I had wondered what form Fr. Schall's first reaction to Benedict XVI's resignation - or retirement, as he calls it - would take. He tries to be light about it, given that he is in the same stage of life as the Pope. But he homes in on what has always fascinated him about Benedict XVI - a mind that brings the unique characteristics and history of Catholic thought to bear on the problems of the world and the Church in a way that no one else has done since, perhaps, John Henry Newman in the 19th century (or, more recently and on a different plane - popular and literary - G.K. Chesterton) but much more comprehensively, and given the times, far more widely read.
On the mind of the Pope
Benedict XVI has, among other things,
spelled out the nature of modern disorder
By James V. Schall, S.J.
February 18, 2013
It so happens that the Holy Father, who is six months older than Schall, announced his retirement about six months after Schall announced his. As far as we know, no causal connection can be established, though several of my friends suspect collusion.
In fact, the Pope’s intentions to retire have been hinted at all along by his attention to previously resigned Popes. His given reasons are pretty much the same ones that I use — one grows weaker with age; no one wants to leave an institution in emergency situations.
When Benedict first announced his resignation, I assumed that he would return to some appropriately quiet convent in Germany for his last years, perhaps with his priest brother. Or he might go to the Villa Helios, run by some German nuns on the Isle of Capri, at which the German Jesuits at the Gregorian University in Rome liked to stay when I was there.
On second thought, Benedict is also a historian. Any reader of Tacitus would know about the unsettling residence of the Emperors Tiberius and Caligula on Capri. Too much unwelcome symbolism would be seen in such a move. Evidently Benedict will stay in the Vatican.
The mechanism for the election of a successor to Benedict is now in place. My chances of accurately picking the new pope are about the same as my chances of picking the winner of the NCAA basketball tournament in March or the winner of the Kentucky Derby in May. We presume that something more is at work in the selection of a new pope than pure luck.
Since at least Pius IX in the 1800s, the Catholic Church has had at its helm a series of rather outstanding men. The last two Popes certainly have been extraordinary, almost as if they were “chosen” by powers beyond the capacities of the men who selected them. No political institution with its “democratic” or hereditary processes for selecting presidents and leaders can match that record over time.
Over the years of his life, Benedict has produced an enormous amount of writings.
I suspect his Opera Omnia, when finally published in a German critical edition, will equal or surpass the collected works of Augustine or Aquinas, both of which are enormous.
It would take most of an ordinary person’s lifetime just to read the works of Aquinas or Augustine or Benedict, let alone write and understand them. We now have the works that Joseph Ratzinger produced as a philosopher and theologian, together with that which he wrote and spoke as part of his Petrine office. As Pope he gave hundreds and hundreds of talks, wrote encyclicals, exhortations, letters, even books.
Benedict’s three volume work,
Jesus of Nazareth, begun before he was elected Pope, is one of those fundamental works bearing the stamp of this remarkable man. He wrote it as a personal, scholarly, yet readable and direct document.
In a way, these volumes have always amused me. In effect, the Pope says to an uncomprehending world: “Look, fellas, this is what I hold and the reasons for it. You do not have to take it on authority. Just read it and see if it makes sense. If you have any arguments or evidence that what I maintain is not so, let me know. I will respond to it.” This is a personal challenge which few are humble enough or learned enough to take up.
For this book does nothing less than affirm that Jesus Christ is who He said He was and that all the “evidence” of classic and modern times presented to show that He was not, is un-sustained or incoherent at some point.
II.
What is the significance of the work, and of the mind of Joseph Ratzinger? Several commentators inform us that he is a shy man who never succeeded in coming out of the shadows of John Paul II. The two men were friends and in many ways possess very similar minds. Probably the work of both of them should be taken together as a whole.
But what I think that Benedict has done, if I might put it this way, is to think through and put in order the basic features of the modern mind in the light of standard Catholic teachings about man, cosmos, and God.
Benedict is a Thomist in the sense that he understands and states clearly and fairly that with which he disagrees. He is familiar not merely with classical and medieval thought, but most modern thought. Indeed, he knows personally a good number of the leading lights of the intellectual world in our own time. Anyone who is not aware of the intellectual caliber of Benedict simply reveals his own incompetence or incomprehension.
In
Spe Salvi and in the Regensburg Lecture, in particular, Benedict has explained the modern mind in terms of its deviation from basic Catholic teachings.
Almost any modern movement has its root explanation in its seeking ends and purposes that are essentially Christian but by means that reject the theological description and substitute a this-worldly, usually political and evolutionary hypothesis, that relocates the transcendent goods in this world.
Once we understand this deeper root of modern thought, we will see that
the work of Joseph Ratzinger has been a re-presentation of the classical Catholic views, though now in the light of those ideologies that proposed alternatives to transcendent ends.
What is clear is that, once it claims independence of revelation and increasingly of reason, the modern mind will claim the “right” to do something that is evil in order to achieve its inner-worldly goal. Almost all the attacks on family, abortion, same-sex marriage, cloning, and human experimentation come from this origin. They are all presented in the name of benefiting mankind in this world.
[The 'false good' that Satan sought to tempt with, as Benedict so compellingly presented in just a few words, before the Angelus prayers last Sunday.]
The claim that they are not for the real good of actual human beings is rejected on the grounds of “rights” and “betterment” of human life and society. The Pope spells out how we have in effect recreated in this world heaven, hell, purgatory, and death.
The fact that what we in effect bring about is something much more terrible than anything we have yet known for man is rejected on the grounds of necessity and idealism.
We are about producing a death, life, hell, and purgatory in this world considerably worse than the worst Christian descriptions of the four last things. We do this “work” in the name of science, technology, and human “rights.”
Once it becomes clear in thought that such problems are really those at work in our reconstruction of society, we begin to realize that Benedict has in fact spelled out the nature of modern disorder.
He has shown intellectually the superiority of the basic Christian understandings of human dignity founded on the faith that guides the plan of salvation that is involved in the Incarnation of Christ Himself.
CWR also provides this analysis by Tracey Rowlands, one of the most perceptive and knowledgeable writers about Benedict XVI during his Pontificate. This article is a first overview, as it were, of his achievements as Pope, so it is unfortunate she starts out with a familiar riff about the 'Vatican bureaucracy' in keeping with her title, I suppose. I do not know who provided the headline, but the judgment it implies is too pedestrian for someone like Ms. Rowland, and does rabk injustice to the rest of the article.
The Pope and the Philistines
Benedict XVI’s papacy has been one of imagination
and urbanity hampered by bureaucracy
by Tracey Rowland
February 18, 2013
In
Called to Communion, published in 1996, a decade before the beginning of his papacy, Joseph Ratzinger had some strong words to say about the bureaucratic machinery of the Church.
He wrote: "The more administrative machinery we construct, be it the most modern, the less place there is for the Spirit, the less place there is for the Lord, and the less freedom there is".
He added that in his opinion, "we ought to begin an unsparing examination of conscience on this point at all levels of the Church". In a later collection of essays, titled
Images of Hope, he observed that “the saints were all people of imagination, not functionaries of apparatuses.”
In recent days one senses that this unsparing examination of conscience might finally have begun. One also senses that in the papacy of Benedict XVI the Church had one of the greatest theologians occupying the Chair of Peter in centuries, but that for all his high intelligence, he never quite managed to contend with the bureaucratic machinery and it often let him down.
[But he has always maintained, as Ms. Rowlands cites - and as he reaffirmed forcefully to German lay Catholic leaders during his 2010 visit to Germany - that it is more important to attend to the essentials first (meaning, the faith) and that if this is done right and well, then the rest will follow. And he practised what he preached, entrusting the housekeeping duties of the Pontificate to someone he completely counted on to do the job but was unable to..]
The decision to abdicate would not have been a decision made lightly given Benedict’s respect for historical precedent and the sacramental nature of his office. He is the last person on the planet to think of the papacy as a job.
He never thought of himself as the CEO of a multinational corporation and he sharply rebuked those whose ecclesiology was borrowed from the Harvard School of Business or, worse, some Green-Left women's collective. Christ was and is a Priest, a Prophet and a King, not a business manager.
Benedict believes that the Church is nothing less than the Universal Sacrament of Salvation and the Bride of Christ. For him the keys of Peter are no mere mythic symbol.
So a decision to abdicate could only have been made on the basis that he thought worse things might happen to embarrass and confuse the Church's 1.2 billion faithful if he lacked the strength to govern.
The challenge in choosing Benedict’s successor is finding someone who has the strength and ability to deal with the administrative side of the office of the papacy while retaining at least some of the intellectual flair and imagination of Benedict and his predecessor.
[I beg to disagree. First, the statement contradicts Benedict XVI's own thought as quoted by Ms. Rowlands earlier. More importantly, the administrative challenge is not for the Pope to confront, but the man he appoints to be responsible to do it for the Church. In this sense, IMHO, Benedict XVI's one wrong judgment was to think Cardinal Bertone could do it. He clearly could not, and worse, was often missing in action whenever the crap hit the fan. I know I sound like a broken record on this issue, but Bertone, facing a hostile bureaucracy, was incapaable or unable to deal with them creatively, resorting instead to installing his own rival bureaucracy who, like him, were considered outsiders and therefore deeply resented by the resident bureaucracy. Benedict XVI stayed loyal to him, but he himself did not show the same loyalty to the Pope by the ultimate disservice caused by his inability to administer the Vatican bureaucracy properly, regardless of his indubitably good intentions and love for the Pope...
There are many who think that either Cardinal Angelo Scola or Cardinal Marc Ouellet could carry these responsibilities. Certainly both are exceptionally intellectually gifted and are men of imagination, not functionaries. They are also in a similar intellectual mould to Benedict. They share the same interpretations of the Second Vatican Council and they are very much across the theological anthropology and moral theology of Blessed John Paul II.
Scola's most important book,
The Nuptial Mystery, and Ouellet's most important book,
Divine Likeness: Towards a Trinitarian Anthropology of the Family, build on the foundations of John Paul II's Catechesis on Human Love, his trilogy of encyclicals devoted to each Person of the Trinity, the moral theology of Veritatis Splendor, and the vision of a culture of life and love set forth in Evangelium Vitae. They and quite a few other members of the College of Cardinals are completely on team with this theological project.
Cardinal James Stafford, Cardinal Francis George and Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, for example, are also men who are exceptionally intellectually gifted and have devoted themselves to following the leadership of Blessed John Paul II and then Benedict XVI.
Caffarra was so strongly attacked in the press for defending
Humanae Vitae he received a letter of support and encouragement from Sr. Lucia of Fatima. (When you start receiving support letters from someone who has private audiences with the Mother of God you know that you must be very high on the devil's hate list.)
[Caffarra has also been one of the most consistently orthodox and Ratzingerian of Italian bishops, and a very articulate one.]
Cardinal Peter Erdo of Hungary, who is the second youngest member of the College of Cardinals, has also distinguished himself in battles for a civilization of life and love against those caught up in the culture of death, as has Cardinal Peter Turkson who also has a reputation for leonine courage.
It is worth mentioning these names in a piece about Benedict, not to get side-tracked but to make the point that one thing that Benedict has achieved, at great personal cost to himself, is that in soldiering on — accepting the keys of Peter while the Church is attacked by sexual perverts from within and militant atheists from without, and while the Church is still contending with loopy interpretations of the Second Vatican Council — he has given the younger men, the Scolas, Ouellets and Caffaras, time to gain the administrative experience of running important archdioceses. He has held on until the next generation of hero-Cardinals is capable of moving forward.
He has also had some significant achievements on the ecumenical front and in so many ways one can say that his was a papacy dedicated to Christian unity. Since the divisions within Christianity often occur precisely because of bureaucratic heavy-handedness and intellectual narrowness it takes someone like a Ratzinger/Benedict with a deep sense of history and nose for cultural sensitivities to set about mending the bridges.
It would be an interesting exercise to collect a list of names of prominent Protestant scholars who converted during this pontificate precisely because they could relate to Benedict intellectually. He spoke their Christocentric dialect and was equally at home with them in the field of Scripture studies.
He broke the mould of the Catholic leader who cites dogma more often than Scripture. [HEAR! HEAR! That is why for Bible illiterates like myself, his homilies and religious writings have been such inspiring and uplifting eye-openers to what is meant by 'Revelation'.]
Two disaster fronts on which he worked particularly hard were those of the English schism of 1570 and the Lefebrvist schism of 1988. His provision of an Anglican Ordinariate for members of the Church of England and its international affiliates who were doctrinally 99% Catholic and who were prepared to become 100% Catholic if they were allowed to bring their high Anglican liturgy and a few other English cultural accoutrements with them, is one example of his use of imagination to help a whole group of people to enter into full Communion.
When it comes to the Lefebrvists it is sadly the case that they can be incredibly narrow minded and neurotic. They are into conspiracy theories and many are latently Jansenist (and some not so latently).
Nonetheless, on their behalf one could say that prior to the Second Vatican Council, France had a very high Catholic culture. One can still find vestiges of it in the great Benedictine monasteries and the villages that surround them.
The Church in France had many martyrs during the Revolution. Some estimates of the revolutionaries’ death toll are as high as one million. Given this it is not surprising that a significant proportion of the French Catholic population was deeply indignant when in the 1960s, after the Council, clerical leaders were going out of their way to affirm the values of the Revolution and to destroy the solemn liturgical traditions.
Anyone who has read
The Dialogues of the Carmelites by George Bernanos, based on the story of the martyrdom of the Carmelite nuns from the convent of Compiègne, will readily appreciate how daft it would be to try and wipe this heroism from the French historical memory
[not the 'French historical memory' but the 'historical memory of France's genuine Catholics\] or otherwise trivialize the sacrifices made at the time of the Revolution.
This is all to say that when dealing with schisms one really has to address the historical memories, not just the doctrinal formulae, and Benedict XVI was very good at this. He did however take an enormous amount of flak for trying to bring home lost sheep.
Hans Küng, for example, grabbed the tabloids' interest by saying that in creating the Ordinariate and holding out olive branches to the Lefebvists, Benedict was fishing for converts in the muddy waters of right-wing extremism. It probably says an enormous amount about where Hans Küng sits theologically when he regards common, garden- variety high Church Anglicans as right-wing extremists.
In both cases, that of the creation of the Ordinariate, and that of the issue of
Summorum Pontificum (which wasn't just for Lefebvrists, but for all those who loved the Missal of St Pius V), the most common criticism inside the Church came from canon lawyers who thought these gracious gestures created a lot of administrative untidiness.
However, as Benedict XVI observed when he was a Cardinal, those who preferred the Rite of antique usage had been treated like lepers, and this was just not right. One cannot, on the one hand, honor the memory of the English martyrs who were sent to the scaffold because they attended this Rite contrary to the edict of a Protestant monarch, and, on the other hand, ban Catholics of the contemporary era from attending the same Rite as if there were something defective about it. This point was made by Cardinal Heenan of Westminster to Pope Paul VI
[Who apparently had no answer to it. But the Novus Ordo was Paul VI's 'Bertone moment', with more far-reaching and damaging consequences than just failing to shake up and motivate a Vatican bureaucracy that had fossilized over the decades! Fortunatek=ly, Benedict XVI has shown us how to make the most of a defective product which is, for all its Protestantizing defects, still an authentic celebration of the Eucharist.]
Similarly, there is something very illogical about tolerating the use of pidgin-English in the liturgy (banal modern hymns, etc.), while balking at the Anglicans' King James English.
Ratzinger had always made the point that there is nothing wrong with having a number of different Rites in use,
providing each particular Rite is of apostolic provenance rather than something cooked up by a committee of academics or the parish liturgy team last Saturday. He was a liturgical pluralist, not someone with a mania for bureaucratic tidiness.
The members of the Anglican Ordinariate are likely to revere his memory for a very long time, and the Lefebrvists may well be wishing that they treated him with more respect and were not so recalcitrant.
He will also be remembered with great affection by the leaders of the Eastern Churches. He went out of his way to include quotations from the Eastern Church Fathers in his homilies, and he invited Patriarch Bartholomew I to the Synod on the Word held in 2008. Patriarch Bartholomew described the gesture as “an important step towards restoration to full Communion”.
[And who can forget the original beauty of the Patriarch's awesome address to the Synod, held fittingly in the Sistine Chapel! I say original because it revealed to me, in the course of a few minutres, the strong aesthetic foundations of Orthodox theology.]
In terms of his magisterial teaching, Benedict XVI wrote three encyclicals and four apostolic exhortations. Sadly, a fourth encyclical on the theological virtue of faith remains in draft form and may never be released. It would have completed the suite of encyclicals on the theological virtues.
The first,
Deus Caritas Est, was focused on the theological virtue of love, and the second,
Spe salvi, on the theological virtue of hope.
Deus Caritas Est dealt with the relationship between eros and agape and offered a reply to the Nietzschean charge that Christianity had killed eros. It also reiterated the central idea of the Conciliar document
Dei Verbum, which the young Fr. Ratzinger had helped to draft, that Truth is a Person.
Spe salvi was the antidote to the liberal reading of
Gaudium et spes.
[I like that formulation, even if I never thought about Spe salvi that way - which I read completely on its own terms. And it is so beautiful and powerful, with its compelling survey of the history of ideas synergizing its theological content, that I marvelled at how 'easily' Benedict XVI had managed to outdo himself after Deus caritas est.]
It makes the point that the only "thing" in which we may legitimately hope is Jesus Christ and that modern ideologies, which can be lethal, are mere mutations of Christian hope.
The third encyclical,
Caritas in Veritate, was a masterful synthesis of late twentieth-century papal social teaching, with a special emphasis on the social implications of the Trinitarian anthropology of John Paul II. At its core was the principle that a “humanism without Christ is an inhuman humanism”. It made the point that social justice without Christ is a recipe for secularism.
In many of his addresses Benedict also emphasized that love and reason are the twin pillars of all reality. The love and reason relationship and the faith and reason relationship were themes to which he often returned. One sensed that he was trying to reconcile the Thomist and Franciscan traditions in a higher synthesis.
[Thanks for this wonderful insight, which would never have occurred to a theological illiterate like me, with with only scant and sporadic acquaintance with Church history!]
Rather than a system which gives typical Thomist priority to truth or one which gives typical Bonaventurian priority to love, he insisted that love and reason are equally foundationally significant — thus the notion of 'twin pillars'.
Although at the time of its delivery the Regensburg Address was regarded as a public relations disaster, for those who take the time to read the whole academic address, what it offers is a deep analysis of the faith and reason relationship.
As Fr. James V. Schall, SJ, explained in his book,
The Regensburg Lecture, the central thesis of the Address is that both contemporary militant Islam and contemporary militant western liberalism share the same voluntarist starting point.
Each one makes the mistake of thinking that what is true is linked to someone's will, rather than what is true being linked to what is good. For the militant Islamists truth is linked to the will of Allah, for the militant liberals truth is linked to the will of the individual.
The point Benedict was making was that an irrational voluntarism is a common pathological property of Eastern Islamists and Western Liberals.
The problem however is that the average journalist has no anthropology, no conceptual scaffold in which to plug ideas like the will and goodness, the will and truth, truth and goodness etc. The low level of education of newspaper journalists makes it very difficult for world leaders to communicate anything more than shallow sound-bites. This was not merely a problem for Benedict but it remains an issue for any deep-thinking world leader.
[Ahem! Please name anyone who answers to that description today!... At any rate, Regensburg, Bernardins, Westminster and Bundestag constitute the inseparable tetralogy of Benedict XVI's great discourses to the secular world.]
The Apostolic Exhortations addressed the topics of liturgical theology, revelation and Scripture, the situation of the Church in Africa and the situation of the Church in the Middle East. The first two reflect Benedict's own theological priorities and interests, the last two the distinctive problems of the faithful in Africa and the Middle East.
Of these the first two will be of enduring theological value, while the last two are likely to provide something of a pastoral plan or at least a significant briefing paper for the new Pontiff.
In his first Apostolic Exhortation,
Sacramentum Caritatis, Benedict summarized the high drama of the Eucharist in the following terms: The substantial conversion of bread and wine into His body and blood introduces within creation the principle of a radical change, a sort of "nuclear fission," which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world, to the point where God will be all in all (cf. 1 Cor 15:28).
In the same document Benedict concluded that everything pertaining to the Eucharist should be marked by beauty.
There is no doubt that beauty is Benedict's “favorite transcendental”. He shares St. Augustine's and St. Bonaventure's and closer to our own time, Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar's attraction to the transcendental of beauty and this comes across very strongly in his liturgical theology.
As a Cardinal he coined the expressions “parish tea party liturgy”, “primitive emotionalism” and “pastoral pragmatism” to refer to the post-1968 trend to make the Mass more like a Protestant fellowship gathering. He said that
this was analogous to the Hebrews' worship of the Golden Calf — a pathetic attempt to “bring God down to the level of the people” that is nothing short of apostasy.
Although it is taking time for his liturgical theology to reach suburban parishes, it is being taken up by the BXVI generation of seminarians and taught in the more serious academic institutions such as the Liturgical Institute at Mundelein [Australia, where Rowland lives]. The effects should start to filter down to the parochial level within a decade.
Verbum Domini, the second Apostolic Exhortation, addressed the issue of how God relates to the human person through revelation, Scripture and Tradition. Themes included the cosmic dimension of the word, the realism of the word, Christology and the word, the eschatological dimension of the word, the word of God and the Holy Spirit, and God the Father, source and origin of the word. This particular exhortation amplified the central theses of
Dei Verbum and the general Trinitarian Christo-centrism of the Council.
[Both theological Apostolic Exhortations are sublime! Sacramentum caritatis even had sales of more than a mllion within two weeks of its publication, almost tying the record for Deus caritas est. This is the other little-cited but historical aspect of Benedict XVI's writings as Pope, significant not just for the history of the Papacy but for cultural history in general. Never before had an encyclical, much less an apostolic exhortation, become a best-seller of any kind. And it's hard to see it happening again in our lifetime. (The best analogy I can think of is that, if the printing press had been invented by then, it's as if St. Paul's Epistles had sold like hotcakes among the Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians, etc!)... I was disappointed that Verbum Domini failed to catch on more, but perhaps it reflects continuing uneasiness among Catholic laymen vis-a-vis Scriptures, an aspect of doctrine and catechesis that had been virtually ignored in Catholic instruction until Vatican II choxse to focus on it.]
Finally, though not of magisterial standing, the
Jesus of Nazareth books were read by millions of people and helped to repair some of the damage of so-called scripture scholars who approach the sacred texts without faith.
[In the process, he also introduced his unequipped readers like me to the how and why of Biblical exegesis, as he transfigured dry-as-dust scholarship into the vivid and thrilling adventure of ideas that it is to adepts.]
Even here however, journalists tried to spin paragraphs in ways they were never intended. Thus, Benedict's statement that the ox and the ass at the Christmas crib are symbolic of the Jews and the Gentiles was reported as, "Pope says that there was no donkey".
[It wasn't so much spin, because what's the point of spinning something they virtually dismissed (The Infancy Narrative0 as nothing but papal self-indulgence? Ir was a crude and deliberate effort to trivialize the Pope's thought - and set him up for public scorn - by making him sound picayune!]
When his magisterial teaching is combined with his scholarly output of over fifty books and God alone knows how many academic articles and scholarly homilies, Ratzinger/Benedict has offered future generations of Catholics an intellectual treasury.
As it is commonly said of St. Augustine, if anyone says that they have read everything Ratzinger/Benedict has written, they are stretching the truth. It may also be the case that just as today we only know about Donatists because Augustine had to contend with them, future generations may only know about parish tea party liturgy because it was a strange late 20th-century phenomenon with which Ratzinger had to contend.
In his early life he went to war against the dualistic tendencies in neo-scholasticism, then in the late 1960s he took on the fight against "correlationism" (accommodating ecclesial belief and practices to the spirit of the times). After that it was liberation theology, various problems in Christology, ecclesiology and moral theology and finally militant atheism.
Given the successive waves of intellectual combat he has endured in the service of the Church he loves, a future Pope may well declare Benedict XVI a Doctor of the Church. [Contemporaneous with his canonization not afterwards!]
If that happens, I think he should also be honored as the patron saint of people who are oppressed by bureaucracy, especially bureaucracies run by philistines.
[Somehow, I think this last sentence is not just unnecessary, and anti-climactic to the Doctor of the Church suggestion, but it also implies that Benedict XVI, in effect, was a 'victim' of the Vatican bureaucracy. If he was not well-served in some ways, he was not worse-served than his predecessors either.]
Professor Rowland is Dean and Permanent Fellow of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family (Melbourne). She earned her doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge University and her Licentiate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. She is the author of Culture and the Thomist Tradition after Vatican II (2003), Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (2008) and Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (2010).
There's a commentary written for the February 25 issue of the conservative US newsmagazine The Weekly Standard that builds on the public perception, at least in the United States because of the dominant media bias and ignorance, that Benedict XVI was forced to resign because of the 'scandals' in the Church and the pressures of the job. Nothing unusual or surprising with that perception of the public perception.
www.weeklystandard.com/articles/papal-abdication_701317.html?n...
But going on little more than the information that's available to the public through the media (and what they say people 'inside the Vatican' say), the writer, Joseph Bottum - who used to be editor of First Things - basically is disputing that Benedict should have resigned at all and the reason he gave for resigning, and saying outright that "he has been, all in all, a terrible executive of the Vatican... but as bad as a Pope has been for 200 years". He hedges the qualifying phrase very carefully, but it still has the effect of saying, as even the editor of the UK Catholic Herald summarized the article in one line, that Benedict was the worst executive at the Vatican in 200 years. And that is the soundbite that people will take from this outrageous article. But there are even worse things.
Such as that 1) resignation was a smart thing to do under the circumstances, but not the wise thing at all; 2) that Benedict's age has nothing to do with why he resigned ("his advanced age is not a cause for his incapacity"; "we are not incapacitated as human beings when we age and prepare to die"), nor do the problems of today's world ("Benedict speaks of the unique pressures of 'today’s world' which he insists require a younger man’s strength of mind and body. But today’s world is unique only because we say it is"; 3) that his having to stay on within the Vatican will be counter-productive.
For all its veneer of erudition and 'serious' analysis, it is probably the worst piece I have come across so far about Benedict's renunciation, which Bottum does not see as renunciation but abdication, i.e., a desertion of duty. About the only good thing I can say about it is that he also presents how John Paul II did an 'end run' about the Vatican bureaucracy by leaving it all to his own people to deal with.
And what to say about the wavering of someone like William Oddie who now feels compelled to question for himself, besides citing other Catholic commentators, Benedict XVI's decision to renounce, and to claim moreover that it will be impossible for the next Pope to exercise his authority with Benedict in the background! With the titanic image of John Paul II constantly made to loom over him, Benedict did it - and with an outstanding record that is in many ways precedent-setting - despite the callous certainty of many that no one could possibly follow John Paul II with any degree of success. There is only one Pope at a time - and it does not matter if the previous Pope is dead or alive, the Vicar of Christ and Successor of Peter holds all the keys and all the powers and prerogatives that belong to him alone. The living presence of Joseph Ratzinger can only be an inhibition to a Pope who has not internalized the unique significance and implications of his sacred office, and why should we think that the new Pope would be anyone incapable of that?
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2013/02/18/how-during-the-lifetime-of-a-pope-can-his-successor-gain-the-authority-he-needs-we-are-in-a-time-of-uncertainty-but-we-are-also-in-gods-hands/
Though this post is already quite long, I must add the following short piece which, in reaffirming the important points to remember about Benedict's decision, acts like a gust of ozone to clear out the suffocating smoke of obfuscation from articles like the two I cite above.
Pope Benedict’s greatest lesson
by William Doino Jr.
February 18, 2013
However history remembers Pope Benedict, one thing is assured: his reign will be remembered as one of the great teaching pontificates. Even those who question other aspects of it, praise it for that.
“Where the Church has emerged especially strong under Benedict,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, “is in its intellectual discourse, elevated by a professorial pope who dedicated considerable time and energy to a series of highly regarded encyclicals and three books on the life of Jesus.”
The Acton Institute’s Samuel Gregg hails Benedict as “Reason’s Revolutionary,” and John Allen notes his intellectual achievements, too: Many observers believe four cornerstone speeches delivered by Benedict XVI — at Regensburg, Germany, in 2006; at the College des Bernardins in Paris in 2008; at Westminster Hall in London in 2010; and at the Bundestag in Germany in 2011 — will be remembered as masterpieces laying out the basis for a symbiosis among faith, reason and modernity.
George Weigel believes Benedict’s rich insights have “turned the Church definitively toward the New Evangelization — the evangelical Catholicism of the future,” and thus placed Catholic orthodoxy in a far stronger position than his critics realize.
Given his reputation, it is fitting that Benedict’s decision to abdicate has served as an extraordinary teaching moment itself. The decision is at once humble, wise, and courageous.
It is humble because it reveals Benedict cares more about the strength of the Church than he does about his own personal position or privilege (unlike numerous other prelates).
It is wise because it shows that he understands that the current demands of the office are better served by someone in vibrant health.
And it is courageous because, as the first Pope to step down from the papacy in six centuries, he is bringing true reform to the contemporary Church, making it easier for future pontiffs to follow suit, should they, too, believe that is the best course to follow.
But the greatest lesson to take away from Benedict’s momentous act is its fearlessness and expression of freedom — above all, the freedom to follow one’s conscience as the Lord leads it, regardless of secular expectations. [YES!]
In today’s world, there are tremendous pressures — political, cultural and religious—to change one’s convictions, and conform to certain mass patterns of thought and behavior. We also face an attack on religious freedom throughout the world — and now, to a lesser extent, even in our own country. Benedict has met both challenges with firm resistance, and a clarion call for freedom.
Pope Benedict’s belief in the fundamental dignity and freedom of every human being is at the heart of his papacy, and yet it is usually either overlooked or contested by critics. They accuse him of being inconsistent — preaching about tolerance, while supposedly acting as an “authoritarian” and “oppressor” of those seeking more freedom in the Church.
This is to profoundly misunderstand the true nature of freedom, as the Church expounds it. True freedom is not the freedom to do whatever we please, but the freedom to abandon sin and error, and pursue objective truth, and commit ourselves to Christ unreservedly in the service of that truth.
The charge that the Catholic Church inhibits authentic freedom is unjust. Catholic orthodoxy holds that membership in the Church is an entirely free act, i.e., completely voluntary, not mandatory, and that anyone in the Church is perfectly free to leave it, who objects to its essential teachings and beliefs.
Benedict is the first to proclaim this: the Catholic Church proposes; it does not impose. Further,
when people freely enter or retains their membership in the Church, they simultaneously accept and understand — if they are knowledgeable and faithful Catholics — that the role of a Pope is precisely to uphold, preserve, and develop the Deposit of Faith — but never contradict or undermine it in any fundamental way.
If there is one area where Pope Benedict’s “holy freedom” can be found, it is in his teachings on the liturgy, and his commitment to its renewal. In her book,
Ratzinger’s Faith, Dr. Tracy Rowland explains Benedict’s understanding of the liturgy as a priceless treasure to be cherished and revered—and reformed only with painstaking care, not with endless experimentation:
Ratzinger believes that showing respect for faithfully transmitting the Liturgy to the next generation has the effect of guaranteeing the true freedom of the faithful. It makes sure that members of the laity are not victims of something fabricated by an individual or group, it guarantees that laity are sharing in the same liturgy that binds the priest, the bishop, and the Pope.
If liturgical innovators or dissenters are allowed to violate sacred boundaries, warns Benedict, an unholy “dominion” will overtake and offend the faithful, and bring harm to the Church. Real Christian liberation must always be rooted in humility, and obedience to the timeless truths of the magisterium.
The Pope’s decision to retire, rooted in this genuine concept of Christian liberty, is widely said to have “shocked the world,” and even much of the Church. But it really is not that shocking to anyone who has followed the life and beliefs of Joseph Ratzinger. For both before and after he became Pontiff, he has always marched to the beat of his heart and inner conscience, guided by total devotion to Christ and His Church.
For faithful Catholics (and not only them), Benedict’s last major papal act, like his beautiful teachings, are a source of profound inspiration.
William Doino Jr. writes often about religion, history and politics. He contributed an extensive bibliography of works on Pius XII.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/02/2013 14:53]