Thanks to Lella and her blog
for this article written by AGI's Salvatore Izzo, for what is said to be a bimonthly magazine of the Vatican publishing house LEV, but I don't see it online so far. (I'm also confused by LEV which now has two sites: - other than its web pages in the main Vatican site, it also has an independent website that is still under construction, in which, so far, the new titles are presented without an illustration of the book covers, as they used to do... But while they were setting up the new site, they almost abandoned the old site which has just added on the July to December 2010 list of new books, and does not yet contain the January list)... Anyway, Mr. Izzo has written a remarkable early Valentine for the Pope that is most unusual from a veteran Vaticanista.
Pope Benedict is the 'Good Teacher' -
as Jesus was in the Bible
by Salvatore Izzo
Translated from
EDITORIA VATICANA
Last March 25, in a meeting with the young people of the Diocese of Rome in St. Peter's Square, a girl asked the Pope the question that the rich young man in the Bible had asked Jesus: "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
As a reporter, I was there to listen, and that night, I reported Benedict XVI's beautiful and engaging answer for AGI. He began by citing the next verse of the Gospel, 'Follow the commandments", which Jesus said, could be summed up in one alone: "Love God with all your heart, with all your reason, with all your existence, and love your neighbor as you love yourself".
See the translation of the entire Q&A on Page 82 of this thread:
benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=8527...
One must remember that March 25 was just a few days after the MSM launched their 'expose' of Cardinal Ratzinger's supposed misbehavior in dealing with the Hullermann case in Munich, and the Pope was under siege, as it were. Some 70,000 young people of Rome and Lazio converged in St. Peter's Square for a pre-diocesan WYD meeting that had been scheduled long before, and their enthusiasm must have been a welcome infusion for the Pope.]
To love God, the Pope explained, one must get to know him. "This is the first step we must make: to seek to know God. Thus we will learn that our life is not by chance, it is not random. My life was wanted by God in eternity. I am loved, I am needed. God has a plan for me. So my life is important and even necessary."
There have been hundreds by now of the German Pope's discourses that I have had to summarize and report for AGI but this dialog with the youth remains within me. And I thought of that Q&A when this article was requested of me.
Having covered Benedict XVI in all his public events, I am convinced that he himself can be called 'Good Teacher'. This is an expression on which exegetes have devoted a lot of discussion because the synoptic Gospels are not in full agreement - Matthew, for instance, transfers the adjective from the appellative to the question itself, "Teacher, what good can I do to have eternal life?" so that there would be no juxtaposition between the person of Jesus and God. And I, too, always thought, as Mark's Gospel has Jesus say it, 'Only God is good".
But having reported on Joseph Ratzinger for some time before he became Pope, we Vatican reporters have always observed and experienced his goodness as a man, his goodness as a priest, his exquisite tact, his spiritual mastery in dealing with others, his wise counsel, his prudence in making decisions, and his immense generosity in giving himself for his apostolate.
And I am sure I do not commit a wrong against God to say that he, too, Joseph Ratzinger, is good - that he is the good teacher like Jesus because he takes part intimately in the goodness of God who has given him his wisdom and has chosen to illuminate him with his supernatural light.
Like Jesus, he is humble - this great Pope who is also the greatest living theologian today, and, as they said of him when he was elected, author of more books than most cardinals of the Holy Roman Church have read.
He called himself 'a humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord' when he first presented himself to the world as Pope (with the sleeves of his black professor's sweater visible under his new white papal garments, confirming that, although most of us had come to believe he was the favorite, he himself had not expected to be elected).
Until then, his work had been mainly intellectual. And he has not given that up as Bishop of Rome, endowing his leadership of the Church, which he has carried out gently but firmly, with the added value of his cultural superiority.
If his predecessor, the equally great John Paul II, marked his Pontificate with gestures made during his travels - pilots and airline crews became his most useful 'collaborators' - we might say that Benedict XVI's principal 'aides' have been editors and typesetters, starting with the personnel of the Vatican publishing house.
Not abandoning his work as theologian has been key to his great openness. In the Preface to the first volume of his book JESUS OF NAZARETH, he wrote another sentence that struck me most: "This book is In no way an exercise of the magisterium, but is solely an expression of my personal search 'for the face of the Lord'. Everyone is free, then, to contradict me. I would only ask my readers for that initial goodwill without which there can be no understanding".
Perhaps no other Pope has ever spoken in such terms. The book
Light of the World, the interview-book with Peter Seewald, subtitled, 'The Pope, the Church, and signs of the times', confirms this attitude of Papa Ratzinger, as Seewald himself said at the Frankfurt Book Fair, "I continue to be overwhelmed by the goodness and accessibility of the Pope".
"Only a Pontiff who is good and accessible," commented Paolo Rodari in
Il Foglio, "could agree to speak so freely of issues which, for the Catholic Church, are among the most difficult and heated. But they are subjects which he has faced, not without controversy and often with severe criticism, in the past five and a half years".
That March night in St. Peter's Square, I was also quite struck by Benedict XVI's answers, not just for their evangelical content, but the essentiality and clarity with which he pointed out to the girl who asked the question and the tens of thousands of young people present that night, a way of living that all of us can and should follow.
As a theologian, then as cardinal, and now as Pope, Joseph Ratzinger has always used "a modern language, very clear, which goes straight to the heart of things".
It is a language, says Lucetta Scaraffia, professor of contemporary history at La Sapienza and editorialist for
L'Osservatore Romano, "that is never difficult but seeks to communicate in the easiest way possible what he wants to say".
"A language that is never self-referential, that never indulges in that jargon that is unfortunately so widespread in contemporary Catholic culture, separating it completely from secular culture, and above all, does not inspire reflection, much less true personal involvement".
Along with Cardinal Bertone and Undersecretary Gianni Letta of Prime Minister Berlusconi's cabinet, Scaraffia contributed an essay to the book that introduces the first volume in Italian of Joseph Ratzinger's
Collected Works. She says further:
"The words of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, have never failed in this respect: there are no commonplaces, no banal concepts, nor anything that has been said so often and in the very same way that it has become devalued. Language is fundamental for being able to touch the heart of the believer, but especially, in order for the rest of the world to pay attention - a perennial problem that the Church today can resolve by simply following the example of the Pope".
The Pope himself tackled this subject on November 13 speaking on the potential of the new media to the Pontifical Council for Culture, when he called on the Church to "listen to the men and women of our time, in order to promote new occasions to announce the Gospel" in an atmosphere of 'profound cultural transformation' characterized by 'new languages and new forms of communication'.
He stressed how "in this context, pastors and faithful will note with concern some difficulties in communicating the evangelical message and in transmitting the faith within the ecclesial community itself" - problems that "seem to increase when the Church must address men and women who are distant or indifferent to the experience of faith, and whom the evangelical message hardly reaches or at least not in an engaging way".
"In a world that makes communications the winning strategy, " the Pope said, "the Church must not remain indifferent". Rather it should seek "to avail of communications with renewed creativity and commitment... and with a critical sense and attentive discernment" of the new communications modalities.
"The inability of language to communicate the profound meaning and beauty of the experience of faith can contribute to the indifference of so many today, especially of young people. It can become a reason for their detachment, as the dogmatic constitution
Gaudium et spes expressed, adding that an inadequate presentation of the Christian message obscures instead of manifesting the true face of God and of religion".
For his part, Benedict XVI does this work of 'translating' the truth of the faith everyday, following the example of one of his teachers, Romano Guardini, the great Italian-German philosopher-theologian under whom he studied at the University of Munich.
For Guardini, as the Pope recalled later this year, "what mattered was not what someone had said about Christian truth, but what was true itself".
"It was this aspect of his teaching," he told the members of the Berlin-based Guardini Foundation whom he addressed at the Vatican, "that struck us students, because we did not want to learn about any 'spectacular pyrotechnics' of existing opinions within and outside Christianity. We wanted to know what is. And here was someone who, without fear, but with all the seriousness of critical thought, placed the question before us and helped us to think things through together".
And Guardini's ex-student who had become Pope added: "This was a novelty compared to the rhetoric of old - he did not seek any rhetoric at all, instead just spoke simply to us, spoke the truth and led us to dialog with the truth. So we had a broad spectrum of dialogs with authors like Socrates, St. Augustine, Pascal, Dante, Holderlin, Morike, Rilke and Dostoevsky. He saw them as living mediators, who revealed the present in some statement from the past, allowing us to see and experience it as something hew. And this gave us a power that led us back into ourselves".
This is precisely what Papa Ratzinger achieves, for instance, every Wednesday in his catecheses at the General Audience, which LEV has been presenting in a series of volumes on each catechetical cycle.