More 'appreciations' of Benedict XVI -
on the seventh year of his Pontificate,
before anyone thought he would ever resign
At this time in 2012, I ran these posts - both of them an appreciation of the first seven years of Benedict XVI's Pontificate six weeks before the actual anniversary came around. On 2013, the timing seemed eerie, as does the discussion on resignation in the second article....
It is not given to many - much less to a Pope - to preview the verdict of his contemporaries about his life, achievements and legacy. The kind of verdict usually rendered first in obituaries. For Benedict XVI, it has been a mixed bag, of course. But nothing could surprise him about what his detractors say - he's had decades to get used to them. What counts is the testimony of qualified objective observers of Church affairs who do acknowledge his extraordinjary gifts and how he has put them in the service of God and his Church, and who end up being admirers if they did not originally start off being such. The kind of testimony that would have a lesser man say to himself, "I must have done something good', but which, to a man like Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, corresponds to the joyous peace with God of someone with an unburdened conscience.!
For an economist, Dr. Gregg always makes a compelling commonsense 'theological' analysis when he writes about Catholic subjects. He 'gets it' spot on. This is one great introduction to an appreciation of Benedict XVI's first seven years as Pope (of which I hope we will get many excellent ones. Articles, I mean, but in a different sense, many more wonderful years with B16 as our Pope... [Mmmm, little I wot we would have less than a year left of his Pontificate!]
Benedict XVI and
the irrelevance of 'relevance'
by Samuel Gregg
March 8, 2012
Over the soon-to-be seven years of Benedict XVI’s papacy, it’s been instructive to watch the shifting critiques of this pontificate.
Leaving aside the usual suspects convinced that Catholicism should become what amounts to yet another liberal-Christian sect fixated with transitory politically-correct causes, the latest appraisal is that “the world” is losing interest in the Catholic Church.
A variant of this is the claim that the Irish government’s 2011 decision to closing its embassy to the Holy See reflects a general decline in the Church’s geopolitical 'relevance'.
[And you'd think a veteran Vatican observer like John Allen - who is also a sort of self-appointed expert on world Catholic affairs, since no one else is doing what he does, taking snapshots of the state of the Church worldwide bu visiting some key capitals to talk to the locals - would be one of those who would not respond with this knee-jerk banal commonplace, but that was exactly what he led off with last year, commenting on the Irish government's decision! Not one of the Italian Vaticanistas made that almost non-sequitur leap of logic! Clearly, Irish PM Kenny's government wanted to twist into its backstab on the Church to make it hurt more, and that's the only reason one should give. No other country has followed Ireland's example in the months since, even if the financial crisis drags on, so where does that put the 'irrelevance' claim?]
Whenever one encounters such assertions, it’s never quite clear what’s meant by 'relevance'. On one reading, it involves comparisons with Benedict’s heroic predecessor, who played an indispensable role in demolishing the Communist thug-ocracies that once brutalized much of Europe.
[And those who argue this completely ignore that the global picture is radically different today from what it was when the free world was still fighting the 'evil empire', and terrorism as a daily political instrument was just in its beginnings, only becoming 'routine' after 9/11/2001. Islam was not the active threat for global hegemony that it is today via its surrogates who rule the Muslim countries.]
But it’s also a fair bet that 'relevance' is understood here in terms of the Church’s capacity to shape immediate policy-debates or exert political influence in various spheres.
Such things have their own importance.
Indeed, many of Benedict’s writings are charged with content which shatters the post-Enlightenment half-truths about the nature of freedom, equality, and progress that sharply constrict modern Western political thinking.
But Benedict’s entire life as a priest, theologian, bishop, senior curial official and Pope also reflects his core conviction that the Church’s primary focus is not first-and-foremost “the world,” let alone politics.
Rather, Benedict’s view has always been that the Church’s main responsibility is to come to know better — and then make known — the Person of Jesus Christ. Why? Because like any orthodox Christian, he believes that herein is found the summit and fullness of Truth and meaning for every human being.
Moreover, Benedict insists the only way we can fully comprehend Christ is through His Church – the ecclesia of the saints, living and dead.
These certainties explain the nature of Benedict’s long-standing criticisms of various forms of political and liberation theology. His primary concern was not whether such movements reflected some Catholics’ alignment with the left, or the liberationists’ shaky grasp of basic economics.
Instead,
Benedict’s charge was always that such theologies obscured and even distorted basic truths about the nature of Christ and His Church. [And those who claim otherwise simply parrot the totally unfounded media stereotype of Joseph Ratzinger as the pedantic, dogmatic and robotic enforcer of orthodox Catholic teaching - without once reading what he has actually written and said about liberation theology.]-
There is, of course, a 'relevance' dimension to all this.
Unless Catholics are clear in their own minds about these truths, then their efforts to transform the world around them will surely run aground or degenerate into the activism of just another lobby-group amidst the thousands of other lobby-groups clamoring to be considered 'relevant'.
Which brings us to
another great 'relevance' of Benedict’s pontificate: his desire to ensure that more Catholics understand the actual content of what they profess to believe.
It’s no great secret that Catholic catechesis went into freefall after Vatican II. It’s true that much pre-Vatican II catechesis was characterized by rote-learning rather than substantive engagement with the truths of the Faith.
But as early as 1983, Joseph Ratzinger signaled his awareness of the lamentable post-Vatican II catechetical state of affairs in two speeches he gave in Paris and Lyons.
Much to the professional catechists’ displeasure — but to the delight of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger and every young priest present — Ratzinger zeroed in on the huge gaps in the catechetical text-books then in vogue.
Two years later, the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops suggested that a new universal catechism be published.
[Every time this is brought up, I cannot resist adding that in George Weigel's account of that Synod in his biography of John Paul II, it was the later much-maligned Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston who put forth the suggestion for the Catechism during that 1985 Synod. It doesn't make up, of course, for his terrible judgment lapses in almost coddling abusive priests in his diocese, but he does earn a positive footnote in history for this.]
This bore fruit in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church produced under Ratzinger’s supervision. Significantly, it followed precisely the fundamental structures he had identified in his 1983 addresses as indispensable for sound catechesis.
Fast-forward to 2012. Now Benedict is launching what’s called “a Year of Faith” in his apostolic letter Porta Fidei to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Vatican II’s opening.
Reading this text, one is struck by how many times Benedict underlines the importance of Catholics being able to profess the Faith. Of course you can’t really profess — let alone live out — the truths of the Catholic Faith unless you know what they are. Nor can you enter into conversation with others about that Faith unless you understand its content.
Hence, as one French commentator recently observed, at least one sub-text of Benedict’s Year of Faith is that the “doctrinal break-time” for the Church is over.
This point was underscored by the recent Note issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Along the other practical suggestions it gives for furthering the Year of Faith, the Note emphasizes “a profound bond between the lived faith and its contents” (i.e., true ortho-praxis can only be based on ortho-doxy). P.S. 2015 The polar opposite of the Bergoglian-progressivist push to divorce pracis from doctrine, on the fallacious assumption that the Church can change some of its practices without affecting doctrine in any way.]
It also stresses that Catholics need to know the content of the Catechism and the actual documents of Vatican II (rather than, sotto voce, the ever-nebulous [and rather noxious] spirit of Vatican II” that seems indistinguishable from whatever is preoccupying secular liberals at any given moment in time.
[Documents which, it would seem, the liberal progressivist spiritists have not really read, or bothered to read, judging by the untruths and half-truths they have been spewing abundantly in the past four decades, passing off their own ideas of what they would like the Church to be, as the 'spirit of Vatican II'. Until Benedict XVI became Pope, few contested them at all - in fact, this unfettered do-as-you-please abuse of the liturgy came to be taken for granted - the Mass as performance art!!
Just start with all the inventions they stuck on the Mass, many of them never mentioned in Sacrosanctum concilium(SC), the Vatican II constitution on the Liturgy (e.g., sidelining the tabernacle and tearing out the old altars to give way to bare tables -with the corollary of celebrating the Mass ad populum; receiving Communion in the hand), and some directly contradicting SC (e.g., eliminating Latin completely from the Mass, allowing all sorts of profane music - instruments and lyrics - instead of SC's encouragement of Gregorian chant, religious texts (preferably Scriptural) for lyrics, and organ music; and worst of all, using Vatican II as an excuse for any priest to say and do as he pleases when saying Mass, instead of sticking to the ritual and the words that make a Mass a Mass. None of everything that has made a Novus Ordo Mass objectionable as commonly practised since 1970 is to be found in SC!]
The predictable retort is that this proves that, under Benedict, the Church is turning in upon itself. Such rejoinders, however, are very short-sighted. To paraphrase Vatican II, Benedict understands the Church can only have a profound ad-extra effect upon the world if it lives its ad-intra life more intensely and faithfully.
Far from being a retreat into a ghetto, it’s about helping Catholics to, as the first Pope said, “be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope” (1 Peter 3:15).
And therein lies the Church’s true contemporary significance, as understood by Peter’s present-day successor. It’s not to be found in turning the Catholic Church into something akin to the Episcopal church of America (otherwise known as the preferential option for self-immolation).
It’s about bringing the Logos of the Lord of History into a world that lurches between irrationality and rationalism, utopianism and despair, so that when we die, we might see the face of the One who once called upon Peter to have faith in Him and walk on water.
And what, after all, could be more relevant than that?
The following is a positive evaluation of Benedict XVI from another angle, although it begins, unfortunately, by buying into all the 'public opinion' commonplaces that most commentators have used to interpret and thereby further promote the wildly disproportionate hype over the leaked documents from the Vatican. None of those documents objectively constituted or indicated any high crimes or genuine scandal. To any objective view, they represent, at best, the interplay of conflicting interests inherent and normal in any human institution, especially bureaucracies (the Vatican bureaucracy is obviously no exception).
NB: Il Regno is a twice-monthly publication out of the Bologna-based Centro Editoriale Dehoniano run by the Congregation of Priests of the Sacred Heart founded by the late French priest Leon Dehon, whose cause for beatification has been stalled because of accusations that he was anti-Semitic.]
Benedict XVI:
Spiritual renewal in the face
of worldliness in the Church
by Gianfranco Brunelli
Translated from
March 8, 2012
The kindness of his gaze, the elegance of his manners, the calmness of tone that distinguish Benedict XVI did not veil the firmness of his words.
In his series of interventions during his fourth consistory to name new cardinals, he assembled a collection of unequivocal spiritual and doctrinal references following a recent spate of poison allegations aimed at the Vatican.
It could not be otherwise. The media clamor had been generated first around the confidential letters written by the ex-secretary-general of the Vatican City Governatorate, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, now Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, to the Pope and to Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone regarding questionable financial transactions at the Governatorate. Then a couple of internal memoranda on the new anti-money-laundering laws to be enforced at the Vatican 'bank' IOR: and finally the 'delirious' anonymous memorandum inferring a supposed assassination plot against the Pope within this year - all had created great perplexity in the Church and in international public opinion.
The fact that some parties had resorted to leaking confidential documents, of various levels of importance, in order to feed any existing conflicts within the Roman Curia but most of all, calling to question the role and the ability of the Secretary of State, offered the image of a moral and institutional crisis within the Church's principal organ of governance. [DIM=89t][2013 P.S. It would be three more months before we would find out that it was all largely the work of one 'party' - the Pope's treacherous, devious and magalomaniacal valet.]
[The general impression that the leakers intended to create was precisely for public opinion to think the worst - that unimaginable crimes have been happening inside the Vatican, even if the incidents reported did not include any really major 'scandal' and merely reflected normal internal rivalries within any bureaucracy. But for an informed 'analyst' to simply echo that intended impression as the actual outcome of the leaks is lazy and almost irresponsible.]
In a consistory February 2012] in which a number of Curial officials were made cardinals, the Curia was therefore under scrutiny both in terms of image and of substance.
[I beg to disagree. In fairness to the media, practically no one projected the negatives created by the leaks to the Curial officials who became cardinals - perhaps because, even if most reports kept referring to the 'revelations' as affecting 'the Curia' - the targets, as well as the leakers, were clearly all within the Secretariat of State, which is by no means the entire Curia.
The running beef was that, yes, the Pope had elevated more curial officials than metropolitan bishops to cardinal in this consistory .but that's an argument that has been discussed several times on this thread. But it must also be noted that no one, not even the Italian media, faulted any of the new Curial officials for lack of qualification or competency for the jobs that Benedict XVI named them to. Even if some of them may be proteges or friends of Cardinal Bertone, that does not make them less competent or qualified; surely, no one could say Benedict XVI named some cardinals to their positions of responsibility if he did not think they were the best men for mostly administrative and technical responsibilities.]
But whoever wanted Cardinal Bertone replaced has failed at least for now, but he is expected to set everything straight in his own department. In fact, this kind of crisis affects the Pope by implying a crisis of authority in the Church. [Again, that was the kneejerk conclusion drawn by run-of-the-mill commentary, echoing the main criticism by the Pope's detractors who claim that he takes no part and no interest at all in the actual government of the Church. Detractors like Marco Politi deliberately ignore that the Pope holds weekly meetings with his chief Curial collaborators - the heads of CDF, of Bishops and of the Evangelization of Peoples, who head the curial offices with the greatest direct impact on churches around the world; and that every afternoon, he sits down with Bertone and/or his two deputies to discuss administrative issues. But gullible members of the public will simply take their cue from what the commentators say and do not question any of their (very faulty) premises.]
It is not accidental that the latter stages of the controversy also brought forth the hypothesis that the Pope may resign. [It really is a non sequitur, because the resignation hypothesis has been floated since last year, not however because of any controversies or administrative issues, but because of alleged health problems! And it is bound to be brought up more often, as the Pope gets older, since in Light of the World, Benedict XVI said clearly that he felt a Pope should resign if he was no longer physically, psychologically and mentally capable of carrying out the Petrine ministry.] [P.S.2013 How could we know the resignation would come less than a year after this article was published?]
In the three days associated with the consistory, the Pope touched all the necessary themes. Starting with what he considers decisive for the Church in this historical moment.
He reads this last critical development as a confirmation and an acceleration of what he called 'a crisis of faith' in his address to the Roman Curia last December. A crisis that cuts across all Christianity. But especially European Christianity.
And alongside the sex abuses by priests, supposed financial scandals, and rivalries for power, there is the more significant testimony of Christians in places where the Church is now the target of persecution for what she believes. It is this reality that concerns the Pope most.
In his allocution to the cardinals before the rites that actually made them cardinals, the Pope spoke the 'mundanization' of the Church, and to the logic of power pursued by some of her members. A logic that is directly anti-evangelical.
Thus he told the new cardinals that, following the example of Christ, they are called on "to serve the Church with love and vigor, with the limpidity and wisdom of teachers, with the energy and firmness of pastors, with the fidelity and courage of martyrs".
Then, commenting on the account of St. Mark regarding the request made to Jesus by the sons of Zebedee, James and John, about sitting next to him in his glory, to the right and left of him, dBenedict XVI quoted the words of Jesus: "You do not know what you are asking".
"James and John, with their request, showed that they did not yet understand the logic of life that ought to characterize the disciple, in his spirit and in his actions". But he pointed out that such erroneous logic did not just dwell in James and John, but "according to the Evangelist, it contaminated even 'the other ten' apostles, who "started to be indignant with James and John. They were indignant because it is not easy to enter into the logic of the Gospel, and to leave that of power and glory".
The episode narrated by St. Mark (cf Mk 16,37-45) ends with the admonition to all his disciples that "they may be servants" and 'slave to all'. An unequivocal admonition on the day of the consistory. To stigmatize an evil that has once again taken grip of the Church.
"Dominion and service, egoism and altruism, possession and gift, self-interest and gratuitousness - these profoundly contrasting approaches have confronted each other in every age and place", the Pope concluded.
"There is no doubt about the path chosen by Jesus. He does not merely indicate it with words to the disciples of then and today, but he lives it in his own flesh. He explains, in fact, 'For the Son of man also came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many' (Mk 10,45).
"These words shed light on today's public Consistory with a particular intensity. They resound in the depths of the soul and represent an invitation and a reminder, a commission and an encouragement, especially for you".
The Pope calls on the Curia in general and to the various internal factions to stop their infighting. One doubts that his message will be heard at all.
Extending this admonition to pastors to the entire Church, on his homily of February 19, feats of the Chair of St. Peter, the Pope recalled:
Everything in the Church rests upon faith: the sacraments, the liturgy, evangelization, charity. Likewise the law and the Church's authority rest upon faith. The Church is not self-regulating, she does not determine her own structure but receives it from the Word of God, to which she listens in faith as she seeks to understand it and to live it.
The Fathers of the Church fulfill the function of guaranteeing fidelity to Sacred Scripture. They ensure that the Church receives reliable and solid exegesis, capable of forming within the Chair of Peter a stable and consistent whole.
The Sacred Scriptures, authoritatively interpreted in the Magisterium in the light of the Fathers, shed light upon the Church's journey through time, providing her with a stable foundation amid the vicissitudes of history.
Summarizing symbolically the various elements of the Chair of Peter, and looking at the ensemble of the Bernini Altar of the Chair, the Pope underscored the simultaneous presence of a twofold = ascending and descending.
This is the reciprocity between faith and love. The Chair is placed in a prominent position in this place, because this is where Saint Peter’s tomb is located, but this too tends towards the love of God. Indeed, faith is oriented towards love. A selfish faith would be an unreal faith.
Whoever believes in Jesus Christ and enters into the dynamic of love that finds its source in the Eucharist, discovers true joy and becomes capable in turn of living according to the logic this gift. T
True faith is illumined by love and leads towards love, leads on high, just as the altar of the Chair points upwards towards the luminous window, the glory of the Holy Spirit, which constitutes the true focus for the pilgrim’s gaze as he crosses the threshold of the Vatican Basilica. [How I agree so passionately! From the first time I ever entered St. Peter's Basilica, I always thought that that alabaster window was its most compelling feature.]
"Pray that I may be able to keep my hand on the tiller with gentle firmness". This was Benedict XVI's response to the speculation about his possible resignation.
He knows how this debate over the resignation of a Pope, occasionally aired by the media, can in fact weaken the exercise of the Papal role, since he had experienced this as an involuntary protagonist alongside John Paul II.
For now, resignation is out of the question. His health allows him to govern the Church fully even if he is about to turn 85. But his response was not - as John Paul II's was in 2003 - inherent to his state of health, but rather to the route and handling of the ship of the Church. That 'gentle firmness' says everything about his will to exercise pastoral direction and governance of the Church.
[2013 P.S. In 2012, I did not find the paragraphs above ominous or even cautionary in any way. I lived in the blissful cocoon I had built that Benedict would live as long as Leo XIII, if not longer, and would look older and obviously, less physically fit, but I never imagined how fast physical deterioration can take place in persons over 80.]
And here, the writer builds up to a wonderful conclusion that synthesizes the vision of Benedict XVI:
It is not accidental that he has placed before himself and the universal Church a demanding biennial on the symbolic and doctrinal levels: the Year of Faith which will open in October on the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, and will conclude towards the end of 2013.
It will be, in fact, a new Great Jubilee [marked by the Church in 2000 to celebrate the first 2000 years of Christianity]. This Conciliar Jubilee configures itself symbolically as a landing stage in his Pontificate.
All the points of reform in his Pontificate coalesce around the Year of Faith: a new season of evangelization, reinforced by a spiritual renewal to clean out all behavior that constitutes a continual counter-testimony to the message of the Gospel.
Nor was it accidental that at the pre-consistory assembly of the College of Cardinals on February 17, the Pope asked incoming Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, and president of the US bishops' conference, to introduce the subject of New Evangelization, and on Mons. Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization, to present the initiatives programmed at various levels of the Church during the Year of Faith.
In this, the Pope calls on the universal Church to make an examination of conscience on the reception thus far of the teachings from the Second Vatican Council according to that hermeneutic of continuity that he has so often cited.
Along this line, Benedict XVI hopes to bring the Church out of the ruts of scandal and internal power conflicts.
Along this line, he hopes to lead the Church to a new season of faithful witness. It is a plan strongly characterized by the personal vision of the theologian Pope but which remains, at the same time, quite open. [Open to what? To tactical adjustments, perhaps, but not to strategic or substantial change!]
In 2013, two days before the 2013 Conclave opened, I wroe this to consolidate in my own mind the literally gruesome nature of the media cross that Joseph Ratzinger Benedict XVI has had to bear since he came to Rome in 1982 and became the lightning rod for all the grudges of the world against the Catholic Church.
I am re-posting it, not out of self-indulgence, but because the it continues to be resoundingly valid about the overall media attitude towards him, and because it contrasts so glaringly with the glowing superlatives that have been heaped on his successor almost from the first moment that he faced the world as Pope.
The operative dynamic for this was obvious: 1) Compared to Joseph Ratzinger whom they had freely demonized for almost a quarter-century before he became Pope, they knew virtually nothing about the new Pope, so he was a tabula rasa on which they were free to write anything they pleased, especially because 2) it was the platinum opportunity for them to be able to finally 'show up' Benedict XVI as the polar opposite, in their minds, to all the virtues and excellencies of a new Pope who was instantly the paragon of all virtues and excellences.]/DIM]
All the criticism by media
of Benedict XVI's Pontificate
is manufactured or false
March 11, 2013
Some eight years ago, most media commentators contemplated with utter chagrin the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope. For decades their favorite whipping boy for everything they dislike about the Catholic Church, he was now her spiritual leader.
To salvage their devastated spirits, they struck back right away by saying he would be a transitional Pope at best (i.e., they didn’t expect him to live long), and that, in any case, he would never be able to ‘fill the shoes’ of the great John Paul II. As if he were nothing but a midget compared to a giant.
He did not need to fill anyone’s shoes because his own shoes were uniquely exceptional. He had a pre-papal biography that is arguably unparalleled in the history of the Papacy.
He was no transitional Pope because even if he ‘reigned’ less than a third of the time that his predecessor did, he accomplished quite a lot in less than eight years. As a head-to-head comparison with the first eight years of his predecessors in modern times would show. He may not have called an ecumenical council as John XXIII did, or helped bring about the collapse of Communism, as John Paul II did, but those are unique events that cannot be created spontaneously.
Meanwhile, he quickly stamped his own gentle and joyful style on his Pontificate, amplified in untold ways by the clarity of his teaching and the power of his quiet personal witness to which he did not call attention at all or need to.
After he announced his renunciation of the Pontificate, not one of those detractors has dared go back to dismissing him as a transitional Pope. Not one now says he was unworthy at all to have followed the great John Paul II. And even those who called him a reactionary obscurantist have had to admit that his decision to give up the Papacy was truly revolutionary and radical.
But instead of acknowledging his achievements, they have taken the insidious tack of presenting his Pontificate as if it were the alpha and omega of everything that’s wrong with the Church, or that the major problems the Church has to face in the world are exclusive to his Pontificate alone.
Even so, those who had been consistent in their admiration and adherence to him have not hesitated to call him a great Pope and have been doing so since after his first two to three years as Pope.
My intention here is not to review the achievements and attributes that make him great in every sense of the word - they are obvious to those who love him, and they deserve better than the cursory comments I can make – but to point out how not even his worst critics can come up with anything substantial to fault him with.
My starting point is the AP’s pre-conclave story on March 11 (see earlier post) which echoes Marco Politi’s brief list of Benedict’s supposed ‘failures’.
To begin with, the fresh furor that is whipped up at will by the media over abusive priests and permissive bishops - for cases that had mostly taken place decades before Benedict became Pope. This issue had been thoroughly worked over in 2000-2002, but was revived to peak intensity in 2009-2010, it seems with the sole purpose of getting Benedict XVI to resign out of shame. MSM’s biggest guns in the US and Germany huffed and puffed to find anything in his past that they could defile him with but found nothing.
You'd think from the continual harping in the media that only Catholic priests had ever been guilty of sex crimes against children, that all Catholic priests were sex predators, and that the Church, and especially Benedict XVI, had not done anything to redress a past in which such shameless deeds took place and were tolerated and/or covered up. But on this front, Benedict acted in a way his sainted predecessor did not, and everyone knows it. The sex-abuse scandals attributed to him patently constitute a false charge.
Then, consider the mediagenic and media-generated false controversies like Regensburg and the Williamson case - which were pumped up far beyond the actual significance of the almost trivial details on which MSM (and the public opinion they shape willy nilly) chose to focus to the exclusion of everything else. But which did notimpede Benedict from proceeding to build bridges to Islam, to the Jews and to non-believers. In concrete ways that were visible to everyone.
And finally, 'Vatileaks' - the most over-hyped petty felony in history, more than Watergate which had been a case of inept housebreaking into rival party headquarters raised to epic proportions by an unnecessary and stupid cover-up.
Here we had rank thievery of private documents by the Pope's own valet. He may have been acting on behalf of still unnamed others, but he himself was on a monomaniacal mission of his own - 'to save the Church' from a Pope he considered uninformed, and from everything and everyone in the Vatican whom he sanctimoniously considered 'evil and corrupt' with the shining exception of himself! Yet MSM gladly used his line as if it were gospel truth, without looking for any substantiation at all of that generic accusation.
The media treated this episode as if they were covering the crime of the century - even if the stolen documents showed nothing negative about Benedict XVI himself, nor any outrageous scandal in the Church, nor any previously unreported power games in the Curia. There was not even a show attempt by the media to investigate any lead that might yield a genuine expose of the much-bandied 'evil and corruption' in the Vatican.
Moreover, Vatileaks provided the cue for open season by all and sundry to eviscerate 'the Curia' as if it were a single amorphous monstrous organism that is the Church's heart of darkness. And so the Curia has become the scapegoat of this Conclave, the villain of villains in a vile and thoroughly villainous Vatican.
When someone I have respected and admired a great deal like Mons. Charles Chaput - whom I had secretly thought would make the ideal first North American Pope - tells an Italian newspaper that the next Pope "should clean the Vatican bureaucracy from the ground up (as) a pressing task that would require an energy that Benedict XVI could no longer provide", then I truly despair.
If the media meme can get to someone as intelligent and perceptive as Archbishop Chaput, no wonder the whole world is ready to toss the Church into the dustbin of history. Is it a surprise then when a Catholic anchor like Bill O'Reilly, whose following is astronomical, declares ex cathedra that "the Church has really damaged itself with the sex abuse scandals that I do not see how it can ever repair the damage"?
Although he ought to be better informed, but is not in this case, he is speaking for the many who consider that a few rotten apples in a silo full of fruit means that everything else is tainted and spoiled beyond salvage and must be condemned.
And there is the sideshow of IOR, rightly criticized for its lack of transparency for most of its history. But who was it who, for the first time in Vatican history, decreed that all Vatican offices should follow minimum standards of transparency and be subject to a Financial Information Authority? Who first sought to bring IOR in line with commercial banks that are certified for efficient financial controls by an international authority?
Benedict XVI decreed financial transparency at the Vatican in the same way that he sought zero tolerance for abuses committed by priests and dismissed bishops shown to have failed to apply canon law to erring priests or even to have covered up for them.
But MSM is blind to anything clean and shining, at least where JR-B16 was and is concerned - and can only see what is sordid and sinister, because bad news is news, and good news is no news. Meanwhile, their current meme for the Ratzinger Pontificate is 'evil and corruption, upheaval and uncertainty' without an objective basis, but only because that is what they choose to tell the world about the Church. Without a single good word.
As I said in my comments on Marco Politi's 'making nice' after years of Benedict-bashing, if he could only mention the few 'topics' that he does, and cited above, as the major criticisms of Benedict XVI's Pontificate, then we are talking of manufactured crises (Regensburg, Williamson and Vatileaks), or of conditions left to fester for decades without any redress (abusive priests and IOR) until Benedict XVI took a hand, or conditions endemic to any bureaucracy (‘the Curia’).
No one can name a major problem ‘caused’ directly by Benedict XVI or his administrators. But certainly a major problem for the Church now is the widespread perception created by MSM and the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ that the above-mentioned problems are genuine crises that have 'rocked and damaged' the Church – even those that have been addressed well and positively, such as priestly perversions and financial opacity.
They have established a black myth about the Church that is as pernicious and dishonest – and unfortunately as devastatingly effective - as that which Soviet propagandists constructed around Pius XII.
My only consolation is that those who appreciate Benedict XVI for who he is and what he has accomplished are not just a few scattered voices among those who write the chronicles which future historians will use as sources to report on his Pontificate.
Whatever judgment secular historians make of Benedict XVI's Pontificate, Church history will get it right. Especially when it concerns the Pontificate of a potential and future Doctor of the Church.
As a sort of complement to the above, here is an account by a French priest who lived in Rome at the time of the 2005 Conclave - and his reaction to Benedict XVI's election, and how he had been conditioned by what he had read in the media about Cardinal Ratzinger. From the thread 'THE EXPERIENCE OF APRIL 19, 2005' in the PAPA RATZINGER FORUM. The article appeared in the June 2005 issue of “Feu et Lumiere”, a monthly Catholic magazine in France.
Joseph Ratzinger:
His heart was 'Christified'
during two decades of calumny
while he was Prefect of CDF
Translated from
Feu et Lumiere
Issue of June 2005
Editor's Note: Many things have been said about Benedict XVI since his election. It seemed important to us to allow our readers to make their own judgment. Father Ide, who lives in Rome, tells us how he experienced the event and the immense hope that fills his heart.
I think I will remember all my life the moment when Benedict XVI was elected. I was in my office which overlooks St. Peter’s Square. It was around 4:30 p.m. I had to make a long-distance call, and the operator said:”We have a new Pope!” -“No!”- “Yes!”…Well in that case, my call could wait…
I looked out the window. The police were clearing the sagrato, the space right in front of the entrance to St. Peter’s, where important celebrations take place. The crowd was swelling fast. Then, the bells of St. Peter’s started ringing, driving away all my doubts. After 4 ballots and within less than 24 hours, a new Pope had been chosen. The Piazza filled up with unprecedented speed: businessmen, familes, children, all Rome seemed to arrive, running to St. Peter's.
16:40 The window on the Loggia of Benedictions had hardly started to open when a cry of joy ran through the crowd.
What followed, you have all seen. First, we found out who the new Pope is – “Josephum…Ratzinger”. And then the name he had chosen, “Benedictus XVI”.
Nevertheless, I felt myself oddly ambivalent. On the one hand, I thought, “How well-prepared this new Pope is!” On the other hand, I could not bring myself to rejoice. For me, Cardinal Ratzinger was and could only be the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, chosen by John Paul II to help him guard the treasury of the Faith, though with an incomparable openness to doctrinal debate.
I also remembered some opinions that had been reported of his years as Archbishop of Munich: that he was more a doctor rather than a pastor. But most of all, I imagined all the negative reactions that would come and I was saddened in advance.
Unfortunately, I was not wrong. The same evening, the false judgments, the caricatures, the unfair criticisms started to air. We have since heard everything said against him, including the unimaginable and the unsupportable. But these criticisms require our discernment, because they mask a diversity of different internal attitudes towards Joseph Ratzinger.
At one extreme, we find a hatred that is destructive and lying, that dares to say Benedict XVI had colluded with Nazism, a charge that amounts to the most inadmissible calumny. In his admirable autobiography, which has been translated in French, Ratzinger tells how at age 17, he refused, despite the jeers of his friends, to join the SS militia by affirming that he planned to become a Catholic priest.
The more moderate feed their anger by trite arguments that “he is too conservative.” Behind all this misinformed and sectarian anger, one senses fear.
One person told me: “I love the Church. I loved John Paul II. I did not have any a priori objections to Benedict XVI as I did not know anything about him. On the contrary, when I saw his face on television, I liked him at first sight. But afterwards, all that I have heard of him makes me afraid that the Church will lose the beautiful openness that his predecessor had brought to it.” We then talked about the new Pope’s personality, and I could see confidence gradually replacing my friend’s fear.
But there is also sadness. We need some time to mourn John Paul II and to fully welcome his successor without comparing them. The Vicar of Christ is not Christ, and if Benedict XVI does not have all the qualities of John Paul, the reverse is equally true.
Some anecdotes often reveal the man far more than long discourses. For instance, a group of American pilgrims now recall that one day, at St. Peter’s Square, they asked a priest to take their pictures. He did so, gladly, and they asked him to pose with them. Imagine their surprise to see that the obliging priest in the picture is now the Pope!
After the Pope’s inaugural Mass, a simple man, who says he barely knows how to write, said wondrously: “I understood everything he said in his homily. And yet, it lasted all of 35 minutes.”
A theologian on the prestigious International Theologic Commission, of which Cardinal Ratzinger was president [ex-officio, as CDF Prefect], recalls: “It often happened that we would lose ourselves in endless debates that were increasingly complex. After listening, the Cardinal had his say, offering his point of view which, almost always, reconciled opposing views, and even better, clarified them.”
And someone told me: “When the time comes that the world will say goodbye to Ratzinger, the high and the mighty will be surprised to see they will be surrounded by beggars and hobos, those whom the Cardinal greeted each day when he met them on the street, stopping to exchange a few words and to hand them alms.”
How better to describe the man’s simplicity, his concern for the poorest, his openness, his exceptional intelligence? These are qualities that the faithful began to discover in the first few days of his Papacy. But they were always there, even when he was a cardinal.
There are those who are concerned about his “intransigence.” But they mistake his sense (and defense) of the truth for intransigence. Today, to speak of love and solidarity and compassion will elicit only unanimity. But some contrast what they take to be all-tolerant love with a truth they consider to be “exclusive”. But isn’t truth the greatest good needed by the soul? Benedict XVI, who in his inaugural homily recalled at length the significance of the pallium, does not separate love and truth.
There are those who are unhappy about his “conservatism.” But didn’t Christ himself say that "not the smallest letter…will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished”(Mt 5, 18)? And who will dare to say that Christ is “conservative”?
There are those who are concerned about his stand in matters of ecumenism and inter-religious dialog. It is to forget that Ratzinger worked alongside Protestant theology faculties during his university career, that he sent his first Papal letter to the Jewish community in Rome, that he speaks modern Greek fluently, that he is a friend of the Patriarch of Moscow, that in all the liturgical celebrations since the death of John-Paul, the Vatican has allowed [to use John Paul’s metaphor] both lungs of the Church, the East and the West, to breathe freely.
I think hope will prevail over any fears if we adopt a resolutely theological attitude towards the election process itself at the Conclave. First, it required a two-thirds majority. And it required that each cardinal, before placing his ballot into the urn, pronounce the following oath: “I take as my witness Christ who will judge me, that I cast my vote for the person who I judge should be elected.”
Benedict was elected by a great majority of his brother cardinals from all over the world. The fact was more evident and significant because the process was quite short.
Afterwards, a passage from his homily on April 24 gave me a sense of joyous hope about the new Pope: “I do not need to present a program of government…My true program of government is not do my will, not to pursue my ideas, but, with the whole Church, to listen to the word and the will of the Lord and to let myself be guided by him in such a way that it will be God himself who will guide the Church at this hour in our history.”
A man endowed with all the gifts he has, who puts himself entirely in the hands of God – that is a winning formula! After more than 20 years of testing and calumnies of all sorts that have come his way, he has learned to pardon unconditionally. A gentle and humble man, his heart was “Christified” in his previous office, preparing him in turn for his new and crushing mission as Vicar of Christ.
Finally, how can one not think that John Paul II must have prayed for his successor, and prayed in particular for this successor? Benedict has said he feels his predecessor’s hand holding him firmly by the hand. From the day after he was elected, my heart has felt much lighter – now it is in a state of thanksgiving and deep confidence.
The past has proven that our predictions often go wrong. Who would have thought that John XXIII, whom everyone said would simply be a “transitional” Pope, would call the Second Vatican Council?
Moreover, the history of the past two centuries shows that the Church has often been blessed with Popes who have led incontestably saintly lives.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/03/2015 16:15]