I am wary of every article that comes out now in the UK media about Benedict XVI - and I had a sinking feeling when I saw the title for this one. After five years, I still find it remarkable how the same stereotypes keep cropping up again and again. As though the media simply prefer to cut and paste same-old-same-old over and over, instead of actually thinking things through - and afresh - so they can say something original, honest and truthful. It beats me why 'man of the sacristy' should be used in this article as though it were pejorative...
Benedict XVI, 'a man of the sacristy',
walks in the shadow of John Paul II
by EAMON DUFFY
Sept. 8, 2010
The state visit this month of a reigning Pope to Britain is a historically charged event, for Britain is officially, even constitutionally, anti-Catholic.
The Church of England was called into being by Henry VIII to embody the claim that “the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm”.
The Act of Settlement of 1701, still in force, excludes “for ever” from the succession to the throne not merely any Roman Catholic, but anyone married to a Roman Catholic.
Till relatively recently, Guy Fawkes Day celebrations of the nation’s deliverance from “Gunpowder Treason” might include the burning of the Pope in effigy, a practice that continues every November 5th in the south coast town of Lewes.
Catholics were for centuries the hated other, against whom a single national identity might be forged for the disparate Protestant peoples of the archipelago: 'Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks', as the British national anthem has it (in a verse usually tactfully omitted nowadays).
That demonisation was assisted in Victorian England by the flooding of the English, Scottish and Welsh Catholic communities by hordes of Irish immigrants. Catholicism now looked literally as well as notionally “foreign” – dirty, disease-ridden and disloyal, as well as religiously benighted.
Time, social mobility and, not least, the atrophying of the Protestant convictions that once fuelled anti-Catholicism, have changed all that. Catholics have colonised the establishment.
The English Catholic community has always encompassed a core of ancient families – the “Brideshead” phenomenon. It now includes a newer kind of elite, represented by a millionaire ex-prime minister, and the current director general of the BBC.
During the last quarter of the 20th century, the cardinal archbishop of Westminster was an aristocratic ex-public school housemaster, whose brother-in-law was secretary to the cabinet, and whom the Queen liked to call “my cardinal”.
The papal state visit is remarkable nonetheless, not least because the invitation to make it was issued by a Prime Minister who is also the son of a minister of the Kirk of Scotland.
Mr Brown’s motives are not altogether clear. He may in part have been seeking to mend political fences. English, Welsh and Scottish working-class Catholics have traditionally voted Labour, an allegiance weakened in the long term by the rise of the Catholic middle classes, but more ominously by recent frictions between the Catholic hierarchy and New Labour over “life” issues, education policy, and the impact on Catholic social and adoption agencies of what the church sees as doctrinaire equal rights legislation.
The invitation to the Pope may therefore have been intended as an olive branch. But Brown’s invitation is more likely to have sprung from
a recognition of the Pope’s standing as leader of the world’s largest religious collective, encompassing more than a billion people, most of them in the developing world.
He is aware, too, of the Church’s unique role as a powerful international pressure group for human rights and development issues, and the world’s largest and most diversified humanitarian agency.
If so, not everyone in Britain shares that perception. The English, Scottish and Welsh Catholic bishops have so far weathered the storm over clerical abuse better than their beleaguered Irish counterparts, but in Britain as elsewhere, the Church’s moral credibility has nonetheless taken a battering.
An often rancorous hostility to Catholicism is becoming fashionable again among the British intelligentsia, and is an increasingly noticeable feature of opinion-forming journalism.
Irresponsibly casual condemnations of priests en bloc as a danger to children, or claims that the Pope’s opposition to condoms as a preventative against Aids makes him a mass murderer, surface routinely, and have replaced evocations of the Armada or Gunpowder Treason as the ritual constituents of a resurgent no-popery.
At the sillier end of the spectrum, there have been calls for the arrest of the Pope as soon as he sets foot on British soil, and there have been rumblings in the Letters pages that taxpayers must foot the security bill for protecting a religious leader whose teachings are so much at odds with the dominant mores of modern Britain.
British Catholics are keen to make the Pope welcome, but they are perhaps apprehensive about just how successfully Benedict will address this delicate situation, not least in his speech to representatives of “civic society” in Westminster Hall.
Even among the faithful, Benedict’s coming has elicited neither the widespread enthusiasm nor (on present indications) the vast and admiring crowds that marked the visit of his charismatic Polish predecessor in 1982. [First of all, the tickets given out for Benedict XVI's three public events are a fraction of those that were issued for John Paul's events. Example: 100,000 for Bellahouston Park against 300,000 in 1982. And how can Duffy judge the crowds before the Pope has even arrived?]
John Paul II was manifestly a giant on the world stage, his life story one of titanic struggle against 20th century Europe’s two great tyrannies, he himself a key player in the collapse of the Soviet empire.
His social and moral views elicited no more enthusiasm from the secular world than those of Joseph Ratzinger, but his craggy integrity, mesmeric personal presence and mastery of crowds made him formidable even to those who rejected his religion.
By contrast, Pope Benedict is an altogether smaller figure, a man of the sacristy and the lecture room.
[Has Duffy just dropped in from Mars? Where was he in the past five years, when Benedict XVI quickly eclipsed John Paul II's audience figures at the Vatican, scored a number of impressive foreign trips, wrote 3 landmark encyclicals and an even more landmark book on Jesus, to mention just a few concrete facts? And where was he in the 25 years before that, when Joseph Ratzinger was arguably the most prolific and best-selling Catholic theologian of the second half of the 20th century? Everyone seems to forget that he came to the Papacy better known internationally before he became Pope than any new Pope in the entire 20th century (Pius XII maybe, but he was Secretary of State in the 1930s long before communications technology made the world a global village)! And that Joseph Ratzinger had solid theological achievements independent of his function in the Roman Curia. I really do not understand why so many Catholic prelates and academics like Duffy appear to forget - conveniently and unpardonably - the extraordinary biography of Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope, and continue treating him as almost 'unworthy' to be wearing the Shoes of the Fisherman after someone like John Paul II. Especially since from all accounts, he was elected Pope precisely because there was no one else who could conceivably step into the shoes of the late Pope with the same authoritativeness and personal holiness!
Kindlier, probably more intelligent and certainly a better theologian than his predecessor, he is also shyer, more anxious,
less willing to engage with a culture which he perceives as in denial of its Christian roots, and on a disastrous slide into corrosive moral relativism. ['Less willing'? How can Duffy say that when no one else on the world stage today other than Benedict XVI is engaging that culture?]
Much in Benedict’s analysis of the malaise of western society will trike a chord with thoughtful Christians.
But the Pope has repeatedly shown himself maladroit and badly advised in his attempts to promote his views. An academic to the toes of his red papal slippers, he has poor antennae for the likely public perception of his actions and utterances. That was made clear by the hostile reaction to his Regensburg remarks on Islam, and, more recently, by his disastrous though doubtless well-intentioned conciliatory gestures to the holocaust-denying Lefebvrist rebel Bishop Richard Williamson.
[Is Duffy a genuine academic, or is he merely parroting what he reads and hears in the MSM? Does he have no independent judgment? What do the deliberately distorted hijacking of the Regensburg lecture and the irrelevancy of Bishop Williamson's historical ignorance have to do with Benedict XVI's message on the ills of modern society???? And is it the Pope's fault that the media chose to latch on to one sentence instead of reading the rest of what is probably the most seminal intellectual engagement of the decline of Western reason since the Enlightenment, and whose intrinsic worth not even that misleading contrived contretemps over Islam can dim, diminish nor dislodge?]
The reign of Papa Ratzinger has not ushered in the era of ferocious reaction many feared when he was elected, but his own deep reservations about many aspects not only of the modern world but of the modern Church have become increasingly plain.
An ongoing Vatican campaign to downplay the novel and reformist dimensions of the second Vatican Council, and to emphasise continuities with the attitudes and ideas of the age of Pius XII, appears to have his support.
[That Duffy chooses as he does to misread the hermeneutic of continuity (also called hermeneutic of reform, by the way), is sheer ideological doggedness. Typically, like most critics of Benedict XVI, who underscore their bias by comparing him unfavorably with John Paul II, Duffy conveniently ignores that John Paul II had the same interpretation of Vatican II, and that in fact, as Cardinal Wojtyla, he had written a book to guide the bishops and clergy of Poland in the right 'reception' of Vatican II.]
His decision in 2007, in the teeth of opposition from most of the world’s bishops, to permit the free use of the old unreformed Latin Mass, seems another straw in the same wind. [Opponents of Summorum Pontificum often toss that line cavalierly, but what evidence do they have that 'most of the world's bishops' opposed the Pope's decision, rather than 'most of the bishops we know"?
Not one opponent has ever answered the obvious question why they should demonize a rite that was in use since 1570 until 1970 when the Novus Ordo came into being, and how a rite that was used until the liturgical reform (ill-advised and even more ill-executed), suddenly became, for them, an object of contempt and derision overnight! They can't even stand it even when no one is forcing them to use or attend it, no one is taking away the Novus Ordo, and all they have to do is let the tradtional rite co-exist with it, as the other lesser-known rites of the Catholic church have co-existed together for centuries and still do!]
It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that the religious high point of the Pope’s visit is to be the beatification in Birmingham of the Victorian intellectual, writer and theologian, Cardinal John Henry Newman.
[That is both a non-sequitur and another instance of insolent ignorance (willful or feigned)] of fact by Duffy, who surely cannot be unaware of Benedict XVI's personal interest in beatifying a man who became one of his intellectual guides since he discovered him at age 19! But as we shall see, Duffy cherry-picks some of Newman's liberal ideas to make it appear that he was the ideological opposite of someone like Benedict XVI!]
Newman, who, among other distinctions, served in the 1850s as first rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, in fact had two careers, both of them momentous.
Till 1845, he was the leader of the Oxford Movement, which transformed the Church of England by re-establishing a profoundly sacramental understanding of Christianity within it. And after 1845, when he became a Catholic, Newman went on to formulate a series of brilliantly original theological insights which over the next century would help transform Catholic theology, anticipating some of the key themes of Vatican II.
Though he changed churches halfway through his life, Newman was a profoundly consistent thinker. Most of the key ideas he developed as a Catholic had their roots in his Anglican preaching and writing. He retained deep and enduring friendships with Anglicans.
His most widely read book, the
Apologia pro Vita Sua, one of the greatest of all religious autobiographies, was written 20 years after his conversion, but focused almost exclusively on his Anglican years.
His beatification is therefore the ratification of a deeply and distinctively English sensibility and theological method. It is an ecumenical gesture in itself, at a time when relations between the Church of England and the Catholic Church are sorely in need of such gestures.
[Surely Duffy knows that the timing for the beatification was completely independent of Anglicanorum coetibus - unless beyond the grave, Newman had decided to intercede for Jack Sullivan and knew God would grant the favor of healing him just in time for Benedict XVI to decide on accommodating disaffected Anglicans! Do these ideologues ever read back what they write before submitting it for publication?]
Pope Paul VI declined to advance Newman’s beatification, because he thought him a depressive who “had no joy”. By contrast, the present Pope is a professed admirer who has taken a personal interest in Newman’s cause. At one level, it is not hard to see why.
Like Pope Benedict, Newman devoted much intellectual energy to a sustained critique of the drift towards moral and religious relativism which he saw as the main intellectual danger of his day. An ardent believer in the objective reality of revelation and the claims of an informed conscience, he was by his own account a dedicated enemy of “liberalism”.
Yet labels can be deceptive. In terms of the inner politics of contemporary Catholicism, Newman himself was a liberal, and his vision of a healthy church was in many respects the antithesis of Pope Benedict’s. Though punctiliously loyal to the papacy, Newman was a vocal opponent of the definition of papal infallibility in 1870, which he thought unnecessary and a burden to consciences. He denounced the “aggressive and insolent faction” of Ultramontanes who centralised Catholicism too much on Rome.
He deplored clericalism, worked to create an educated and active laity, and argued for greater freedom for theology within the Church.
“Truth,” he wrote, “is wrought out by many minds, working together freely.” He detested, and himself suffered from, trigger-happy dogmatists who tried to pre-empt intellectual exploration by invoking pat formulae and ecclesiastical denunciations.
Structures of authority gave the Church strength, he conceded, but did not give it life: “We are not born of bones and muscle.”
[And yet, just the other day, Duffy's colleagues at Commonweal were chastising Benedict XVI for agreeing with Hildegarde von Bingen that true reform does not come from structural changes but from renewal through self-purification.] Truth was objective, but had to be sought out by the heart and conscience as well as by the head, and he took as his motto as a cardinal the phrase of St Francis de Sales, “Heart speaks to heart.”
Like Pope Benedict, Newman believed that British society was in danger of cutting itself adrift from the Christian values that had given Europe and the West their distinctive religious, moral and aesthetic character.
But he also believed the slide into relativism would not be halted by mere denunciation.
[The use of the word "But' following the previous statement would seem to indicate that Duffy is drawing a comparison between Benedict and Newman in this respect - as though Benedict were simply making his point by 'mere denunciation'!]
If Christian values were to survive and prevail, they must commend themselves by their intrinsic power and attractiveness.
[And how does that differ from Benedict XVI's repeated exhortation that Christians, especially priests, must teach and attract by example??In this respect, h? He has often quoted Paul VI who said, in effect, that the world will learn from witnesses to Christ whose life examples teach, and not from teachers who are merely teachers.]
Modern materialism, he wrote, must be met “not by refutation so much as by a powerful counter-argument . . . overcoming error not by refutation so much as by an antagonist truth”.
When Pope Benedict addresses British “civil society” in Westminster Hall on September 17th, he will stand on or near the spot on which Thomas More was tried and condemned.
More’s defiant declaration to his judges that, “I am not bound, my lords, to conform my conscience to the council of one realm, against the general council of Christendom . . . these thousand years” is an appropriate text for a Pope intensely conscious of the potential for offence in his deeply counter-cultural message.
But many who wish both him and his message well will also want him to take his lead from the man whom he is to declare blessed two days later, and concentrate not on denunciation but on commending the Christian “antagonist truth” by its inherent hopefulness and humanity.
[Duffy repeats the implied accusation that Benedict XVI has only been bent on denunciation rather than example, and as though Benedict XVI had ever been less than 'cooperatores veritatis'! As for hopefulness and humanity, Duffy obviously never read Spe salvi nor the two other Benedictine encyclicals!]
Eamon Duffy is professor of the history of Christianity in the University of Cambridge, and a fellow and former president of Magdalene College. His Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes is published by Yale University Press.
I am truly heartsick that so many prominent Catholics, with credentials like Duffy has, persist in tossing off their unadulterated opinions without first testing them for logic and honesty!
Now, contrast Duffy's article and its prefabricated, stereotype-based and ideologically driven pronouncements about Benedict XVI, with this surprising article from today's Catholic Herald, by the man the BBC commissioned to make a documentary about the Pope that we have all presumed will be a hatchet job. It may yet still be one - despite the 'conversion' of the documentary-maker while doing it. PROTECT THE POPE says Mark Dowd is an ex-Dominican and homosexual who, "commissioned by the BBC to make a documentary about the Holy Father for the week of his visit, found it a journey of personal discovery about Pope Benedict and came away with a much more positive vision of the man". Let us pray that the documentary will also reflect this positive vision!
How I changed my mind
about Pope Benedict
By Mark Dowd
Friday, 10 September 2010
June 1945. An exhausted 17-year-old boy has been released from a prisoner of war camp and completes an 80-mile journey back home, eager to see his family and friends. As he descends at sunset from the hills into his home town of Traunstein close to the Austrian border on the feast of the Sacred Heart, he hears music coming from the church of St Oswald. It is almost something from a Hollywood screenplay.
“The heavenly Jerusalem itself could not have appeared more beautiful to me at that moment,” he writes. The teenage Joseph Ratzinger knew that his mother and sister Maria were in the church. You or I might have hastily pulled open the church door and blundered in, scouring the pews in search of eager family reunion.
But what does the present Pope tell us in,
Milestones, his short collection of memoirs published in 1997? “I did not want to create disturbance so I did not go in.”
Why not? This was one of a huge list of questions I wanted answers to and one which forms part of a BBC Two film,
Benedict: Trials of a Pope, to be shown next week before the arrival of His Holiness on the first ever state visit by a Pope to Britain.
The most fitting person on hand to answer that question was his 86-year-old brother, Georg, now a retired choirmaster and canon at Regensburg Cathedral. Our production team had found a willing intermediary in family friend, Margarete Ricardi, who I met outside his home in the centre of Regensburg.
“How do I address him?” I asked nervously. “Is it OK to call him Herr Ratzinger?”
Margarete’s face betrayed a faint sense of revulsion. “No, no,” she said. “You must call him Herr Domkapellmeister [cathedral choirmaster]. Titles are very important in Germany.”
Clearly. Ninety per cent of my O-level German has all but disappeared, but this word was inserted firmly into my cerebral cortex and duly reappeared five minutes later as we made our introductions.
So what about that reluctance to enter the church?
“My brother has spent his whole life in devotion to the liturgy and knows that it is the central pillar of the Church’s life,” Georg told me. “He knows that if he had gone in, it would have created a disturbance. No, he said a prayer and that was it.”
The young Joseph went home. Father was waiting, and later, that long-awaited reunion with his mother and sister. But if ever a story were to touch on so many important themes in the Ratzinger worldview, it is this one:
the respect for the aesthetics of liturgical life, the centrality of order and a strongly held sense of boundaries: and not making yourself “the story”, realising that self-assertion is not a central component of personal freedom.
The making of this film has been something of a voyage of discovery for me. I can’t be the only Catholic in the world who had major apprehensions on April 19, 2005 as the conclave made its decisive choice to elect the first German pope since the 11th century (I don’t count Adrian VI, born in Utrecht in 1459, part of the Holy Roman Empire).
I was worried about whether the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith might be just a little too polarising. I am no expert of conclave arithmetic, but my hunch was that he simply had too many doubters inside the College of Cardinals to get the required votes. Wrong.
And I have been wrong about him, too. It is not that he has changed radically since taking up the papacy; it is simply that
when you have to make a one-hour programme on one of the most clever [Inappropriate adjective for Benedict XVI!] and gifted people on the planet you have to look behind the headlines and the angry rants on the blogosphere. In short, you have to do justice to the man as best as you can.
Something similar is going on with Pope Benedict at the moment, as has been occurring with John Henry Newman in recent months. Recognising the brilliant intellectual acumen of an individual often leads to wings, sections of the Church, staking their claim. They want to possess them as “their own”. I can understand why.
But there are occasionally rare moments when these drives towards colonising the output of a gifted mind simply fail on account of the sheer dynamism and multi-facetedness of the individual concerned. So Pope Benedict’s uncompromising language on homosexuality, his disciplining of liberation theologians, and 2007 Motu Proprio on the Old Rite of the Roman liturgy all have conservatives ticking their boxes and approving.
But how then to deal with some
rather contradictory evidence ['contradictory' only if one insists that a principled man's choices can always be pigeonholed into pre-conceived categories, and they can't be! Joseph Ratzinger's views cannot be labelled 'conservative' or 'liberal' according to prevailing thought, but simply Christian and rational] - not least of all his championing of workers’ rights in
Caritas in Veritate and his uncompromising critique of neo-liberal economics?:
“I would like to remind everyone, especially everyone engaged in boosting the world’s economic and social assets, that
the primary capital to be safeguarded and valued is man, the human person in his or her integrity” (italics from the text).
Similarly, those who complain of the betrayal of Vatican II and have this pontificate down as unreservedly restorationist and insular have some explaining to do.
How is it that such a man commands the respect of a towering figure and atheist intellectual such as Jürgen Habermas, so much so that they are prepared to engage in a dialogue in public?
How is it that such a man devotes his first encyclical to a profound discussion of human love and ponders on the potential for Eros and Agape to be a bridge between the human and the divine?
Furthermore, how is it that this Pope has taken every opportunity to emphasise that care for the environment is not some woolly-minded aspect of New Ageism, but an integral part of his theological outlook?
So much so that in January His Holiness called in many of the ambassadors accredited to the Holy See and berated them for the “economic and political resistance” that resulted in the failure of last December’s climate summit in Copenhagen.
[Now, that's unwarranted politicization of the Pope's words at the time!]
When I ascended the roof of the Aula Nervi [Aula Paolo VI] just a three-minute walk from St Peters, the charming Vatican architect, Guido Rainaldi, unveiled an amazing sight to me: more than 2,500 solar panels. Low carbon heaven.
Green energy companies have been beating a path to the site and sounding out the idea of using Vatican employees as guinea pigs with their emerging fleet of electric cars and scooters.
“Who knows,” said Signore Rainaldi, “perhaps when we get the first consignment of vehicles, the Holy Father will bless them. Maybe he can take one for a spin?” (The Pontiff does not possess a driving licence, but in theory that is no bar on him hopping on to a scooter.)
That Joseph Ratzinger has not quite lived up to his predictable billing is a point well understood by the Italian senator Marcello Pera, with whom Pope Benedict wrote a book on Europe and culture called
Without Roots. When I met Pera in the heart of Rome earlier in the year he told me of the reaction of his fellow legislators.
“There was a huge prejudice,” Pera said. “Everyone was expecting the Rottweiler. I had invited him to address the Senate: this was the first time a cardinal had ever set foot inside the building and they were amazed. He really charmed them.” What exactly was Pera doing, as a godless man, engaging with the Vicar of Rome?
“I wanted these secularists to reflect. They talk about the absolutist nature of human rights, but they have no idea of the basis of where such an idea comes from – namely, that everyone is made in the image of God and deserves respect and has an integrity based on that.”
Pera makes a further point: “Let’s look at this question from a historical point of view. What happened to Europe, when it denied Christianity? We had Nazism, Fascism, Communism, anti-Semitism. That means that when Europe tried to avoid its own roots and so the culture of rights, specially the respect of the human person, Europe finds itself in dictatorship.”
Good for Pera. Can you imagine this from the archpriest of atheism, Richard Dawkins?
But
the real delight for me has been in engaging with the writings of this 83-year-old man. The encyclicals have been given deserved space and attention. Yet you have to go back to 1968 for his classic,
Introduction to Christianity, a work in which it becomes abundantly clear that, for this gentle and determined Bavarian, that man does not create his own truth through effort and endeavour, but, as he writes:
“To believe as a Christian means in fact entrusting oneself to the meaning that upholds me and the world, taking it as the firm ground on which I can stand fearlessly… to believe as a Christian means understanding our existence as a response to the word, the logos, that upholds and maintains all things.”
There are some wonderful reflections on Moses, the encounter with the burning bush, the voice of God, and the seeds of the understanding of true monotheism – the God who replies, “I am what I am” being a transcendent presence “who cannot give his name in the same way as the gods round about, who are individual gods alongside similar gods and therefore need a name”.
Jump forward almost 40 years and we have volume one of
Jesus of Nazareth. I must confess to being daunted by this work as many had started and failed, warning me that it was “hard going”.
Be that as it may,
what is genuinely moving about the encounter one undergoes in reading this book is the sheer power and depth of faith in the 335 pages. Forty of those are a flowing meditation on the Lord’s Prayer and the Pope writes with such a direct voice, occasionally moving away from a more formal and academic tone – you almost feel he is in the room, singling you out, speaking to you directly. [Bless you, Mark Dowd! You have read the book in the spirit of faith, as it was meant to be! And yes, no Christian can be unmoved by the reflection on the Lord's Prayer that, also for myself, I found the 'best' part of the book.]
“We must also keep in mind that the Our Father originates from [Jesus’s] own praying,” he writes, “from the Son’s dialogue with the Father. This means that it reaches down into depths far beyond the words… each one of us with his own mens, his own spirit, must go out to meet, to open himself to, and submit to the guidance of the vox, the word that comes to us from the Son.” And to think that volume two on the Passion, death and Resurrection has already gone off to the publishers…
These books are not exercises of the Magisterium, as Pope Benedict reminds us in the preface to his first volume: “Everyone is free to contradict me. I would only ask for that initial goodwill without which there can be no understanding.”
That this goodwill has been at times conspicuous in its absence in the run-up to next week’s visit has been obvious for some time. I put that down to a trinity of factors which, when mixed in a heady brew, account for a lot of the reservations: an ever-present strain of anti-Catholicism here in Britain, a small but potent anti-German sentiment and, of course, the understandable raw nerve touched by the seemingly endless crisis of clerical sex abuse.
It is this last factor which deserves some detailed attention and in our BBC film we do our best to take account of how fair it really is to single our Pope Benedict for special criticism.
The man I approached to help me evaluate all this was John Allen, the Vatican correspondent for the
National Catholic Reporter and a man described as having a “maddening objectivity” by the online Catholic magazine
Godspy. In a Catholic world of tribal rivalries, Allen is trusted by most to get it right and to be fair. That is why his Vatican contacts are the envy of most members of the fourth estate.
Allen’s take is principally that the bottle is overwhelmingly more full than empty. The Pope has met the victims of abuse on several occasions, made numerous apologies and embraced a zero-tolerance policy for clergy found guilty of abuse. The statute of limitations has recently been extended to 20 years to allow abuse cases to be pursued with greater ease, placing the Catholic Church ahead of many civil authorities in this respect.
Moreover, it was the Pope, shortly after his accession, who moved to isolate Fr Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionnaires of Christ, after years of mounting evidence of abuse and corruption, evidence which culminated in a Vatican investigation into his movement.
None of this happened under Pope John Paul II and many have suggested that the then Cardinal Ratzinger would have taken action earlier, but supporters of Maciel acted to block any initiatives. But it is clear this is not a man in denial.
When I spoke to Allen in Rome about the effect all this was having on the Holy Father, he said: “I have spoken to people who work in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith who were there in the rooms when case files were being read out loud and they saw the kind of reaction of disgust and horror and shock that washed across the visage of Joseph Ratzinger.
“I don’t think that was for show. This was away from TV cameras in a private room. I think that genuinely does speak to his experience.”
As my quest to understand Joseph Ratzinger gathered momentum a clearer picture was emerging. Far from questions of massive personal culpability, it seemed to me that the implosion of recent cases presents the leader of the Catholic Church with a very heavy personal burden.
This man’s talents are not best served by details of management and structures: he is a first-rate theologian and thinker. As John Allen put it, “There is a root kind of frustration that he must feel. This a mind that is so given to the quest for order, to creating logical links from A to B to C leading to the glories of Christian orthodoxy. Now to be put in a position of governing not only a Church that seems in meltdown in many ways, but a world which changes every 15 minutes as blog sites are refreshed and where the situation to which he is trying to respond is constantly in flux, I think has to be a source of angst.”
But also remember that this is a man whose instincts are also geared to searching for truth. On the recent flight to Fatima in May a posse of journalists on the papal plane took their seats and when one of them asked about any possible links between the predicted sufferings of the Church in the Fatima visions and its present difficulties, Pope Benedict replied with candour: “The greatest persecution of the Church doesn’t come from enemies on the outside, but is born in sin within the Church. The Church thus has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the necessity of justice.”
It was a decisive riposte to
those in the Vatican who had sought to blame everything on the media and “idle gossip”. [That, however, is one of those cavalier and unfounded generalizations that MSM has made without ever citing one name at the Vatican who has ever 'blamed everything on the media'. And the reference to 'idle gossip' aimed at Sodano is simply wrong. because Sodano was clearly referring to attacks against the Pope himself, not to the sex abuses committed by priests, when he was adressing his very brief message of support for the Pope in behalf of the College of Cardinals last Easter Sunday.]
As my former prior in the Dominicans, Fr Timothy Radcliffe, told me: “The Pope is just too honest a man to accept the idea that all this is simply somebody else’s fault. He knows it comes from us and that we have to face it. And I find this all very promising and I hope it leads to a more honest church, a more transparent Church and a humbler Church.”
The predictions of an inflexible Vicar of Rome, “God’s Rottweiler”, in 2005 have been misplaced. Many of us got it wrong and I am happy to say so unambiguously.
But I end on this thought. My old novice master, Herbert McCabe OP, was always reminding us of the massive dilemma at the heart of all theology: that as humans we are drawn to God and made to share union with the Creator, but our ability to use words to reference all this is always doomed to failure, given the gap between our finite status and the transcendent force that lies beyond our grasp. T S Eliot puts it best in “Burnt Norton”:
words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
Pope Benedict, shy and retiring man that he is said to be, might be horrified at this suggestion.
[No, he will not! He has always made it clear that words that are not backed up by actions are useless, that the Church must not only preach but teach by example!]
But might it be that one of the reasons is he is so hard to categorise, to put into that simple neat box, is that his writings, teachings and insights are an albeit imperfect reflection of that infinity and immutability that is the “peace that surpasseth all understanding”?
[And they are necessarily imperfect - but not any less true and sincere - precisely because they are human!]
Mark Dowd’s film, Benedict: Trials of a Pope, will be broadcast on BBC Two on Wednesday September 15 at 7pm.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/09/2010 00:43]