Finally, George Weigel comments in writing about the 'great renunciation'...
The legacy of Benedict XVI
by George Weigel
February 20, 2013
At his election in 2005, some thought of him as a papal place-keeper: a man who would keep the Chair of Peter warm for a few years until a younger papal candidate emerged.
In many other ways, and most recently by his remarkably self-effacing decision to abdicate, Joseph Ratzinger proved himself a man of surprises. What did he accomplish, and what was left undone, over a pontificate of almost eight years?
He secured the authoritative interpretation of Vatican II that had been begun (with his collaboration) by his predecessor, Blessed John Paul II. Vatican II, the council in which the Church came to understand herself as a communion of disciples in mission, was not a moment to deconstruct Catholicism, but a moment to reinvigorate the faith that is “ever ancient, ever new,” precisely so that it could be more vigorously proposed.
He helped close the door on the Counter-Reformation Church in which he had grown up in his beloved Bavarian countryside, and thrust open the door to the Church of the New Evangelization, in which friendship with Jesus Christ is the center of the Church’s proclamation and proposal.
As I explain in
Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church,
Benedict XVI was a hinge man, the pivot on which the turn into the evangelical, mission-driven Church of the third millennium was completed.
He accelerated the reform of the liturgical reform, accentuating the liturgy’s beauty. Why? Because he understood that, for postmoderns uneasy with the notion that anything is “true” or “good,” the experience of beauty can be a unique window into a more open and spacious human world, a world in which it is once again possible to grasp that some things are, in fact, true and good (as others are, in fact, false and wicked).
He proved an astute analyst of contemporary democracy’s discontents, as he also correctly identified the key 21st-century issues between Islam and “the rest”: Can Islam find within itself the religious resources to warrant both religious toleration and the separation of religious and political authority in the state?
He was a master catechist and teacher, and, like John Henry Newman (whom he beatified) and Ronald Knox, his sermons will be read as models of the homiletic art, and appreciated for their keen biblical and theological insights, for centuries.
As for the incomplete and the not-done:
Benedict XVI was determined to rid the Church of what he called, on the Good Friday before his election as Pope, the “filth” that marred the image of the Bride of Christ and impeded her evangelical mission. He was successful, to a degree, but the work of reconstruction, in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal, remains to be completed.
[Of course, It will take time to rebuild the wreckage of decades, not just in the local parish, diocesan and school institutions, but among the post-Vatican II generation of bishops and priests who saw Vatican II as a license for individual self=indulgence, at the clear expense of the Church and in violation of their duty as priests and as human beings to God and their fellowmen.]
This is most urgently obvious in Ireland, where the resistance of an intransigent hierarchical establishment is a severe impediment to the re-evangelization of that once-Catholic country.
[Weigel has been openly severe with the Irish bishops, to the point of suggesting that they be replaced by non-Irish bishops, but it's hard to see how, under current circumstances, any Irish hierarch could continue to be intransigent.]
And the next Pope must, in my judgment, be more severe than his two predecessors in dealing with bishops whom the evidence demonstrates were complicit in abuse cover-up—even if such an approach was considered appropriate at the time by both the counseling profession and the legal authorities. The Church has higher standards.
[One Italian Vaticanista has kept count and says that some 60-plus bishops have resigned or been otherwise replaced in the past eight years as a result of failing to act properly on sex abuse cases. The open questions have to do with cardinals like Mahony and Rigali in the United States and Danneels in Belgium, but I had hypothesized at the time the Mahony files revealed the extent of his misconduct that Benedict XVI was effectively in estoppel from punishing cardinals for this reason, after John Paul II appeared to reward the first known cardinal transgressor, Cardinal Bernard Law, with an important position in Rome. If he were to discipline Mahony, he would have to discipline Law as well, as he would have had to discipline Danneels and Rigali earlier. I don't know. This dilemma about the cardinals, as well as the decision to appoint Mons. Vigano nuncio to Washington, are perhaps the two things I have not managed to comprehend about Benedict XVI's decisions.]
Joseph Ratzinger had extensive experience in the Roman Curia and it was widely expected that he would undertake its wholesale reform. Not only did that not happen;
things got worse, and the Curia today is, in candor, an impediment to the evangelical mission of the Pope and the Church.
[I should not dare contradict Mr. Weigel whose acquaintance with the Curia, and contacts with many within the Vatican over the past two decades at least, certainly qualify him to make the statement he does - but how exactly have 'things got worse' in the Curia than it was during the final years of the last Pontificate when the Curia was left on self-indulgent autopilot, to each his own?
To this day, outside of the obvious administrative incompetencies and normal share of office intrigues in the Secretariat of State, I have not read one single news report of specific misdeeds in the Curia under Benedict XVI that could even come close to the questionable real-estate deals undertaken by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in the last years of the previous Pontificate, nor any irregularity in the IOR today that is not an insignificant fraction of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal that cost the Vatican $250 million, nor a deliberate conspiracy by those closest to the Pope to cover up for some despicable false prophet like Maciel. Does it not say something that the worst known villain in Benedict's Pontificate is a layman who was a domestic in the papal household, not a man of the cloth? Of course, there must be some venal men - priests and prelates - in the Curia, as there are in any human society, but is it not time to stop discrediting the entire Curia wholesale and at least make specific accusations if there are any to be made?]
A massive housecleaning and re-design is imperative if the Church’s central administrative machinery is to support the New Evangelization: which, for the Curia, is not a matter of creating a new bureaucratic office but a new cast of mind. ('Evangelical Catholicism' contains numerous suggestions for how that might be done.)
And then there is Europe. The man who named himself for the first saintly patron of Europe tried his best; but like his predecessor, the best he could manage was to stir the flickering flames of renewal in a few parts of Catholicism’s historic heartland. Its re-evangelization remains an urgent task.
[Surely, Benedict XVI was not expected - nor did he himself expect - to re-evangelize Europe virtually overnight (eight years) after 26 years in which his predecessor made little headway and almost seven decades into the mass secularization of Europe after the Second World War. Which is the whole point to why he had to activate the 'new evangelization' first advocated but never formally actualized by John Paul II. Benedict created a Pontifical Council for the purpose and convoked a Synodal General Assembly to make sure that the bishops of the world internalized the call and fell in line with the program. The same way he sought to actualize it in Latin America at the fifth General Assembly of Latin American and Caribbean bishops calling on them to re-evangelize the continent.]
Since it took Mr. Weigel this long to commit himself to a written commentary on the renunciation, I think he would have preferred to take his time, and he probably is, until he can come out with something as informative and insightful in the short term as God's Choice, his excellent account of the transition from the final days of Wojtyla to the first days of Ratzinger.
What I have always admired about him is that he has never allowed what would be an understandable partiality for John Paul II to show through at all in whatever he has written about Benedict XVI, and that he obviously admires Joseph Ratzinger genuinely. The only thing I fault him with in this all-too-short piece is his opaque denunciation of the Roman Curia. Perhaps I should buy his new book and find out what specifics, if any, he has on this subject.
A second Benedict article in FirstThings 'On the Square' today provides a fresh context for the Regensburg address The writer served on the Executive Secretariat of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO at the U.S. Department of State, where he has since worked as a consultant...
Benedict XVI
face to face with Islam
by Andrew Doran
February 20, 2013
In 1095, in a carefully crafted speech before prelates and nobles in Claremont, France, Pope Urban II called Europe to action: A Crusade to aid the Christian empire of Byzantium.
Emissaries of the emperor in Constantinople had come to Urban to ask for aid against the advancing Muslim Turks, who were mistreating conquered Christians, desecrating shrines, and pressing on toward Constantinople. The response was sensational and spread immediately across Europe. Knights, clerics, and peasants all heeded the call and marched to the East — toward Byzantium, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
In July 1099, four years after Urban’s call to Crusade, Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders. It was a triumph marred by unspeakable violence. The Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of the city were slaughtered, almost to a man. The chronicler Fulcher of Chartres wrote of wading through ankle-deep blood. These horrors would haunt not only the Crusaders but Muslim-Christian relations for a thousand years.
Around this time, a less well-known, though no less significant, event took place.
Late in the eleventh century, after much reflection, the Muslim philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali completed
The Incoherence of the Philosophers. It may have been the most influential book in all of Islam after the Qur’an.
Islam had initially encountered Greek thought with an open mind in what was known as Islam’s Golden Age. This period saw the great philosopher Avicenna reconcile Aristotle with Islamic revelation, as Aquinas would later do with Christianity.
Ghazali rejected this synthesis of faith and reason, concluding that causation and free will were illusory, as God’s direct intervention was the source of each cause and each motion. Reason itself was but a human construct, its parameters insufficient to contain God’s will—will that could contradict itself in defiance of human comprehension.
Ghazali’s work was the epitaph of Islam’s encounter with Greek philosophy, of hellenized Islam, and of Sunni Islam’s experiment with faith and reason. As Ghazali’s movement to dehellenize — that is, to root out all rational analysis, all philosophy, all reason—gained ascendancy in the Muslim world - the inter-religious, intellectual, and cultural engagement that had characterized the era of medieval philosophy drew to a close. It may well be argued that the Muslim world has been in decline since.
The twelfth-century Muslim philosopher Averroes attempted to refute Ghazali and to re-hellenize Muslim scholarship and culture. He failed. Averroes was banished, his books were burned, and the teaching of philosophy prohibited—so complete was Ghazali’s triumph. With his banishment ended the last meaningful philosophical dialogue between the Muslim world and the West.
In 2006, a millennium after Urban’s call for a Crusade, Pope Benedict XVI gave a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany, to address the crisis of reason in the West.
The influence enjoyed by the papacy had diminished significantly in the intervening thousand years; no longer would rulers stand in the snow to beg forgiveness. If not a “prisoner of the Vatican,” the Pope now saw his ambit limited by a public culture that was increasingly secularized and hostile.
The Vatican could scarcely rein in Catholic academics, let alone shape the ideas of greater academia. Philosophy had been declared dead in the West by materialist thinkers as it had been centuries before by the fundamentalist Ghazali. It was precisely the West’s break with reason — its dehellenization — on which Benedict focused his remarks.
The vital fusion of faith and reason—of Athens and Jerusalem — that had been part of Christianity since the early centuries had been divided by the Reformation and corollary movements, Benedict argued.
To preface his argument, he quoted the words of another scholar under siege, the late Byzantine emperor Manuel Paleologus, who had engaged in a dialogue with a Muslim prince on the subject of God’s nature and man’s freedom. Benedict recalled the emperor’s contention that “violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. Paleologus said,
God is not pleased by blood — and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats. . . . To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.
Benedict continued:
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.
The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.
Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.
As with Urban’s speech at Claremont, Benedict’s address gave way to violence, though unlike Urban, this was not what Benedict had hoped for. The speech was widely condemned in both the Muslim world and the West.
Ironically, few of those who expressed outrage appear to have read it; indeed, few critics seemed to be aware that the speech was principally about the West—not the Muslim world.
What are the consequences of dehellenization? For the Muslim world, one consequence has been plain: Faith unmoored from reason has led to widespread violence in the name of that faith.
For the West, dehellenization has led to the rejection of all non-material categories of knowledge, of the metaphysical. Such ideas are not as innocuous or as irrelevant to our lives as they may appear.
That man may know Reason, and through it the mind of the Creator of the cosmos; that this Creator writes the law into the very nature of man; that using violence as a means of conversion is contrary to the Divine will; that the freedom to choose faith is written into the nature of man by that God—these are powerful ideas with profound implications.
Such ideas were a predicate to the dialogues of Muslim and Christian scholars of the medieval era. These ideas are presently rejected by both mainstream Sunni Islam and Western secularists, especially academics.
Ghazali’s campaign of dehellenization may be as obscure as the Crusades are infamous, but this medieval idea is perhaps more to blame for violence in the Muslim world than medieval knights.
If the dehellenization thesis is correct, then the West’s secular approaches to end religiously based violence by means of war, democracy, foreign aid, or other policies are doomed to failure before they begin.
If Benedict is correct, then philosophical re-engagement is the true basis for peace — a peace that was lost not on a battlefield but centuries ago in the realm of medieval philosophy.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/02/2013 02:51]