I started this exercise idly by wondering - in view of the momentary media preoccupation with 'Gorgeous Georg'e - whether, other than we Benaddicts, the general media had ever written about Joseph Ratzinger's good looks, but I can't Google anything of the sort. I think perhaps, the fact that he came to wider media attention when he was already a cardinal and called to Rome by John Paul II (he was only 55 then, one year younger than GG is now) precluded anyone from commenting on his looks, this aspect being irrelevant for prelates. (Also, he's not six feet tall. Indeed, if it comes to good looks, it would seem no one ever pointed that out either about the imposingly handsome Cardinal Martini.)... From the montage above that I put together hastily years ago, one wonders why no one thought to call the cardinal 'Gorgeous Joseph' then. Did the Italian media coin the term 'il bel Bavarese' )the beautiful Bavarian) or was that an Italian Benaddict tag?... Well, in the process of Googling, I came upon BBC News's recently updated 'profile' of Benedict XVI, which I am posting here, warts and all...
Profile:
Pope Benedict XVI
Updated January 3, 2013
At 78, Benedict XVI was one of the oldest new Popes in history when he was elected in 2005.
Previously known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the piano-playing professor was looking forward to retirement when Pope John Paul II died in 2005. He has said he never wanted to be Pope.
If he or any of the cardinals who elected him imagined a brief, uneventful reign, paving a transition to a new era, they were to be disappointed.
Benedict took the helm as one of the fiercest storms the Catholic Church has faced in decades - the scandal of child sex abuse by priests - was breaking.
Other gaffes, mishaps and scandals have provided plenty of ammunition to critics both inside and outside the Church.
In fact, he has taken charge during a particularly difficult period, when a rapidly changing world has provided continuous challenges to an institution whose traditions go back 2,000 years.
The flood of allegations, lawsuits and official reports into clerical abuse, which reached a peak in 2009 and 2010, may be the defining episode of his pontificate.
[Why not the positive side of it - which is all that he has done to redress previous inattention to the problem and to make sure that it does not recur except as inevitable truly isolated cases?]
The most damaging claims for the Church have been that local dioceses - or even the Vatican itself - were complicit in the cover-up of many of the cases, prevaricating over the punishment of paedophile priests and sometimes moving them to new postings where they continued to abuse.
[Yes, but there should be a simple statement to say that this phenomenon is not limited to Catholic priests but takes place just as much among ministers of other faiths and even more so among laymen in jobs that involve constant contact with young people.]
While some senior Vatican figures initially lashed out at the media or alleged an anti-Catholic conspiracy, the Pope has insisted that the Church accept its own responsibility, pointing directly to "sin within the Church".
He has met and issued an unprecedented apology to victims, made clear that bishops must report abuse, and introduced fast-track rules for defrocking abusive priests.
Before his election as Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger spent 24 years as one of the senior figures in the Vatican, heading the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - once known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
It earned him the nickname "God's rottweiler"
[from the British press which popularized the epithet by using it in headliens when he was elected Pope],and played to his passion for Catholic doctrine.
His high office gave him ultimate oversight of a number of clerical abuse cases.
Critics say he did not grasp the gravity of the crimes involved, allowing them to languish for years without proper attention - or even that he deliberately subordinated the victims' welfare to that of the Church itself. He has never publicly given his own version of events.
[What version does he need to give? He had nothing to do at all with the sex abuse cases until John Paul II gave the responsibility to the CDF in 2001, since when much of what the CDF has done has been public knowledge!]
His backers, however, say he has done more than any other Pope to confront abuse.
[That is plain dishonest and weaselly of the BBC, simply to ascribe the statement to 'his backers'! If they wanted to, the facts are easy enough to assemble of everything he has done as CDP Prefect and as Pope to extirpate this cancer from the Church. Besides, it's not just that "he has done more than any other Pope" to control abuse - he's really the only one who has done so. Even if the problem had never really surfaced significantly until 2001, and so, earlier Popes did not have to deal with it. Also, his predecessor Pope did recognize the magnitude of the problem enough in his final years to put him in charge of it.]
Shortly before his election in 2005, he lamented: "How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those... in the priesthood."
And one of his first acts as Pope was to banish a former Vatican favourite, Father Marcial Maciel, whose sexual and criminal exploits were starting to come to light.
Joseph Ratzinger was born into a traditional Bavarian farming
['rural' is probably the more correct adjective] family in 1927, although his father was a policeman.
The eighth German to become Pope, he speaks many languages and has a fondness for Mozart and Beethoven.
He was said to have admired the red robes of the visiting archbishop of Munich when he was just five and carried his
love of finery to the Vatican, where he has re-introduced papal hats not seen in decades.
[Hats are now considered finery? Both the camauro and the saturno serve practical purposes = one against the cold, the other against the sun!]
At the age of 14, he joined the Hitler Youth, as was required of young Germans of the time.
World War II saw his studies at Traunstein seminary interrupted when he was drafted into an anti-aircraft unit in Munich.
He deserted the German army towards the end of the war and was briefly held as a prisoner-of-war by the Allies in 1945.
The Pope's conservative, traditionalist views were intensified by his experiences during the liberal 1960s.
He taught at the University of Bonn from 1959 and in 1966 took a chair in dogmatic theology at the University of Tuebingen.
[Between which there was Muenster. But the major oversight here - no mention at all of his work in Vatican II![
However, he was appalled at the prevalence of Marxism among his students.
In his view, religion was being subordinated to a political ideology that he considered "tyrannical, brutal and cruel".
He would later be a leading campaigner against liberation theology, the movement to involve the Church in social activism, which for him was
too close to Marxism. [And totally and wrongly subordinated the spiritual mission of the Church to political action!]
In 1969 he moved to Regensburg University in his native Bavaria and rose to become its dean of theology and vice-president.
He was named Cardinal of Munich by Pope Paul VI in 1977.
[No, unpardonably imprecise of BBC News! First he was named Archbishop of Munich-Freising, then a month after his episcopal ordination, he was made a Cardinal. I have not checked, but I believe that swift rise is a record unmatched in modern times.]
At the age of 78, Joseph Ratzinger was the oldest cardinal to become Pope since Clement XII was elected in 1730.
It was always going to be difficult living up to his charismatic predecessor.
[What? Nothing follows??? What about the fact that he has attracted more people to his liturgies and audiences, or that the reception for him abroad has certainly not been less than that for John Paul II, as the BBC itself could well attest from the Sept. 2010 state visit to the UK?]
"If John Paul II had not been Pope, he would have been a movie star; if Benedict had not been Pope, he would have been a university professor," wrote US Vatican expert John L Allen.
[How stupid is that statement! He was a university professor for 25 years.]
He has a reputation as a theological conservative, taking uncompromising positions on homosexuality, women priests and contraception.
He espouses Christian compassion - speaking out for human rights, protection of the environment and the fight against poverty and injustice.
A central theme of his papacy has been his defence of fundamental Christian values in the face of what he sees as moral decline across much of Europe.
He has confounded those who expected him to appoint hardline traditionalists to key posts.
But the conclave of cardinals, which will elect his successor, is now dominated by Benedict's appointees, and
has a bias towards European, and particularly Italian, clerics. [Not so! That facile and superficial impression is belied by the actual numbers.]
Benedict is described by those who know him as laidback, with a mild and humble manner, but with a strong moral core.
One cardinal put it another way, calling him "timid but stubborn".
Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, the former head of the Church in England and Wales, says he is "unfailingly courteous" and has many talents, but administration is not one of them.
[As Joseph Ratzinger himself has decried about himself! But the Pope is not supposed to administer as if he were a CEO - for that, he has his Secretary of State and the Curia, Too bad Cardinal Bertone has failed to provide Benedict XVI with the effective administration he needs.]
An embarrassing leak of documents from the Pope's desk
revealing corruption and mismanagement inside the Vatican [and that's how historians will describe Vatileaks if they depended only on media reports and commentary, as most will] led to the conviction of his butler
[VALET!]. The affair gave a damaging impression of a power struggle at the Holy See. [Another facile and fallacious statement. It wasn't as if there was any titanic struggle between equals - just petty power struggles of permanent bureaucrats wanting to preserve their fiefdoms and trying to unseat the Secretary of State, thlough not one of them has the stature to challenge him!]
The Pope's handling of the child abuse scandals also attracted stinging criticism from the secular press. [Mis-statement! The sting was not in criticism of his handling - what could they criticize about it, after all, when he was always ahead of their curve? - but the sting (more like repeated homicidal stiletto stabs, really) was in the crusade of leading media like the AP. the New Yotk Times, and years before them, the BBC, to link him directly, even if in a patently false way, to covering up sex abuse by priests when he was Archbishop of Munich and as CDF Prefect.]
And he has managed to offend Muslims, Jews, and Protestants with his actions and speeches. [No responsible journalist throws out a line like that without citing at least one example of each, because otherwise, the intended impression is that offending others is habitual with him!]
Supporters argue such incidents misrepresent the Pope's avowed intention of improving inter-faith relations.
He has reached out, visiting the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and praying for peace at the Western Wall.
Even so, questions were raised about those who advised the Pope, and their attention to public relations - leading, eventually, to the appointment of a former Fox News correspondent, Greg Burke, to head the Vatican's communications strategy.
For Benedict, public relations gaffes may only be fleeting concerns compared with the serious long-term challenges for the Church - the falling away from the Church of
millions of Catholics [??? Oh, OK, if the BBC is referring to all the millions of secularized Europeans], and the decline in numbers of priests being recruited in the West.
[The second big oversight in this profile: Not a word about his writings and books! You;d think JESUS OF NAZARETH at least deserved a mention.]
Benedict seems unlikely to meet any of these crises by compromising with the liberal modern world.
He has always believed that the strength of the Church comes from an absolute truth that does not bend with the winds.
That approach disappoints those who feel the Church needs to modernise and despair of his intransigence on priestly celibacy or condoms. [It has noting to do with intransigence, as if these were purely personal decisions at his discretion. It is his duty as Pope to preserve the continuing Tradition and Magisterium of the Church.]
But for his supporters, it is exactly why he is the man to lead the Church through such challenging times.
[Except for using the word 'intransigence', the anonymous profiler appoars to have regained his good sense with those last sentences!]
And here are two pictures I serendipitously came across during the above exercise:
The commemorative card for the 25h anniversary of his priesthood I had seen before because it was posted in the PICTURES thread of the Papa Ratznger Forum by Maklara back when, but really, I had forgotten all about it (or I would have resurrected it when the brothers Ratzinger celebrated their Diamond Jubilee as priests in 2011); while the stamp from Romania is a complete surprise. The caption says it was issued in 2005 - I've checked back - it's a companion stamp to one they issued about him when he became Pope...
Translation of the words on the Silver Jubilee commemorative card:
By the grace of God
25 years a priest of Jesus Christ
JOSEPH RATZINGER
Professor of Theology
1951 June 29 1976
"We are God's co-workers;
You are God's field, God's building".
(1Cor 3,9)
The upper bottom line identifies "Christ, from a deesis, Greek, 17th century. private collection" which must be the front piece of the card. The lower line is justinformation about the printer.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/01/2013 00:56]