Grasping the drama of the Age
Review by Lewis Ayres
Dec. 2, 2010
This short book is an extended interview with Benedict XVI, conducted in hour-long sessions over the course of a week. Even in advance of publication, the Pope’s comments on the use of condoms by the HIV-positive have received much newspaper coverage. Whether or not this was the result of an organised publicity drive, it will surely push this book up the best-seller lists for a while, and that cannot be a bad thing.
Benedict also comments extensively and powerfully on the child-abuse crisis, although I leave discussion of this question to commentators more knowledgeable than me. But
if we are taken up only by the Pope’s comments on the “hot button” questions of the day, we run the danger of missing the many ways in which this text fascinates.
His interviewer Peter Seewald is a German journalist, and one whose life and career has been intertwined with that of Benedict. Brought up (like Benedict) in firmly Catholic Bavaria, Seewald left the Church and became a radical Marxist journalist. He was slowly drawn back to the Church, in part through interaction with the then Cardinal Ratzinger. His earlier interviews with the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1996 and 2000,
Salt of the Earth and
God and the World, revealed a man fascinated with his subject and determined to (at the least) show up his subject’s decisive place in the Church under the previous papacy.
Seewald questions one whom he not only respects but also sees as one of the more pivotal successors of Peter. While his story is a touching tribute to the Pope’s spiritual authority and pastoral presence, it also results in a certain tension in the interview and, at times, a sense of opportunity lost.
Most importantly, Seewald’s own concerns dominate a number of the questions. For example, when he discusses Benedict’s views on scriptural interpretation, the journalist asks questions that allow Benedict to offer views rehearsed in a number of his previous scholarly works.
But Seewald does not press far down this path: he really wants to know Benedict’s views on a reading of Revelation that sees hidden therein a prophecy of the seven ages of the world.
At one point Seewald asks a leading question, revealing his own belief that the accuracy of the New Testament’s reporting of Jesus is such that we can discount any transformation of Jesus’s message by his followers before the text was composed.
Benedict rather subtly resists Seewald’s line of argument – as we should expect from one who has argued so forcefully that the guidance of the Spirit makes the Church the source of both the New Testament and its faithful interpreter.
Seewald expects clarity, knowledge and prophecy; from his end of the tennis court, Benedict delivers a healthy mix of clarity, faith and
humility before the divine mystery.
Benedict expresses particularly clearly the importance he places on our recognising “the internal continuity of Church history” and “the intrinsic continuity of faith and prayer in the Church” (both page 106).
We see also Benedict’s concern for the foundational role of Christianity in the development of Western European nations and the pivotal moment that comes when Christians become only a misunderstood body within the nation.
Here – as in his previous writings on the subject – Benedict chooses not to stress the Church’s complicity with some of the darker aspects of the life of any and all of the supposedly “Christian” nations of Europe. [He has amply commented on these darker aspects in the past. Why would he bring it up in detail this time when the Church has crises within the institution itself? His answers are meant to be timeless and timely on current issues, not a lookback at the two millennia of Church history.]
His concern that the Church be a force for good and his concern for the role of the Jewish people is palpable, but he is unshakeable in his faith in the possibility of the Catholic nation – no hint of any anti-Constantinianism here.
At the same time, Benedict’s emphasis on the presence of God in and through all things as a distinctive mark of Christian faith is elegantly expressed.
Similarly his focus on the liturgical and the sacramental as our mode of attention to this presence states in direct and simple forms many of the themes of his
The Spirit of the Liturgy.
Everyone will find in Benedict’s responses something that fascinates; for me it was his confession that the saints to whom he regularly prays are Augustine, Bonaventure and Thomas. Benedict is a theologian with the most notable connection with the great figures of the Western tradition.
It is difficult, however, to avoid some comment on this book’s confirmation of what seemed to be the case in a number of the missteps of the past five years.
For example, Benedict admits he composed his famous Regensburg address without realising “that people don’t read papal lectures as academic presentations, but as political statements” (page 97).
His professorial mode expresses itself not in a lack of clarity, but in not grasping the character of the media’s modes of
[badly mis-]interpreting and interrogating all that appears in the public square.
More disturbingly, when he discusses the case of the Lefebvrist bishop Richard Williamson, he says: “Unfortunately, though, none of us went on the Internet to find out what sort of person we were dealing with” (page 121).
[Why is it disturbing to make a statement of fact? Williamson's opinions of Holocaust, after all, had nothing to do with why he was excommunicated. The Pope said in LOTW that if he had been aware of the Holocaust issue, he would have considered Williamson 'a case apart'. I don't think he meant he would not have lifted his excommunication, but that he would have had the Vatican issue a statement along with the decree of revocation to the effect that Bishop Williamson is known to have expressed unfortunate opinions about the Holocaust, but as reprehensible as the statements are, they have nothing to do with why he was excommunicated and do not disqualify from the revocation given to the other 3 bishops.]
Through the book shines a clear sense of Benedict as the highly intelligent and pastoral professor, a man of great spiritual vision and depth. His concern, though, is that the Pope be able to discern the signs of the times. And it is here that readers of the book must make their own judgement.
Has Benedict grasped the drama through which we live? [Excuse me??? Has that not been obvious not just in this book but in everything Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has said adn written all these decades?]
His challenge is that, while we must attend to the crises and failures of the Church in our day, the true drama is a spiritual one, a drama in which the Word has appeared in flesh and offers to us immediate communion in the divine life. Surely a good message for Advent?
[Ayres make no sense. Surely, Benedict XVI has not - and has never - relegated the spiritual challenge in his priorities. How many times has he said, in various ways, that pastoral and practical challenges, individual and collective, can only be met after God is given priority over everything else, because from that starting point, then everything will follow!]
With this week's issue, the Tablet also inaugurates a new section called 'The Bigger Picture' "devoted to notable speeches, lectures and documents", with key excerpts from LOTW. It's never repetitious to present excerpts from the book, and the choice of excerpts is often indicative of who is doing the excerpting.
Intimate reflections of a Pope
Dec. 4, 2010
In the first entry in our new section devoted to notable speeches, lectures and documents, we publish excerpts from the book-length interview Pope Benedict XVI gave German journalist Peter Seewald, called Light of the World, which was published this week.
On the place of condoms in preventing HIV
The sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalisation of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves. This is why the fight against the banalisation of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.
There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralisation, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanisation of sexuality.
Are you saying, then, that the Catholic Church is actually not opposed in principle to the use of condoms?She of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality.
Editor’s note: Holy See spokesman Federico Lombardi clarified on Tuesday: "I asked the Pope personally if there was a serious distinction in the choice of male instead of female and he said 'no'," Lombardi said. "That is, the point is it [the use of a condom] should be a first step towards responsibility in being aware of the risk of the life of the other person one has relations with. If it is a man, a woman or a transsexual who does it, we are always at the same point, which is the first step in responsibly in avoiding passing on a grave risk to the other." Seewald added: "The Pope indicates that, beyond the single case, there are further cases where one can imagine that condom use is a step towards a responsible approach to sexuality in this area to avoid further infection," he said.
On barring gay men from the priesthood
Homosexuality is incompatible with the priestly vocation. Otherwise, celibacy itself would lose its meaning as a renunciation. It would be extremely dangerous if celibacy became a sort of pretext for bringing people into the priesthood who don’t want to get married anyway. For, in the end, their attitude toward man and woman is somehow distorted, off centre, and, in any case, is not within the direction of creation of which we have spoken.
The Congregation for Education issued a decision a few years ago to the effect that homosexual candidates cannot become priests because their sexual orientation estranges them from the proper sense of paternity, from the intrinsic nature of priestly being…
The greatest attention is needed here in order to prevent the intrusion of this kind of ambiguity and to head off a situation where the celibacy of priests would practically end up being identified with the tendency to homosexuality.
On divorce and when a marriage is ‘valid’
One thing we can do is inquire more precisely into the question of the validity of marriages. Up to now, canon law has taken it for granted that someone who contracts a marriage knows what marriage is. Assuming the existence of this knowledge, the marriage is then valid and indissoluble.
But in the present confusion of opinions, in today’s completely new situation, what people “know” is rather that divorce is supposedly normal. So we have to deal with the question of how to recognise validity and where healing is possible.
On the abuse crisis
It is a great crisis, we have to say that. It was upsetting for all of us. Suddenly so much filth. It was really almost like the crater of a volcano, out of which suddenly a tremendous cloud of filth came, darkening and soiling everything, so that above all the priesthood suddenly seemed to be a place of shame and every priest was under the suspicion of being one like that too. Many priests declared that they no longer dared to extend a hand to a child, much less go to a summer camp with children.
For me the affair was not entirely unexpected. In the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith I had already dealt with the American cases; I had also seen the situation emerge in Ireland. But on this scale it was nevertheless an unprecedented shock...
Right now, in the midst of the scandals, we have experienced what it means to be very stunned by how wretched the Church is, by how much her members fail to follow Christ.
On what led to the abuse crisis
The Archbishop of Dublin told me … that ecclesiastical penal law functioned until the late 1950s; admittedly it was not perfect—there is much to criticize about it — but nevertheless it was applied. After the mid-sixties, however, it was simply not applied any more.
The prevailing mentality was that the Church must not be a Church of laws but, rather, a Church of love; she must not punish. Thus the awareness that punishment can be an act of love ceased to exist. This led to an odd darkening of the mind, even in very good people…
Of course the intellectual climate of the 1970s, for which the 1950s had already paved the way, contributed to this … The thesis was advocated—and this even infiltrated Catholic moral theology — that there was no such thing as something that is bad in itself. There were only things that were “relatively” bad. What was good or bad depended on the consequences.
In such a context, where everything is relative and nothing intrinsically evil exists, but only relative good and relative evil, people who have an inclination to such behaviour are left with no solid footing. Of course paedophilia is first rather a sickness of individuals.
On the Vatican’s handling of the abuse crisis
We responded to the matter in America immediately with revised, stricter norms. In addition, collaboration between the secular and ecclesiastical authorities was improved. Would it have been Rome’s duty, then, to say to all the countries expressly: Find out whether you are in the same situation? Maybe we should have done that.
On care for abuse victims
It is important that we first take care of the victims and do everything that we can to help, support, and heal them; secondly that such acts be prevented by the proper selection of candidates for the priesthood, as much as possible; and thirdly that the perpetrators be punished and be barred from any opportunity to repeat such acts. To what extent the cases must then be made public is, I think, a separate question, which will be answered differently in different stages of public awareness.
On the disgraced founder of the Legionaries of Christ
Unfortunately we addressed these things very slowly and late. Somehow they were concealed very well, and only around the year 2000 did we have any concrete clues. Ultimately unequivocal evidence was needed in order to be sure that the accusations were grounded.
To me, Marcial Maciel remains a mysterious figure. There is, on the one hand, a life that, as we now know, was out of moral bounds – an adventurous, wasted, twisted life … Naturally corrections must be made, but by and large the congregation is sound.
On papal infallibility
Under certain circumstances and under certain conditions the Pope can make final decisions that are binding, decisions that clarify what is and what is not the faith of the Church.
This does not mean that the Pope can constantly issue “infallible” pronouncements … It goes without saying that the Pope can have private opinions that are wrong.
On a resurgence of faith
We on the continent of Europe are [not experiencing] the great dynamic of a new beginning that is really present elsewhere and which I encounter again and again on my journeys and through the visits of the bishops …
Less clearly but nevertheless unmistakably, we find here in the West, too, a revival of new Catholic initiatives that are not ordered by a structure or a bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy is spent and tired. These initiatives come from within, from the joy of young people. Christianity is perhaps acquiring another face and, also, another cultural form … I am quite optimistic that Christianity is on the verge of a new dynamic.
On the Ordinaritate for disaffected Anglicans
It remains to be seen how much use is made of it, how much fruit it will really bear, and what kinds of developments and variations might be involved in it. But it is at any rate a sign, you might say, of the flexibility of the Catholic Church.
On the Regensburg address (where Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor linking Islam to violence, prompting attacks on Christians in some Muslim-majority countries)
I had conceived and delivered the lecture as a strictly academic address, without realizing that people don’t read papal lectures as academic presentations, but as political statements. The political reading ignored the fine web of the argument, ripping the passage out of its context and turning it into a political statement, which it wasn’t ... [Then] all the awful things … happened, about which I can only feel sadness.
On the old Good Friday prayer for the ‘perfidious’ Jews
The old formulation really was offensive to Jews and failed to express positively the overall intrinsic unity between the Old and New Testament…
I altered the text in such a way as to express our faith that Christ is the Savior for all, that there are not two channels of salvation, so that Christ is also the redeemer of the Jews, and not just of the Gentiles.
But the new formulation also shifts the focus from a direct petition for the conversion of the Jews in a missionary sense to a plea that the Lord might bring about the hour of history when we may all be united. So the polemical arguments with which a whole series of theologians assailed me are ill-considered.
On the reporting of the lifting of the SSPX excommunications
An incredible amount of nonsense was circulated, even by trained theologians. They were excommunicated because they had received episcopal ordination without a papal mandate … for the sole reason that they now pronounced an acknowledgment of the Pope — albeit not yet following him on all points — their excommunication was revoked …
I must say that in this matter our public relations work was a failure. It was not explained adequately why these bishops had been excommunicated and why they now, for purely canonical reasons, had to be absolved from the excommunication.
On the Holocaust-denying Richard Williamson
There was the total meltdown with Williamson, which we had unfortunately not foreseen, and that is a particularly distressing circumstance.
Would you have signed the decree lifting the excommunication if you had known that among the four bishops there was a person who denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers?
If I had known, the first step would have been to separate the Williamson case from the others. Unfortunately, though, none of us went on the Internet to find out what sort of person we were dealing with.
Williamson is an atypical case in that he was, when you think about, never Catholic in the proper sense. He was an Anglican and then went over directly to Lefebvre. This means that he has never lived in the great Church, that he has never lived with the Pope … Of course one is always more intelligent in hindsight.
On false friends
Decisions regarding personnel, however, especially appointments to the circle of your closest collaborators, are occasionally seen as posing problems for you. Is this your weak point?
Personnel decisions are difficult, because no one can look into another person’s heart and no one can be certain of not being deceived. For this reason, I am more cautious, more anxious in this area, and it is only after having consulted with a variety of people that I make these kinds of decisions. And I think that, in spite of everything, in the last few years there has been success in making a whole series of really good personnel decisions.
On resigning
Is it possible then to imagine a situation in which you would consider a resignation by the Pope appropriate?
Yes. If a Pope clearly realises that he is no longer physically, psychologically, and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign.
On claiming to have the truth
It is obvious that the concept of truth has become suspect. Of course it is correct that it has been much abused. Intolerance and cruelty have occurred in the name of truth. To that extent people are afraid when someone says, “This is the truth”, or even “I have the truth.”
We never have it; at best it has us. No one will dispute that one must be careful and cautious in claiming the truth. But simply to dismiss it as unattainable is really destructive.
On the wearing of the burqa
As for the burqa, I see no reason for a general ban. Some say that many women would not wear the burqa voluntarily at all and that it is actually a violation of women. One can, of course, not agree to that. But if they want to wear it voluntarily, I do not know why it must be prohibited.
On following in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II
I really am a debtor, a modest figure who is trying to continue what John Paul II accomplished as a giant. I [have] simply told myself that I am who I am. I don’t try to be someone else. What I can give I give, and what I can’t give I don’t try to give, either.
I don’t try to make myself into something I am not. I am the person who happens to have been chosen – the cardinals are also to blame for that – and I do what I can.
On disappointments
I am also disappointed – by the continued existence of this lack of interest in the Church, especially in the Western world. By the fact that secularity continues to assert its independence and to develop in forms that increasingly lead people away from the faith. By the fact that the overall trend of our time continues to go against the Church.
On being human
But there does need to be a new realisation that being human is something great, a great challenge, to which the banality of just drifting along doesn’t do justice... There needs to be a sense that being human is like a mountain climbing expedition that includes some arduous slopes. But it is by them that we reach the summit and are able to experience for the first time how beautiful it is to be. Emphasising this is of particular concern to me. [Great! This was one of the most beautiful passages I treasure in LOTW!}
On how the spends Pope his free time
Yes, what does he do? Of course even in his free time he must study and read documents. There is always a great deal of work left over. But with the papal family, with the four women from the Memores Domini community and the two secretaries, there are meals in common, too; those are moments of relaxation... I watch the news with the secretaries, but sometimes we watch a DVD together as a group ... We like to watch Don Camillo and Peppone.
On exercise
Do you actually use the exercise bicycle that your former physician Dr. Buzzonetti set up for you?
No, I don’t get to it at all — and don’t need it at the moment, thank God.
So the Pope thinks like Churchill: “No sports!”
Yes!
On wearing Pope John XXIII’s hat
It caused a stir when you chose the now famous camauro, a sort of peaked cap that had last been worn by John XXIII, as a head covering for the winter. Was that just a fashion accessory – or was it the expression of a return to tried and true forms in the Church?
I wore it only once. I was just cold, and I happen to have a sensitive head. And I said, since the camauro is there, then let’s put it on. But I was really just trying to fight off the cold. I haven’t put it on again since. In order to forestall over-interpretation.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/12/2010 22:49]