Away again for too many hours, but at least, nothing big has developed in the meantime, and this is the only item I have seen in the Anglophone media today that merits special attention... Much of what George Weigel says in this interview is positive and edifying, but there is also implicit criticism of Benedict XVI's Pontificate (although on both points, the criticism applies to John Paul II as well, even if he does not say so).
Weigel has been almost exemplary in his overall 'treatment' of Bendict XVI, starting with his remarkable book 'God's Choice' on the Conclave of 2005. But this interview was conducted in such a way as to make it seem as if, at the end of Benedict XVI's Pontificate, the Church is in 'the worst of times' with hardly any redeeming element at all!
Start with the strange title for the article. You'd think Benedict XVI had not thought for the future at all, that he never got around to 'the business of the future', and never even tried to 're-form' the Church. And yet, the writer and interviewer (she probably was not responsible for the title) is one of the most orthodox of Catholic bloggers and commentators today...
Holy Roman re-forming:
Getting down to
the business of the future
Interview with George Weigel
By Kathryn Jean Lopez
February 25, 2013
George Weigel’s new book,
Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church (Basic Books), seems destined to be a reference point in the papal interregnum that begins at 2 p.m., New York time on February 28, and well into the new pontificate. I caught up with Weigel, who has been in Rome since Ash Wednesday, to pose some questions about the conclave, the state of the Church, and the analysis of Evangelical Catholicism:
By Pope Benedict XVI publicly acknowledging problems inside the Vatican is he giving guidance to the cardinals gathering in Rome this week? [I don't understand why the writer, who has always been so sensible otherwise, suddenly implies that Benedict XVI is only now 'publicly acknowleding problems inside the Vatican' when he has been doing that all along, so I am glad Weigel quickly sets her straight right off the bat!]
The Pope has mentioned these problems more than once, although no one seems to have noticed until the world’s attention suddenly became riveted on Rome and the Vatican.
[If 'no one' seems to have noticed - i.e., enough for public opinion to be actively aware of Benedict XVI's passionate commitment to purifying the Church starting with her own ministers - perhaps that is because they choose not to notice. Especially since he has also been ever careful to say that the Church does not just have sinners but also countless men and women who try their best everyday to be worthy representatives of the faith they profess, as the Vatican mentioned today in its statement about the report from the three cardinals commissioned by Benedict XVI to investigate the system that made Vatileaks possible.]
Benedict XVI has no intention of “giving guidance” to the men who will elect his successor; he is too good a churchman, too humble a man, and too much a respecter of the conclave process to even think of doing something like that.
But there is no doubt, here in Rome, that the dysfunction in the Vatican bureaucracy will be a major topic of the cardinals’ conversations before the conclave is enclosed.
Benedict XVI was ill-served by men in whom he reposed trust and to whom he gave great authority, and everyone knows it — except, alas, those who ill-served him.
[Triple alas and alack! These persons - and I can think of one, in particular - will never acknowledge that they ill-served him because after all, they love him and would never seek to harm him! Which was exactly Paolo Gabriele's self-justification! And Weigel's phrase 'those who ill-served him' has to include Gabriele among others far more intelligent than the self-righteous ex=valet, but just as self-deluding.]
Not to be Pollyannaish, but how do Church institutions become worldly and even corrupt? Ought there to be a sanctification there? Can there be? [I have to believe that the apparent naivete of Lopez's questions only means she is trying to articulate questions raised by skeptics and the man on the street who does not know much about the Church.]
The Church is a human institution, and at certain moments in time, the darker aspects of that humanity come into the glare of publicity. As for the situation right now, a distinguished Italian historian said to me, shortly after I arrived in Rome, that Italy had become a “corrupt society and culture” and that, with
the deep and broad Italianization of the Roman Curia over the past half-decade [Meaning, under Benedict XVI], similar patterns of incompetence and malfeasance had penetrated the Leonine Wall.
[While I understand that the above may be a perception common to professional Vatican watchers, I would welcome some statistics to show that the Curia is any more Italian now than it was in John Paul II's time, when not just Cardinal Sodano, but also Cardinals Re and Sandri - all bred-in-the-bone ItalianS - wielded actual and real power in the Curia just as much as John Paul II's secretary did. Which Curial official under Benedict XVI has had similar power?
Cardinal Bertone could only command his own men, and they were clearly no match for the far more extensive and ensconced Old Guard left in place by John Paul II's curial plenipotentiaries. And surely, incompetence and malfeasance were already there under the previous regime, perpetrated by the career middle-management satraps of the Curia whose tenure is not dependent on whoever is Pope, and who actually control the levers of Vatican bureaucracy!]
That strikes me as true, and it needs to be said. What also needs to be said is that there are many good and faithful servants in the Roman Curia, men and women for whom service in Rome is a real sacrifice which they undertake out of love for the Church and obedience to the call of their superiors.
These people, who don’t imagine the Curia as a career-boosting ticket-punch but who look forward to returning to their local Churches, are the human model of the curial reform I lay out in Evangelical Catholicism – for
that reform will begin with a change of attitude, not merely a change of structures, important as the latter is.
[As Benedict XVI has always underscored! Reform must begin with purification, and purification must begin with the individual.]
Why is the Vatican a state? Doesn’t that bring with it all kinds of opportunities for distraction from her mission?
It’s long been understood that the Pope, as Universal Pastor of the Church, cannot be the subject of any worldly sovereignty. Thus the sovereignty of the Vatican City micro-state is protection for the Pope’s evangelical and pastoral mission.
That mission can and must include a critical challenge to the world of affairs, as in Benedict XVI’s remarkable “September Addresses” in Regensburg, Paris, New York, and Berlin (which I describe in the March 11 print issue of NR).
What that mission ought not to include is fooling around in the circus of Italian politics, which has been a weakness of the present cardinal secretary of state and his predecessor.
[Well, thank God Weigel got that out! The vainglory in both Sodano and Bertone has consisted in thinking that the best way for them to assert their position as being, in effect, 'head of government' of the Vatican, is to make a splash or at least affect politics in the secular world of Italian politics, instead of attending to their primary responsibility of running the Vatican, i.e., administering the Roman Curia and all the organisms within the Vatican.
And yet for all the efforts of Sodano and Bertone, their analogs in the Italian bishops' conference = Cardinals Ruini and Bagnasco, respectively - have been far more effective in standing up for the Church in the maelstrom of Italian politics (and even in affecting the way Italian Catholics vote), and doing so because the Italian bishops conference, not the Vatican Secretariat of State, was designated by the revised Lateran Pacts to represent the Church in dealing with the State of Italy.]
What might the priorities of the next Pope be? [Should there even be a different order of priorities than the obvious ones Benedict XVI worked on?]
He’s got to have trifocals: meeting the challenge of an aggressive secularism in the West with the dynamic, affirmative orthodoxy of evangelical Catholicism; encouraging the burgeoning “new churches” of the global South, purifying and deepening their experience of Jesus as Lord and savior and their integration into the rhythms and practices of Catholic life; and defending religious freedom for all, especially against the challenge of jihadist Islam, which exemplifies what Benedict XVI has described as religion unpurified by reason.
Will he be an Evangelical Catholic? What does that mean? How will we know?
The Evangelical Catholicism I describe in that eponymous book isn’t the product of any one man; it’s the result of a lengthy, complex, and difficult process of development in the Catholic Church since the late 19th century.
Vatican II brought that process to a high moment of ecclesiastical drama. John Paul II and Benedict XVI focused the Council’s many-layered teaching and gave it a sharp focus by teaching, with the Council, that to be a Catholic is to be a radically converted disciple in a communion of disciples that lives for mission — for offering others the possibility of friendship with Jesus Christ.
And thus with John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the door has been thrust open to Evangelical Catholicism in its first maturity. That maturation process will continue, because a robustly orthodox Catholicism impassioned about mission is the only Catholicism that has a future.
Why? Because it’s the Catholicism that is answering Christ’s call to mission in the Great Commission, and it’s the only Catholicism that can meet the challenge of aggressive secularism, jihadism — and limp discipleship.
What are the kinds of questions cardinals must be asking themselves and one another as they prepare for the conclave?
As they measure a man for the shoes of the fisherman, the first and obvious question cardinals should ask is:
Is this a man of God, who lives out of a depth of faith that can sustain him in an impossible task? And can he communicate that faith, enticing others to consider sharing it, through who he is, not just by what he says?
Another urgent question is:
Does this man have good judgment in people? That is, can he draw to himself the collaborators who will give his mission real effect? And is he willing to correct errors in judgment about people when they become clear? [It seems to me this is implicit criticism of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, each of whom was seriously ill-served by some of the men they named and trusted the most. I choose now to interpret Benedict XVI's intransigent loyalty to Bertone as one more indication he knew he himself was not going to stay on, that the end would come sooner rather than later, so what was the point of changing horses in midstream?]
I describe in some detail other qualities one would like to see in a Pope in the last chapter of
Evangelical Catholicism.
Choosing the next Pope is no small thing. How does one even begin to deliberate? [But the Church has been doing it for centuries!]
The first thing the cardinals (including the non-voting cardinals over 80) will do is assess the state of the world Church during what are called “General Congregations.” In that process, men can begin to be measured for those aforementioned shoes.
I would also hope that the General Congregations become a kind of retreat. The elders of the Church need to take stock, in conscience and in prayer, of the ways in which they and others have failed in their own leadership responsibilities. That kind of purification seems even more essential today than before.
[That is precisely the spirit Benedict XVI sought to infuse into the synodal assemblies and the 'day of reflection' he chose to take with cardinals gathered in Rome before each of his consistories to create new cardinals, opening each of them with off-the-cuff meditations that are marvels of spiritual, theological and pastoral exhortations. If he did not do that during the pre-Conclave congregations in 2005, I imagine it was only because he could not presume to speak as primus inter pares (which he was, in fact, as dean) among his brother cardinals. Cardinal Sodano has the advantage this time that he is out of the running as he is over 80, so let us hope he will exercise a prayerful exhortatory direction of the congregations.]
The General Congregations, and the conclave, ought to be far more like a religious community or order discerning its next leadership than like a court choosing its next king or queen.
Can the conclave itself act as a renewing force for bishops and the priesthood?
It can do so by choosing a Pope who will take the reform of the episcopate seriously (and there’s a whole chapter on that in
Evangelical Catholicism) and who will continue the reform of the priesthood that began with John Paul II and has been accelerated by Benedict XVI.
[That's another implicit criticism of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI - and their predecessors as well - for 'failing to reform the episcopate seriously' while seeking to reform the priesthood, although that criticism ignores the 60-plus bishops who were constrained to resign during Benedict XVI's Pontificate for assorted misconduct.[
It would also be helpful if the new Pope could become, by the vigor and magnetism of his own priestly witness, what Cardinal William Baum once called John Paul II: the “world’s greatest vocation director” (or what the military would call a “great recruiter”).
[And weren't John Paul II and Benedict XVI particularly emblematic witnesses to priesthood, long before they became Pope, and who did generate countless vocations during the international WYD gatherings? Who in the current College of Cardinals has been touted in any way as being 'magnetic' in their priestly witness?]
How can — and must — a Pope convey “sacramental seriousness” at a time when holiness is being pushed to the sidelines by a secularism that all too many within the Church have bought into? Can the cardinals convey it in their choice? [Personal holiness is its own best witness - if it is present, it will shine through all the dense miasma of obfuscation and malice that dominates media-imposed public opinion (or 'published opinion', as Georg Gaenswein has called it).]
I think a Pope does that in two ways. If he celebrates the liturgy in a dignified and reverent way, he offers the jaded world an experience of beauty which just might open up a discussion about truth and goodness.
And in his magisterium, he can challenge the soul-withering insularity of secularism by explaining that the world really does have doors, windows, and skylights, and that life is much more noble — and much more fun — if we recognize that rather than hunkering down in enclosed bunkers of self-absorption.
[And didn't Benedict XVI do both exceptionally well? In fact, the faux 'bumper sticker' RE-ELECT RATZINGER is a metaphor to say: Elect someone as close as possible to the ideal shown by Papa Ratzinger, only someone younger and in great physical shape!]
These are men in the conclave. What if they don’t listen to what He says?
Well, it’s been known to happen before. Cardinal Ratzinger himself once said that the role of the Holy Spirit in a conclave is to prevent the cardinals from electing a Pope who would completely wreck the Church. That’s a kind of negative boundary, but, looking back over the relevant history, it has the ring of realism to it.
In the apostolic constitution that will govern this conclave, John Paul II suppressed the methods of electing a Pope by “inspiration” ( a cardinal or cardinals gets up in the Sistine Chapel and proclaims his belief that Cardinal X has already been chosen by God, and at least two-thirds of the others agree — the scenario in Morris West’s novel, The Shoes of the Fisherman) and by “delegation” (the cardinals agree to choose a committee who will choose the new Pope).
John Paul’s view, I think, was that the conclave is a drama of discernment in which every elector ought to feel the full weight of his religious and moral responsibility. That they will do this under the gaze of the Christ of the Last Judgment, in the Sistine Chapel, rather underscores that point.
Can the Church — from Pope to her priests and all the faithful — re-introduce itself and what Christ proposes through her to a world that has seen much unseriousness and disappointment and even evil from those who call themselves Catholic? [Isn't that what Benedict XVI began to undertake? This re-introduction is precisely what the New Evangelization is about! But no one deludes himself that it can be done overnight - it has to rebuild from the wreckage of five decades of downgrading Catholicism to Protestantism-lite and even outright secularism.]
It has to, and that begins both by acknowledging the failures of the people of the Church (and its leaders) and refusing to be cowed into evangelical silence by those sins and failures. If the Church models a more humane way of life than what’s on offer from others, it will draw the curious and the wounded and all those looking for the Good Shepherd, whether they consciously know that’s what they’re seeking at this moment or not.
Has Pope Benedict set some markers in terms of liturgical reform the next Pope can build on?
As I explain in Evangelical Catholicism, he’s accelerated the reform of the reform of the liturgical reform, and with what seem to me to be notable results. There are exceptions, of course, but the liturgical silly season is over.
Are the reforms that have not been implemented by this Pope an indicator of a failed pontificate? Many, as you know, have said in recent days that his is a failed papacy.
I don’t think it’s a failed pontificate, but the full agenda imagined for it in April 2005 certainly hasn’t been completed. Pope Benedict XVI will be remembered as the greatest papal preacher since Gregory the Great in the sixth century, and his sermons and homilies will be read for centuries for spiritual nourishment. Ditto for his catechetical talks at the Wednesday general audiences. Ditto for the “September Addresses,” when it comes to world affairs and the discontents of contemporary democracy.
What hasn’t been begun, much less completed, is the reform of the Vatican bureaucratic machinery so that it becomes an instrument of, not an impediment to, the Pope’s mission as an evangelical pastor and missionary. [And I must ask why Mr. Weigel, like so many other armchair Popes these days, must place all the burden for reforming the Vatican bureaucracy on Benedict XVI when his predecessors could do nothing about it either.
When, in fact the great and Blessed John Paul II was not interested enough in the administrative machinery of the Vatican - Mr. Weigel himself has been among the first to defend the Polish Pope's deliberate choice to evangelize ad extra, and let his lieutenants take care of internal affairs.
What about the fact that, for a start, Benedict XVI legislated transparency into Vatican finances - a revolutionary action in itself, especially for the Vatican and its much-discredited mystique of secrecy - but why does he not get credit for that? After he has now opened the shutters to let in the purifying glare of sunlight on Vatican finances that arouses the most prurient interest among the media and the public, no successive Pope can close them again.]
At this time of transition, what are you praying for? What ought Catholics be praying for? Can Evangelical Catholicism be a handbook for this moment?
I hope Evangelical Catholicism encourages those who read it to imagine a robust and dynamic, if also challenging, future for the Church. And that’s what we should all be praying for, all the time: the courage to be Catholic, which is the prerequisite to living our lives, in a virtual infinity of ways, as disciples in mission.
You talk a great deal about Leo XIII in your book. What might be his advice to the cardinals and to Catholics of this moment?
I think he’d ask the cardinals, and all of us, to see in postmodernity and its discontents a challenge that can be turned to evangelical advantage, if we have the wit, will, spiritual strength, and intellectual formation for it. I also think he’d be asking us to pray for the protection of St. Michael the Archangel, for we are surely in battle, and the Evil One is having what cricketers would call “good innings” these days.
Everyone else must be asking you these questions: Who do you think the next Pope will be and what are the odds he hails from North America?
I don’t do names; I don’t do odds; but I will say that geography will have little or nothing to do with the selection of the next Pope.
[I certainly hope not. Political correctness has no place in a Conclave. And if any Third World cardinals believe in the conventional unwisdom that it is high time one of them was Pope just because the preponderance of Catholics live in their part of the world - and not because he is really the best man for the job at this time - then they mistake the Church, as the pundits do, for a secular democracy guided by proportional representation rather than the unique institution that it is, founded by Christ to prolong his mission on earth through the ministry of human beings.
Further about the coming Conclave: I have never understood why, in my lifetime, the media tend to think in apocalyptic terms about the Church whenever a new Pope must be elected. It is always 'the worst time for the Church' and, "dear Lord, what are we to do now, the sky is falling in, who can save us"? - which is necessarily a negative judgment on the last Pope, in this case, on Benedict XVI.
They said the same thing after John Paul II died - those who thought he was absolutely irreplaceable - but what is the worst thing they can say of Benedict XVI today? That he 'failed to reform the Roman Curia', as if that was the priority responsibility of a Pope.
What is the worst scandal they can dredge up against him? That his own valet betrayed him. A manufactured scandal in which Benedict XVI, betrayed, has been the only real victim so far, even if not the least venal thing was attributed to him by anyone in the leaked documents (the only accusing finger was from the valet who thought the Pope was uninformed because "he would often ask me questions about things he ought to have known". Really!)
And yet, with the Internet, this has been the most closely scrutinized Pontificate of all time - in real time, 24/7. To emerge in eight years with only the failure to reform the Roman Curia and the Vatileaks mess as the worst they can say of him is achievement enough.
And what about his real accomplishments? What he did for the Church, as well as his own personal distinctions? What Pope, in his lifetime, has been compared to Leo the Great and Gregory the Great for his preaching, and to Augustine and Aquinas for the breadth and depth of his writing?
All this, after succeeding to another Pope who was immediately dubbed 'the Great' upon his death, and being hounded to the end by the uncharitable judgment that he could never be able to fill the shoes of his predecessor. He did not need to, nor want to. It is symbolic he, unwittingly and by media whim, made the papal red shoes his own 'trademark' in the secular world. The only shoes he needed to fill were his own - a perfect fit for him as if they had been the sandals of Peter himself.
His detractors, and even some Catholic circles, now fault him for betraying his 'divine mission' by resigning, for abandoning a sinking ship (a rat, in short, and perhaps somewhere in cyberspace, someone has already dubbed him 'the zinger rat') - making it appear that a truly selfless act of abnegation to make way for someone more able than he is, is somehow the most selfish thing a Pope could do. To the end, he is being demeaned by those in the business of demeaning
As for the apocalyptic tones, when was it ever not the 'worst time for the Church' through the centuries, and why should we think that this time, it is worse than the worst? It's a far from insidious way to seek to undermine the Church at its foundations, but didn't her founder say, "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church" against whom "the gates of Hell shall not prevail"?
2/27/13 Weigel has given a similar interview to Vatican Radio, which reproduces some of his answers in textual form below. In this interview, he seems muck more charitable towards Benedict XVI, even indulging in quite a few superlatives.:
'A hinge moment in
the history of the Church'
Interview with George Weigel
February 27, 2013
“I think Benedict XVI will be remembered for many fine accomplishments. He was the greatest papal preacher since Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century. He was a master catechist.”
George Weigel, a leading American Catholic scholar, and author of the new book “Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st Century Church,” shares with Vatican Radio his thoughts about Pope Benedict XVI’s legacy, in the days leading up to the Holy Father’s resignation.
He says Pope Benedict “showed himself a remarkably insightful analyst of the discontents of twenty-first century democracy and the essential moral foundations for any democratic civilisation of the future. He did that in his Regensburg lecture, his address at Westminster Hall in London, his address to the German Bundestag, his address at the United Nations.”
The Holy Father, he says, will also be remembered for his emphasis on the liturgy: “In terms of the Church, I think the Pope asked us to see beauty in the liturgy as a unique path towards a post-modern appreciation of the truth and the good in what the Church proclaims.”
Weigel sees Pope Benedict continuing the work begun by the Second Vatican Council and continued by Blessed John Paul II. “I think he secured the transition of what I call in this book ‘Evangelical Catholicism,’ the transition from the Church of the Counter-Reformation formed in the sixteenth century to the Church of the New Evangelisation which has been brought into being by the Second Vatican Council, John Paul II, and now Benedict XVI.”
He describes the relationship between the papacies of John Paul and Benedict as a kind of “dynamic continuity.”
“These two pontificates, I think, will be viewed historically as two episodes in one great moment of giving an authoritative interpretation to the Second Vatican Council.”
The two Popes “complemented one another in a remarkable way . . . [they] forged a remarkable working relationship that was a real mutual exchange of gifts between two men of supreme intelligence, one a philosopher, one a theologian – two men who had the humility to see in the other something that he lacked and that put together would work for the good of the Church.”
The conclusion of Pope Benedict’s papacy, says Weigel, marks the end of an era. “We are at a real hinge moment in the history of the Church, not simply because of this unprecedented ending of a pontificate but because of the very nature of the life of the Church at this moment in time.”
George Weigel’s interview with Christopher Wells: media01.radiovaticana.va/audiomp3/00359780.MP3C
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/05/2013 04:37]