Other than sheer affection and uncontained admiration, I have no idea what occasioned this article by Renato Farina. It's too early to mark the fifth anniversary of Benedict XVI's Pontificate, but it feels very much like an anniversary piece. I may quibble with a couple of points, but no Benaddict can question the affection with which it is written. Thank you, Mr. Farina.
BENEDICT XVI:
A serenity that can change the world
A ‘simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord”.
A vineyard inherited from John Paul II and which,
in perfect continuity with his ‘trusted and beloved friend’,
Benedict XVI has cared for from the very start
with stubborn dedication and thoughtful attention.
He does not spare severe judgments on the world and the Church,
but afterwards, he lays down flowers of joy and friendship.
Karol the Great has given way to Benedict the Childlike,
which is another way of being great.
by RENATO FARINA
Translated from
January 21, 2009
We have become accustomed to Papa Ratzinger. He has become a constant presence, a gentle and candid background to our life, who does not stride into our homes with force nor take down the walls of our consciences with great fuss.
A bourgeois style in the highest and most serene sense possible: that red and white winter capelet of silk and ermine, that had fallen into disuse after John XXIII, the camauro and the red shoes said to be by Prada even if he may not know it – he would not have the time to know it if it was.
Benedict XVI has never tried to be different from his predecessor. He knows very well he is. And he accepts it. As he told some African children in Angola on March 21, 2009, “With somewhat different features, but with the same love in my heart, here before you is the present Successor of Peter, who embraces all of you in Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and for always”.
We could never get 'accustomed' to Papa Wojtyla. The Great Pole was a bit like Caesar, according to the definition by Lucan: “He bent fate and imposed on destiny”. John Paul strode on the world stage with a power unlike any in contemporary times.
In contrast, Ratzinger will change the world by osmosis, by his way of being rational and childlike at the same time.
Allow me a recollection. Piazza di Citta Leonina, #3. I had found his address in the Annual Pontifical Directory. I learned to watch out for him before 8 in the morning. I had no special reasons. I lived in a nearby hotel, and I wanted to see the candid face of faith in one of the most intelligent men in the world.
I would greet him and he would answer, “Buon ciorno!’ He held a black briefcase in his right hand and would walk briskly towards his (holy) office. Five hundred meters from his home. Not that I dared to walk with him all the way. But we would walk a few steps together, and then I would watch him walk off lost in his thoughts.
If I wanted to understand something, I would ask him a question. He always responded. And I can say this: In those years, he became my ambulant theology teacher.
He loved Saturdays. And he had a true devotion to Don Giussani
[founder of Communione e Liberazione, to which Farina belongs], and in treating me well, it was as if he were giving him a caress.
Once in a while, I would convey greetings from Hans Urs von Balthasar, his colleague in theology, whom I would call at 5 a.m. in his home in Basel to ask for permission. Towards Balthasar, Ratzinger felt intellectual awe. Towards Karol Wojtyla, it was a mixture of total love and slight reproach [???].
For more than four years now, he has been Pope. And he has remained who he was. In the early days, he may have thought he was wearing robes too large for him, that his body and soul should adapt to these new immense dimensions.
But he has understood that it was him the Holy Spirit wanted – him, just as he is. Awkward with crowds, docile, truly a ‘humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord’.
As he said that April evening when for the first time he wore the white robes – but with the sleeves of a black sweater visible underneath. A
minimal Pope.
[Which I find a meaningless if not demeaning term. What does minimal mean here? That he is limiting himself only to the minimum that a Pope should do? But the minimum that a Pope should do is as maximal as it can be, because besides all his other temporal titles and responsibilities, he is also the Vicar of Christ on earth!]
If I may dare to say – and I know I am not wrong – we have in Benedict XVI the greatest intelligence in a childlike character. The temperament of that boy who could not play football and hid himself when it came time to form teams in the seminary so that he would not be a liability to the team to which he would be assigned! He says so in his memoir
La mia vita – an autobiography written as the simple life of a simple man.
Ratzinger taught three things as a theologian. Faith is beauty, similar to music. Faith is rational. And Jesus is the peak of beauty and rationality. In him, reason and beauty are manifested as unity of being in a person, Jesus of Nazareth, “my beloved Lord, my Savior”.
In the book that he wrote as Pope and entitled, precisely, JESUS OF NAZARETH, all the commentators praised the fact that he had said he expected to be contradicted.
And how did he do it? In the book, one hears Jesus talking, praying, one sees him walking… today, now. For a theologian, it was the maximum achievement: to be the chronicler, the portraitist, the photographer, a friend of he who died for us, one who would die for him, enamored, as Peter was. As a Pope is.
The rationality of this Bavarian thinker culminates in how he proposes the question of God. Ratzinger’s rationality is enchanting, without frills, but baroque nonetheless. Bach and Mozart together.
As a cardinal and even as a priest, the Bavarian has always taught that it all begins with an encounter. And that one must learn to obey God’s will. Without ever excluding the use of one’s reason.
To that which Karol Wojtyla drew from poetic intuition and developed in concentric circles, Joseph Ratzinger gave linear geometric order, rounding the arches and consolidating the spires of the Petrine ministry.
That he loved the Pope is clear from the photographs. I sensed this in 1987 when in May I saw him in the airplane seated next to the Pope, like a child drawing affection from his father.
When he turned 75, Joseph asked to leave the paternal home. He had a house in Bavaria with his books, his piano, flowers in the front yard, cats perhaps, a nearby river, the woods. But John Paul II told him: “Stay, please, I beg of you!” in German – as they spoke to each other in German. The day before he died, Joseph received his thanks – and they exchanged words we will not know.
There were two times when I learned from him what love is between father and son, but also love between two friends. And what obedience means.
The first was on the 25th anniversary of the Polish Pope’s Pontificate. Ratzinger was the dean of the College of Csrdinals. As such, he gave the speech to mark the occasion. In St. Peter’s Basilica, everything seemed ready for the celebratory rhetoric.
Instead, we were all translocated to the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Christ had risen – his side was pierced, his heart wounded. He asks Simon Peter: “Do you love me?”
It was a question Karol Wojtyla heard everyday, being Peter. His dearest friend, on that October of 2003, in the midst of war
[Iraq was invaded by coalition troops in March], reassured him with loving tenderness.
He, the cardinal, could tell the Pope he had answered the Lord and well. “You have warned your children as a mother does. You have offered not only the Gospel but your very life to the world, to bring down the walls of hatred. You have allowed yourself to bear the Cross, to be consumed”.
Yes, in this society of empty consumerism, this Pope had allowed himself to be consumed like a can of soda, to give the world a bit of 'good water'. John Paul II, from his wheelchair, responded to his ‘collaborator and trusted friend’: “God, knowing my human fragility, encourages me to respond with trust. I have full confidence, Lord, in your mercy”.
Ratzinger seemed to be the Apostle John, by his Master’s side, as he sweated blood. He probably sensed that the call and the burden would pass on to him. The Pope had probably predicted it to him, even if Joseph did not wish it.
The second was the day of John Paul II’s funeral. It was Friday, April 8, 2005, and in St. Peter’s Square, the wind opened up the pages of the Gospel laid on the coffin of the man he kept calling ’our beloved Pope’.
Ratzinger was burying yet another friend. In February, it had been Don Giussani in the Cathedral of Milan. And now Wojtyla.
I look at my notes that day: “At 13:47, the crowd is reluctant to have the coffin taken away. They are waving handkerchiefs and their hands in St. Peter’s Square, but even in front of the jumbo screens outside Santa Maria Maggiore and elsewhere. They weep and applaud. They do not want to believe he is dead. But he is.”
Except that Papa Wojtyla had said the truth earlier - that death is only a transition from one life to another. But that is not easy to accept in time of sorrow, when death is felt as a tremendous laceration.
On that day, Cardinal Ratzinger said with certainty: “We can be sure that our beloved Pope is now at the window of the Father’s house, looking down on us and blessing us”. In his words, one felt the certainty of hope. As a physical carnal thing. Pointing his finger to the heavens.
But why then was the cardinal sad? Why did he weep? Wojtyla must have predicted his successor, advised the cardinals around him to elect Ratzinger. Even if the latter did not want it. And would do everything later to dissuade the cardinals, and God as well.
All the newspapers were againmst him. Editorial voices said he was on the outs, and this was quickly disseminated. I can tell you with certainty that the Sant’Egidio Community deployed all of its famed diplomatic resources to push the candidacy of Dionigi Tettamanzi, Archbishop of Milan
[arch-progressive and protégé of Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini].
[Interesting revelation!]
I think the Bavarian cardinal may well have
worked with them to avoid a responsibility for which he considered himself inadequate.
[This seems highly unlikely! First, because as Dean of the College of Cardinals, he would never have taken sides openly. And second, because if he had any personal preferences himself, it certainly would not have been for a progressive with a track record of promoting the hermenetic of dicontinuity about Vatican II!]
I was in St. Peter’s Basilica for the Missa pro eligendo Pontefice, at 10 a.m. on Monday, April 18. This is the rite that precedes the entry of the cardinals into the Conclave.
Cardinal Ratzinger gave the homily. It was severe and pitiless. Certainly one that would drive off the votes of the timid, of all those who wanted a Pope who would be ‘soft’ with the world, who would be accessible and sympathetic to the advocates of inter-religious theologies and feel-good dialog.
He tells them that the Lord is good but is not a doting uncle. “The mercy of God is not a grace to be obtained cheaply”, And “Faith does not follow the waves of fashion”.
No one had spoken so frankly about the Church in recent decades. He described her as ‘a small boat battered on all sides’.
But inexplicably, he also used the words friendship and joy – strange words in the circumstances. How was it possible? After such harsh judgments on the Church and the world, to lay down these flowers of joy and friendship?
Now that some years have passed and Benedict XVI reigns over the tumult in serenity, I understand better. He believes in us.
On that April 19,2005, he stood before the world with the smile of a cherubin and the black sleeves of a sweater worn by someone who feels the cold. Was this the Grand Inquisitor, square and frigid, that the media had been describing for years?
On the contrary, from that day on and
ad multos annos, he would fill the world with music, he would proclaim the Gospel with simplicity – yes and yes – and he would say the word ‘joy’ again and again, along with another: ‘truth’.
[And love, and beauty, and reason…]
He had been portrayed as Torquemada, but his language is that of a lover: “It is beautiful - the story of love with Jesus”. In a world encumbered with the dictatorship of relativism, “the limit of evil is mercy”.
Yes, the small boat of the Church is tossed about, but “once past the dark valleys”, it will be possible to get back to the origins – to Christ as he looked at the rich young man who sought his counsel.
In these years, Benedict XVI has been the humble worker who came after the conqueror of continents.
[Which does not prcclude the humble worker conquering continetns in his own way!]
John Paul II had beaten down the walls. Benedict VXI has been repairing the vineyard, caring for its withered plants. In perfect continuity with the man who called him ‘his trusted and beloved friend’.
But with a different style. We have gone from Karol the Great to Benedict the Childlike. Which is another way of being great.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/01/2010 03:41]