Of the many articles that have been written about our beloved Pope on the fifth anniversary of his election as Pope, let me translate first this one written by Rabbi Jacob Neusner for Corriere della Sera.... which also contains an authentic piece of news!
Benedict XVI: The power of reason
in dealing with other religions
by Rabbi Jacob Neusner
Translated from
Once in a gymnasium, when someone disputed my opinions about the New York Yankees as against the New York Mets. I said, "Don't try to change my mind. I am A professor, so I know I am right!" Unfortunately, instead of appreciating my humor, he pushed me against the wall!
When a scholar and intellectual is given the attribute of infallibility, then problems arise. A scholar does not need to be told he is infallible. He knows he is, especially if he has paid the price for it. Because the profession of research and study demands integrity, reason and intellectual honesty.
In the first five years as Pope, Joseph Ratzinger has shown all this, along with abundant humility, generosity and love.
But the world apparently needs more time to get used to this scholar Pope, who faces the fundamental issues directly and without hesitation - and ignores silliness whenever possible.
The Muslims found out what this Pope is made of in Regensburg, when with a very profound lecture, Benedict XVI cast doubt, in effect, on what Islam has actually contributed to civilization.
The Anglicans found out when, in an initiative of great honesty, he invited their clergy to come back into communion with Rome.
The Jews found out when he re-authorized a liturgy that included a prayer for the Jews.
In all three cases, the 'break' was quickly restored and the more moderate positions have prevailed: peace has been made with Islam, and conciliation with the Anglicans and the Jews.
And yet the scholar Pope did nothing but to express the truth as it is felt in the heart of Catholicism. Islam cannot compete with Christianity for moral authority, the Anglicans will always be welcome, and the Jews would be so much better if they converted.
Pope Benedict speaks as a scholar and states Christian truth as one would expect of the Bishop of Rome. He could not do less.
Meanwhile, a question which now agitates many is how the future Pope dealt with a priest who had sexually abused children in his care. Christian charity suggests forgiving a priest who had long been retired and apparently penitent and who was, moreover, dying. So Cardinal Ratzinger spared him the humiliation of the just punishment he deserved. The priest died in the bosom of the Church, and the future Benedict XVI underscored the meaning of Christian repentance and charity.
Last January, when I met the Pope in Rome, I asked him what his next project would be after the publication this year of the second volume of his book on
Jesus of Nazareth.
He smiled, and said: "Nothing more. This is my last book. I have many other things to do".
A scholar who stops writing books is generally often considered a has-been. Of course, Benedict XVI did not need to say,"After all, I am Pope." And yet the academic in me remonstrated privately, "Yes, at what cost!"
What the world has learned in these past five years about the scholar Pope is the price that a true scholar must pay for sustaining truth and maintaining his own integrity.
People prefer politicians who are able to mediate and placate rather than persons who are critical and tend to start controversy. In general, this is an obvious lesson the world has learned from the scholar Pope.
But what I appreciate in him is something more. The true integrity of this man and his capacity to express the truth to all of mankind have mobilized very powerful interests.
And so, Muslims, Anglicans and Jews must be prepared for a continuing high-profile debate on reason and rationality that can be shared, in order to find a common point on conflicts and seek to establish what is right, and what Sacred Scriptures and Tradition counsel us.
[The article was translated for Corriere della Sera from Rabbi Neusner's original English by Esther Leibel. I expect the original will come out shortly in an English outlet, but so far I do not see it online.]
Another intellectual weighs in.... Alain Besancon (born 1932), Catholic, is a French historian of the Communist and Nazi totalitarianisms as well as of Christianity, who was elected in 1996 to a seat in the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the legendarily prestigious Institut de France, to which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger himself was elected in 1992 to take the seat of the late Russian physicit Andrei Sakharov.
The restoration of intelligence
and the glory of martyrdom
by Alain Besançon
Translated from
the 4/19-4/20 issue of
The election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to Peter's Chair five years ago was welcomed trustfully by the Catholic Church and Christians all over the world.
It reminded us of his significant 'teamship' with his predecessor John Paul II. The Polish Pope, endowed with a strong personality and irresistible charisma, had the wisdom and, one might add, the humility, to have beside him a great mind in the best German tradition, one who had received a more complete classical education than his own - a Herr Doktor Professor, the best prepared of all the custodians of the faith handed down from the Apostles.
John Paul II left - or so we thought - a Church that was back on its feet, and that now, the Church needed a time of calm and reflection. No one was better prepared for this than Benedict XVI, who demonstrated from his very first acts what the spirit of his Pontificate would be.
He took his name directly from the wise Benedict XVI who had sought in vain to end the First World War; from Benedict XIV, the Pope of the Enlightenment, so cultured and broadminded; and from St. Benedict, Europe's Founding Father.
His first encyclical,
Deus caritas est,put an end to the confusion, so typical of our time, between
eros, Christian
agape, and the ancients'
philia.
He did not condemn eros, source of life, but placed it where it ought to be, in the service of friendship and of charity.
In the same way, his second encyclical showed the right discernment between the virtue of hope and that which one may reasonably expect - in other words, exposing the false promises of utopias and revolutions.
Benedict XVI has stood tirelessly for clarity and precision. Nothing seemed more dangerous to him than the relativisim that corresponds to modern democratic society - where any organized group can legitimize its own opinion just because it is its opinion without having to justify it with reason.
In the religious field, the correlative to relativism is a vague humanism that is hostile to dogmatic statements because these would create frontiers and provoke conflict. In short, it is wrong to proclaim the truth, and it is wrong in itself to have people opposed to you!
We have seen very well that this Pope has given himself a farsighted task: the restoration of intelligence in the bosom of the Church.
The Reformation, the French Revolution, Communism, Mazism, were all dramatic shocks that threatened the very survival of the Church and which did not leave room for
otium, that calm space required for thinking.
The Pope spelled out what needs to be done in his discourse at the College des Bernadins in Paris, a magnificent lecture worthy of the most august of the Church Fathers.
One needs, he said, to avail of moments of peace in order to carry out profound tasks. In particular, the Church could better reflect on the administrative structure of the Curia which basically goes back to the days of the Council of Trent, and which the Second Vatican Council sought to loosen.
The Pope, a passionate music lover, had his old piano brought into the papal apartments. It was a gesture that seemed to say he would find time for music.
Well, it seems he really has not. History is unpredictable. In five years, the Pope has had to confront two unexpected 'incidents'.
Like his predecessor, Benedict XVI is committed to the cause of ecumenism. He welcomed joyfully the understanding [on the doctrine of justification] reached with the Lutheran community ten years ago. With the Orthodox world, the process still appears stalled, although it's hard to be resigned to the fact that these churches are separeted from Rome despite professing the same faith, as England and the United States are saparated by the smae language.
[Perhaps Besancon under-estimates the progress that has been registered in the theological dialog with the Orthodox, which is now examining the role of the Papacy in the Church as it was before the Great Schism of 1054.]
It is too early to judge the outcome of the path opened for the Anglicans. On the other hand, the Pope has sought to establish good faith with the non-Christian religions.
Thus, the first incident, which brought the question of Islam in the world sharply into focus. The Regensburg lecture was scholarly, moderate and benevolent. But it immediately provoked violent reactions, directly threatening the Christian churches that survive in conditions of dhimmitude [political subjection] to Islam.
It also revealed the incomprehension of 'humanitarian' activists who refuse to entertain the thought that Islam could possibly have any fundamental differences with their own vague Christianity.
Evidently, if one considers that the Incarnation, Redemption and the Trinity are mysteries which are outdated and unimportant, what would prevent wlecoming Islam as just another variety of a religion common to all?
The disproportionate reaction to the Regensburg lecture revealed most of all the tragic ignorance of Catholic clergy and faithful about the religion of Islam, as well as of their own religion, because one cannot understand Islam without first understanding Christianity.
So, once again, the urgent need for a 'restructuring' of Christian intelligence became absolutely clear. When asked whether stupidity (
stultitia) was a sin, St. Thomas Aquinas replied that it was, if it was the result of forgetting the divine. He added that it was also a sin if it was about things that one ought to know!
The other 'incident' proceeds fromm baser reasons. Numerous but old charges of pedophilia were suddenly aired out again quite brusquely, orchestrated in a media vortex of the kind that our society generates increasingly more often, except that this time it has assumed unprecedented breadth.
The Church is accused of having covered up and kept silent about uncontestable happenings, and indeed, it often
was. I would like to make two observations about this.
The first is that the 'offensiveness' of such crimes committed in the past half century has undergone considerable amplification in the public mind, and the law has often reflected this. However, in sexual matters, several acts previously considered unthinkable are now allowed, sometimes even exalted, acts which would have been severely penalized in the past.
And the weight of all these now allowable other sexual acts has all been deflected towards sexual abuse of minors, the last taboo that is still upheld.
The second is that the Church looks on these acts as an offense against God, and that sin is a notion distinct from crime. The Church does not forgive the crime but leaves its punishment to the courts. She looks at the sin over which she has competence. Christ gave priests the key to bind as well as to loosen.
The Church has always said first and foremost that man is a sinner and says so in every prayer. Sin is man's identifying feature. 'Ora pro nobis peccatoribus', pray for us sinners - we who do not do the good that we should love but instead do evil which we should hate. And so the Church is not surprised even by the most horrifying acts.
"We are all capable of everything," wrote the young St. Therese of the Child Jesus. Therefore, the strange prejudice is perplexing that some men, simply because they choose to be priests, should be considered different from everybody else in this respect. All men are sinners.
No one has found a way to make men other from what they are and can be: proud, greedy, lustful, angry, always sinners. No psychological or medical screening can keep them from being what men are.
[But Christianity teaches them what they should be.]
This should not make us ignore that the immense media maelstrom has sucked in issues that have nothing to do with sexual abuse of minors: allowing priests to marry, ordaining married priets, and the like, questions wqhich are radically different.
Such opportunistic issues reveal hatred for the very designation 'Christian' as well as a loss of trust in the Catholic Church.
[Not that her critics ever had any such trust!]
Whatever it is, it is the Pope who has to carry all the brunt of these confusions. After five years, his Pontificate seems to be a sorrowful one.
John Paul II fought a monstrous political regime - Communism - but he had all of society and mankind itself with him. Benedict XVI is opposed by the whole of modern society, that which was born in the various crises of the 1969s which gave rise to a new morality and a new religion.
It is somewhat akin to the situation of Paul VI, after Vatican II, who soon found he had to deal with what he called the 'self destruction' of the Church. But this time, Benedict XVI faces the self-destruction of society itself, of nature and of reason.
The glory of his Pontificate is not visible. It is the glory of martyrdom.
Although he would not think of it in terms of glory, no one could be more certain that Benedict XVI himself that martyrdom. symbolic as well as actual, is the fate of Christians who uphold the Gospel and the faith in the face of incomprehension and malice.
And the other 'sign of contradiction' of course is what the Holy Father referred to in his extemporaneous homily to Biblical theologians last week:
I must say that we Christians have in recent times avoided the word repentance, which appears to us rather harsh. Now, under the attacks by a world that tells us of our sins, we can see that to do penance is a grace. We can see it is necessary to do penance - which is to acknowledge what is wrong in our life, to be open to forgiveness, to prepare for forgiveness, to allow ourselves to be transformed.
The pain of repentance, namely of purification, of transformation - such pain is grace, because it is renewal, the work of divine mercy.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/04/2010 14:48]