BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

I had been wondering when Mr. Restan would come out with a moderating view on the unbridled enthusiasms of the past month, and here it is..,

The continuity running through
the Successors of Peter
Translated from

April 11, 2013

After a vertiginous month, Pope Francis has ended the first stage of his journey. Its coincidence with the celebration of Holy Week and Easter allowed him to focus his initial Magisterium on the heart of the Christian faith – on Jesus who died and rose again to save every human being.

[One can thus better appreciate the exquisite timing Benedict XVI chose for stepping down from the Papacy - precisely to give the cardinals enough time to choose his successor so that the Church would have a new Pope for Holy Week of 2013, the peak of the liturgical year. He could have waited until he had completed eight years as Pope, which no one would have contested, but to have done so would have been to miss the opportunity of presenting a new Pope to the world in the full panoply of the Holy Week liturgies and the Magisterium inevitably associated with it.]

He has also carried out many gestures that reveal his missionary temperament and his pastoral style of being close to his flock. He has effectively communicated a message woven with the threads of mercy, the Cross and apostolic vigor.

But he has not yet really begun governing, and the great expectations he has aroused only serve to magnify the logical questions one must ask.

One of these refers to the way in which he intends to exercise his ministry as Successor of Peter. The question of modality is not inconsequential: John Paul II, in his ecumenical encyclical Ut unum snit(That they may be one) posed the challenge of finding a form of exercising the primacy of Peter which – without renouncing what is essential in his mission - could be acknowledged and accepted by all Christians.

Recent Popes have been quite conscious of the paradox that as much as the Petrine ministry is an essential service for the faith and for the unity of the Church that the Lord explicitly wanted, it has also been a stumbling block for many non-Catholic Christians [with respect to an eventual Christian unity].

From his first greeting to the world, Pope Francis has forcefully underscored his position as Bishop of Rome, citing the famous words of St. Ignatius of Antioch who said that “Rome presides with charity over all the churches”.

He has also underscored that the power received by Peter from the Lord can only be exercised as service. A fact that Benedict XVI always upheld, from the time he took possession of St John Lateran as Bishop of Rome, and that John Paul II made clear in the aforementioned encyclical.

But what is the exact meaning of this function of the Bishop of Rome that has been recognized since the first Christian century? For over a century now, recent Popes have sought to analyze this question deeply, even as they have sought to strip the Petrine ministry of its temporal adherences, unhealthy incrustations, and historical inertias.

Significant for this is the previously unpublished 1997 text by Joseph Ratzinger which was released in L’Osservatore Romano earlier this week, in which he points out that the First Vatican Council had highlighted the spiritual dimension of a papacy free of any temporal ballast, and “defined it in a new way, as a discipleship of Christ that was devoid of any earthly power from hereon, just as Peter, the fisherman, had followed Christ, without any powers at all, to his ultimate crucifixion in Rome”.

One must keep this perspective in mind when considering the ardor of many who describe Pope Francis’s first steps as a rupture with previous Pontificates.

In the mass media as well as in specialized circles, some have made it appear that the primacy of faith and charity can only be expressed as service and not as any kind of ‘jurisdiction’. I do not mean to advocate a hypothesis but simply to refer to this transcendental question for every Christian and for the whole Church.

John Paul II already warned that the function of assuring the communion of the faithful would be illusory if the Bishop of Rome were deprived of the ecclesiastical power and authority that are rightly his.

For his part, Benedict XVI underlined with particular effect that “Presiding in doctrine and presiding in love must be one and the same – all the doctrines of the Church ultimately lead to love”.

In his memorable book The anti-Roman complex, Hans Urs von Balthasar destroys without hesitation the eternal pretext of emptying the Petrine ministry of substance by reducing it to mere ‘service’ artificially conceived as an opposition to ‘jurisdiction’.

In the dynamism that is inherent in the work of renewal in continuity, Pope Francis will find his own style, and it is possible that his Pontificate will take new steps towards Christian unity as John Paul II hoped in Ut unum sint.

Certainly, the Pontificate of Benedict VXI, with his profoundly evangelical approach and his innovative actions, has paved the way. For nearly eight years, he explained and demonstrated ceaselessly that the Pope is not an absolute sovereign whose thought and will must be law. On the contrary, he conceived of the Petrine ministry as the guarantee of the Church’s obedience to Christ and his Word.

And here, the continuity between Benedict and Francis becomes evident far beyond their differing styles and temperaments. No Pope imposes his ideas on the Church, but knows he is one with the great community of faith through the centuries, that his power is not above the Word of God but in its service, and that he has the responsibility to make this Word continue to resonate in all its purity in the face of frivolity, shifting fashions and falsehoods.

It is a ministry that the new Pope has made clear by reminding us that “faith is not for sale, nor does one acquire it by installment” because like Peter, “we cannot keep silent about what we have seen and heard”. In the history of the Peeple of God, he said, there has always been the temptation to eliminate some part of the faith, “but the faith remains what it is, as we profess it in the Credo”.

Finally, it is understandable that Orthodox Christians and evangelicals look with hope [???? Did they ever?] on the long history of the papacy, but it would be good if they too moved towards the undivided Church of the first millennium. [As I understand it, the ongoing theological dialog between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches have now reached the stage where they are examining the elements of the Papacy in the undivided Church, as a basis for coming to a common position about the primacy of the Pope in a reunited Church.]

Regarding the climate that is being created by some Catholic intellectuals, it is to be hoped that we do not require a new Vladimir Soloviev, perhaps someone from the East, to remind us that for every Christian, Rome is the condition for freedom.