Please see preceding page for earlier posts today, 9/5/10, including the Holy Father's visit to Carpineto and today's Angelus. I have posted translations of both the Pope's homily in Carpineto and his Angelus message - both of them exceptional in its own way. His presentation of Leo XIII's person and Magisterium in a clear historical context was quite a tour de force, and his decision to sum up himself the core of his message for World Youth Day 2011 at the Angelus was an indication of how inadequately it was reported in the media, and, even more critical, how misleading was the narrow focus they chose to emphasize from the carefully-structured messsage!
Coming from someone whose comments have always been upbeat and fighting rightly in behalf of the faith, this piece by Cristina Odone, a former editor of the UK's Catholic Herald, comes across as surprisingly skeptical, even if it starts out on the right note. Perhaps, since she is a UK resident, she is merely being realistic, but there are positive ways of expressing realism without 'spinning' reality in any way. Besides, she makes a number of statements which are highly questionable, if not downright false, coming from someone like her! The Telegraph underscores the skeptic tone by the blatantly unrealistic headline it gave to the essay. Conversion in the mass is hardly ever the work of four days! Apostolic visits by the Successor of Peter are not evangelical revival carnivals with their spectacles of instantaneous mass 'healings and rebirth'.
Will we be converted
by the Pope’s visit?
By Cristina Odone
05 Sep 2010
The visitor to the More Hall care home in Stroud, Gloucestershire, usually finds an oasis of pious tranquillity. But for some days now, the Benedictine nuns who run the home have been in a state of high excitement: two of the sisters have won tickets to Birmingham on September 19 to see Pope Benedict XVI.
The beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman will take place at Cofton Park and – “God willing” – Sister Elsy Poonoly and another nun will be there. “We are very pleased,” Sr Elsy tells me, “and very excited.”
Threats of a citizen’s arrest; protests from survivors of priestly abuse and the gay rights lobby; some spectacular organisational bungling on the part of the Catholic hierarchy in this country:
nothing can dent the sheer joy felt by many of Britain’s four million Catholics at the prospect of seeing the Pope in their midst.
In what must count as the
annus horribilis of the Church, when every day seemed to bring fresh revelations of abuse by priests of their young charges, the Catholic faithful are hungry for reassurance.
Apart from a miracle – Richard Dawkins’s Damascene conversion? Cardinal Newman, resurrected, fulminating at the next gathering of the British Humanist Association? – the papal visit, with its pomp and picnics, is the best means to restore hope and rekindle faith.
“The visit gives us our one chance to hear the Pope directly,” says the composer James MacMillan. “It will be of immense value to us, as his flock, to receive his message without the media’s negative interpretation. The impact will be felt for decades – we’re still talking about John Paul II’s visit in 1982.”
This will be a very different papal visit. When Benedict XVI lands at Edinburgh airport on September 16, he will not drop to his knees and kiss the ground, as his predecessor did. This is not only because the octogenarian Pontiff is physically frail and less of a showman, but because the grand romance of that gesture would strike a false note today.
The Polish Pope’s coup de théâtre perfectly encapsulated
the vigour and glamour of the Catholic Church 30 years ago. [????? Surely, this is a pink-colored retrospective gaze! Five years into John Paul II's Papacy, the 'vigour and glamour' at the time were attributed to him personally, not to the Catholic Church in full disarray following Vatican II and already written off by the seculars as irrelevant in today's world!]
The papacy was respected for waging battles against totalitarian regimes in the former USSR and South America. John Paul II, blessed with Hollywood magnetism and capable of
Churchillian oratory, held non-Catholics as well as Catholics in thrall.
['Churchillian oratory'??? Without detracting from the great Pope's virtues, I don't think even Karol Wojtyla himself, despite his theatrical experience, would have claimed such an attribute for himself!]
These are different times. Catholics have watched in horror as,
almost daily and almost in every country, broken men and women have come forth to tell of their ordeal at the hands of abusive priests.
[This is the kind of loose factual exaggeration. almost a parody of truth, that is unforgivable when indulged by Catholics themselves!]
Here in Britain, Catholics have witnessed their Church being subjected to humiliating attacks from a commentariat which, more than anywhere in the world, is strident in its hostility to all religions.
MacMillan is convinced that Benedict will be able to “counter the primal anti-Catholicism here in Scotland and in England. We need to show people what the Pope is like. That will convert them.”
Privately, organisers of the papal visit must be wondering whether the numbers attending each event will be sufficient to fill the venues, let alone bring about the conversion of England.
As one source who asked not to be named explained, ticket sales outside of London have been disappointing and donations from the faithful limited.
“
He’s not a money-spinner,” confirms Andreas Campomar, editorial director at the publishers Constable & Robinson. “
There’s been no interest in doing a book on the papal visit, or a celebration of Benedict to tie-in with his coming. There is, instead, appetite for anti-Catholic, anti-Pope books centred on priestly abuse.”
[The UK is not the world, and books about Benedict XVI - not to mention by him - continue to be written elsewhere, so while the lack of interest by UK publishers is lamentable, consider that between the official programs for the visit and the million booklets handed out by the local churches, that should far outnumber the buyers of anti-Pope literature (assuming that there is actually a significant market for it, even in the UK)!]
For Campomar, Benedict XVI is not only a victim of age-old anti-Catholic feeling, whipped up by the recent scandals, but also of anti-German prejudice. A half-German Catholic himself, Campomar sees the Pope as “fatally Germanic” in his precision and unwavering conviction.
“It boils down to his not being simpatico. People don’t warm to him.” [This man obviously has not watched any single public event with Benedict XVI - and clearly ignores (or is ignorant about) all the crowds he has drawn to him at the Vatican - outnumbering the crowds for John Paul II - and in all the Christian nations he has visited! I am surprised Odone simply takes down his word and does not offer a single factual statement in rebuttal, when facts and figures abound to do it with!}
Lord Guthrie, a Catholic convert, dismisses complaints that Benedict is not “a people person”. “This is a holy man, not a celebrity. We cannot judge him by the standards of a pop star. He would be horrified if he thought people saw him as anything other than a spiritual man who has devoted his whole life to the Church.”
Benedict would be horrified, too, one suspects, if either his Popemobile, a performance by the Irish clergy trio The Priests, or Carol Vorderman – the former Countdown presenter who has been hired as a warm-up before the Pope’s appearance at a Mass in Hyde Park – distracted the faithful from what he sees as his mission here: the beatification of John Henry Newman.
Newman’s work on the evolution of theology, his writings on religion and his theories of education have inspired generations of scholars. The hope is that his beatification will encourage legions of ordinary British Catholics to believe that they, too, can become spiritual local heroes.
Benedict, like John Paul II, who created more saints than all other Popes together, believes that beatification and canonisation can serve as powerful prods to renew a flagging faith. This is the “Yes we can” spirit, in a Catholic context.
From the sidelines, members of the established Church [of England] will watch with interest and perhaps not a little regret as a man who started life as one of their own is elevated to “Blessed” status.
Benedict XVI cannot be accused of “scalp-collecting” in Newman’s case; but few close to the Archbishop of Canterbury will forgive the Pope
for trying to lure disaffected Anglicans to Rome during the row over women bishops last year.
[How can Odone say such a thing? With Anglicanorum coetibus, he threw a lifeline across the Tiber, not a lure, for disaffected Anglicans who themselves asked to be taken in!]
Rowan Williams and Benedict XVI both boast a brilliant intellect, but neither seems inclined to use it to cement an ecumenical alliance. Those who hope that this visit will somehow thaw the frosty relations between Rome and Canterbury should see the Popemobile as proof of their delusion: there’s only room for one. [WHOA! What's with Odone? That's a whole raft of questionable statements right there: 1) Benedict XVI has not used his intellect to cement ecumenical alliance??? What should his intellect have told him - callously turn down traditional Anglicans who began knocking at the Vatican almost 20 years ago? 2) Is there anyone on either side - Catholic and Anglican - who thinks that an apostolic visit by the Bishop of Rome to his Catholic flock would be the occasion to 'thaw frosty relations' between Rome and Canterbury? The Pope is not visiting the UK to promote ecumenism but to confirm Catholics in their faith! 3) What does the configuration fo the Popemobile have to do with the Church of England? The only other prelate meant to share the Popemobile when the Pope is visiting is the local Catholic bishop!]
Can Benedict XVI transform the image of the Catholic Church in Britain in his four days here? A poll published this week shows the notion is not as risible as it may seem.
[It may not be risible but it certainly is totally unrealistic. He may change some critics' opinion of him as a person, but it won't change what they think of the Catholic Church, because their real enemy is the Church and what it stands for, and part of their hostility to Benedict XVI is that he happens to be the leader of that Church today.]
People were asked to comment on whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements contained in the Pope’s third encyclical letter,
Caritas in Veritate. Twelve representative statements, taken directly from the letter, were tested
[without citing that they came from the Pope, though, and the source of statements does make a significant difference in polling responses!] and a significant majority agreed with 11 of them – from “Investment always has moral as well as economic significance” to “An overemphasis on rights leads to a disregard for duties”. A majority even agreed with Catholic teaching about sexuality: 63 per cent felt that it is “irresponsible to view sexuality merely as a source of pleasure”.
Ed Stourton, a lifelong Catholic and the BBC broadcaster who will anchor much of the Corporation’s coverage of the visit, is not surprised by these findings. “People are looking for an alternative to the moral relativism that has become the ideology of today. Benedict is one man who really challenges the status quo: the disillusioned can’t help but be drawn to his words.”
Here, then, is the challenge before the Pope: he must drag his message on the human condition out of the shadow cast by the child abuse scandals. It is a long shadow; but his is a worthwhile message.
[He faced that challenge before - in the US, in Australia, in Malta, in Portugal. And each time, he got his message through, if we are to judge alone by what and how the MSM themselves reported on those trips. One might have expected Ms. Odone to at least point that out!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/09/2010 01:14]