plan is target of criticism

Catholic Sense

Having talked last time about the way the major media treated Pope Benedict XVI upon his resignation, I was going to go on to another subject this week, but some things are just too annoying to ignore. The insults, sneers and put-downs continue. It’s as if the Holy Father is stuck in the middle of a pack of mean girls in junior high, the kind of girls who just make up reasons to pick on their victim.

Now they’re on him about his retirement. So let’s look at this. Imagine a man, an executive vice president of a very large multinational corporation, who kept working when he wanted to retire because the CEO asked him to stay, and who a few years later took on the job of CEO when he really, really wanted to retire.

He did it for the good of the company and its employees and stockholders. It was a 24/7 kind of job, as high-pressure as any job you can think of, and he accepted it at an age when most men in most businesses had already been retired for 10 years.

Eight years later, worn out in the company’s service, he retires so the company can find another man who can serve it more effectively. He will live in a small retirement home near his old headquarters with a handful of servants coming with him from the old job, with most of his expenses covered.

He’ll receive a modest pension of about $39,000 a year (maybe double that, if the next CEO decides), the same as the other executive vice presidents. He’ll get it after 62 years of service to the company, getting it for the first time about 20 years after other men in his position would have started, and after he had given up the physical capacity to do most of the things he must have dreamed of doing when he retired.

Imagine the news stories when such a man retired, the praise for his long and sacrificial service and for his amazingly modest retirement. Reporters would compare his retirement package with that of his peers, who took vastly more than he had taken and took it at a much younger age. He would be the media’s “flavor of the month.”

But not when the man is Benedict XVI. Then, well, he’s living like a king. An article on the Slate website (a reliably anti-Catholic production) provides a model for this. The writer doesn’t say anything directly critical, but she leaves the impression that the man should be criticized.

She makes her points more by nudges and hints. For example, the sentence that begins, “While that number in itself might not seem obscenely high.” It’s meant to look like a fair-minded evaluation when, in fact, it’s an implicit criticism.

The number is not only not obscenely high, it’s not high at all, not for a man who’s done what he has done and not even for an average upper-middle-class American or European. It’s a great deal less than a writer for Slate would get after 62 years there.

His pension, the writer notes, “is only about $100 short of the maximum pension possible under Social Security.” I think you’re supposed to think, “Wow, that’s a lot of money,” but it isn’t. And anyway, how many people getting Social Security worked for 62 years before they started getting it? Then there are the lines about his living in “the extravagant papal summer home” and in what is “possibly the most privileged retirement home in the world” in the Vatican. Very nice quarters, admittedly, but also quarters that already existed and don’t cost the church much to give him. This is like blaming someone for retiring to his family home.

Besides, where else could a retired pope live in security and the seclusion he wishes and deserves but the Vatican? If Benedict set himself up somewhere else and paid for the security he needs, this writer and her peers would criticize him for that.

Mean girls usually don’t get nicer, and the church is now the kid they want to exclude. Pope Benedict, I suspect, forgives all this if he notices it at all.

Mills is executive editor of First Things (www.firstthings.com). He can be reached at catholicsense@gmail.com.

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