For the first time I find myself objecting vehemently - and appalled - at a commentary by Giuliano Ferrara. My problem begins with his assumption that Benedict XVI's Papacy has been 'interrupted' in any way at all! An interruption short of death or permanent disability would be constituted by force majeure in which the Pope is forcibly taken from the Vatican, exiled somewhere and completely disabled from exercising his Petrine ministry. None of that has happened or is ever likely to happen,
So where is the interruption here? Is it the never-ending bloodsport by the media who consider the Pope as just another politician to be treated more mercilessly even than politicians because he is supposed to be the Vicar of Christ? Did the malice and targeted persecution of the Jewish establishment in his time 'interrupt' Jesus's ministry at all? Not even his death did! Which is the whole point of the faith handed down to us from Calvary and the garden tomb.
I don't understand this article at all, and Ferrara's rather bizarre picture of despair and defeat in the Church that is not what Benedict XVI sees at all, and which is indirectly a judgment on Benedict, and a most unfair one. In the light of Ferrara's eulogy of John Paul II's singlehanded achievments, it amounts to accusing Benedict XVI of bringing the Church he inherited to despair and defeat!
The most charitable explanation I can think of for this anti-Benedict aggression from a most unexpected quarter is that the idea of an 'interrupted' Papacy popped into Ferrara's head as he sat down to write his weekly column for Panorama, and he decided to flesh it out, no matter how mentally tortuous it would be... I wish Marcello Pera would dispute this article!
The true scandal: The 'interrupted'
Pontificate of Benedict XVI
by Giuliano Ferrara
Translated from
February 21, 2012
There is nothing extraordinary about the fact that there should be squabbling about finances at the Vatican Governatorate or at the IOR. Nor about the creation of a malicious, gossipy and anonymous document on the health of the Pope, in which a ranking prelate travelling to China is said to have oblique thoughts about the succession to the Papacy and the fighting around the Vatican Secretary of State.
The Church of men has always known such things, and in themselves, recent news reports do not constitute a scandal beyond that of the usual tragicomedy of blunders, in this case fueled by burning rivalries over rank and power.
But what is an enormous scandal is that these things end up chronicled in the newspapers, on TV, in the media, the more so because the scandal encumbers
a stagnant Church and a Curia that is once again the center of gossip,
The stale stuffy atmosphere, the unease over the future of the Pope, repeated speculation about his imminent resignation even by
some emeritus bishops [actually by one bishop, reported so far],, the very idea itself of a papal resignation - this is, in fact, terrible for the Catholic Church.
[Maybe I am less cynical than I thought, but why would anyone take these resignation talk seriously? Especially about a Pope who has been the first one in modern times to have ever confronted the issue out in the open and made clear his views about it so unequivocally! Who has shown in recent days, in word and deed, that he is far from being 'phyically, mentally and psychologically unable to carry out his ministry' - the criterion he defined as the only grounds for a Pope to resign!]
John Paul II was reproached for failing to govern the Curia with the reformatory attention it needed. In fact, he virtually abolished it.He was the Curia, with his great prophetic and charismatic work in travels and pilgrimages. The Curia in his time was his policy as the anti-Communist Pontiff, as the agent of European resurrection and of religious freedom, of eradicating the 'Third-Worlder' equivocations of liberation theology
[About the anti-Communism: Pius XII was no less anti-Communist, and John Paul II himself was constrained to adopt in part - except in his own homeland - the Ostpolitik of a compromise modus vivendi between the Church and the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, as had been advanced by Vatican diplomacy under John XXIII and Paul VI! I know great intellects like Ferrara can often be pardoned for their audacious generalizations, but this one is not helpful at all!]]
The Curia was his Christlikeness on the go that was able to dance in churchyards, enchant the young people of half the planet, express the universal mission of the Church by bringing youth to the aged Church of Rome, in a way that was 'athletic', one of perennial movement, and with a program of ideas counter to the dominant current of thought, not coddling the contemporary politically correct ideology, scientistic immoralism, a pan-sexual culture incapable of appreciating his theology of the body, soul and human responsibility.
[Gee, I'm out of breath. That does not leave anything much for anybody else to do or to achieve, does it? I admire Blessed John Paul II for a great many things, but I find this an unnecessary apotheosis, that Ferrara uses to dramatize his audacious proposition that the Polish Pope needed no Curia because he was the Curia all by himsel, that his Pontificate was completely a one-man show! Yet, as much as the media admired John Paul II to the point of being almost captive, that did not stop them from chronicling all the peccadillos and major sins of his Curia, and even his great charism could hardly cover up or obfuscate redhot scandals like Banco Ambrosiano or Father Maciel!]
With the decisive help of theologian Joseph Ratzinger
[Finally, an afterthought that is more in the nature of a footnote to break all that effusion!], Karol Wojtyla was modern and combative, preached the splendor of
his truth [His truth? Not Christ's?] and
he 'manufactured' saints [
[That's a terrible misrepresentation, because the Congregation for Saints could not have 'fabricated' the documentation of hundreds of sainted lives and their corresponding miracles to 'turn them out' for undeserved beatification and canonization! What on earth has happened to seriously disturb Ferrara's usual intellectual equilibrium?]].
But he was also capable of making millenary apologies for the deviations the Church had made throughout history - he embodied the anxieties of the Western world regarding the lack of any meaning for life in a mass society, even as he gave light, color and sense to the emergence to Christianity of mission lands and of new local churches in every part of the world.
Benedict XVI intended to firmly 'fix' in place the achievements of his predecessor, placing them on secure theological tracks to measure up to modern history and reasoning, while seeking to occupy more firmly a public space that had been conquered forcefully by his predecessor, who had a strength that seemed to me gentle as well as massive, and full of a non-reactionary romanticism.
Benedict XVI's speeches about Vatican II to the Curia, at Regensburg, the Bundestag, along with his homilies, were part of his inviting and promising approach. But
something seriously went wrong - beyond anonymous leaks and questionable job contracts awarded to Vatican cronies.
[And that's it? That's what Ferrara would now reduce Benedict's Pontificate to? After all the eloquent eulogies he has written in the past about it? And yet, nothing has changed for the worse. He has just undergone yet another ordeal by media fire, with his personal reputation enhanced by showing yet again, serenity and grace under pressure.]
Crucial in all this was the campaign to highlight the sins and crimes of the clergy. Malicious and carefully crafted to strike at the very basis of priestly relations with the people entrusted to their care,
this great neo-Protestant wave of denunciation has reduced the Church to its bare bones, and her identity as separate, sacred and sacramental to the dimensions of a secularized supercongregation.
[While that may be the impression of the secular world - to which Ferrara belongs, even if he is a self-identified 'devout atheist' who is doubtless sincere - but that is hardly the self-image of the Church today, represented by Benedict XVI. The Church is holy as ever, even if her members are sinful and in constant need of purification. The 'bare bones' she has been 'reduced to' are the essentials of the faith. never more catechized by the Successor of Peter than today! [/G\To succumb to the image that the outside world has of the Church today is to surrender that faith and admit defeat for a Church about which Christ himself said "the gates of Hell shall not prevail!".
Furthermore, Ferrara does not even acknowledge the fact that the anti-Church campaign that has used priestly sex offenders as a convenient pretext began at a time when John Paul II was already visibly in the late stages of Parkinson's, but perhaps compassion for him helped the fact that after two years of hyper-exposure and hyperventilation of public and private rages at the scandal, it died off with only occasional traces and did not rekindle significantly even after 2004 and the public unmasking of the Pope's friend, Fr, Maciel, started.
But with Jon Paul II gone and someone who had been a favorite media target for decades was installed in his place, it took the pretext of a decades-old situation of abuse in a Berlin Jesuit boarding school to start a raging media-stoked conflagration. This criminal arson aimed openly at discrediting Benedict XVI personally and through him, the Church he leads. Suddenly, all the sins committed by treasonous men of the Church for decades and decades were all visited upon Papa Ratzinger as though he had been responsible for each and every offense, as in fact vengeful lawyers have tried to show in court. With little said about the two decades of inaction under the previous Pontificate that preceded the US disclosures!/G]]
[And so the Church has been placed in a state of victimhood, as a defensive minority against the secularism that is increasingly active and dominant in her own ranks. In which the enchantment of thinking, of the faith, of the spirit has been replaced by an incubus over her pastoral light and an intellectual morale been weakened by the burdensome need for penitence and expiation.
This, I believe, is the problem and the scandal of Benedict XVI's interrupted Papacy, not the gossip.
Quite a lot of assumptions which, IMHO, are careless generalizations. And certainly, that is not at all what one feels and thinks listening to Benedict XVI's words - whereby he stands firmly and constantly for the saving truth of Christ's message that will prevail over worldly setbacks, as long as Christians testify to Christ with their lives. The Christian hope he preaches is the very antithesis of worldly despair, as Christian truth is the ultimate antithesis of all worldly ideologies
The Church as victim? Yes, but as Benedict XVI himself pointed out, persecuted more by the sins of her members than by what the outside world can manage to do - and equally important, she has never wallowed in victimhood. Through the ages, her saints, righteous Popes and honest hardworking men of God have guarded her against that to inspire a positive response that can overcome persecution.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/03/2012 23:43]