BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI

In contrast to the 'deafening silence' this year - understandable by the criteria of those who lose all interest in an 'old model' (in this case version 265.0 of the Successor of Peter) the moment there is a new version - regarding the eighth anniversary of Benedict XVI's election as Pope, I am re-posting a number of the media assessments made last year, starting with the viewpoints of Reuters and AP. Though Reuters's Pulella did underscore Benedict XVi's 'frailty' and seeming health problems, I think it is safe to say that very few thought at the time that it would be the last anniversary he would mark as Pope.

I was certainly among those who bristled most at any suggestion that he would resign as Pope, not because I did not think he was capable of doing that, but because I blithely assumed that he would continue to be able to soldier on, physically (often imagining he would live on as Pope as long as Leo XIII did). Forgetting, of course, that a sharp physical decline in his 80s was already presaged by the experience of his brother Georg, three years older than he, and always the more robust one of the two, who nonetheless began to exhibit this age=induced physical decline at an age at least five years earlier than Benedict XVI was at the time he stepped down from the Papacy.... Anyway, the following posts and the running comments I made at the time capture the media climate around Benedict XVI this time last year.




I have been dreading the inevitable analysis-commentary pieces from the major news agencies on the Pope's milestones this week because one could only be certain of encountering a string of platitudes rehashing and recycling all the prejudices and idee-fixe criticisms they have of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. And sure enough, the first one to come along is Reuters's 'trouble-making' chief Vatican correspondent. With a headline that cues us to what MSM's drumbeat will be this week - they all agree on their herd approach but making it appear that the ideas are not theirs.

Name me an 85-year-old man or woman who does not show signs of frailty, and what succession talk? I suspect MSM are using 'resignation' as a euphemism for 'death', because they're really not watching out for his resignation, are they? They have the indecency to show that they can't wait to get on and think about the next Pope. And note that not once in the entire lengthy piece does Pullella even pay lip service to wishing Benedict more years!... And of course, no reference, no matter how fleeting, to anything he has achieved in seven years, just everything his critics think he did wrong!

Pope marks milestones amid signs
of frailty and succession talk
By Philip Pullella


VATICAN CITY, April 15 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict marks two milestones this week and while his health appears stable, signs of frailty have again prompted speculation over whether he will be the first Pontiff in seven centuries to resign.

Benedict, one of the oldest Popes in history, turns 85 on Monday, and on Thursday he marks the seventh anniversary of his election as successor to the immensely popular John Paul II. [Actually, he is the Successor to Peter, Mr. Pulella, and what does his predecessor's 'immense' popularity have to do with him, who is immensely popular himself! I am still awaiting the first truthful journalist who will not fear to say that "Benedict XVI is at least as popular as John Paul II was", because after all, he proved in the first few months of his Pontificate, that he was drawing greater crowds to the Vatican. Let's not even mention Mexico, where all the MSM expected the Mexicans to turn away in droves!]

Speaking to pilgrims and tourists in St Peter's Square on Sunday, he noted Thursday's anniversary and asked for prayers "so that the Lord may give me the strength to carry out the mission he has entrusted to me".

Benedict is already older than John Paul was when he died in 2005 and is now the oldest reigning pope since Leo XIII, who died aged 93 in 1903 after reigning for 25 years.

"His health at 85 is better than John Paul's was at 75," said one high-ranking Vatican official who reports to the Pope regularly. "He is a very methodical man. He looks after himself and feels that he still has much to do," the official said.

The Vatican has announced that he will visit Lebanon in September and he may go to Brazil in 2013.

"I'm old but I can still carry out my duties," the pope told Fidel Castro during his trip to Cuba last month.

Still, Benedict is increasingly showing signs of frailty and fatigue, signs that are being watched carefully for their possible effect on the future of the 1.2 billion member Roman Catholic Church.

When he left for Mexico and Cuba, he used a cane at the airport for the first time in public, though sources say he has been using it in private for some time.

Last year, to conserve his strength, he began using a mobile platform instead of walking up the aisle of St Peter's Basilica.

The Vatican says it is to spare him fatigue and there is no concern about his overall health. His brother has said Benedict suffered two mild strokes before his election in 2005 and he reportedly suffers from high blood pressure and arthritis. [So do at least 70% of men his age!]

Where Benedict differs from his predecessors is that he is the only Pope in living memory to discuss publicly the possibility of resignation, though others have done so privately.

In a book in 2010, Benedict said he would not hesitate to become the first Pontiff to resign willingly in more than 700 years if he felt no longer able, "physically, psychologically and spiritually" to run the Catholic Church.

"Those of us who are over 75 are not allowed to run even a small diocese, and cardinals over 80 are not allowed to elect a Pope. I can understand why one day the Pope might say 'even I can't do my job any more,'" said retired Archbishop Luigi Bettazzi of the north Italian city of Ivrea.

"I wish him a long life and lasting lucidity but I think that if the moment arrives when he sees that things are changing, I think he has the courage to resign," Bettazzi told Italian television on Saturday.

The last Pope to resign willingly was Celestine V in 1294 after reigning for only five months. Gregory XII reluctantly abdicated in 1415 to end a dispute with a rival claimant to the papacy.

Every papal birthday or anniversary sparks talk of succession but there is no clear front runner to succeed Benedict, who has now appointed more than half the cardinals who will choose a new Pope from among their ranks. Most are Europeans.

Since his election on April 19, 2005, succeeding one of history's most popular pontiffs, Benedict has been hailed as a hero by conservative Catholics and viewed with suspicion by liberals.

Elected when he was 78 - 20 years older than John Paul was when he was elected - he has ruled over a slower-paced, more cerebral and less impulsive Vatican.

While conservatives have cheered him for trying to reaffirm traditional Catholic identity, his critics accuse him of turning back the clock on reforms by nearly half a century and hurting dialogue with Muslims, Jews and other Christians. [If Pullela mentions criticisms, he should at least substantiate them - but he can't because they are false. Hurting dialog with other religions? No one has been more effective in dialog with them - Muslims, Jews, Anglicans, Lutherans - because he is not content with ritual pleasantries but with substantive talk and action on what people of faith can do together to help solve humanity's pressing problems.]

He also has made a series of missteps that angered Jews and Muslims and lowered his popularity among Catholics themselves. [Again, taking the easy way out and not citing what these supposed 'missteps' - which, from a seven-year familiarity now with the ways of MSM, would be identical to the 'hurting dialog' earlier referred to!]

Before he was elected Pope, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was known by such critical epithets as "God's rottweiler" because of his stern stand on theological issues. [It was never his personal positions he was defending, but the positions of the Church through its 2000-year history, which as an obedient Catholic, are also his positions. Upholding and defending these positions was also his primary duty as head of the CDF!]

A quiet, professorial type who relaxes by playing the piano, the first German Pope for some 1,000 years and the second non-Italian in a row has managed to show the world the gentle side of the man who was the Vatican's chief doctrinal enforcer for nearly a quarter of a century.

But two weeks ago he showed his resolve again, warning rebellious priests that he would not tolerate disobedience on fundamental teachings such as compulsory celibacy and a ban on female priests. [Pullella obviously thinks that gentleness is an absence of resolve!]

His papacy has been hounded most by the child sex abuse scandals. [And who has been leading the pack of hounds but the media, setting off firecrackers in the tails of assorted mongrels like faux victims' advocate groups and Vatican-baiting lawyers??] He has apologized to victims several times for the criminal behavior of priests years before his election but victims' groups say he has still not done enough to make bishops accountable. [Once again, a sweeping statement to which Pullella does not bother to even cite any facts to substantiate the charge.]


The AP version is benign in comparison. While its themes are still the Pope's physical status at 85 and the possibility of resignation, it is surprisingly even-handed, and although it does not bother to say anything of his achievements thus far as Pope, neither does it indulge in the usual fault-finding and miraculously does not contain the words 'sex abuse scandal' or 'pedophilia' at all!

Pope seeks prayers for strength
ahead of 7th anniversary
By NICOLE WINFIELD


VATICAN CITY, April 15 (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI prayed Sunday for the strength to carry on as he marks two major milestones this week: his 85th birthday and the seventh anniversary of his election to the papacy.

The comments, while innocuous, were the clearest sign yet that Benedict has no intention of resigning anytime soon despite his age and increasing frailty.

"Next Thursday, on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of my election to the See of Peter, I ask for your prayers, so that the Lord gives me the strength to fulfill the mission he entrusted to me," he said in French to thousands of people in St. Peter's Square.

Benedict has slowed down recently - he was seen in public for the first time using a cane when he boarded his plane for Mexico last month. During the long, six-day trip to Mexico and Cuba, he at times looked exhausted. He looked similarly tired during the busy Holy Week services that greeted him upon his return to Rome.

But Benedict's health is remarkably strong for someone his age. He has never canceled a planned event due to illness and suffers from no known chronic illnesses. Few men his age go to work every day, run a 1-billion strong church, write books, deliver speeches and meet with visiting heads of state.

And Benedict has some very pressing issues on his agenda. The Vatican is expected to receive word soon from a breakaway group of traditionalist Catholics on whether they will accept the Holy See's terms for reconciliation.

The group, the Society of St. Pius X, opposes some of the core teachings of the Second Vatican Council, particularly its outreach to Jews. Benedict, who is not unsympathetic to some of their concerns, has worked since the start of his pontificate to try to bring them back under Rome's wing out of fear that they are essentially creating a parallel church.

On the other side of the spectrum are hundreds of dissident priests who are making their voices heard in Europe: Priest movements in Austria and Ireland are calling for a relaxation of the celibacy requirement for priests and for the church to ordain women - two things the Vatican has ruled out.

Benedict appeared so concerned by the Austrian initiative in particular that he dedicated much of his Holy Thursday homily to reminding its members that he had no authority whatsoever to allow women priests since an all-male priesthood was an "irrevocable" Church teaching.

Other big events on the Pope's agenda include a trip to Lebanon in September, a meeting of the world's bishops in Rome the following month, and farther ahead, World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 2013.

While he was in Cuba last month meeting with Fidel Castro, Benedict was asked by the 85-year-old retired Cuban president how he can manage to keep doing his job. Castro noted that at his age, he spends his time reading and reflecting.

"I am old but I still manage to carry out my duty," Benedict told him, according to a Vatican spokesman.

That said, Benedict has greatly cut back his schedule. And his birthday Monday will be a rather small-scale affair: His older
brother Monsignor Georg Ratzinger flew in from Germany over the weekend, and Benedict will meet with the governor of his native Bavaria and some Bavarian bishops in town who want to wish him well.

Benedict himself asked to keep the birthday celebrations low-key, his secretary Monsignor Georg Gaenswein told Italian weekly Gente. "Just a family party. As he requested: 'Please I don't want any big celebrations,'" Gaenswein quoted the Pope as telling his aides.

Popes are allowed to resign; Church law specifies only that the resignation be "freely made and properly manifested." Only a handful have done so, however. The last one was Pope Gregory XII, who stepped down in 1415 in a deal to end the Great Western Schism among competing papal claimants.

Benedict himself raised the possibility of resigning if he were simply too old or sick to continue when he was interviewed for the book Light of the World, which was released in November 2010.

"If a Pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right, and under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign," Benedict said.

The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger also had an intimate view of Pope John Paul II's suffering through the debilitating end of his papacy.

Benedict is now older than John Paul when he died. He was also the oldest Pope in 300 years when he was elected at age 78 in 2005, and will soon be one of only a handful of popes over the past half-millennia to reign past age 85.

But if his requests for prayers to carry on his mission are any indication, a resignation is unlikely any time soon. [Because the resignation hypothesis was always a media-manufactured issue, to begin with! In any case - see, Nicole? It is possible to write about Benedict XVI withput tacking on the AP codicil on sex abuses by priests!]

Thankfully, the media outlets appeared to have picked up the AP story overwhelmingly compared to Reuters, if one goes by the Daylife headline summaries so far, the following being one of three such pages...Actually, AP does have many more subscriber outlets than Reuters.


I hope no one other than me was stupid enough to look into what DeutscheWelle - Germany's state radio-TV broadcasting network - would say about the German Pope on this occasion. I have rarely ever cited DW, because from the start, its reporting and commentary on Benedict XVI was obviously and markedly from a liberal bias that has no scruples about misrepresenting facts to advance the liberal cause.

In many ways, DW is worse than America's NPR or the BBC in this respect. Not the least because you would expect from the Germans "that initial goodwill without which there can be no understanding", as the Holy Father writes in his Foreword to Jesus of Nazareth. Sorry to inflict this piece, but this is the kind of asymmetric warfare masquerading as news that is habitually waged against Benedict XVI, day in and day out, in the liberal secular MSM, regardless of nationality....

At 85, Pope Benedict XVI
stays his course
by Antje Dechert
from the English service of

April 15, 2012

As the world celebrates his 85th birthday, Pope Benedict XVI holds fast to his principles. He continues to stand for tradition over reform - whether you like it or not.

"A bit of peace and quiet, God's blessing and health:" according to Georg Ratzinger, that's all his brother, Pope Benedict XVI, wants for his 85th birthday.

It's unlikely, however, that he'll get peace and quiet, as visitors from all over the world will be flocking to the Vatican.

A tiring birthday schedule [What birthday schedule? he will be meeting various groups from Bavaria - that's all on his public calendar tomorrow!] - though the Pope is in good health, as his press spokesman Federico Lombardi never tires of emphasizing.

Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger - the given name of Pope Benedict XVI - was born into a religious family on April 16, 1927 in southern Germany. He grew up in the town of Marktl am Inn in Upper Bavaria. [He was only born there and stayed until he was 3. How can the German national broadcast network get such a basic thing wrong?]

After being ordained into the priesthood and earning his doctorate in Theology, he began teaching at the universities in Bonn, Münster, Tübingen and Regensburg. He quickly rose through the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. [NO! He was a simple priest until he was 50 and then, his rise in the hierarchy began!]

In 1977, he became the archbishop of Munich and Freising. Pope John Paul II appointed him prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican, a position laden with responsibility. His task was to safeguard the official teachings of the Church.

Many were surprised when, of all people, the seemingly demure Joseph Ratzinger succeeded [he was elected!] the more charismatic Karol Wojtzyla as Pope. The election took place quickly and he was initially named a "transitional Pope."

Ratzinger nevertheless managed to win over his own die-hard critics. The headline of the biggest German tabloid, Bild, read: "We Are Pope." But how much of the initial euphoria is left after the Pope's seven years in office? [Even in Germany, that euphoria lasted a few weeks at most!]

Benedict XVI entered with a vision that encompassed many ideas. He intended to promote dialogue between Christian denominations - commonly referred to as ecumenical dialogue -and between the Catholic Church and other world religions.

The newly elected Pope didn't want to leave ecumenism at "sincere feelings." Instead, he aimed to make "concrete gestures," as he said in Latin in his first papal address.

As a Pope from the homeland of the German Reformation theologian Martin Luther, Benedict XVI wanted to end the ice age of ecumenism. This awakened hopes of possibly even celebrating Mass together and sharing communion, but this notion repeatedly ended in disappointment, the most recent example occurring during Benedict's trip to Germany in 2011.

In Erfurt, Germany, where Luther lived for many years, the Pope made clear that he was not willing to make any quick changes in the name of ecumenism. [A clear example of how liberal reporters project their own wishes to their reporting of events, with the result that they distort the news. Benedict XVI never ever proposed that celebrating Mass and the Eucharist together was a foreseeable prospect, and he said very clearly befor going to Germany, "Don't expect anything sensational". But this obstinately liberal reporter will persist in her own bullheaded perspective and blame the Pope for not acting according to her expectations! Nor does she take into account that year after year, the heads of the most important Protestant federations, including the World Council of Churches and the World Lutheran Federation make it a point to call on the Pope. And of course, she ignores the relations with the Anglican Church - and Anglicanorum coetibus - altogether!]]

In contrast, he has made progress in talks with Orthodox churches. He resumed the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue in the fall of 2006 and held a historic meeting with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I in Istanbul. [That meeting was not the significant point about relations with the Orthodox - they have met on several other occasions in Rome. But the reporter seems unaware of the most important development in this area - that the theological dialog between the Roman and Orthodox Churches has reached the point of discussing the primacy of the Bishop of Rome in a reunified Christianity!]

But despite the good will Pope Benedict XVI encountered, one controversy followed another. After finally smoothing over the waves caused by his contentious speech in Regensburg, in which he linked Islam with violence, a new scandal followed.

The Pontiff attempted to build bridges with the ultraconservative Society of Pius X. Meanwhile, his ties to Judaism and the Catholic base threatened to crumble behind him. [Good Lord! Such ado about nothing! This reporter has absolutely no sense of proportion whatsoever!]

The cause stemmed from the introduction of a new version of a Good Friday prayer, in which Christians can pray for the conversion of the Jews, a crucial test for the Pope. [And she compounds her appalling and unabashed bias with abysmal ignorance - does she even understand exactly what the Good Friday prayer is?]

As if that weren't enough, in 2009 Benedict lifted the ban on four bishops of the Society of Pius X who had been illegally ordained outside of the Church, including the Holocaust denier Richard Williamson. The storm of protest, most especially coming from Germany, revealed the chasm that had grown between himself and his base. [Have you ever heard such unfounded hyperbole? Not even John Allen goes that far!]

The most challenging scandal followed in 2010, as a wave of newly discovered abuse cases gripped Catholic organizations in Germany, then in Ireland and the US. While child abuse by Catholic priests outraged all of Germany, Benedict XVI did not rush to issue a public admission of guilt on behalf of the Church. [Will someone please stifle this moron now?]

The irony of a slow response from a Pope that had always preached zero-tolerance only further worsened the crisis. Through meeting with abuse victims and asking for their forgiveness, the Pope tried to restore honor to his Church. [This commentary gets more embarassingly crude, amateur and sophomoric by the line!]

To many, the old man behind the Vatican walls is just an out-of-touch conservative, yet Benedict has still been able to enthuse people again and again on his trips around the world, even if big crowds aren't exactly his thing.

He's a star despite himself. During most of his international visits, he is a noteworthy political presence, even in anti-papist England. He conquered the people's hearts in much the same way during his last visit to Latin America. [Gee, thanks! I am shocked you could concede that at all! But you couldn't concede the same thing about him in Germany, could you?]

Fidel Castro and his brother Raul even seemed to have been won over, too, as they agreed to recognize Good Friday as a national holiday in communist Cuba.

Joseph Ratzinger entered onto the scene as a Pope who strove to make the Church ready for the future and attractive and to steer it in a pluralistic world - no easy task for someone who insists on responding to "every possible contemporary movement" with a "clear set of beliefs." With this approach, he risks getting stuck in outdated structures. [Party line! Same-old, same-old yada-yada... You'd think he had not specifically criticized this obsession with structures rather than individual faith and true individual conversion, when he was in Germany last!]

His goal is to safeguard tradition rather than reform institutions. [A complete mis-statement that mixes up the apples of tradition with the oranges of institution! This reporter has absolutely no clue about the spiritual message of Christianity!]

This is why many Christians in Germany have left the Church. In response to issues that affect local churches, such as what should happen to the vow of celibacy or whether divorcees should be allowed to marry a second time in the Church, Rome hasn't given any answers[/ [None are so deaf as those who do not want to listen! Of course, Rome has answered again and again - NO! It's just not the answer that you liberals want to hear. Misrepresenting facts about the Church won't make her change her doctrine to suit the pick-and-choose Catholics. Just-get-up-and-go would be the best advice to them.]

But this is clear: Joseph Ratzinger is no "transitional pope." The shepherd of Rome strives to impart his own values onto the Catholic Church, whether it suits his sheep or not. [That is hands-down the dumbest statement in this litany of dumbness! The Pope trying "to impart his own values on to the Church"???? The Pope's values and teachings are the Church's, never his own. And for that, I am writing DeutscheWelle to prohibit this person from ever reporting again on the Church, and to get some editors who know something about the Church to process dumb copy like this one!]

Now for some of the good stuff in last year's media lookbacks at seven years of Benedict XVI's Pontificate...




One of only two articles I've seen so far in the Anglophone online media (outside of the news agencies) that takes appropriate notice that this week is extra-special for the Pope... And thank God it's the reliable Samuel Gregg who always manages to thnk outside the box.

Benedict XVI: God’s Revolutionary
by Samuel Gregg

April 16, 2012

“Revolution” – it’s a word that conjures up images of winter palaces being stormed and the leveling of Bastilles. But if a true revolutionary is someone who regularly turns conventional thinking upside-down, then one of the world’s most prominent status-quo challengers may well be a quietly-spoken Catholic theologian who turns 85 today.

While regularly derided by his critics as “decrepit” and “out-of-touch,” Benedict XVI continues to do what he’s done since his election as Pope seven years ago: which is to shake up not just the Catholic Church but also the world it’s called upon to evangelize.

His means of doing so doesn’t involve “occupying” anything. Instead, it is Benedict’s calm, consistent, and, above all, coherent engagement with the world of ideas that marks him out as very different from most other contemporary world leaders – religious or otherwise.

Benedict has long understood a truth that escapes many contemporary political activists: that the world’s most significant changes don’t normally begin in the arena of politics. Invariably, they start with people who labor – for better or worse – in the realm of ideas.

The scribblings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau helped make possible the French Revolution, Robespierre, and the Terror. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine Lenin and the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia without the indispensible backdrop of Karl Marx. Outside of academic legal circles, the name of the Oxford don, H.L.A. Hart, is virtually unknown. Yet few individuals more decisively enabled the West’s twentieth-century embrace of the permissive society.

Benedict’s most status quo-disrupting forays occur when he identifies the intellectual paradoxes underlying some of the dysfunctional forces operating in our time.

To those who kill in the name of religion, he points out that they scorn God’s very nature as Logos, the eternal reason which our own natural reason allows us to know.

To those who mock faith in the name of reason, Benedict observes that in doing so, they reduce reason to the merely-measurable, thereby closing the human mind to the fullness of truth accessible through the very same reason they claim to exult.

A similar method is at work in Benedict’s approach to internal Church issues. Take, for instance, Benedict’s recent polite but pointed critique of a group of 300 Austrian priests who issued a call for disobedience concerning the now drearily-familiar shopping-list of subjects that irk dissenting Catholics.

Simply by posing questions, the Pope demonstrated the obvious. Do they, he asked, seek authentic renewal? Or do we “merely sense a desperate push to do something to change the Church in accordance with one’s own preferences and ideas?”

Beyond the specifics of the Austrian case, Benedict was making a point that all Catholics, not simply dissenters, sometimes forget. The Church is not in fact “ours.” Rather, it is Christ’s Church. It is not therefore just another human institution to be changed according to human whim.

That in turn reminds us that Christianity is not actually about me, myself, and I. Rather, it is centered on Christ and our need to grow closer to Him. Certainly the Church always needs reform – but reform in the direction of holiness, not mere accommodation to secularism’s bar-lowering expectations.

So has all this attention by Benedict to the world of ideas come at a cost? Even among his admirers, one occasionally hears the criticism that Benedict focuses too much on writing and not enough on governing.

But perhaps Benedict writes and writes because he knows that for the Pope to write is to participate in the arena of universal public conversation, thereby putting the truths of the Catholic faith precisely where they should be.

For this, he’s widely admired not just by Catholics but also countless Orthodox and Evangelical Christians, and even the occasional “smiling secularist.”

The Pope isn’t, however, doing this because he’s trying to please certain audiences. Like all true revolutionaries, Benedict is remarkably single-minded. Throughout his pontificate, he’s relentlessly endeavored to do what many of the immediate post-Vatican II generation of bishops, priests, religious, and theologians manifestly failed to do – which is to place us before the person of Jesus the Nazarene and the minds and lives of the doctors and saints of His Church, in order to help us recall the Christian’s true vocation in this world.

As the never-named whiskey priest in Graham Greene’s 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory, realizes the night before his execution, the goal of Christian life isn’t ultimately earthly justice, human rights, or this or that cause.

Instead the seedy alcoholic who’s broken all his vows discovers that Christianity is about something else: “He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted – to be a saint.”

Sanctity isn’t a word you hear very much from dissenters. After all, if you spend much of your time trying to read out of Scripture all those things that make Jesus the Christ, or seeking to collapse Christian ethics into consequentialist incoherence, you’re unlikely to be encouraging people to pursue lives of heroic virtue.

Yet even among faithful Catholics, there’s often the sense that sanctity is for other people: that our everyday failures to follow Christ mean that holiness is somehow beyond us.

That, however, is most decidedly not Benedict’s view. For him, sanctity is what it’s all about, no matter how many times we fall on the way. Moreover, it’s only sanctity, Benedict believes, which produces that breath of fearless and indestructible goodness that truly changes the world.

Never did Benedict make this point so directly than when he spoke these words during an all-night prayer-vigil for thousands of young people at World Youth Day in Cologne, 2005:

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The saints are . . . the true reformers. . . . Only from the saints, only from God does true revolution come . . . It is not ideologies that save the world, but only a return to the living God, our Creator, the guarantor of our freedom, the guarantor of what is really good and true. True revolution consists in simply turning to God who is the measure of what is right and who at the same time is everlasting love. And what could ever save us apart from love?

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Yes, God is Love. The Logos is Caritas – there is no more revolutionary message than that.


The other article is on Mercator.net, where Mr. Gregg's articles usually appear. But it's the editor himself who has taken the floor:

Benedict XVI still soldiering on:
His analysis of the crisis of Western culture
is outstanding in its depth and clarity.
by Michael Cook

April 16, 2012

Benedict XVI celebrates his 85th birthday today. This makes the sovereign of the Vatican City State the eighth oldest world leader. (Eighty-five sounds very senior indeed but he is a full five years behind the Governor-General of St Kitts and Nevis, Cuthbert Sebastian.)

Although insiders say that Benedict is slowing down, he lives at a pace which would kill younger men: a relentless succession of trips in Italy, trips overseas, daily speeches, a multitude of official visitors and the constant pressure of global attention.

And Joseph Ratzinger is still a one-man ideas factory. Since he was elected in 2005, he has written two books of his own as the theologian Joseph Ratzinger, has collaborated in a book-length interview, has written three encyclicals (more or less book-length theological position papers) and his collected addresses have been compiled into several books.

Google, which is supposed to be the premier company for fostering creativity, ought to engage him as a consultant.

You don’t have to be a Catholic, or even a Christian, to appreciate the subtlety and creativity of Ratzinger’s contribution to modern thought. Although he is not a man with a flair for spin, it seems beyond doubt his brilliant syntheses of thorny issues have given renewed clarity to the countless disputes.

It is surely his influence which accounts for a flurry of new books acknowledging the contribution of Christianity to key elements of Western thought -- from democracy to to science to human rights – written by admitted atheists! “We should call ourselves Christians if we want to maintain our liberties and preserve our civilisation,” writes Marcello Pera, an unbeliever and a former president of the Italian senate, in his most recent publication, Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians. [But Pera, a self-described 'devout atheist'. is not your typical atheist.He has co-authored two books with Cardinal Ratzinger, and Benedict XVI wrote the Preface to this new book!]

There is no denying that Western humanism is tottering. It was born in the cradle of religious belief and is grounded on the twin cornerstones of respect for reason and awe at the dignity of mankind. But – to telescope 200 years of cultural history into a few sentences – it is quavering in a crisis of self-confidence. Religion is shut up in a closet. The ambit of reason is restricted to only those things which can be touched and measured. And human dignity is being suffocated by technology.

Furthermore, the Catholic Church has still not emerged from its own crisis of self-confidence, even though Benedict’s predecessor, Karol Wojtyla, gave it a new dynamism. It is still mired in ghastly sex abuse scandals which have badly tarnished its prestige.

What is remarkable about Benedict is that without shirking the burden of purifying the Church of this “filth”, he has taken upon himself the task of exposing the cultural contradictions of rejecting Christianity.

Books have been and will be written about Benedict’s achievement. But I’m not risking anything by highlighting out the following themes.

If the ideal society is thoroughly secular, why is depression one of the leading causes of disability? Even before he became Pope, Benedict has stressed that Christianity offers a coherent answer to our search for happiness.

Joy as the secret weapon of Christianity is a theme to which he returns again and again. "Faith gives joy. When God is not there, the world becomes desolate, and everything becomes boring, and everything is completely unsatisfactory,” he said in a 1985 interview. “To that extent it can be said that the basic element of Christianity is joy. Joy not in the sense of cheap fun, which can conceal desperation in the background."

If atheism is a sign of progress, why have we trashed the environment? Few people have noticed, but ecology is a recurrent theme in Benedict’s writing. This stems not from a vague pantheism or nostalgic conservatism, but from the Biblical conviction that man is the steward of creation. A desolate environment mirrors interior desolation. As he wrote in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate:

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The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development. Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other. Herein lies a grave contradiction in our mentality and practice today: one which demeans the person, disrupts the environment and damages society.

---

If science is so convincing, why is it so difficult to agree on fundamental issues? Militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens have depicted Benedict as a superstitious dolt. This is travesty of the truth. Opening up all of reality to reason instead of keeping it locked in a cellar is a theme to which he seems to return almost every week. He told his countrymen in an address to the German Bundestag:

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Anything that is not verifiable or falsifiable, according to this understanding, does not belong to the realm of reason strictly understood. Hence ethics and religion must be assigned to the subjective field, and they remain extraneous to the realm of reason in the strict sense of the word.

Where positivist reason dominates the field to the exclusion of all else – and that is broadly the case in our public mindset – then the classical sources of knowledge for ethics and law are excluded. This is a dramatic situation which affects everyone, and on which a public debate is necessary.

---

Questioning moral relativism is fundamental to his program. He keeps reminding his listeners that if reason cannot deal with intangible issues like what is good and what is just, they will be defined by whoever is most powerful.

Do we understand democracy properly if it is used as an excuse to crush human dignity? In Benedict’s mind, democracy is a tool for defending human dignity, not for defining it. If it undermines human life, it loses its authority and becomes a tool for unscrupulous politicians.

“For the fundamental issues of law, in which the dignity of man and of humanity is at stake, the majority principle is not enough: everyone in a position of responsibility must personally seek out the criteria to be followed when framing laws,” he told the Bundestag.

If our society offers young people unprecedented opportunities for freedom, why are so many slaves to drugs, sex and consumerism? Benedict is an unlikely rock star, but he has been received rapturously by millions of young people at World Youth Days in Cologne, Sydney and Madrid. They are responding to his vision of a freedom based on truth and commitment. What Christianity offers is infinitely more attractive than gadgets and eroticism:

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“A new generation of Christians is being called to help build a world in which God’s gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished – not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed.

A new age in which love is not greedy or self-seeking, but pure, faithful and genuinely free, open to others, respectful of their dignity, seeking their good, radiating joy and beauty.

A new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deaden our souls and poison our relationships.”

---

Benedict’s crystal-clear diagnoses of our cultural ailments are beginning to make more and more sense to people who are looking for answers.

He will die without seeing a seismic shift in the culture. But he has laid the foundations for a critique of our feverish materialism which will be decisive in the decades to come. It’s hard to imagine that his successor will do a better job. What is it they say in the Vatican? Ad multos annos! More power to your elbow!

More of the good stuff, but from the Italian media...



Marco Tosatti is one of three veteran Vaticanistas reporting for the Turin-based Italian newspaper La Stampa and its trilinjgual offshoo, VATICAN INSIDER, along with Ancrea Tornielli and Giacomo Galeazzi. Here is Tosatti's assessment of the seven years of Benedict XVI's Pontificate.

Seven years as Pope:
Not a transitional Papacy
by Marco Tosatti
Translated from

April 16, 2012

I am curious in a somewhat malicious way, wondering how many of those who in April 2005 had voted for Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to become Pope thought then that seven years later, the Bavarian Pope would still be around - with his brisk walk now affected at times by problems with his right hip and knee, but still with us and evidently wanting to be.

Unfortunately, that's a question one cannot survey and for which it would be difficult to get a sincere answer. In any case, that which for many cardinals - and much of the media - was supposed to be merely a transitional papacy, as they were quick to say at the time, has been showing itself to be something else altogether.

It is a 'founding' Papacy, the work of someone who works silently but persistently - and in depth. [Tosatti does not bother to explain why this is a 'founding Papacy', as he felicitously calls it, but those of us who follow Benedict XVI know that it is so because of his return to the essentials of the faith - since the institution of the Papacy, or anything else about the Church, cannot be effective unless these essentials are made the foundation of what is done by the Church and in the name of the Church.]

How? Few know that a great part of Benedict XVI places much time and commitment into a thankless task that does not and could not attract the interest of the media but one that is fundamental for the life of the Church - and precisely so that years from now, the media will not have base and negative reasons to make much ado about its consequences.

Benedict XVI is convinced that the strength - and the weakness - of the Church lies primarily in the dioceses, the local Churches. In John Paul II's Pontificate, very often the choice of bishops was delegated to the presidents of the episcopal conferences, the nuncios and other elements of the central and local Churches.

Most of the time, the Pope, especially in the final years of his life, was limited to signing his approval for their choices, if we are to believe what has been recounted since (and which we have no reason to doubt). John Paul II delegated - he trusted his collaborators, not always successfully as history has shown us.

Benedict XVI has a different style. He studies every dossier that is submitted for the short list of three final candidates proposed to fill any diocesan vacancy. He studies their records of study, preparation and work before he decides. [And asks questions. The Pope meets once a week with the Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops for this reason - to discuss the candidates for bishop and to arrive at final decisions.]

Not infrequently he has asked to be presented with other candidates because he finds not one in the proposed list satisfactory. This is tedious work, far from attention-getting, but one for which the Church in subsequent decades must be grateful. [A bishop's appointment is lifelong, and even if they must usually retire at age 75, most bishops have at least 15-20 years of service ahead of them.]

That just happens to be the way Benedict XVI works. As it was when he was a cardinal. A 'lonely' way, certainly. But he has never been known to be a socializing person. Other than occasional visits to older German prelates and priests living in Rome, he was never known to frequent the homes of colleagues and friends, nor invite them to his.

One notes the same solitude by preference now that he is Pope. The progressive weakening of the figure of his Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, underscores this trait.

In the autumn of his life, Pius XII had Cardinals Tardini and Ottaviani, two guardian 'mastiffs' of the first order, who had his back, to help him hold up. Paul VI had Cardinal Benelli who kept the Curia and the Secretariat of State in place with an iron hand. [And John Paul II had his faithful Mons. Dsiwisz, who was more than just his private secretary, and from all accounts, Cardinals Sodano and Sandri, as well as the Polish cardinals in the Curia, to look after the routine of governance. But in addition, he had Cardinal Ratzinger not just as an adviser on important Church affairs, but as the lightning rod used by the media to deflect from the Pope all serious criticisms of the Pontificate. And that is why he was the most prominent cardinal at the time..]

But today, outside observers would be hard put to say who exactly are 'the Pope's men' other than Bertone - who unfortunately seems incapable even of reacting effectively to the many traitors within his own department who have damaged him in recent months. (And, by the way, we still have not heard any results of the supposed internal investigations into determining the leaks in the system, nor do we even know which prelates are in charge of the investigation, so it is even doubted that there is one.) [One must add to Tosatti's parenthetical that we have not heard either any results of Vatican police investigation into these leaks, yet it will soon be three months since the first 'Vatileaked' report. I find that outrageously inexplicable - this is not the Orlandi case they are supposed to solve, just an evident abuse of privileged access to information.]

In these seven years, Benedict XVI has worked steadily to carry his work forward - seeking to honor a legacy, often weighty and ambiguous, which was left to him by his prophetic predecessor, while defending himself and the Church from a number of attacks whose malevolence against the Vatican has not been seen since the Cold War, and he has tried to do this with inadequate tools and collaborators. [The inadequate tools are, presumably, the flawed Vatican media mechanisms, not the Pope's own simple, direct and transparent responses, in word and deed, to the unfair and unjustified attacks.]

Above all, to get back to the start of this reflection, he has done so with a capacity for resistance, even physical, that cannot but amaze the observer. Which brings some to think that perhaps it is because he is never alone, and in fact, works with the best of all Friends. Ad multos annos.

[A demurral to Tosatti's implication about 'the Pope's men': I would argue that all the Curial heads and secretaries he has appointed are Benedict XVI's men - not that they form part of any privileged 'inner circle', because this Pope does not seem to have a kitchen cabinet other than his literal household members, who cannot possibly create any palace intrigue. The Italian media have suggested with some plausibility that his only close associate is really Mons. Georg Gaenswein who necessarily is in on all the details of what the Pope does.

But the fact that Benedict XVI now has his own appointees heading the various organisms of the Curia means that he is confident each of them are capable and responsible for doing the specific tasks devolving upon each of them, and that none of them is likely to act autonomously or deliberately in ways that would harm the Pontificate. much less betray the Pope by an act of commission or omission.

So he may not have a Cardinal Ratzinger to fall back on as Papa Wojtyla did, but he does have 44 men (Curial heads and secretaries) to count on with some degree of confidence. It is distressing that his #1 Curial aide, Cardinal Bertone, has proven to be such a disappointment, but he should not be used as a standard to measure his senior colleagues in the Curia.]

Tosatti's fellow Vaticanista on La Stampa, Giacomo Galeazzi, assesses this Pontificate from a very significant, less obvious viewpoint. He also goes on to discuss the challenges of Vatican-II today for a Pope who took part in it as a young consultant:

A Pontificate of purification
by Giacomo Galeazzi
Translated from

April 16, 2012

Benedict XVI was elected Supreme Pontiff on April 19, 2005, and it is time to make a first evaluation of the man who succeeded John Paul II.

"The worst persecution of the Church is the sin that afflicts it from within". Enroute to Portugal in May 2010, that single statement by Benedict XVI was enough to sweep away all conspiratorial and self-absolving theories about ecclesiastical scandals and scourges.

It is a statement that could well be the manifesto of this Pontificate of purification. Three dates frame the boundaries for an evaluation of this Pontificate: his 85th birthday today, the seventh anniversary of his election to be the Successor of Peter on Thursday, April 19; and that of the solemn inauguration of his Petrine ministry, on Tuesday, April 24.

No one has done as much as Joseph Ratzinger against the sexual offenses committed by the clergy and the financial dealings of the Roman Curia.

He handed down a canonical punishment for Fr. Marcial Maciel reducing him to silence in 2005, and placed his flagship institution, the Legionaries of Christ, under pontifical receivership.

He has set up a Financial Information Authority to watch over 'sacred business' and he has retired many bishops around the world who had helped cover up thesexual absues committed by their priests.

This was a theologian who, once he was Pope, took on with determination the role of reformer. But in whose daily governance of the Church has never lost sight of his fundamental objective: to bring back Christ/God to the center of the life of the Church and of secularized man.

Having strengthened the Church with his battle against priestly pederasty and financial reforms whose first results we are starting to see, Jospeh Ratzinger is now focused on a new venture: a refelction on the Second Vatican Council 50 years after it opened to animate a Year of Faith and open a new season for Christianity and the Catholic Church.

The Ratzingerian line is increasingly that of transparency, ready if need be, to undertake an internal investigation, as it did to look at the charges made against the Vatican Governatorate by the present Apostolic Nuncio to Washington.

As a cardinal in the Roman Curia, Joseph Ratzinger was never concerned either with intramural intrigue nor with building a power base, and was not concerned about influencing opinion in the Church or outside it.

Once Pope, he was obliged to deal with the countermoves by people who never shared his attitudes, but this has not made him swerve his fundamental aim to live Christianity himself and to communicate this commitment to others. Starting with the younger generations.

In his relationship with young people, he has certainly benefited from his early intense experiences with the young people he guided in his first year as a priest assigned to be a chaplain in various suburban parishes of Munich, and from 1952 to 1977, as a professor of theology at the Freising seminary and four German universities.

Those who were his students at the time recall that he would often eat out with them, and in Tuebingen, some of them bought him a second-hand bike so that he could more easily go to and from the university.

In his first homily as Pope seven years ago [Address to the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel on April 20, 2005], he said: "I will continue our dialogue, dear young people, the future and hope of the Church and of humanity, listening to your expectations in the desire to help you encounter in ever greater depth the living Christ, eternally young".

Of course, he has not lacked for obstacles. The theological thinking and pastoral ministry of Benedict XVI "have been continually exposed to serious misunderstandings.. to criticisms and prejudices" against which It is 'an urgent task' to present the 'true face' of his Magisterium, says Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, in the Preface to his book 'Il mistero del granello di senape' which was to be presented today at Rome's Centro Internazionale.

Cardinal Koch points particularly to 'the profound criticism, often reiterated" that "the Pope has moved backwards and really wants to return the Church to what it was before Vatican II".

On Joseph Ratzinger's experience at Vatican-II, his brother, Mons. Georg Ratzinger sheds more light in his book My brother, the Pope, written with Michael Hesemann.

In his account of meetings held by the German-speaking bishops during the council at the Roman seminary of Santa Maria dell'Anima, one better understands the role Ratzinger played as an expert consultant to the Germanophone bishops. One relives the atmosphere of that extraordinary season for the Church, as well as the clear contrast between the forward-looking Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Frings, and Cardinal Ottaviani, who as the prefect then of what was still called the Holy Office, did all he could to block any reforms.

Joseph Ratzinger, as a theologian in his early 30s, was in effect the ghost writer for Cardinal Frings, who played a leading role among the reformers in Vatican II. Most notably, he wrote for the Cardinal a lecture about the Council delivered by Cardinal Frings in Genoa months before it opened, an address which was widely considered as a virtual theological program for the coming Council. [In fact, as affirmed in another article I must translate for these anniversary days, John XXIII himself was so impressed by how Frings's lecture captured the objectives he had in mind for Vatican II that he congratulated Frings for it, and the latter disclosed to him that it had been prepared by his young theological consultant.]

Now, half a century later, it is that former consultant who must now preside over the interpretation and deal with the results and the challenges of that Council.

Andrea Tornielli's 'jubilee post' for Benedict XVI underscores the basic messages sounded by the Pope that appear to have completely escaped those who have vested interests in their negative criticisms of this Pope.

Seven years as Pope:
Benedict XVI's message has been inconvenient
for some on both ends of the ideological spectrum
by ANDREA TORNIELLI
Translated from

April 17, 2012

VATICAN CITY - One of the fates marked out for Benedict XVI, the theologian who became Pope at the age of 78, is similar to that which fell to his predecessor Paul VI, who had made a then 50-year-old professor Archbishop of Munich-Freising in 1977 and a cardinal shortly afterwards.

And that is to be the object of criticism from both the right and the left, showing that he has been misunderstood more often than we think and even by those who profess themselves to be 'Ratzingerian' and who therefore ought to be transmitting his message.

Seven years ago, when he was elected, Joseph Ratzinger, who was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for over 20 years, had been encumbered for years by the media with the label 'Panzerkardinal' for being the inflexible guardian of Catholic orthodoxy accused of having 'reined in' the innovative intentions of John Paul II, of whom, instead, he was the most faithful and obedient of co-workers.

And Paul VI [who presided over most of the Second Vatican Council after John XXIII died during the first session] was accused of carrying out a 'closed' Pontificate compared to the hopes raised by his predecessor John XXIII who had convoked Vatican II.

Reconciliation with the Lefebvrians, which now appears imminent, preceded by his decision to liberalize the use of the traditional Mass in 2007, has earned Benedict XVI widespread dissent among some bishops.

The Pope's intention was to allow the possibility that the traditional Mass and the post-conciliar Novus Ordo would enrich each other reciprocally - so that the latter would recover the sense of sacredness and encounter with the mysteries of God that characterize the old Mass (and which has often been lost in the welter of liturgical abuses that the Novus Ordo engendered), and that the old would in turn benefit from the richness of Scriptural readings found in the Novus Ordo.

This has only been partly successful so far [it's only been five years since this first great step in the 'reform of the reform'] - mainly because of rather discomposed reactions against the Pope's decision by progressivist bishops and priests, but also by the emergence of some forms of estheticism that have nothing to do with the essence of liturgy. [Naturally, the worst rebuke to the dissenters is that no one is forcing them to celebrate or attend a traditional Mass at all, and more important, the Novus Ordo is still considered the ordinary form and has not been affected in any way other than to curb its abuses. So what is their problem? The Mass that was celebrated every day during the four years of Vatican-II - and for 500 years before that - is suddenly objectionable???]

But Benedict XVI has also been rebuked by those who expected him to use an iron fist and doctrinal reorientation as well as a reaffirmation of the Christian identity of Europe in the face of the challenge from Islam. [And what is their problem? The iron fist comes inside a velvet glove for this man of the Church, and what has he done from the very start but reorient the Church to the essentials of the doctrine of the Faith? As for that babble about Christian identity in Europe, he has almost singlehandedly espoused that cause in his 22 years at the CDF and since. What have others done at all to define and defend Christianity against Islam as he has done, while still managing to open a genuine cultural dialog with leading Islamic thinkers?]

Thus, if the critics on the left consider him a throwback to the past who cannot read the signs of the times [Let us refer them to Prof. Ratzinger's 1961 paper for Cardinal Frings that spelled out the signs of the times - they still are - which made Vatican II necessary!], those on the right think he has simply been too weak against the enemies of the Church. [But where were they in the years before Joseph Ratzinger became Pope, when none of them was even bold enough to organize in order to 'force' John Paul II to correct the post-Conciliar injustice against the traditional Mass? Or to do anything else, for that matter, to assert Catholic identity the way Joseph Ratzinger was doing consistently in everything he said and wrote? How do they explain their virtual silence between 1965 and 2005 as the progressivists rampaged throughout the Church? It is Benedict XVI who has enabled a climate in which they can finally express themselves - and the first one that they turn their guns on is him!]

Both the progressivists as well as the disappointed 'Ratzingerians' forget the heart of Benedict XVI's message This is a Pope who said in Fatima, in May 2010:

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When, in the view of many people, the Catholic faith is no longer the common patrimony of society and, often, seen as seed threatened and obscured by the “gods” and masters of this world, only with great difficulty can the faith touch the hearts of people by means simple speeches or moral appeals, and even less by a general appeal to Christian values.

The courageous and integral appeal to principles is essential and indispensable; yet simply proclaiming the message does not penetrate to the depths of people’s hearts, it does not touch their freedom, it does not change their lives. What attracts is, above all, the encounter with believing persons who, through their faith, draw others to the grace of Christ by bearing witness to him.

---

Words by a Bishop of Rome who at the start of his Pontificate had said:

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In carrying out his ministry, the new Pope knows that his task is to make Christ's light shine out before the men and women of today: not his own light, but Christ's.

---

In a Church resounding with daily ethical questions and urgent appeals to a rediscovery of Christian values, a Church in the midst of great crisis (Benedict XVI himself referred to the 'tragic situation of the Church today' in his Chrismal Mass homily) [Which was not to say that the crisis started in his Pontificate - it is the crisis that has engulfed the Church since the end of Vatican-II which, instead of strengthening the Church in her identity, lent itself instead to progressivists hijacking her message and promoting an agenda which has everything to with who has 'power' in the Church - the dissidents want to seize any such 'power' - rather than any spiritual concerns. How often do we even find the words 'God' and 'Christ' in progressivist and dissident statements? ], in a Church that has been scourged by the scandal over pedophile priests, by the silent schism implied by teh open calls to disobedience by dissident priests in some European co8untries, by the careerism that is unfortunately quite widespread among Churchmen, by Vatileaks and the obvious failings in the Vatican's curial mechanism, the octogenarian Pope has not desisted from repeated calls to individual conversion with what it requires in penitence and humility.

In Germany last September, he called on the Church to be less worldly:

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History has shown that, when the Church becomes less worldly, her missionary witness shines more brightly. Once liberated from material and political burdens and privileges, the Church can reach out more effectively and in a truly Christian way to the whole world, she can be truly open to the world.

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Two months later, enroute to Benin, he said:

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It is important that Christianity should not come across as a difficult European system that others cannot understand and put into practice, but as a universal message that there is a God, a God who matters [to us], a God who knows us and loves us, and that concrete religion stimulates cooperation and fraternity. So, a simple concrete message is very important.

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Far from any triumphalism, Benedict XVI reminded the new cardinals on February 19:

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Serving God and others, self-giving: this is the logic which authentic faith imparts and develops in our daily lives and which is not the type of power and glory which belongs to this world.

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The harshest, most dramatic and realistic words about the situation of the Church came from this gentle Pope himself, who has remained serene amid tempests, but also acknowledges this:

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Attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church. This too is something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church, and that the Church thus has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification.

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Papa Ratzinger, at the Mass celebrated in Lisbon on May 11, 2010, said:

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Often we are anxiously preoccupied with the social, cultural and political consequences of the faith, taking for granted that faith is present, which unfortunately is less and less realistic. Perhaps we have placed an excessive trust in ecclesial structures and programmes, in the distribution of powers and functions; but what will happen if salt loses its flavour?

---

In the face of the attacks against the Pontificate, the crosses it has to bear, in the face of scandals and dysfunction in the Curial mechanism, in the face of ecclesiastical careerism, Benedict XVI simply renews, as he did to the new cardinals in the recent consistory, his appeal for the Church to immerse itself in humility. For everyone, without exception.

Because only he who is humble knows that he needs help, support, the light of the Other. Only the humble can make the light of Christ shine forth, that which is profoundly needed by men and women today.
[2013 P.S. Sentiments that Mr. Tornielli has since transferred totally to Pope Francis as though he has been the first Pope in recent memory to be humble.]

VATICAN INSIDER also found it useful to resurrect some words of praise for Benedict XVI from Joaquin Navarro-Valls...

What Navarro-Valls wrote about
Benedict XVI in his memoir
by Michelangelo Nasca
Translated from

April 16, 2012

"The English writer G. K. Chesterton said that the miracle of language was that it allowed a man not just to express his own ideas, but also to leave a trace of himself, of his own irrepetible individuality. Obviously, this does not have to do only with writing but with the 'style' of a person, which is revealed by his gestures, his behavior, his life".

This is what Joaquin Navarro-Valls - who was the Vatican spokesman for more than 20 years under John Paul II and for another year under Benedict XVI - wrote in his book 'A passo d'uomo" published in 2009.

Twenty-two years of service (1984-2006) is quite a lot. Then, he decided to step aside. "I am very grateful to the Holy Father (Benedict XVI) who accepted my request. that I have manifested many times, to leave the position of Director of the Vatican Press Office, after so many long years. I am aware that during these years, I received much more than I could give and more than I can even now fully appreciate".

Although Joaquín Navarro-Valls spent less than a year (April 2005-July 2006) serving under Benedict XVI, he immediately appreciated the outstanding human caliber and excellent communicational gifts of the ex-Prefect of the the Doctrine of the Faith.

In his book, Navarro-Valls writes: "For Ratzinger, ideas do not give a face to persons, but rather, persons reveal themselves through their ideas... His actions are elegant and effective because that is the way he thinks."

Without a doubt, he continues, "Ratzinger has that strange and admirable strength of someone who loves to be amazed more than he wants to amaze. And so his attitude is one of a peaceful kindness and, one might say, graciousness. His outlook comes from the detachment and elevation of someone who seeks to look deep into the human heart".

Benedict XVI is also a man of dialog, he adds. "One who can dialog is fearless. He is not affected by the clamor or the silence of the crowd or of contrary opinions. But one who dialogs must know how to dialog, he must know the mechanisms that move opinions and must believe that it is worth pursuing dialog. And that is what Ratzinger resolutely believes".

As Navarro-Vall's own account shows, dialog becomes most effective if it is supported by an information service that is adequate and able to keep up with the rhythms of the Pope, and it is in this sense that the role and support of the Vatican press office is fundamental.

Think of the great events that mark the history of any Pontificate and the mastodon-like work that the Vatican Press Office must face in terms of getting out news bulletins, official statements, diplomatic reports, and dealing with media outlets - and it is evident that even the smallest error or delay in communications can compromise its task.

In all this, one must also consider the friendship and esteem that comes to be established between the Pope and his press director.

"The memories I keep of Joseph Ratzinger," says Navarro-Valls, "end on the day he entered the Sistine Chapel at the start of the Conclave. Our eyes crossed at one point, and that was the last time I saw Joseph Ratzinger. The person I saw just two days later was no longer Cardinal Ratzinger, but a Pope, in his sacred robes. who appeared for the first time was Benedict XVI on the central loggia of St. Peter's."

"At that moment, I understood subconsciously that everything had changed for him. That all his previous life was over - even without disappearing - for always. And I can now understand one of his subsequent statements, 'I, but no longer I'. With his habitually delicate and brilliant discretion, his personal life from that day on receded, to give way to the sacred identity and institutional responsibility of the Papacy. For Benedict XVI, the mystery commenced that every Pope carries in him - or that every Pope is".

I have always admired Navarro-Valls and George Weigel for their ability from Day One not to show the slightest prejudice in public against Benedict XVI by virtue of their intimate association with his predecessor. Their assessment and admiration of Benedict XVI's personal attributes and of the work he is doing has been generally unstinted and kept distinct from their understandable prior loyalties to John Paul II.

That also means that they have never been tempted, at least not in their public statements, to indulge in the usual cheap game of comparing the two Popes as if they were competing poodles in a pet show, as most of their colleagues happily do at the slightest pretext. Of course, Weigel has been critical of some aspects of Caritas in veritate, and of the Pope's failure to meet with dissidents in Cuba. but that's honest and legitimate dissent (though eminently arguable!) on peripheral issues, which is not fundamental dissent nor a personal attack. [2013 P.S. Until Weigel's new book Evangelical Catholicism which, it seems to me, utilizes many of the fundamental ecclesiological concepts of Benedict XVI but which Weigel has somehow turned into a critique of the Church under Benedict XVI - very apparent in his post-publication and pre-Conclave writings and interviews - as if the faults of the Church had all originated with the latter.]

Let me add a fourth brief tribute to the Pope, one of the best and most unequivocal that I have read, from another Italian commentator, Angelo Scelzo, who was once undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications under John Paul II...

Seven years of the prophet-Pope
by Angelo Scelzo
Translated from

April 16, 2012

We open a week of major anniversaries for Papa Ratzinger. Today, he turns 85 and becomes the oldest serving Pope in the past 100 years. Three days later, on Thursday the 19th, the seventh anniversary of his election to the Chair of Peter.

The Easter rites are barely behind him, but this sequence of events that inevitably have the figure of Benedict XVI in the center seem almost like a prolongation of the high point in the Church's liturgical year.

The atmosphere of Holy Week particularly made evident an aspect of this Pontificate that has emerged with more and more clarity.

Papa Ratzinger has brought on an unexpected era for the Church - something unprecedented and not easily labelled, which is expressed and manifested through a Pontificate that has been unlike any other in living memory, which nonetheless has not swerved from a natural continuity with what has gone before, especially not with the Pontificate of his predecessor, Blessed John Paul II.

There has been no contradiction, but the fact is that Benedict XVI's Magisterium has offered unusual viewpoints deriving not from contemporary events but from the Gospel, which are almost explosive whenever he deals with the narrative of Jesus's Paschal mystery, from the drama of his passion and death to the exultation of his Resurrection.

In such a scenario of presenting the strongest themes possible that do not admit of half measures, Pope Benedict has embodied - especially in these days of his double jubilee as a person and as Pope - the essence of the Petrine ministry itself, which can be read in the words he said at the recent Mass of the Lord's Supper in the Lateran Basilica: "We do not announce our private theories and opinions but the faith of the Church of which we are the servants".

A statement that recalls the image he used when he first addressed the world as Pope - 'a simple and humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord' - but which also underscores his total anchorage to a mission that he lives in a very Augustinian sense: "What else is so much mine than I myself, and what else is less mine than I myself?"

Seven years of a Pontificate understood in that sense give a new and more profound sense of that selfless and humble dimension, because it is evident that it is the 'true form of government' of Benedict XVI's Church.

The radicalness itself of Eastertide has projected the words of the Pope to such a vast terrain that renders not just an overview of his Pontificate possible, but the most evident datum of these seven years: how he looks to the future, looking ahead to draw hope, even when one sees "the filthy flood of all the lies and all the disgrace" advancing against the Church.

Even when the Church must do something about "the often tragic situation which the Church finds itself today", which is beset by betrayals even within herself - struck at the heart by her own ministers who have betrayed innocent children, and undermined by the disobedience of those who claim to be blazing new but improbable paths of reform.

The Easter liturgies are not merely evocative in these days of double jubilation for the Pope. Their powerful and mystic sacredness have helped to disclose more of the personality of this Pope who, in the difficult bench test posed by the Paschal Triduum of the passion, death and Resurrection of Christ, urges this search for truth that is much more than just his passion as a theologian, but the main road along which to lead the Church in its encounter with the world.

The Triduum days and Easter were a time in which we might say that Benedict XVI recapitulated his entire Pontificate - not as a compilation of acts, however great and of major importance, but in images of unexpected scenarios - and of amazement that gradually gives way to acceptance; of the gentleness and kindness with which he sets aside false and exhausted stereotypes; of the warm affection of the faithful; of moral rigor and firmness that is always tempered by mercy.

And above all, by his way of speaking about God to a world which needs to know him, but that even with the urging of a Pastor who does not hesitate to invoke his name, is nonetheless uneasy about seeking Him.

And in these jubilee days, how can we not think of Vatican-II as among the strong points of this Pontificate? These days, it is more on our minds not just because it will be 50 years since it opened, but also because with the Year of Faith that Benedict XVI has decreed to mark that anniversary, it will shine forth once again as a springtime for the Church.

And the travels of a Pope who despite his age has just completed his 23rd apostolic visit abroad, and who will be going to Lebanon later this year.

Much has been written and talked about the 'surprises' from Benedict XVI. After seven years, it is time to elevate the discourse. It is time to speak about a prophet for our time, who has become that authentic sign of contradiction that the Gospels speak about.

In truly unexpected ways, through a path that has been often difficult and rough, he has managed to shake the Church into new life with his gentleness and to challenge the world with the truth which makes us humble and free.



Despite the general ill will in the media against Benedict XVI, at least he has the (I think) unprecedented satisfaction of being alive to see his Pontificate so well regarded and even highly praised on balance for what he did do right and well, which was quite a lot in seven years even in the opinion of the career Vaticanistas who mostly - and inevitably - judged him in comparison to his predecessor who served almost four times as long as he did. And even so, he has come out very well in their assessments. I hate to have to resort to comparison myself, but far better than the judgment was on the substance of John Paul II.s Pontificate after his first seven years as Pope.

The encomiums on the seventh anniversary of the Pontificate - from commentators who did start out with "that attitude of good will without which there is no understanding" that he asked from readers of his JESUS OF NAZARETH books - were reiterated in different form after he announced his historic decision to step down from the Papacy, when even his arch-critic Marco Politi gave him his due.

The only problem is that many of those voices of praise seem to have developed Benedict-amnesia after March 13, 2013, all but contradicting their previous praises by making it appear that the Church finally has a Pope in Francis who would somehow undo all the mistakes of past Pontificates, especially the previous one, and solve all the problems of the Church simply because he was now Pope and not anybody else. Overnight, Benedict XVI and his Pontificate became nothing more than instruments conveniently used by the trend-setters and arbiters of public opinion to serve as the negative contrast that would highlight all the excellences of the new order.

I know - Benedict has run the media guantlet for decades, and as a good Christian, he has always known to turn the other cheek. God bless his sweet and gentle soul - he must be rejoicing that his successor does not have the media karma that has been a succubus on Joseph Ratzinger for decades. And who could better pray for Francis and the greatest success for his Pontificate than he? So lead on, sweet Benedict, and help weaker mortals like me to get over my resentments...

The most beautiful 'Credo' mosaics
in the world are in Monreale near Palermo
The articles of Christian faith illustrated in 7,000 square meters of wonderful 12th-century mosaics.
A series of broadcasts on TV 2000 starting April 21 will present them to the viewer as never before.
by Sandro Magister
From the English service of


ROME, April 18, 2008 – In his last Wednesday general audiences, before renouncing the papacy, Benedict XVI had begun to explain the Credo, the Christian profession of faith. His successor, Francis, has decided to continue the work.

[I had been meaning to make a small comment on this earlier, but did not have the appropriate opening to do so. Benedict XVI started his catecheses on the Credo, reflecting on its first three articles, "I believe in God", 'the Father almighty", and 'creator of heaven and earth", before he stepped down as Pope. He would have resumed with "...and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord" - the essence of the Christian faith (and I have no way of telling whether he would have treated the line in one catechesis or three). Pope Francis resumed the catecheses on the Credo at his second GA on April 3, the Wednesday after Easter (his first GA had been dedicated to the significance of the Holy Week liturgies). But he picked up from "the third day he rose again from the dead", presumably because of its liturgical timeliness. That meant that he skipped - unless he plans to go back in the sequence - the part from "and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried...", namely, the entire part about the incarnation of Jesus and his human life. Go figure...]

The Credo is the first breath of the newborn Christian. It is all of a piece with Baptism, it is proclaimed at Sunday Mass, it is the identity card of the believer. “The faith is as we say in the Credo,” Pope Francis reiterated in a recent morning homily. The whole faith - he added - without subtractions, without reductions, without compromises.

This is the reason that - in this Year of Faith - induced TV 2000, the channel of the Italian episcopal conference, to put the Credo at the center of an original series of broadcasts, beginning on Sunday, April 21.

But how? With the forms, the colors, the light of that masterpiece unique in the world which are the mosaics of the cathedral of Monreale, in Sicily.

In twelve episodes like the twelve apostles, Sunday after Sunday, each article of the Credo will be narrated and presented to the viewer from inside that very cathedral, illuminated by its wonderful mosaics from the 12th century.

The narrator will be Fr. Innocenzo Gargano, a Camaldolese monk, a master of the Sacred Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church. A narrator in the proper sense of the word.

Because the Credo is not an arid list of dogmas. It is the living history of the action of God with men and for men. It is "historia salutis" with its summit in the Christ "Pantocrator" that dominates the apse of the cathedral of Monreale.

Step by step, from inside the cathedral, Fr. Innocenzo will unveil the “spirit” of the images and therefore of the sacred narration, following the outline of the articles of the “Credo.”

He will alternate with the art historian Sara Magister, who will illustrate the “letter,” the iconography of the same images, from the studios of TV 2000 in Rome.

One will thus embark upon an adventure without equal, from the first moments of creation to the coming of Jesus to the heavenly Jerusalem. An adventure revisited precisely in the place in which these same images become sacramental reality, when the Eucharist is celebrated on the altar.

More than eighty years ago the cathedral of Monreale was visited by Romano Guardini, an Italian-German theologian very dear to Joseph Ratzinger and Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

Guardini attended the rites of Holy Week in the packed church, and was struck by the attitude of the faithful: "The women with their veils, the men with their cloaks around their shoulders. Everywhere could be seen distinguished faces and a serene bearing. Almost no one was reading, almost no one stooped over in private prayer. Everyone was watching intently, everyone was rapt in contemplation."

The director of TV 2000, Dino Boffo, said in presenting the new program: "The believers who over the past nine centuries had the opportunity to turn their gaze upward and admire the mosaics of the cathedral of Monreale were for the most part illiterate, but not for this reason fatally destined to remain in ignorance. The nourishment of the faith came through the charm of the beautiful, of the majestic. 'One day we will look upon that beautiful face of the Risen One,' Pope Francis said to the cardinals who had just elected him. And so, one foretaste of that unfathomable beauty is precisely in the vault of the apse of Monreale, where the mosaics that decorate the walls of the cathedral converge.”

The twelve episodes of “Il Credo nei mosaici di Monreale," each of them half an hour long, will be broadcast every Sunday at 8:30 in the morning and replayed at 3:30 pm.

The first episode, on Sunday, April 21, will illustrate the first article of the profession of faith: “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.”

TV 2000 can be seen in Italy on cable channel 28 and satellite channel 142 of Sky.

But the program can also be seen via streaming all over the world, on the website of the channel www.tv2000.it/ Afterwards, all of the episodes will be available on YouTube.



"Il Credo nei mosaici di Monreale" is a program created by Sandro Magister and Fr. Innocenzo Gargano.
The artistic commentary is by Sara Magister.
The producer is Francesca Romana Pozzonelli.
The director of the filming in the cathedral of Monreale is Davide Gambino of Run To Me Film.
The director in the studios of TV 2000 is Edoardo Pacchiarotti.
The evocative soundtrack of the broadcast is made up of Gregorian chant, beginning with the hymn of the title sequence: "Urbs Jerusalem beata".



Allow me a little digression. When Benedict XVI made a pastoral visit to Palermo in October 2010, AGI's Salvatore Izzo recounted his visit to Palermo as Cardinal Ratzinger, at the invitation of the then Archbishop of Palermo, Cardinal Di Georgi (whom Benedict XVI would choose 13 years later as one of the three cardinals he requested to conduct an internal inquiry on Vatileaks and present a report on the Curia).

Faith, words and art:
Joseph Ratzinger's previous
visit to Palermo
Translated from


It was Benedict XVI's first visit to Palermo as Pope. But not his first. When he was the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger flew to Palermo for a visit that remains in the annals of the city.

It was March 13, 2000 - during the Grand Jubilee Year, no less - and he had been invited by Cardinal Salvatore De Giorgi, then Archbishop of Palermo, to inaugurate the 'Week of Faith' in Palermo Cathedral.

The bioethical challenge, inter-religious dialog, the task of Catholic missions, and of course, God-become-man, were the themes that the cardinal spoke about to an audience of 1,500 who well remember his lecture, even if at the time, it was farthest from anyone's mind that the lecturer would be Pope in five years!

His hosts also remember how fascinated he was, looking up enrapt at the magnificent mosaics of the Cathedral in Monreale. He was impressed by the beauty and fidelity to Scripture of the scenes depicted in the mosaics and stunned by Monreale's great Christ-Pantocrator on the dome, just as he was utterly enchanted by the jeweled wonders of the Cappella Palatina in the Palace of the Normans.

It was a taste of Sicily which must surely have stayed in his heart.

At the time, I was wondering how I could work in Monreale into the coverage of the Palermo visit, and Izzo's item gave me the opening. Forgive the indulgence, but one cannot go to Palermo and not visit Monreale, which is a short trip by public bus outside the city.


Do not be deceived by the exterior. The whole church-monastery complex was first built in the late 12th century and is considered the best amalgam of Norman, Byzantine and Arab architecture from that time. Its Benedictine cloister is arguably the world's most beautiful, best preserved and largest medieval cloister. And yet its exquisite adornment almost pales compared to the 6,600 square meters of mosaic work, representing the most extensive extant cycle of Biblical illustrations, that covers the church interior. (Only Hagia Sophia in Istanbul had a greater mosaic area, but much of it, of course, has been lost.) When one contemplates the mosaics of Ravenna, Santa Maria Maggiore and Monreale, one realizes that mosaic artists are the most under-rated in the visual arts. It is mind-boggling to think how they can manage to put together the thousands of colored glass bits to produce the seamless artistry that they do. I find the Christ Pantocrator (Almighty) of Monreale as stunning as the Christ in Michelangelo's Last Judgment. (It's as high as a four-story building, to begin with). But, of course, Monreale is more than just its mosaics, as awesome as they are....




In the same post, however, I found this item - totally unrelated to Monreale - which has taken on added significance for me, besides the intrinsic value of Benedict XVI's gesture:

Pope makes unscheduled stop
to lay flowers at monument to
a judge killed by the Mafia
Translated from

October 3, 2010

---

During the ride from Palermo to the Falcone-Borsellino airport in Punta Raisi, the Pope asked that the motorcade stop at Capaci, at the point where Judge Giovanni Falcone and his escorts were assassinated in 1995.

He left the car to place a bouquet of flowers on one of the marble steles ercted to commemrorate the victims and offered a prayer for all the victims of the Mafia and other forms of organized crime.

The motorcade then proceeded to the airport and the flight back to Rome.

---

The Falcone-Borsellino airport is, in fact, named for Judge Falcone and one other judge who was also assassinated by the Mafia.

The new significance of this episode for me is that even if this was an unprogrammed stop at a roadside monument, on his way to the airport to return to Rome, Benedict XVI honored the occasion enough to wear a ceremonial mozzetta and put on choir dress to pay his homage to the martyred judge.

Do you suppose Pope Francis will ever wear choir dress? (But wait, he wore one for the Conclave, along with the requisite red cardinal's mozzetta! He was one of the few cardinals I remembered to look out for at the time they made their individual oaths on the Bible in the Sistine Chapel before the Conclave began. If choir dress was acceptable to him for the Conclave, why did he not continue wearing it over his brand-new papal white cassock, along with the papal mozzetta, for his first loggia appearance? Suppose he held his first consistory - will all the cardinals come in their black cassocks with red buttons, to be in keeping with the Pope's preference, or will Mons. Marini ask them in his usual pre-event notification to come in regulation choir dress, so they will be in customary ritual garb for a consistory, while the Pope will stick to his unadorned white cassock?

When Pope Francis took possession of the Lateran Basilica earlier this month, his Vicar for Rome, Cardinal Vallini, received him in the ritual vestments of choir dress and red mozzetta, while the Pope was wearing only his plain cassock. The Italian Vaticanistas took note of this, but what was Vallini supposed to do? Improvise on dress rules that have been in force for decades, if not centuries? Who could fault him for sticking to the rules? He is not the Pope and does not have the 'discretion' or the 'freedom' of the absolute monarch that the Pope [and Bishop of Rome] is, who can break with established rules and traditions only because he is an absolute monarch (or, if he were President of the United States, for instance, because he chooses to be an imperial President).

While the visible consequence of following the sovereign's personal preference may, in fact, be plainness and simplicity - i.e., not imperial at all - the will itself to let personal preference take precedence over tradition is imperious and arbitrary.

If the idea is to set an example so others will follow and the Pope's personal preferences become the unwritten rule, one would have expected that by now, cardinals and bishops around the world would have set aside their golden and/or jeweled pectoral crosses for a plain steel cross, given up living in their official residences to take up rooms at the diocesan center or perhaps at a center for the homeless, packed away all their chasubles for the plain caftans the Pope prefers, banned lace and embroidery from their churches, etc. Have they? Perhaps I missed the reports and the photos...

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/04/2013 18:58]

Dear Pope Francis, you are the Pope, our Pope, the Pope of all Catholics, and I love you for that. I wish you the best because the Church of Christ deserves only the best. But please understand why some of us continue to be devoted to Benedict XVI, especially now that he is no longer Pope.

Because we came to love him with a passionate personal connection that was not really our choice - it just materialized instantly and totally. One did not question it and joyfully accepted it, reveled in it, in fact, because it has brought nothing but good things to our lives.

For some, the initial phenomenon happened when he delivered the homily at John Paul's funeral, for others like me, when he first came to the loggia of St. Peter's on April 19, 2005. In the same way I am sure many of your own passionate devotees were initially struck by and drawn to you, and many others by John Paul II, John Paul I, and the other Popes of the media age in their time...

Our love and personal involvement with Benedict XVI simply expanded almost infinitely the more we got to know about him and know him through his Pontificate and his writings. How infinite I did not realize until he announced he was giving up the papacy in an unprecedented act that was nonetheless consistent with everything he is. To give way to someone with the physical strength he no longer has to lead the Church in these challenging times. And the someone turned out to be you, who have been blessed by God to be the new Vicar of Christ on earth and who now commands the allegiance and affection of all Catholics.

But precisely because love is infinite, speaking for myself, my love and devotion for Benedict XVI can co-exist with the filial love that I owe you as Pope, without, for now, the personal connection I felt with your two predecessors. The same filial love nonetheless that I had for the other Popes in my lifetime from Pius XII onwards.

I believe that is the spirit in which William Oddie wrote that courageous but all-too-real item entitled "I knew I was going to have trouble with two Popes..." for the UK Catholic Herald on April 11. And the spirit in which one of his followers, 'paulpriest' immediately posted the following comment, which further expresses oh-so-poignantly the personal connection we have with Benedict XVI...

Aqua actually called my attention right away to paulpriest's comment, and I simply failed to post it. But today, feeling so bereft because of the blatant lack of interest in the Anglophone media and blogosphere for Benedict XVI's double jubilee in April, I immediately thought about it as the right balm for my spirit at this time - like all the comments posted by the followers of Father Z to his reminder of the April 19 anniversary
http://wdtprs.com/blog/2013/04/8th-anniversary-of-the-election-of-benedict-xvi/
and the 160 pages of online greetings to Benedict XVI in Avvenire...

God's will be done!
But still...
Reply by paulpriest
to William Oddie's
'...When I pray for the Holy Father,
it's still Benedict XVI I think of'

April 11, 2013

He's like the king over the water...

Like Aslan...

There wasn't a word he said which didn't force us to think and compel us to act...never one utterance was superfluous - not once did he not instill, reassure or revitalize.

His insight and wisdom were otherworldly but fewer understood the world more...

He understood...GOD!! He Understood!!!

He didn't need to 'do' anything...he just was!

Love flowed...

There was pain, sorrow, regret and the overbearing almost unedurable weight of the cross was always there behind the eyes...

But he smiled...and everything became so much more real...

In 'Jesus of Nazareth' you felt you were there, hearing, touching, smelling...

In Spe Salvi it was like he was uttering words which were carved on our hearts

In Caritas in Veritate it was like we were listening to him both addressing the whole world from the highest mountain while simultaneously whispering confidentially just to you across the flames of an intimate campfire.

He gave...constantly.

His message was one of true joy...one that echoed the Beatitudes exemplifying true, eternal unfaltering happiness which the world doesn't understand.

It didn't matter one iota if this man had been a great saint or sinner...he was there as our shepherd and we knew he was always ours..and we his..because in him we could see that it was all true..this little silver-haired german fox was whispering in our ear with a twinkle in his eyes..all your hopes are true..but we have a long, hard journey to make first..let me show you...

He'd been a hero - a paladin for Orthodoxy.

Yet who could deny he was as gentle as a grandfather who'd seen everything, understood everything and could forgive anything.

Yet at times he had that look of such childlike innocence where complexities, technicalities and vainglorious wordly exigents just vanished into that simplicity beyond complexity...hence he could say more in a sentence than other wise men have written in libraries and lifetimes...

To him everyone and everything was important and worthwhile and cherishable.

And he never needed to show it...

You just knew it!

There's the old saying that Bonaventure showed the truth of Love while Aquinas manifested the love of Truth.

But with Benedict it's like one is sitting next to him on a hillside overlooking a valley where all the goodness, truth and love of it all is expressed..and he puts his arm round your shoulder and points and says:

'Look at it all...beautiful isn't it! Thanks be to God!"

As for the present situation?
Don't want to think about it: Don't want to talk about it.

I'm still enraptured with the first page of the first chapter of the papacy of Benedict XVI...and I don't yet want to begin to contemplate this story having an end...

He's my Pope! I choke holding back the tears every time I say it out loud.

I don't understand what's happened except it feeeeelllsss soooooooo wrong!

God's will be done...
But I sometimes get the feeling the angels and saints are watching this from behind a window in Heaven and they're banging on the glass screaming, 'This isn't suposed to be happening! This isn't in the script! Somebody do something'...

Anyway, paulpriest, thank you for the way you articulated so well what most of us Benaddicts feel, even as we know and accept that, by his free and well-considered choice, Benedict is no longer the Pope.


Apropos, the sea change - even perhaps, a parallel universe - that has overtaken the overwhelming majority of the media, Catholic and secular regarding the Church, here is a brief comment from an Italian journalist who writes for Italy's first online news journal...

The Church has suddenly
become all holy and spotless -
What has happened?
by Gianni Toffali
Translated from

April 19, 2013

A new mystery has engulfed planet earth. Those who only last month looked at anything spiritual with suspicion, smugness and derision and/or who accused the Church of pedophilia, careerism, 'affarismo' [Italian term for inappropriate involvement in business and financial affairs], power struggles and all the ills that supposedly led Benedict XVI to resign, appear to have been 'miraculously' submerged in a wave of general gullibility..

All those problems [seem to] have been forgotten, even annulled. Tout court [the French expression is used), the Church has become all holy and spotless. Has reason been discarded or is this simply the effect of rockstar-like adulation?

April 21, Fourth Sunday of Easter
WORLD DAY OF PRAYER FOR VOCATIONS

ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY (ANSELMO D'AOSTA) (b Italy 1033, d England 1109)
Benedictine monk, Abbot, Archbishop of Aosta, Archbishop of Canterbury, Doctor of the Church
Anselm first wanted to be a priest at 15 but his rich father opposed him, and so he spent the next 12 years of his life enjoying life to the full. During a trip to France, he came to the Benedictine monastery of Bec in Normandy, and joined the order at age 27. Within 15 years, he became its abbot, succeeding Lanfranc, who had been his mentor, quickly transforming Bec into a famous monastic school. He also started publishing his philosophical and theological works which were likened to St. Augustine's, in which he sought to analyze and illumine the faith through reason. Meanwhile, Lanfranc had been sent to England to help the English clergy in a much-needed renewal. As Archbishop of Canterbury, he asked Anselm to help him, and when Lanfranc died, Anselm was named to succeed him. It was 1093 and he was 60 years old. He spent the rest of his life fighting to defend Church freedom in England. Twice he was exiled by two kings for his opposition to them. Finally in 1106, King Henry I renounced his right to the conferral of ecclesiastical offices, the collection of taxes and the confiscation of Church properties. Anselm returned to England in triumph, devoting himself to moral formation of the clergy and carrying on his own theological studies. He is considered the father of Christian scholasticism. He died in 1109. He was canonized in 1492 and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1720. Benedict XVI devoted a catechesis to him on Sept. 23, 2009
www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20090923...
Readings for today's Mass:
fhttp://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/042113.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

Mass to ordain 10 new priests for the Diocese of Rome - Pope Francis performed his first ordination rite as Bishop of Rome
at St. Peter's Basilica Sunday morning. The homily he delivered, the Vatican bulletin notes, is the ritual homily that
appears in the Pontificale Romanum for the ordination of priests, with one or two personal additions.

At noon, Pope Francis led Regina caeli prayers from the third-floor study window of the papal apartment. He reflected
on the Gospel of the Good Shepherd today, expressed concern for the post-election turmoil in Venezuela, enjoining
against violence to resolve the issues, and requested prayers for the victims of an earthquake in southern China.




One year ago today, Benedict XVI met with 15 US bishops from Region XI (various dioceses of California and nearby western states) on ad-limina visit, and members of the US-based Papal Foundation, which raises funds for specific papal charities around the world.

However, on the occasion of Good Shepherd Sunday, which is also the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, here is a re-post of Benedict XVI's homily at the ordination Mass he presided at last year, when the commemoration fell on April 29. He ordained eight new priests for the Diocese of Rome and a ninth one, who had also studied In one of the Roman seminaries, a former Vietnamese lawyer who would return to his country.

WORLD DAY OF PRAYER FOR VOCATIONS
Fourth Sunday of Easter
April 29, 2012




Here is a translation of the Holy Father's homily:

---

Venerated Brothers,
Dear Ordinands,
Dear brothers and sisters:

The Roman tradition of celebrating priestly ordinations on the fourth Sunday of Easter, the Sunday of the Good Shepherd, contains a great wealth of significance, linked to the convergence of the Word of God, the liturgical rite, and the Paschal season in which it occurs.

In particular, the figure of the shepherd, so relevant in Sacred Scripture and naturally, very important for the definition of a priest, acquires its full truth and clarity in the face of Christ, in the light of the mystery of his death and resurrection.

You too, dear ordinands, can always draw from this richness every day of your life, thus continually renewing your priesthood.

This year, the Gospel is the central part of Chapter 10 in the Gospel of St. John, and begins with Jesus's affirmation: "I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep" (Jn 10,11).

Here we are immediately led to the center, to the summit of the revelation of God as the shepherd of his people. This center and summit is Jesus, he who died on the Cross and resurrects from the sepulchre on the third day, who rises again with all his humanity, and in this way, he involves us, every man, in his passage from death to life.

This event - Christ's Passover - in which the pastoral work of God is realized fully and definitively, is a sacrificial event: that is why the Good Shepherd and the Supreme High Priest coincide in the person of Jesus who gave his life for us.

But let us briefly look also at the first Readings and the responsorial psalm (Ps 118). The passage from the Acts of the Apostles (4,6-12) presents us with the testimony of St. Peter to the leaders of the people and the elders of Jerusalem after the miraculous healing of the cripple.

Peter states with great frankness that Jesus "is the stone rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved" (vv 11-12).

The Apostle then goes on to interpret Psalm 118 in the light of Christ's Paschal mystery - the psalm in which the praying man gives thanks to God who has responded to his cry for help and who brought him to safety.

The Psalm says: "The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. By the LORD has this been done; it is wonderful in our eyes" (Ps 118,22-23).

Jesus had lived that experience: of being rejected by the leaders of his people and rehabilitated by God, placed at the foundation of a new temple, of a new people who would give praise to the Lord with fruits of justice" (cfr Mt 21,42-43).

Thus, the first Reading and the responsorial psalm, which is Psalm 118 itself, strongly recall the Paschal context, and with this image of the rejected stone which is then rehabilitated draws out attention to Jesus who died and resurrected.

On the other hand, the second reading, taken from the First Letter of John (3,1-2), speaks to us of the fruits from Christ's Passover - our having become children of God. In John's words, one still feels all the wonder at this gift: we are not just called children of God, but "we truly are" (v 1).

In effect, the filial condition of man is the fruit of Jesus's salvific work: with his Incarnation, with his Death and Resurrection, and with the Gift of the Holy Spirit, he has placed man into a new relationship with God, the same relationship he has with the Father.

That is why the Risen Jesus says: "I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (Jn 20,19). It is a relationship that is already fully real but which has not yet been fully manifested: it will be in the end, when, God willing, we shall be able to see his face without a veil" (cfr v 2).

Dear Ordinands, it is that to which the Good Shepherd wants to lead us. It is that to which the priest is called to lead the faithful who are enrusted to him: to the true life, life "in abundance" (Jn 10,10).

Let us return to the Gospel, and to the parable of the shepherd. "The good shepherd gives his own life for his sheep" (Jn 10,11). Jesus insists on this essential characteristic of the true shepherd who is He himself: that of 'giving his own life".

He repeats it three times, and concludes by saying: "This is why the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again. This command I have received from my Father" (Jn 10,17-18).

Clearly, this is the qualifying trait of the shepherd as Jesus interprets in his own person, according to the will of the Father who sent him, the Biblical figure of the Shepherd-King, whose principal task is to sustain the people of God, to keep them united and to lead them - this entire kingly function is fully realized in Jesus Christ in the sacrificial dimension, in the offering of his life.

It is realized, in one word, in the mystery of the Cross, in that supreme act of humility and oblative love. The abbot Theodore Studite said: By means of the Cross, we, the sheep of Christ, have been united into one single flock destined for eternal dwelling places" (Discorso sull’adorazione della croce: PG 99, 699).

This is the perspective towards which the formulations of the Rites of Ordination for Priests that we celebrate today are oriented. For example, among the questions that have to do with "the commitment of the elected", the last one, which has a climactic and in some ways synthesizing character, reads: "Do you resolve to be united more closely every day to Christ the High priest, who offered himself for us to the Father as a pure sacrifice, and with him to, consecrate yourself to God for the salvation of all?"

In fact, the priest is he who becomes, in a singular way, introduced into the mystery of the Sacrifice of Christ, in a personal union with him, in order to prolong his salvific mission. This union, which comes thanks to the Sacrament of Holy Orders, asks to become 'ever closer' through the generous co-response of the priest himself.

That is why, dear Ordinands, shortly you will respond to that question, saying, "I do, with the help of God."

Subsequently, in the explicative Rites, at the moment of the Chrismal unction, the celebrant will say: "The Lord Jesus Christ, whom the Father anointed with the Holy Spirit and power, guard and preserve you, that you may sanctify the Christian people and offer sacrifices to God".

And then, at the offering of the bread and wine: "Receive the offerings of the holy people for the eucharistic sacrifice. Take note of what you do, imitate that which you will celebrate, conform your life to the mystery of the Cross of Christ the Lord".

It highlights very strongly that, for the priest, celebrating the Holy Mass every day does not mean carrying out a ritual function, but fulfilling a mission that involves entirely and profoundly one's very existence, in communion with the Risen Christ who, in his Church, continues to carry out the redemptive Sacrifice.

This Eucharistic-sacrificial dimension he is inseparable from the pastoral, and constitutes the nucleus of truth and salvific power upon which the effectiveness of our every activity depends.

Of course, we do not just mean effectiveness on the psychological or social plane, but of the vital fecundity of the presence of God at the profoundest human level.

The very preaching, the works, the actions of various kinds that the Church carries out with her multiple initiatives, would lose their salvific fecundity if the celebration of the Sacrifice of Christ were any less profound. And this is entrusted to ordained priests.

Indeed, the priest is called on to live in himself what Jesus experienced firsthand - namely, to give oneself wholly to preaching and to the healing of man from every affliction of the body and spirit, and then, in the end, to sum up everything in the supreme gesture of 'giving one's life' for men - a gesture which finds its sacramental expression in the Eucharist, perpetual remembrance of Jesus's Passover.

It is only through this 'door' of the Paschal sacrifice that men and women of all times and places can enter eternal life. It is through this via santa (holy way) that they can complete the exodus that will lead them to the 'promised land' of true freedom, to the "green pastures' of peace and joy without end (cfr Jn 10,7.9; Ps 77,14.20-21; Ps 23,2).

Dear Ordinands, may this Word of God illuminate all your life. And when the weight of the Cross is heavier, be aware that it is the most valuable time, for you and for the persons entrusted to you: By renewing with faith and love your "Yes, I do, with the help of God", you will be cooperating with Christ, High Priest and Good Shepherd, in pasturing his sheep - even if it were just the one lost sheep, but for whom there will be a great feast in Heaven!

May the Virgin Mary, Salus Populi Romani, always keep watch over each of you and on your paths. Amen.

---

He returned to the theme in his Regina caeli reflections after the Mass:

---

Dear brothers and sisters,

Shortly before now, the Eucharistic celebration at St. Peter's Basilica, during which I ordained nine new priests of the Diocese of Rome, ended. Let us give thanks to God for this gift, a sign of his faithful and provident love for the Church.

Let us draw close spiritually to these new priests and let us pray that they may fully accept the grace of the Sacrament which has conformed them to Jesus Christ, Priest and Shepherd.

And let us pray so that all young people may be attentive to the voice of God who speaks to their heart interiorly, calling them to detach themselves from everything in order to follow him.

This is the purpose to which today's World Day of Prayer for Vocations is dedicated. Indeed, the Lord always calls, but many times, we do not listen. We are distracted by many things, by other, more superficial voices. And then, we are afraid to listen to the voice of the Lord, because we think that it may deprive us of our freedom.

In fact, each of us is the fruit of love: certainly, the love of our parents, but more profoundly, the love of God. The Bible says: If even your mother can forget you, I will never forget you because I know you and I love you (cfr Is 49,15).

The moment I become aware of this, my life changes - it becomes a response to this love, greater than any other, and in this way, my freedom is fully realized.

The young people whom I consecrated as priests today are not different from other young people, except that they have been profoundly touched by the beauty of God's love, and they could do no less than to respond with their ehole life.

How did they encounter God's love? They met it in Jesus Christ: in his Gospel, in the Eucharist, and in the community of the Church. In the Church one discovers that the life of every man is a story of love. Sacred Scripture shows this clearly, and it is confirmed by the testimonials of the saints.

St. Augustine's statement in his Confessions is exemplary, when he addresses God and says: "Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside... You were with me, but I was not with you... You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness" (X, 27.38).

Dear friends, let us pray for the Church, for every local community, so that they may be like an irrigated garden in which all the seeds of vocation that God sows in abundance may germinate and mature.

Let us pray so that this garden may be cultivated everywhere, in the joy of feeling that we are all called, in the variety of our gifts.

In particular, families are the first environment in which one 'breathes' the love of God, who gives us an interior strength even in the midst of the difficulties and trials of life. Whoever lives in his family the experience of God's love receives an inestimable gift which will bear fruit in its time.

May all this be obtained for us by the Blessed Virgin Mary, model of free and obedient acceptance to the divine call, Mother of every vocation in the Church.

After the prayers, he said this:
I address a special greeting to the pilgrims who are gathered at the Basilica of St. Paul outside thw Walls, where this morning, Giuseppe Toniolo was proclaimed Blessed. Living in the 19th and 20th centuries, he was a husband and father of seven, a university professor and educator of young people, economist and sociologist, passionate servant of communion in the Church.

He applied the teachings of the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII; he promoted Catholic Action, the Catholic University of Sacro Cuore, the Settimani Sociali [Social Consciousness Weeks] for Italian Catholics, and an institute of international law on peace.

His message is of great relevance especially in our time. Blessed Toniolo shows the way of the primacy of the human being and solidarity. He wrote: "Above and beyond the legitimate good and interests of single nations and States, there is an indissoluble element that coordinates and unites everyone, namely, the duty of human solidarity".

Also beatified today, in Coutances, France, was the priest Pierre-Adrien Toulorge of the Premonstratensian Order, who lived in the second half of the 18th century. Let us give thanks to God for this luminous 'martyr for the truth'.

I greet the participants in the European meeting of university students, organized by the Diocese of Rome on the first anniversary of the beatification of Pope John Paul II.

Dear young people, continue confidently on the path of the new evangelization in the universities. Tomorrow evening, I will be with you spiritually for the prayer vigil that will be held in Tor Vergata, near the great Cross that marks the site of World Youth Day in 2000. Thank you for your presence.

---

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/04/2013 14:57]

One day late with the greeting, but I cannot think of another female religious in our time, other than Mother Teresa, whom one can call unique and sui generis, not just as a model Catholic and as a female icon par excellence but as a great and saintly person whom dissident nuns could well learn from for her no-nonsense orthodoxy, her genuine charity, and for realizing the monumental groundbreaking institution that is EWTN. Thank you, Mother Angelica, for all the years of inspiring Catholic TV from EWTN, and for your own engaging chats so full of quick wit, humor and practical holiness I have often thought of you as the female counterpart of that other great rerun champion on EWTN, the Venerable Fulton Sheen. On this World Day of Prayer for Vocations, I could not think of a better poster girl for vocations. Ad multos et felicissimos annos!

Irondale, Alabama, Apr 20, 2013 (CNA/EWTN News).- The Eternal Word Television Network is celebrating the 90th birthday of its foundress, Mother Angelica, on April 20 with 90 hours of programming featuring her wit and wisdom.

“I still marvel at what God accomplished through this great woman, and what continues to be accomplished with the ongoing prayers of Mother Angelica and the nuns,” said Michael Warsaw, president and CEO of EWTN, on April 19.

“That a cloistered nun with no experience was able to build a worldwide Catholic media network based in Irondale, Alabama, reaffirms my faith every day. It is nothing short of miraculous.”

Mother Angelica was born in 1923 to an Italian-American family in Canton, Ohio. She led a difficult childhood marked by the divorce of her parents and her mother's poverty. In her youth, she suffered ptosis of the stomach, which gave her severe pains, but was remarkably cured, after which she devoted herself to God.

In 1944, Mother Angelica joined the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration, a contemplative Franciscan community. She made her solemn profession of vows in 1953.

In 1961, she founded Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Irondale, a suburb of Birmingham, Ala., which has become the home of EWTN. She later relocated the monastery to the grounds of the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville, some 45 minutes north of Birmingham.

Mother Angelica began EWTN in a garage on the monastery property in 1981.

EWTN is now available in over 150 million television households in more than 140 countries and territories. In its mission, it uses direct broadcast satellite television and radio services, AM and FM radio networks, worldwide short-wave radio, an internet website and a publishing arm.

Mother Angelica turned control of EWTN over to a board in 2000, and in 2001 suffered a stroke.

In October 2009, Benedict XVI awarded the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice Medal to Mother Angelica. The medal is the highest honor the Pope can bestow on religious and is given for service to the Church.

“The one thing we keep hearing from our viewers around the world is that Mother’s shows are as relevant now as when they first aired,” Warsaw said. “Even translated into other languages, her message resonates with people across all cultural and geographic boundaries.”

As Mother Angelica observes her 90th birthday, fans of her apostolate have sent numerous messages wishing her a blessed day, both on her Facebook page and at EWTN's website.

“You have been a wonderful inspiration in my life!! You have taught me so much about our faith, and for this I am now closer to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. I am truly grateful to you!!! Happy 90th Birthday Mother Angelica!!! God Bless You Always,” wrote one fan.

Another said, “Happy Birthday to Mother Angelica. I have been watching your show for many years since the ‘80s. I am very fortunate as a result and wish you peace and blessings on your birthday!”

Father John Trigilio, an EWTN personality, wrote that when he first met Mother Angelica, she was so humorous that “my sides were hurting.”

“She is so down to earth, genuine, and straight-shooting and VERY Italian. She says what she means and means what she says.”

Though none of the nuns who gave me the first ten years of my school education were as brilliant as Mother Angelica, her cheerfulness and what I call practical holiness reminded me of them from the very beginning, and I can only thank God I was fortunate enough to be raised by pre-Vatican II sisters (of St. Paul) who gave me a firm and highly positive idea of what nuns ought to be like...

Problems at the IOR surfaced again this weekend when several Italian newspapers published reports about the contents of the 'confidential memorandum' written by former IOR president Ettore Gotti Tedeschi last year before he was ousted as IOR president, and which was among documents confiscated during a police raid on his his homes and offices in Milan in June 2012, less than two weeks after he was 'fired' from IOR. None of the reports cited how the reporters got hold of the memorandum. Here is how La Stampa reported it, and the subsequent reaction from Gotti Tedeschi's lawyer. This post necessarily contains many parentheticals, because the memorandum is written for people who know all the persons involved and the references made...

Venom at the Vatican:
What was contained in Gotti Tedeschi's
confidential memorandum on IOR last year
by Guido Ruotolo
Translated from

April 20, 2013

For two more months, he had to be looking over his shoulder, fearing he could end up hanging dead from Blackfriars Bridge in London like Roberto Calvi [the Italian bank president at the time of the 1980s Banco Ambrosiano crash that cost the bank's major partner IOR at least $250 million to restitute bsnk depositors.]

In Msrch 2012, two months before he was unceremoniously thrown out as president of the Vatican 'bank' IOR, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi had written a confidential memorandum to be released in case anything 'happened' to him.

He sent it to his secretary instructing her that when the need arose, she should send the memorandum to three persons: journalist Massimo Franco, who writes for Corriere della Sera; editor Giovanni Maria Vian of L'Osservatore Romano [for whom Gotti Tedeschi had provided front-page editorials and commentary on financial and economic matters]; and a childhood friend identified only as 'Engineer Garofano'.

What emerges from the memorandum is the account of internal dissension at the Vatican over IOR, in which Cardinal Secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone opposed Gotti Tedeschi and others who were his allies among Benedict XVI's associates.

As a result of which he feared for his life, in addition to feeling hemmed in, stepped on, spied upon and having his correspondence intercepted. To the point of deciding to write this memorandum.

He cites, as 'a marginal fact but one that cannot be under-estimated', a warning he received from Pietro Orlandi [brother of Emanuela, the Vatican teenager who disappeared mysteriously more than 30 years ago] who told him: "After TB (Cardinal Bertone) found out that you have been speaking to GG (Mons Gaenswein), he gave orders to isolate you and keep you under close watch" [I don't know why Orlandi should even be considered a credible source, even if Gotti Tedeschi thinks the statement is 'marginal', since he has an axe to grind against the Vatican, and is no longer employed at the Vatican as his father once was.]

But Gotti Tedeschi also makes clear that other figures in the Vatican were equally hostile to him. "I am being spied on, or at least I feel that. Lena knows exactly who are the people I meet with. [Jeffrey Lena is the US attorney hired by the Vatican to represent its interests in the USA, but apparently also a close adviser of Cardinal Bertone, who asked him to help revise the original financial transparency law promulgated for the Vatican by Benedict XVI in December 2010]. All my visitors and calls are reported by Cipriani [Paolo Cipriani, lay managing director of IOR]. My e-mails are opened and read. And at least twice, mail addressed to me at IOR was opened by the Secretariat of State".

But beyond the apparent personal affronts to him, Gotti Tedeschi speaks of the never-acknowledged existence of lay accounts in the IOR [which is supposed to cater only to diocese, parishes, religious orders, and individual bishops/priests/nuns]

He says [in a statement that makes sense only to those who understand who the names refer to, but the editor provides the necessary information], "I must recall that lawyer Severino [Paola Severino, who would become Italian minister of justice in the Monti government] told me. asking my discretion, about a conversation with Briamonte [Michele Briamonte, a lawyer who has been a consultant to IOR] who confessed his role was to deal with the lay accounts, especially that of Geronzi" [Cesare Geronzi, a Roman banker who is now the president of a federation of insurance companies].

Severino has quickly reacted, claiming, "I know nothing about this. I never had a confidential conversation with Briamonte, and I knew nothing about the Geronzi account".

Gotti Tedeschi sent the e-mail with his three-page confidential memorandum to his secretary at 5:21 p.m. on March 27, 2012. It was preceded by a brief note of instructions: "In case anything happens to me, any accident of any type, in whatever circumstance and at any time, you are authorized to give these and the following document files to these persons".

He said he had sent the document file as early as January 2012 to Mons. Gaenswein. Now, he also wanted it sent with the memorandum to editor Vian and his friend Garofano.

But all three recipients of the confidential memorandum (Franco, Vian and Garofano) were also to get a copy of an earlier confidential memorandum dated March 13, 2012, about the lay accounts, sent to Mons. Angelo Becciu, deputy Secretary of State.

"Since in recent days, I have been the object of specific attacks through the press (Il Fatto Quotidiano), through blogs in korazym, through SMS (by lawyer Lena), and orally (from Cipriani), and since at the Vatican, such matters tend to be overlooked, I must point out that these attacks are meant to bring down my credibility and my reputation by presenting me as a traitor to IOR: that I have been releasing private documents (my own), that I was to blame for the financial transparency law that constituted the Financial Information Authority [AIF, the body created by Benedict XVI in the December 2010 law to oversee and report on the financial activities of all the Vatican organisms], conspiring in this way with Mario Draghi of Banca d'Italia to destroy Vatican finances".

Gotti Tedeschi names his principal opponents at the Vatican other than Cardinal Bertone: Marco Simeon, a protege of Bertone who is the director of Italian state TV RAI's Vatican bureau; IOR managing director Cirpriani, and lawyer Lena.

"I recall getting two warnings from Simeon and Cipriani: 'You will go down in history for having destroyed IOR'. Meanwhile, he said, they were progressively discrediting him with Cardinal Bertone, and had "also sought to discredit me with Mons. Gaenswein (they failed) and His Holiness".

He claims Simeon's warnings "followed a failed attempt" to coopt him regarding the Geronzi account. He then expresses his concern over "the indifference of the Secretary of State to a description of these facts" [apparently those contained in the memorandum to Becciu],, but most especially, "with the trust he places in lawyer Lena, a cross between the secret agent and the bumbling inspector in the film Pink Panther".

But Gotti Tedeschi considered these as 'marginal' aspects, compared to a 'most serious fact' made known to him by Mons. Gaenswein - about "calumnies which the Secretary of State passed on to GG about things I had supposedly said against the Pope. Only the intelligence, perspicacity and good faith of GG allowed me to explain myself about these supposed calumnies. And led me to prepare the dossier for him".

He continues, "Another marginal fact that is useful to know is the attitude taken towards me by Mons. Balestrero [Ettore Balestrero, a ranking SecState official who was a trusted aide of Bertone, and whom Benedict XVI named Nuncio to Colombia last February]. He reacted with irritation when I told him, during an inspection visit of Moneyval, that it was my task to make sure the Holy See would get into the 'white list' [of financial institutions given the seal of approval for using adequate financial transparency measures against money laundering and financing of terrorist activities]. He said, no, it was his task. In fact, (to the surprise of Cardinal Bertone himself), I was not informed, invited nor involved when the Secretariat of State amended the December 2010 law [to give the SecState equal say as the AIF in overseeing Vatican finances]. [According to all the reports in early 2011, Benedict XVI had entrusted Gotti Tedeschi with the Moneyval effort, having asked him to draft the December 2010 law, in which the then IOR president sought the help of the lawyer who had drafted a similar law for Italy. It must be remembered how revolutionary the December 2010 law was - being the first time in almost 2000 years that the Vatican would be making all its financial activities open even to scrutiny by an outside institution, in this case, an international one like Moneyval, an office of the European Union. In July 2012, months after Gotti Tedeschi's ouster, Balestrero led the Vatican delegation to Strasbourg which received the interim report of Moneyval on the Holy See's financial transparency measures.]

Gotti Tedeschi ends his March 26, 2012 memorandum by quoting an SMS he received from lawyer Lena, which was copy-furnished by the latter to Cardinal Attilio Nicora, head of the AIF, to Fr. Cristian Falcetto [no identification provided], and Prof. Marcello Condemi [the Italian lawyer who helped draft the December 2010 law] as a member of the AIF.

The SMS said: "Dear President Gotti Tedeschi, do you really think that as legal representative of the IOR, it is at all legitimate for you to meet with members of the AIF - its president, its directors and its management? Are these meetings to secretly work against Law 127 [the amended December 2010 law, which both Cardinal Nicora and Gotti Tedeschi thought diluted the authority of the AIF]? Are you sure you know what you are doing?"

That, too, sounded like a warning to all the persons who got the SMS. In fact, on May 26, Gotti Tedeschi was ousted from the IOR by a no-confidence vote taken by his four colleagues in the IOR board [and the unprecedented release of an internal memorandum explaining the action, citing a variety of reasons from Gotti Tedeschi's alleged incompetence to questioning his psychological condition.]

Shortly after the police raids on Gotti Tedeschi's home and offices last year, La Repubblica had reported on the 'confidential memorandum' but without the detail available this time, and added that Gotti Tedeschi feared enough about his life that he hired a private security escort and agency to protect him.

Today, this reaction from Gotti Tedeschi's lawyer:


Gotti Tedeschi's lawyer decries
release of confidential memorandum
Statement from Fabio Palazzo
Translated from

4/21/2013

---

Following the publication in the media of a private document - what has been tagged 'Gotti Tedeschi's secret memorandum' - our client has asked to make the following clarification.

The document was specifically kept private by our client who had written it (in March 2012) at a time of great tension and concern over attacks against him, and represents his strictly personal, private and even intimate reflections as he tried to interpret the events in which he became involved.

The document, as he writes in its introduction, was intended to be sent to the indicated persons only and exclusively, in case reasons were to be found for any events to his person which at that time he feared.

Contrary to what Corriere della Sera claimed in its report about the memorandum yesterday, and as my client has said on several occasions, he never delivered any documents to the Magistrates, who have the documents that were confiscated during the search of his homes and offices on orders of the Prosecutor of Naples [last May] in connection with an investigation which had nothing to do with IOR and in which Mr. Gotti Tedeschi was heard only as someone who knows the person under investigation.

Our client firmly denounces the publication of his memorandum, which he never intended nor provoked, and asks how it is possible that a personal and confidential memorandum, acquired through confiscation of documents in an investigation that was about a matter that had nothing to do with IOR, could have become available to the media.

It is clear that the publication of the memorandum could further cause Mr. Gotti Tedeschi grave and irreparable prejudice, especially since it is about a matter about which he has maintained total privacy and discretion out of the profound respect that he has for the Church and the Holy Father [Benedict XVI in this case].

Our client reserves the right to undertake the appropriate actions to safeguard his own interests and would request everyone to refrain from publishing any more of his documents that are personal, private and therefore confidential.

---

In fact, despite all the buzz about the secret memorandum after the police raid on his homes and office last June, Gotti Tedeschi never made any statements following his ouster from IOR. One assumes it was because of respect for the Holy Father, and because his fears for his life turned out to be unfounded.

God forgive me for the low opinion I currently hold about the cardinals and other high prelates of the Church, for their abject and totally unnecessary disloyalty to someone they had only more than a month ago owed allegiance and professed high praise.

The prelate in this story, at least, never pretended to even like Benedict XVI, and has now taken the occasion of an official trip as president of the Pontifical Commission for Eucharistic Congresses (to which Benedict XVI appointed him) to give an interview not unlike those given by the overwhelming majority of cardinals so far in their fulsome and fullblown praise of Pope Francis but always at the cruel and unmerited expense of Benedict XVI. And in Piero Marini's case, one almost has a palpable sense that he rejoices at the opportunity to finally make his feelings about Benedict XVI explicitly known. Helped along by the leading questions of a journalist who is part of the grand concert of chirpers.

Other than comments to a few of his remarks which are not part of the chirpers' twitter points, I do not need to fisk his words since they parrot what the rest of the Hallelujah flock has been chirping.
Also, I really do not give a hoot what Marini thinks, except when he disses Benedict XVI as he does here, and as he did earlier in his book on the liturgy, defending the absolute rightness of the post-Conciliar Novus Ordo Mass devised overnight by his mentor Annibale Bugnini.

Is there a sentiment worse than shame that these persons ought to feel about their utter lack of decency, and obviously, of principle? Are they even aware they are committing something wrong????

Mons. Piero Marini says
'the Church is living in hope
after years of fear'
by Alberto Barrantes
Translated from

April 20, 2013

This week, the Catholic Church in Costa Rica celebrated its IV Eucharistic Congress with the end of promoting, through faith and reflection, the mission of priests in bringing the message of Jesus to the faithful. It was to conclude Sunday with a Mass presided by the Vatican delegate for Eucharistic Congresses, Archbishop Piero Marini.

His home is the Vatican and he speaks as a man who has walked alongside three Popes in the Sistine Chapel, from John Paul II to Francis. [How? He did not join John Paul II's staff until 1987, and he was not a cardinal nor a member of the Office for Papal Liturgies at the time of Francis's election. So the only new Pope he did assist in the Sistine Chapel in the crucial first hour post-election was Benedict XVI.]

Mons. Marini is 70, and on his visit to Costa Rica, he said that the new Pope has brought changes that mean hope for the Catholic Church. He also says he is in favor of civil unions for homosexuals and disapproves of Twitter as a means for a Pope to communicate with the faithful.

What has the change in Popes meant for you?
That one now breathes fresh air - it is a window to springtime and hope. Up to now, we have been breathing in air from marshlands which are foul-smelling. [This is probably the nastiest, meanest statement I have read so far about the Benedict years! If it was so foul, why ever did Marini not leave the Curia right away, and why ever did he accept a promotion from Benedict XVI!]

We were in a Church which was afraid of everything and was very problematic with matters like Vatileaks and pedophilia. With Francis, only positive things are said. He places the positive before anything, and speaks of keeping our hope.

Can you describe the present atmosphere in the Vatican?
In these first weeks of the Pontificate, there is a different climate of freedom, of a Church which is much closer to the poor, a Church that is less problematic. [All the problems under Benedict XVI now gone, with him gone from the vatican!] Besides, Francis does not like to live amid great paintings and gold décor. [I must comment on this - the papal apartment is markedly plain and Spartan compared to the public rooms of the Apostolic Palace, and contains not a single 'great painting' as the world saw in the RAI TV documentary for Benedict XVI's 80th birthday.]

With his humble gestures, is the Pope recalling the vow of poverty made by priests?
The call is for us to ask ourselves who are the poor today? They are those who do not know if they will eat tomorrow. We priests shou7ld give an example of a simple and moderate life.

Does it mean that the priest must get out of the temple and share the life of the needy?
Without a doubt. That is why the new Pope has called on us to have the 'odor of the sheep' - which means to live life and faith with the community. [Excuse me, but as colorfully vivid as it is, I really find that phrase rather condescending if not insulting to the 'sheep'].

In your 18 years with John Paul II as master of papal liturgies, what did you learn from such a greatly admired man?
I learned his simplicity. He was a very simple person, spontaneous, but with great ideas to share with the faithful. and who liked to linger with them, chatting, after Mass. [????Did he ever have a chance to do that as Pope?] He had worked in a mine so he knew the reality and the needs of people.

What must be done to integrate young people better into the Church?
It is one of the most important problems and challenges for the Catholic Church. We have a rupture in the transmission of the faith from one generation to the next. We need to recover the message, and that must begin in the family - children must obey their parents.
[How strange he does not refer to the WYD initiative which was one of John Paul II's best legacies! But at least, he agrees with benedict XVI that faith education must start with the family.]

Benedict XVI used Twitter as a means of communication? Do you think it is effective?
If it were me, I would not have done it, but he was advised to do it. The Church does not have to remain 'antiquated', but one must observe caution. [Has he told that to those in the Vatican who are boasting that Francis has more than doubled Benedict's 'followers' on Twitter?]

In Costa Rica, the discussion is now open about a secular state. What do you think about this? [But since when has Costa Rica not been a secular state?]
It is already reality in Europe. The secular state is good - what is bad is if it becomes 'secularist' - meaning that it becomes anti-Church. Church and State should not consider themselves enemies. But in these ongoing discussions, it is necessary, for instance, to recognize same-sex unions, because many such couples are suffering because their civil rights are not respected [None of their civil rights has been 'not respected' - but they consider the right to 'marriage' a civil right, and the Church opposes that for well-known reasons. Is this unsolicited opinion Marini's personal view or is he simply seeking to align himself with the supposed personal view of Cardinal Bergoglio in favor of same-sex civilian unions?[ What cannot be recognized is that such a union is a marriage.

Monday, April 22, Fourth Week of Easter

ST. ADALBERT (WOJTECH) OF PRAGUE (b Bohemia 956, d Poland 997)
Bishop, Missionary and Martyr
Born to a noble family in Bohemia, the future saint was educated by St. Adalbert of Magdeburg,
and at the age of 27 was named of Bishop of Prague. Eight years later he was exiled at the
instigation of those who opposed his clerical reforms. Popular clamor brought him back but
he was exiled once again because he excommunicated the murderers of a woman accused of
adultery who had sought sanctuary in a church. He went to Hungary first to preach and then
carried his mission to the peoples along the Baltic Sea. For chopping down some oaks sacred
to the local pagans, he was killed by pagan priests in what was then part of Prussia (now
part of Poland). His body was ransomed by Poles who buried him in Gniezno Cathedral, but
his remains were taken to St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague in the mid-11th century. He is
highly venerated in the Czechoslovakian lands, Poland, Hungary and Germany.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/042213.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

Pope Francis met with

= Eight bishops from the Umbria region of Italy on ad=limina visit

- Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney.




On this day last year, at the Regina caeli prayers, the Holy Father Benedict XVI reflected on Jesus's second appearance to the Apostles after the Resurrection and his continuing presence in the Eucharist, reminding priests, parents and catechists to prepare their children well for their First Communion, which in many parishes is usually held in Eastertide. He also called attention to the beatification in Mexico City yesterday of María Inés Teresa of the Most Blessed Sacrament, who founded the Clarissan Missionaries of the Most Blessed Sacrament.

REGINA CAELI TODAY
Being authentic witnesses to Christ

April 22, 2012



St Peter’s Square, below the Pope’s study window was packed, mainly with young children from parishes across the diocese of Rome, who are preparing for their First Communion. They had gathered beneath his balcony early Sunday morning, building up to the midday appointment with the Holy Father with song, and adding splashes of color to square with bunches of balloons.

And they were not disappointed. Speaking to them directly before the recitation of the Regina Caeli, which replaces the Angelus during the period between Easter and Pentecost, Pope Benedict urged "parish priests, parents and catechists to prepare this feast of faith, with great fervor, but with sobriety." This day is to be memorable as the moment when ... you too understand the importance of a personal encounter with Jesus".



Here is Vatican Radio's translation of the Pope's reflection today:

---

Dear brothers and sisters!

Today, the third Sunday of Easter, in the Gospel according to Luke, we meet the risen Jesus who comes in the midst of the disciples (cf. Lk 24,36), who were incredulous and frightened, thinking they were seeing a ghost (cf. Lk 24, 37).

Romano Guardini writes: "The Lord has changed. He does not live as before. His existence ... it is not understandable. Yet it is corporal, including ... his whole life experience, his lived destiny, his passion and his death. Everything is real. Albeit changed, but always tangible reality" (The Lord. Meditations on the person and the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Milan 1949, 433).

Since the resurrection has not erased the marks of crucifixion, Jesus shows his hands and feet to the Apostles. And to convince them, he even asked for something to eat. So the disciples offered him a piece of baked fish, and he took it and ate it before them" (Luke 24.42-43).

St. Gregory the Great says that "the fish grilled over a fire does not mean anything other than the passion of Jesus, Mediator between God and men. In fact, he deigned to hide in the waters of the human race, agreed to be caught in the snare of our death, and it was as if he were set on fire for the pain suffered at the time of His Passion" (Hom. in Evang. XXIV, 5: CCL 141, Turnhout 1999, 201).

Thanks to these very realistic signs, the disciples overcome their initial doubt and open up to the gift of faith, and this faith allows them to understand the things written about Christ "in the law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms" (Luke 24,44).

We read that Jesus "opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them: 'Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer, and rise from the dead on the third day. and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins… You are witnesses of these things"(Lk 24,45-48).

The Saviour assures us of his real presence among us through the Word and the Eucharist. Therefore, just as the disciples of Emmaus recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread (cf. Lk 24:35), so we meet the Lord in the Eucharistic celebration. In this regard, St. Thomas Aquinas explains that " It is absolutely necessary to confess according to Catholic faith that the entire Christ is in this sacrament.... since the Godhead never set aside the assumed body" (S.Th. III q. 76, a. 1).

Dear friends, the Church at Easter time, usually administers First Communion to children. I therefore urge the pastors, parents and catechists to prepare this feast of faith well, with great fervor, but also with simplicity. "This day is to be memorable as the moment when ... you too understand the importance of a personal encounter with Jesus" (Post Synodal ap.exort. Sacramentum Caritatis, 19).

May the Mother of God help us to listen attentively to the Word of the Lord and participate worthily in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, to become witnesses of the new humanity.

After the prayers, he said:
I am happy to recall that yesterday in Mexico, Maria Ines Teresa del Santisimo Sacramento (1904-1981) was declared Blessed. She founded the Clarissan Missionaries of the Most Holy Sacrament. Let us give thanks to God for this exemplary daughter of Mexico, which I had the joy of visiting recently and which I will always carry in my heart.

Today in Italy, we observe a day dedicated to the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, with the theme this year, "The future of the nation in the heart of the youth". It is important that young people are formed in values in addition to scientific and technical knowledge. For this, Fr. Agostino Gemelli founded the Catholic University, which I wish to be abreast of the times but always faithful to its origins.

At the end, he had this special greeting:
I affectionately greet Italian-speaking pilgrims, especially the group 'Bambini in missione di pace' (Children on a mission of peace) accompanied here today by the Honorable Mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, Thank you for your joy.

---

I have been meaning to do a post about all the books that have been published in tribute to Benedict XVI since he announced his renunciation of the Papacy, but have been remiss so far. Here is an excerpt, posted by an Italian Benedictine blogger - his blog title, Romualdica, is a reference to St. Romuald, who founded the Camaldolesi branch of the Benedictine order - from one of at least five such tribute books that were published in France as specials by leading Catholic periodicals and even by Le Figaro, an icon of secularism, in the first two weeks after the February 11 announcement. I am most grateful to Beatrice who has been the unfailing source for everything significant about Benedict XVI that has been published or treated by the media in France. (I will do the omnibus post as soon as I have put together all the necessary material)...

Benedict XVI:
A lesson in humility
by Dom Louis-Marie Geyer d'Orth, OSB
Abbot of Sainte-Madeleine di Le Barroux
from the book
BENOIT XVI: PONTIFICAT DE LA JOIE
courtesy of the blog

April 19, 2013

On April 19,2005, Benedict XVI was elected Pope. On the anniversary of that event - thanks to the gracious authorization of Christophe Geoffroy, editor of the mothly magazine La Nef and editor of the recent book BENOIT XVI: Le Pontificat de la Joie - we publish the tribute to Benedict XVI written for the book by the Abbot of Le Barroux.

We were more than just a little proud that the man elected by the conclave had chosen the great Patriarch of the West, St. Benedict, as the patron of his Petrine ministry.

But we must recognize that Benedict XVI has given us a great lesson: that of true humility. This is a rare virtue. Humility is rare, very rare, even among Benedictines. Indeed, it is easy to confuse it with pauperism and cowardice.

Benedict XVI has gone through the twelve degrees of humility described in Chapter VII of the Rule of St. Benedict. It is the longest chapter, because humility is the foundation of Christian life. Jesus himself was a master of humility compared to his disciples - someone who was indeed meek and humble of heart.

Charles Péguy (1873-1914) underscored the importance of this virtue when he wrote in Un nouveau theologien(A new theologian): "This religion... has placed pride at the top of the capital sins, has made humility perhaps more than just a virtue - (but) its very style and rhythm, its secret taste, its attitude both exterior and profoundm canal and spiritual, its posture, its customs, its perpetual experience, almost its very being".

But what is humility? In the first place, it is to live constantly under God's regard. Benedict XVI has shown this through the awareness with which he has carried out his roles. He is a conscientious man, a man who lives from that secret place of the heart which hears God's voice.

He has shown it with his courageous positions, as in Regensburg, in the Bundestag, at Westminster Hall, and with strong actions, like the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum.

Humility means obeying, even in difficult conditions. Benedict XVI showed this by accepting the serious responsibility of Supreme Pontiff at the age of 78. He showed it by not imposing a personal program as Pope, but following the Holy Spirit in accordance with Sacred Scripture, Tradition, and preceding Magisterium.

He followed the faith of the Church, a constant theme in his teaching, as in his last discourse to the clergy of Rome, in which he spoke once more of "the great 'we' of believers".

And what humility in the simplicity with which he recalls his own life! One has the sensation that he has nothing to hide. We know that his life and his youth have been passed again and again through the sieve of mediatic scrutiny.

But the Pope from Germany has already said everything there is to say. This is the fifth grade of humility which, for the monk, consists in hiding nothing from his own abbot.

And without a doubt, he demonstrated the virtue of humility in his resignation. He had decided in conscience that the responsibility of being Pope now surpassed his physical and personal strengths - "the Church now needs someone else: - meeting the sixth and seventh degrees of humility.

If he had not already been an example of courage and hard work, one might have thought it had to do with a weakness of character But all his life has been dedicated body and soul to his work in the vineyard of the Lord. All his intellectual work and various pastoral activities prove it.

Finally, Benedict XVI fulfilled the last five degrees of humility which have to do with exterior attitudes: his reserve and self-mastery, his words, his smile, his very way of talking and walking. Everyone who has had the occasion to meet him, even briefly, are unanimous in saying that the look he gives is simple and joyful. Even if we did not have to follow all the formal protocols of respect when meeting him, we would never have treated him with 'familiarity'.

St. Benedict says that the monk who can pass through the twelve degreeve of humility achieves a charity which precludes any fear.

The last sign of his humility: when the whole earth seemed to have paused in stunned surprise in the face of his renunciation. Like the apostles witnessing the Transfiguration of Jesus. Never did a public person in our time had the authority he had at the moment he announced his decision. As if, through him, genuine humility had shown itself, and at least for that moment, resounded in the heart of every man.

Thus he demonstrated the truth of the words of our Lord Jesus Christ: "Whoever exalts himself shall be humiliated, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted".

Thank you, Holy Father. Thank you from the depth of our hearts.


Steps to humility
from The Rule of St. Benedict

---

Brethren, the Holy Scripture cries to us saying: "Every one that exalts himself shall be humbled; and he that humbles himself shall be exalted."

The first degree of humility, then, is that a man always have the fear of God before his eyes shunning all forgetfulness and that he be ever mindful of all that God has commanded… .

The second degree of humility is, when a man loves not his own will, nor is pleased to fulfill his own desires but by his deeds carries out that word of the Lord which says: 'I came not to do My own will but the will of Him that sent Me.'

The third degree of humility is, that for the love of God a man subject himself to a Superior in all obedience, imitating the Lord, of whom the Apostle says: 'He became obedient unto death.'

The fourth degree of humility is, that, if hard and distasteful things are commanded, nay, even though injuries are inflicted, he accept them with patience and even temper, and not grow weary or give up… .

The fifth degree of humility is, when one hides from his Abbot none of the evil thoughts which rise in his heart or the evils committed by him in secret, but humbly confesses them.

The sixth degree of humility is, when a monk is content with the meanest and worst of everything, and in all that is enjoined him holds himself as a bad and worthless workman, saying with the Prophet: 'I am brought to nothing and I knew it not; I am become as a beast before Thee, and I am always with Thee.' [The Psalm quoted by Augustine and reprised by Joseph Ratzinger in describing himself as a beast of burden for the Lord.]

The seventh degree of humility is, when, not only with his tongue he declares, but also in his inmost soul believes, that he is the lowest and vilest of men, humbling himself and saying with the Prophet: 'But I am a worm and no man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people.'

The eighth degree of humility is, when a monk does nothing but what is sanctioned by the common rule of the monastery and the example of his elders.

The ninth degree of humility is, when a monk withholds his tongue from speaking, and keeping silence. does not speak until he is asked; for the Scripture shows that 'in a multitude of words there shall not want sin.'

The tenth degree of humility is, when a monk is not easily moved and quick for laughter, for it is written: 'The fool exalts his voice in laughter.'

The eleventh degree of humility is, that, when a monk speaks, he speak gently and without laughter, humbly and with gravity, with few and sensible words, and that he be not loud of voice, as it is written: 'The wise man is known by the fewness of his words.'

The twelfth degree of humility is, when a monk is not only humble of heart, but always lets it appear also in his whole exterior to all that see him. Namely, at the Work of God, in the garden, on a journey, in the field, or wherever he may be, sitting, walking, or standing, let him always have his head bowed down, his eyes fixed on the ground, ever holding himself guilty of his sins, thinking that he is already standing before the dread judgment seat of God, and always saying to himself in his heart what the publican in the Gospel said, with his eyes fixed on the ground: 'Lord, I am a sinner and not worthy to lift up mine eyes to heaven'; and again with the Prophet: 'I am bowed down and humbled exceedingly.'

---

In the absence of new material about B16, I'd like to continue re-posting the best and/or most interesting of the tributes/assessments made of his Pontificate at this time last year, when he had completed the Biblically significant first seven years as Pope, and when few really entertained the possibility that he could ever resign as Pope. And I start with this beautiful tribute from Luigi Accattoli, the retired senior Vaticanista of Corriere della Sera, who shows the absurdity of all the accusations that Benedict XVI chose to 'isolate' himself by focusing on his own reading and writing, as if the Vicar of Christ on earth was nothing but a self-indulgent, narcissistic, totally irresponsible slacker who simply neglected his duties to pursue his own personal interests...





On his blog, Luigi Accattoli reprints a center-spread article published in LIBERAL on April 17, which is among other things, an eloquent retort to those like his erstwhile fellow Vaticanista Marco Politi who obstinately and preposterously portray Benedict XVI as a self-absorbed man who has isolated himself by preference, abdicating his duties, as it were, by preferring to read and write.... And you can tell Accattoli worked on this article - he did not just toss it off...

Let me tell you about Benedict XVI:
He is not solitary, but
the soloist in an ensemble
by Luigi Accattoli
Translated from

April 17, 2012

Benedict XVI is not a Pope as many think who is surrounded by a hostile Curia. Nor is he a solitary Pope by temperament: But he is a soloist by choice and in his way of governing. [Soloist in the musical sense, where one plays a distinct solo role in relation to but part of an ensemble performance.]

This soloist Pope turned 85 yesterday, years which he carries very well. We saw him move agilely, with slight assistance from his acolytes, during the long telecasts of the Holy Week and Easter liturgies - his eyes thoughtful and concerned, his steps light as usual but more careful now, and his words vivid as ever.

He suffers from a weakness in the right hip, and last October, started using the moving platform that had been used by Papa Wojtyla. And he is no longer able to perform the prostration before the Cross on Good Fridays as he did in his earlier years as Pope.

But all this merely speaks of his age: He was elected Pope at 78, and on Thursday, he enters the eighth year of his Pontificate. No other Pope in the past 100 years has lived to be 85. Pius X lived to 79, Benedict XV t0 67, Pius XI to 81, Pius XII to 82, John XXIII to 81, Paul VI to 80, Papa Luciani to 65, and Papa Wojtyla to 84.

Benedict XVI's overall physical shape is demonstrated by his travels and by his many public commitments. He withstood the recent trip to Mexico and Cuba very well. On Easter, we saw him celebrate Mass at night and then again in the morning, for a total of six hours within a 14-hour period.

He will be going to Milan for the World Encounter of Families the first three days of June, and on September 14-16, he will be in Lebanon. (Where he will deliver to the bishops of the Middle East his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation* that synthesizes the conclusions of the Synodal Assembly on the Middle East in October 2010).

The visit to Mexico, a country caught up in the tsunami of drug trafficking, and to Cuba in the twilight years of the Castro brothers, and to the Middle East next September, in the aftermath of what was supposed to be an 'Arab spring', are extraordinary undertakings, but the following months will see the maturation of other signal commitments on the Pope's agenda: from the Synodal Assembly on the new evangelization in October, to the opening of the Year of Faith to mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vatican-II.

This year may also see the publication of his encyclical on faith to complete a trilogy on the cardinal virtues, after Deus caritas est on love in 2006, and Spe salvi on hope in 2007.

Also in 2012, we should be seeing the publication of the third and last volume of JESUS OF NAZARETH, signed Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, after the first two volumes published in 2007 and 2011. This will be dedicated to the birth and early years of the Nazarene, where the first two dealt with the public ministry of Jesus and then his passion, death and Resurrection.

This trilogy on Jesus is a work of major importance on which, first as cardinal and then as Pope, he has dedicated at least ten years of work. In his Preface to Volume 1, the Pope says he began writing the first volume during his summer vacation in 2004, and completed it after he became Pope, 'by using all his free time'. And so, we have the unprecedented fact, in the modern era, of a Pope who has published a theological work after becoming Pope.

It is relevant to how he has returned the figure of the Pope to its apostolic dimension and to preaching, with less emphasis on governing the Curia and the bishops - a displacement from governance to mission which has concerned all the Popes of our time, from Pius IX, and which made great progress with the Popes of the Council and after the Council.

His focus on Jesus is equally relevant to the degree of approval for the Pope within the Catholic world, where the appreciation of his teaching is great, whereas there persists a prejudice about his work of governance, despite the points he has gained in recent years with his excellent decisions regarding the pedophile-priest scandal and with the financial reforms in the Holy See.

Whoever still finds it difficult to like Benedict XVI - because of the image that the media had built of Cardinal Ratzinger as a 'fierce watchdog of the faith' for at least two decades before he became Pope - ought to read his books on Jesus. What greater thing can we expect of a Pope than to speak to us of the Nazarene?

Many point out that the Pope must 'nonetheless' govern, and that a Pope who publishes books and writes his homilies by hand ends up delegating governance to the Curia. It's a schematic idea that comes from the past.

It was said of Papa Wojtyla that he was busy being missionary to the world, leaving the routine governance of the Church to the Curia. And they say that now of Papa Ratzinger, that he keeps to his writing and relies on the Curia to do the work. But the analogy does not work.

I firmly believe that Benedict XVI must be given credit for having complete awareness at all times of the issues facing the Church - he spends hours at his desk studying files and reports - to take an example, in the naming of bishops.

It now seems clear that the uproar caused by the chattering crows at the Vatican - which seems to have quieted - was due to the Pope's decisions to institute financial reforms. In other words, it happened because the governance was too strong for some, not because there was no governance.

And in the matter of communications, as someone who is in the business, I can only find one difference of this Pontificate compared to the previous one, which however is not necessarily negative.

We have, as I said, a soloist Pope who nonetheless still has a Curia, substantially the same Curia as it has always been [in terms of function, not in its major players) but it is no longer the sort of court that previous Popes had, who could trip up the Pope and impose their conditions, but rather help foresee, predispose and accompany papal activities.

I would say that the delta-like outflow of communications under Papa Wojtyla helped prepare the terrain for a detailed and relatively flexible reception of papal initiatives by media operators, whereas the estuary-like outflow [i.e., narrower] characteristic of Papa Ratzinger predisposes to media outcomes in which he does not have a safety net - either the reception is successful because of surprise effect and/or by consensus, or it goes very badly because a lack of concerted effort prevents taking negative eventualities into account.

And on the fact that this Pope is a soloist but not solitary, we can cite what he told newsmen in March 2009 on the way to Cameroon: "I don't feel alone in any way. Every time, I receive working visits from mu closest collaborators... I see all the Curial heads regularly, almost every day I meet with bishops visiting ad limina... Recently we had two plenary assemblies if these dicasteries. Then I have my contacts with friends, a network of friendship. Those who were ordained with me recently came to visit... So being alone is not one of my problems. I am surrounded by friends and I have a marvellous working relationship with bishops, my associates, and assorted laymen, and for this I am grateful". [Which should have been obvious to anyone who followed Benedict XVI's activities, as Vaticanistas should. But those who insisted against all evidence that Benedict XVI was 'isolated' are no better than Paolo Gabriele who claimed this out of sheer prejudice and the strange megalomania that he, although a simple-minded valet, could see and know things about the Church that a brilliant man like Joseph Ratzinger could not!]

He listens a great deal, to everyone, but he then decides by himself, and in this sense he is a soloist.

There are even those who claim that he does not have an adequate perception of the crisis in the Catholic Church, but this too is false. We have the curious situation of a Pope who says more negative things about the Church in his homilies than even his critics do with their pamphleteering. [The important difference is that he couches these criticisms of the sins within the Church in gentle pastoral, 'tough love' terms, not as imprecations.]

These critics - let us say Hans Kueng, or the We are Church movement, or the Austrian priests who issued a 'Call for Disobedience' [2013 P.S. Or the whole Church hierarchy that now seems to blame Benedict XVI singlehanded for all the ills of the Church, and would imply, by their panegyrics about his successor, that he did nothing at all about these ills, entirely as if they, these high-speaking hierarchs, cardinals and bishops, had been completely blameless for these ills!] - always say that things wouldn't be going so bad for the Church if only she had the courage to make some reforms - i.e., more democracy in Church affairs, a more active ecclesiastical role for the laity and for women, a more positive tone in preaching [Surely no one can fault Benedict XVI for his preaching, which is always positive even when he criticizes! It's the dissident priests who are relentlessly negative - if not against the Church, then in pursuing their liberal political causes], and less preoccupation with the prevailing sexual culture and with bioethics.

On the contrary, Pope Benedict maintains that the crisis in the Church is even more profound and that no organizational updating or preaching will remedy anything unless first there is a recovery of faith.

[2013 P.S. Obviously, this lesson was completely lost on the cardinals who, during the pre-Conclave congregations and the interviews they gave, seemed to think that the Roman Curia and Vatileaks constituted the be-all and end-all of the problems of the Church! Did I hear anyone talking about the faith? Even Cardinal Bergoglio, in his now-famous pre-Conclave intervention, thought the problem was in the narcissistic self-absorption of the ministers of the Church in their mundane quotidian problems, to the neglect of the mission of the Church. But his words were taken to mean, "He means business- he's going to change how things are done at the Vatican, he will upset the establishment". Sure, there was also "This is the man who will renew the Church", but it was said as if one man by himself could effect such a renewal, which is not possible unless everyone in the Church began renewing himself interiorly first. Remember Mother Teresa - "What must change to renew the Church?" Answwer: "You and I".]

He spoke about this strongly in his address last December 22 to the Roman Curia, which was already feverish over internal issues which would then come to the light with the seeming gusher of confidential documents that would be leaked from the Vatican. [It only seemed 'massive' at the time, because of the undue feeding frenzy in the media, but in fact, there were at most eight such documents that have come out so far, none of which were really major, but by their nature 'scandalous' enough for the media to exploit them as such! The most headlines were generated by the three documents which are for the most part made up of wild partisan charges, gossip and absurd speculation - the Vigano letters and the anonymous memorandum alleging, among other things, a plot to kill the Pope.]

He spoke of 'the crisis of the Church in Europe' which arises from 'a crisis of faith', which he described as a 'fatigue' and 'the tedium of being Christian - strong terms, and hardly 'inadequate perception' by the Pope. [Who, among other things, had already written quite a few books and many essays about the crisis of Europe, before he became Pope, in piercing analyses that leading intellectual figures in the secular world found spot-on perceptive a - precisely - and challenging.]

Last Maundy Thursday, with the same dramatic effect, he addressed the call to disobedience by some Austrian parish priests as 'a desperate urge to do something'.

So the poor Pope has, on the one hand, these 'disobedients', and on the other, the Lefebvrians who, up to this point at least, have appeared to reject the hand he has held out to them.

But the tragedy is not in such tensions and ruptures. Rather it lies in the abandonment of the faith by so many. and by the filth committed by those who have distorted the face of the Church.

It is the Pope's call to penitence and for reform to start with individual purification. From this critical overview of the state of the faith, he has taken the attitude of radical trust in God, which he expressed in a most explicit way in the invocation that he pronounced at this last Christmas Eve Mass, perhaps the most beautiful of the prayers he has proposed since he became Pope.

He developed it from a verse by the prophet Isaiah who announced the birth of a 'son' who would liberate the People from the oppressors' boots, cloaks and rods:

---

At this hour, when the world is continually threatened by violence in so many places and in so many different ways, when over and over again there are oppressors’ rods and bloodstained cloaks, we cry out to the Lord:

O mighty God, you have appeared as a child and you have revealed yourself to us as the One who loves us, the One through whom love will triumph. And you have shown us that we must be peacemakers with you.

We love your childish state, your powerlessness, but we suffer from the continuing presence of violence in the world, and so we also ask you: Manifest your power, O God.

In this time of ours, in this world of ours, cause the oppressors’ rods, the cloaks rolled in blood and the footgear of battle to be burned, so that your peace may triumph in this world of ours.

---

*[It's a bit off-topic, but this is an occasion to say something about the post-synodal exhortations which are typically published two years after the event. I think we all fail to appreciate the effort that the Pope must put into these exhortations. Moreover, Sacramentum caritatis, on the Eucharist, Verbum Domini, on the Word of God, and Africae munus, on the special assembly on Africa, are all major and powerful documents of the Papal Magisterium that have simply been overshadowed in attention by the encyclicals. But they are no less significant (and beautifully written) as Magisterium - and a truly collegial act, rather than just a personal one - since they incorporate what the bishops of the world have concluded and recommended.

Each document must require a great deal of work - hence the two years gestation - since the Pope has to explain each of the dozens of recommendations made by the Synod, tie them together theologically and doctrinally, and then make concrete pastoral directives to carry out the recommendations. It's daunting!

Sometimes I think that even the bishops and priests, to whom these exhortations are primarily addressed, forget to refer to them constantly as they should. Or may never have read them, just as the vast majority, I suspect, of all those who profess to be 'the spirit of Vatican II' have never bothered to read the Vatican II texts and have simply been attributing - wildly and without foundation - their own personal and ideological ideas about the Church to Vatican II.



Another significant item at the time was this interview with Peter Seewald.

Benedict XVI and the time
of the authentic believer
An interview with Peter Seewald
Translated from


MUNICH-ROME, April 16 (kath.net/ps/rn) - Here is an exclusive interview with Peter Seewald on the occasion of Pope Benedict XVI's 85th birthday:

Mr. Seewald, 85 years of Joseph Ratzinger. seven years as Pope Benedict XVI. Is that a reason for jubilation?
For jubilation, perhaps not. But certainly, for joy. No one more than this Pope has made it possible not just to gird the Church for the challenges of our time; to show how to defend herself, and how to find the way back after a time of disorientation. One must not overlook that the world is going through a crisis that is truly tragic. But the spread of unfaith is, of all the ailments of civilization, the most dangerous. Because when faith goes, society cannot do well.

Recently, an Italian Vaticanista ventured to say that perhaps Ratzinger should never have been elected Pope ]the usual villain - Marco Politi].
The truth is that there was no other choice. Joseph Ratzinger helped create John Paul II's Pontificate. He was the best known and most fascinating cardinal worldwide. No one had a better knowledge of the Curia. In almost 25 years, he had become a Roman. He speaks nine or 10 languages. He is a whole very well-rounded, educated person. He already had international renown as one of the greatest theologians and important thinkers of our time. And, and, and. [And his personal holiness was clear to all and indisputable.]

Of course, there have been errors in the past seven years. But the very fact alone that, after a man like Wojtyla, he was able to shift in such a refined, almost elegant way, to his own Pontificate without any gaps, is a herculean feat.

What distinguishes him especially?
A lot. His tirelessness, his fire, his self-sacrifice, his human kindness. At a time which is Godless and depressed, he places high value on praising God. Where believers and priests have fallen into activism, he shows the continuity and the true sources of Christian faith.

For him, catharsis is always the start of anything new. What can seem like a breakdown into mouldering rubble can also be seen as humus for new sowing.

Benedict XVI is not just the Pope of a Renaisssance of Christian origins - he also exercises the Petrine primacy in a very ecumenical way. Which makes it easier for other confessions not to see the Bishop of Rome as a rival but as a symbol for the great mission of Christian unity.

It is said that public consensus was much greater for his predecessor.
Well, at least in his general audiences, he has attracted a much greater public. On his trips, even in Mexico, he is greeted enthusiastically by millions. No politician and no popstar is able to do that.

And it was quite a sight to see in Cuba the greying Commandant Fidel Castro - who appears to have come a long way from rejecting religion as a Marxist revolutionary to what appears to be a rediscovery - now requesting the Pope to recommend books for his spiritual reading!

The critics also say that Benedict XVI is not modern enough. [Too bad this interviewer seems limited to bringing up hoary chestnuts!]
But whoever can put aside the cliches and look more carefully will be surprised. At a time when nonsense, unreason and sheer lunacy are increasing exponentially, the Church is led by someone whom one can call the Pope of Reason.

In a time when the intellectual class is ruined and the public discourse has become even more dumb, an exceptional intellectual sits on Peter's Chair. Bu it is someone who does not stop at purely rational thought, but shows how out, of the symbiosis between knowledge and faith, come wisdom, beauty and truth.

And while the whole world appears to be intent on renouncing truth, the Pope stands firm, pointing to the eternal Truth that man should not lose sight of.

Benedict XVI is above all one of the humblest of Popes. He thinks that non-violence and love are the greatest forces that can work on earth. He is stripping the Papacy of its false attributes, of any lust for power. Indeed, here is one who asks of his Church to be powerless, to give up privileges that had always been sought.

Namely, „Entweltlichung“.
One wonders why this idea sounds so false to us or is not even understood. Nothing is farther from the Pope's mind than for the Church to build its own little special world. 'Enweltlichung' - giving up worldliness - does not mean running away from men, but a rejection of power, of Mammon, of cronyism, of counterfeit, of deception and self-deception. [2013 P.S. These are facts and statements that, of course, were conveniently ignored or forgotten by all who went into ecstasies because the new Pope chose to call himself Francis and expressed his desire for 'a poor Church that is a Church for the poor', as if no Pope had thought about the poor before, or showed himself to be simple and humble.]

Joseph Ratzinger used these very terms in a 1960s essay entitled „Vorgang der Entweltlichung der Kirche“ (A process to rid the Church of worldliness). He believes this is necessary so that the faith can once more unfold her active principles.

'Entweltlichung' is not about turning your back on social and political involvement, and certainly not a rejection of the Christian virtue of charity. It means to be able to resist the world, to show that Christianity is bound by an ideal that goes far beyond every purely worldly and material world view.

Benedict XVI embodies, in this respect, the time of the authentic faithful, who will no longer wave the standard of "We-are-only-doing-this-as-if...' but rather "We will do it', even when we feel weak, and even when we fall again and again, to always start again.

Der Spiegel had a cover picture of Benedict XVI in 2009 as 'Die Entrueckte' (Out of this world), in 2010, as 'Der (un)Fehlbare' [The (in)-Fallible); and in 2011, as 'Der Unbelehrbare' (The Unteachable).
The 2012 cover is still to come. It might well read „Der Starrsinnige“ (The Stubborn), because he does not dance to any piper's tune. He is one of the last representatives of a high culture of education and intellectual endowment that was once known by the expression 'German genius' and was a worldwide wonder.

Today, what we have is the fear of not conforming enough. One lives to get nothing but flattering feedback, even if it should be at the cost of truth or fairness. The Pope is not tempted at all. In that way he is inconvenient to others, he does not fit; in fact, he is not in the mainstream.

For him, the question is not, What is modern?, but What is appropriate for the future? And how can we manage to still have a future? Is it really progressive to follow ill-considered fashions which are not even compatible with the basic order of Creation? Don't we need a new age which will be distinguished by responsibility through a lifestyle that helps us save our souls and not bring an end to this wonderful and beautiful planet earth?

How about that Pope Benedict stands in the way of progress and that he is an enemy of the modern?
They also said that of Papa Wojtyla. Until almost everyone started to realize that his contribution to bringing down the man-hating systems of Eastern Europe cannot be appreciated enough.

Meanwhile, what does the 'modern' look like? In the face of so many mistakes, has it not become a bone of contention itself? Of course, the Pope is old. But precisely from the experience of the past century and his Biblical outlook, he stands by his judgments. Wherever man feels even more in distress, he can offer a a means of healing that basically cannot be beaten.

What do you mean?
The Church no longer has great institutional power. Her remaining spheres of influence are subject to feuds, to mockery, and increasingly, to persecution. The Church, in this way, will seem more Christlike. It's a paradox that she both wins and loses. But the institutional weaknesses of the Church correspond to an interior reinforcement of the papacy. People are looking for support, a spiritual father whom they can trust and whose word is reliable. Do not build on sand, Jesus said, but build on rock.

He found his fit in the Papacy quite fast.
And no one thought that possible. There is a significance in that Benedict's birthday and papal anniversary fall so close together. The three days in between were needed for the rebirth of Joseph Ratzinger from defender of the faith to the shepherd of believers.

It is noteworthy that all his work is in the sign of service. Humility - after the great signs of truth, faith and love - is a stamp of this Pontificate. Very much like the motto that he chose for his ordination as a priest: "We are not masters of your faith but servants of your joy".

He is also called the theologian-Pope.
But that is so inadequate. He personifies, on the one hand, a new intelligence in the announcement of the mysteries of the faith; and on the other hand, he is not a typical scholar, who writes weighty tomes with millions of footnotes, obsessively attentive to the least detail.

A primary concern for him is to reach the hearts of men. He takes that very seriously, but he does it easily - without taking away the mystery of what is great, and without trivializing the sublime.

Has he changed much in seven years as Pope?
With Joseph Ratzinger, everything seemed to have been just right from the earliest years. Not in the sense of being average, but that he early found his center of gravity. That goes for his teaching and his attitudes towards theological issues or questions of Church policy.

That goes also for his temperament. He is always 'in touch'. And with his equability, he is not only very incisive, he is also very efficient. He has hardly changed in this nor in his simplicity and likeable ways. On the other hand, the office and the person have become so fused together that they can no longer be distinguished.

How is that demonstrated?
He feels, as he himself has said, not just the singular grace of the office, but that he must transform his entire person, as much as he can, to become what he has accepted to be.

He defines the Vicar of Christ not as a function that has anything to do with might and fame, but rather as a chance to show exactly who Christ is. In the same way as one must see the Father in Christ, so one must see Christ in the Successor of Peter.

When he looks back at 85 years of his life, what would stand out especially?
Above all, an unparalleled continuity in his work from the very beginning to now. Whoever reads his early texts will already have a full-grown Ratzinger before him, one who never had to correct his texts which continue to read very contemporary today.

On the other hand, Joseph Ratzinger was also someone who had other sides - he could be rebellious, as his school certificate shows, despite his shyness. Someone who was confident enough to stand up to the harassment of a Nazi officer as he would later to a vain theology professor who was a star in his field.

He resisted the call to become a bishop, he resisted the earlier calls to come to Rome, he resisted the call to Peter's Chair. But precisely these road signs of developments which were totally against his will spelled a destiny that obviously someone else held in His hands.

What were his early concerns?
Two above all - truth and love, because for him there can be no love without truth, nor truth without love. Love was the central word of his theological North Star, Augustine, who called reason 'the genius of the heart'. And love was, of course, the subject of his first encyclical.

Was his work on Augustine also the basis for his ideas on the Church?
Yes. He sees the Church as a field in which both wheat and weeds grow. Augustine said that the Church is very often a 'church of sin', that one had to ask whether there was an upright man to be found. But this assembly is part of the Sacred Mystery. It is therefore necessary for the Christian to defend himself from temptation, in order to establish a Church of the pure.

What was his driving force?
He was never interested in building a career in the bourgeois sense. He has always lived with the simplicity of a monk who has never sought luxury, and it's all the same to him whether his environment only has the bare necessities or some degree of comfort.

The reality that interests him is the area that transcends the ordinary. This is where all desirable reality begins, about which most of his contemporaries have no idea. Joseph Ratzinger is, in this respect, a spiritual explorer in search of stars on earth and in heaven. Everything else is too little. Everything else is not really what is necessary in order to find true peace, inner and outer peace.

He saw early something that was hidden. This occupation was clearly not the Glass Bead Game of a virtuoso cultural connoisseur, nor a purposeless pastime, but it always had to do with service - to God and to men.

Is there a still unknown Ratzinger?
Basically, we really know very little about him. Something about the young genius who started to study his beloved Augustine when he was 23 - all the volumes of his work. The young professor whom during his holidays at home, would say Mass in the local jail. The unconventional cross-thinker who made friends with academic outsiders or even with a mystic like Hans Urs von Balthasar. The Curial Prefect who every Thursday after saying morning Mass at the Campo Teutonico would have breakfast with the portress. But mostly unknown are any details about his participation in the Second Vatican Council.

What exactly do you mean?
New research shows that the contribution of the then fairly young theological consultant to Cardinal Frings was far greater than he has let us know. He worked out strategies and final drafts of texts at the German college of Santa Maria dell'Anima on Piazza Navona with the German-speaking bishops. And without a doubt. he played a decisive part in drawing up Lumen gentium and Dei verbum. His intellectual and theological proficiency and his insistence were responsible for rejecting working drafts provided by the Council organizers that were too constricting.

In any case, he also recognized early on that some offshoots of the Council were bad suckers that would bear no fruit.

But there was always talk that he eventually took a conservative turn...
To this day, he has not changed his approaches: he is for dialog, openness, a rediscovery of the sources, and a focus on proclaiming Christ.

Consider his stand on the authenticity of Revelation, the rediscovery of the Sacraments, and especially, a liturgy that is able to bring the joy of the Word of God to the faithful, and of underscoring once more the mystery of the Mass.

He has always advocated a consciousness that comes from the entire breadth of Christian tradition contributing to the holism of faith. That his own thinking is not some sort of lager mentality but a critical analysis on the basis of Biblical thinking that is firmly anchored in the message of Jesus.

That also gives him freedom. He does not have to account to anyone, certainly to no guilds or associations, and least of all, to the spirit of the times. Only to the one with whom it all begins, Christ.

Is he then the preacher against the unfaith of the 20th century?
After the terror of the atheistic ideologies, he grasped this earlier than others. Already in 1967, he said in a lecture in Tuebingen that Christian faith was now surrounded by 'a fog of uncertainty' as it had never been at any time in history. That there were less and less people who would dare proclaim their religion of origin.

He considered his book Introduction to Christianity in 1968 as an attempt to build a wall of reason and faith - it is an illuminating manifesto against the "oppressive power of unbelief" that he had seen arise early enough.

He seems to have closed a circle in his office now as leader of the universal Church.
One could say that. The young Ratzinger is like the older one - and this older one is like the young - helping the Church to return to her origins and to rediscover her authenticity.

The only prescription, Ratzinger has said, is to present in new ways the truthfulness of the Christian faith and its power of persuasion that arises from the Logos and the Mystery of Christ - without fripperies, without aggiornamento in the sense of a religion-less Christianity. while adapting the announcement of Christ to the speech, thought and lifestyle patterns of the secular world.

In an interview you said that even now, Benedict is destined to count among the greats in the long list of Popes...
Of course, it is for history to decide how great he really is. But Benedict is above all the 'little' Pope - that is how he sees himself. At least in comparison to his overpowering predecessor.

We know that in Christian logic, ideas are usually reversed. The little can be great, the last in a past age can become the first in a new one.

The task he has given himself is the most difficult of all: inner renewal. And that is not about 'restoration' but rather a Christian 'renaissance', with a rediscovery of beauty, freedom, joy.

What has impressed you especially?
I find that the Pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI complement each other perfectly. If the other was a man of images, the other is a man of words. And when John Paul II, in a stormy time, put up a fortress to defend the Church against the winds, Benedict XVI is rebuilding what was destroyed within the fortress. He relies on God's help for this, and takes into account the reproach that he is doing too little to fix the exterior of the fortress.

It is impressive that a Pontificate that few had expected to be historical should see the character of salvation history so well expressed: precisely when it is no longer the Vicar of Christ who is in the foreground but Christ himself.

Will Benedict XVI become a symbolic figure?
Without a doubt. He comes from the old and embodies the new - a Church of which not so much her structures but her faith will live, and with it the center of the Christian message: love and the promise of eternal life.

As a Professor, Joseph Ratzinger, through his incisive and well-aimed analyses, could see far into the future. As Pope, he is virtually going ahead of the future in person - he goes for everyone, for life in itself, for our future in another existence.

What do you wish for him on his 85th birthday?
For anyone else at this age, one would wish a peaceful retirement. For Pope Benedict I wish that he may find many laborers for the vineyard of the Lord - priests, nuns and monks, simple laymen, who can still dare to swim upstream, whose dreams are not about consumership and career, who do not represent a weakening of the faith but its strengthening.

For him this is important: Nothing can change and be good if the hearts of men do not first change. The Church cannot be strong again unless the faith is strong again. She does not seek the strength for herself but so that her people can be salt of the earth, a blessing for mankind, and a light for the world.

In this respect, Happy Birthday, Pope Benedict!
VIVA IL PAPA!

Tuesday, April 23, Fourth Week of Easter

ST. GEORGE (b Roman Palestine 281, d Nicomedia [now part of Turkey] 303), Soldier and Martyr
One of the most popular saints especially in the Orthodox world, he is probably also the best-known of military saints.
His father was a famous Roman commander in Palestine in the time of Emperor Diocletian, and his mother was Judean,
but the family was Christian. George presented himself to the Emperor Diocletian in Nicomedia, then the eastern capital
of the Roman Empire, to be a soldier, and he soon became a member of his Palace Guard. However, the emperor decreed
in 302 that all Christians in the Roman army be arrested and offer sacrifices to the pagan Gods. George refused and
professed his faith before the emperor, who sought to bribe him with money and lands to change his mind. Diocletian
had no choice but to order his execution. He underwent many tortures including being dragged through the streets
before he was beheaded. His body was brought back to Palestine where Christians venerated him as a martyr. His cult
spread throughout the eastern Roman Empire and reached the west in the 5th century. He was canonized by Pope Gelasius I
in 494. The Crusades brought him new fame when the Crusaders rebuilt the fourth century basilica erected in his honor.
Chivalric orders dedicated to him sprung up all over Western Europe. England's Edward II put the Order of the Garter
under St. George's patronage, and by the 12th century, England's ships were flying the Cross of St. George. His name was
an English battlecry during the Hundred Years War. Today he is the patron saint of England, Greece, Portugal, and
Russia, among others. Images of St. George are all based on the legend of St. George and the dragon, akin to ancient
fables of a hero slaying a dragon to save a princess from death.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/042313.cfm

A HAPPY AND MOST BLESSED NAME DAY

TO POPE FRANCIS

WHO ALSO CELEBRATED 40 YEARS

AS A JESUIT YESTERDAY.

AD MULTOS ANNOS, SANCTE PATER!

Our affection and prayers go likewise to

Mons. Georg Ratzinger and

Mons. Georg Gaenswein

with our thanks for their ever-loving

support of Benedict XVI.

AT THE VATICAN TODAY

No official events announced for Pope Francis, but at 10 a.m. today, he concelebrated Mass with the cardinals
present in Rome to mark the Feast of St. George at the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace.
[Traditionally, the name day and birthday of the reigning Pontiff are observed as a holiday at the Vatican, and apparently, Pope Francis has stayed with the tradition.]

Here is Vatican Radio's translation of the Pope's homily at the Mass today.

---

I thank His Eminence, the Cardinal Dean, for his words: thank you very much, Your Eminence, thank you.

I also thank all of you who wanted to come today: Thank you. Because I feel welcomed by you. Thank you. I feel good with you, and I like that.

The [first] reading today makes me think that the missionary expansion of the Church began precisely at a time of persecution, and these Christians went as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, and proclaimed the Word. They had this apostolic fervor within them, and that is how the faith spread! Some, people of Cyprus and Cyrene - not these, but others who had become Christians - went to Antioch and began to speak to the Greeks too. It was a further step. And this is how the Church moved forward. Whose was this initiative to speak to the Greeks? This was not clear to anyone but the Jews. But ... it was the Holy Spirit, the One who prompted them ever forward ... But some in Jerusalem, when they heard this, became 'nervous and sent Barnabas on an "apostolic visitation": perhaps, with a little sense of humor we could say that this was the theological beginning of the Doctrine of the Faith: this apostolic visit by Barnabas. He saw, and he saw that things were going well.

And so the Church was a Mother, the Mother of more children, of many children. It became more and more of a Mother. A Mother who gives us the faith, a Mother who gives us an identity. But the Christian identity is not an identity card: Christian identity is belonging to the Church, because all of these belonged to the Church, the Mother Church. Because it is not possible to find Jesus outside the Church. The great Paul VI said: "Wanting to live with Jesus without the Church, following Jesus outside of the Church, loving Jesus without the Church is an absurd dichotomy." And the Mother Church that gives us Jesus gives us our identity that is not only a seal, it is a belonging. Identity means belonging. This belonging to the Church is beautiful.

And the third idea comes to my mind - the first was the explosion of missionary activity; the second, the Mother Church - and the third, that when Barnabas saw that crowd - the text says: " And a large number of people was added to the Lord" - when he saw those crowds, he experienced joy. " When he arrived and saw the grace of God, he rejoiced ": his is the joy of the evangelizer. It was, as Paul VI said, "the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing." And this joy begins with a persecution, with great sadness, and ends with joy. And so the Church goes forward, as one Saint says - I do not remember which one, here - "amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of the Lord." And thus is the life of the Church. If we want to travel a little along the road of worldliness, negotiating with the world - as did the Maccabees, who were tempted, at that time - we will never have the consolation of the Lord. And if we seek only consolation, it will be a superficial consolation, not that of the Lord: a human consolation. The Church's journey always takes place between the Cross and the Resurrection, amid the persecutions and the consolations of the Lord. And this is the path: those who go down this road are not mistaken.

Let us think today about the missionary activity of the Church: these [people] came out of themselves to go forth. Even those who had the courage to proclaim Jesus to the Greeks, an almost scandalous thing at that time. Think of this Mother Church that grows, grows with new children to whom She gives the identity of the faith, because you cannot believe in Jesus without the Church. Jesus Himself says in the Gospel: " But you do not believe, because you are not among my sheep." If we are not "sheep of Jesus," faith does not some to us. It is a rosewater faith, a faith without substance. And let us think of the consolation that Barnabas felt, which is "the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing." And let us ask the Lord for this "parresia", this apostolic fervor that impels us to move forward, as brothers, all of us forward! Forward, bringing the name of Jesus in the bosom of Holy Mother Church, and, as St. Ignatius said, "hierarchical and Catholic." So be it.

---

Obviously, with his daily short homilies delivered extemporaneously in the Mass he offers every morning at Domus Sanctae Marthae, Pope Francis is a very able preacher = who uses direct simple language very effectively, as we see very well in today's homily. I just have one comment to make about this homily - he never mentioned the saint of the day, whose name he carries.




One year ago, the Holy Father Benedict XVI met with Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, Prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches, and nine US bishops from the states of Washington and Alaska in northwest USA (Region XII) on their ad-limina visit.

Not finding any homily or reflection of Joseph Ratzinger online on St. George, I am re-posting instead the concert in honor of Benedict XVI's double anniversaries in April 2012 with the performance of Felix Mendelssohn=Bartholdy.s appropriately named Lobgesang (Song of Praise).




'Song of Praise':
A birthday concert
for the Holy Father
Translated from

April 21, 2012

On Friday afternoon, April 20, at 6 p.m., the Holy Father attended a concert to honor him on his 85th birthday, presented by the world-famous Leipziger Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, one of the oldest orchestras in the world.

It was a present to the Holy Father from the Free State of Saxony and the City of Leipzig.

Music director Ricardo Chailly conducted a performance of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's Symphony No. 2 in B-flat major, also known as the Lobgesang (Song of Praise), for soloists, chorus and orchestra.


The Pope's brother Georg was present for the concert.


Here is a translation of the Holy Father's remarks after the performance:

---

Most Honorable Minister President,
Distinguished Guests from the Free State of Saxony and the City of Leipzig,
Eminences,
Venerated brothers in the Episcopate and Priesthood,
Ladies and Gentlemen:

He began in German:
With this splendid offering of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's Symphony No. 2, Lobgesang, you have made me - as to all those present tonight - a most precious gift for my 85th birthday.

This symphony is, in fact, a great song of praise to God, a prayer with which wee praise the Lord and thank him for his gifts.

First, however, I wish to thank all those who made this moment possible. Above all, the Gewandhaus Orchestra, which really needs no introduction - it is one of the oldest orchestras in the world with an excellent performance tradition and indisputable world renown.

Heartfelt thanks as well to the outstanding choirs and soloists, but most especially, to Maestro Riccardo Chailly, for their moving interpretation.

And my thanks to the Minister President and representatives of the Free State of Saxony, the Mayor and delegation from the City of Leipzig, the Church authorities and the officials of the Gewandhaus, and all who have come here from Germany.

He continued in Italian:
Mendelssohn, the Lobgesang Symhony, Gewandhaus: Three elements linked to each other not just tonight but from the very start. The great symphony for chorus, soloists and orchestra that we have heard was in fact composed by Mendelssohn to celebrate the fourth centenary of the invention of the printing press, and was performed for the first time at the Thomaskirche, the church of Johann Sebastian Bach, on June 25, 1840, by the Gewandhaus Orchestra. On the podium was Mendelssohn himself, who for years was the director of this venerable and prestigious orchestra.

This composition is made up of three movements for orchestra and then a sort of cantata with soloists and chorus. In a letter to his friend Karl Klingemann, Mendelssohn explained that in this symphony, "first the instruments give praise in their congenial way, followed by the chorus and the solo voices".

Art as praise of God - the supreme Beauty - was the basis for Mendelssohn's way of composition, and not just for liturgical and sacred music.

As Julius Schubring said, for Mendelssohn, sacred music per se was not a step above other music, but that each kind of music, in its way, must serve to honor God. And the motto that Mendelssohn wrote on the manuscript of the Lobgesang was: "I wish to see all the arts, especially music, in the service of He who created and gave them to us".

The ethico-religious world of our composer was not separate from his concept of art, but was an integral part of it: "Art and Life are not two different things" but one, he wrote. A profound unity that has its unifying element in faith, which characterized all of Mendelssohn's existence and guided all his decisions.

We see this common thread in all his letters. To his friend Schirmer on January 9, 1841, he wrote, referring to his family: "Of course, we do not lack for concerns and difficult days... Nonetheless, we can only pray fervently to God to keep us in the health and happiness he has given us". And on January 17, 1843, he wrote to Klingemann: "Every day I can only thank God on my knees for every good that he has given me".

Thus, he had a faith that was solid, deeply felt, and nourished profoundly by Sacred Scripture, which is shown, among others by his Oratorios on Paul and Elias, and the symphony we just heard, which is full of Biblical references, especially from the Psalms and St. Paul.

It would be difficult to cite all the intense moments that we have experienced tonight. But I would only wish to recall the marvellous duet between the sopranos and the choirs on the words, «Ich harrete des Herrn, und er neigte sich zu mir und hörte mein Fleh’n» (I placed my hope in the Lord and he bent down to me and listened to my plea). It is the hymn of someone who places all his hope in God and knows with certainty that he will not be disappointed.

He reverted to German:
Once more, I wish to thank the Orchestra and the Choir of the Gewandhaus, the Choir of the Mitteldeutschen Rundfunk [MDR, the Saxon broadcasting agency], the soloists and the Maestro, as well as all the representatives of the Free State of Saxony and the City of Leipzig for the presentation of this 'work of light', as Robert Schumann called it.

Through this, you have given us all the chance to praise God and in a special way, I can once again thank God for the years of my life and of my ministry.

He ended in Italian:
I wish to conclude with the words that Robert Schumann wrote in the magazine Neue Zeitschrift für Musik after having heard the first performance of the symphony we heard. They are an invitation on which to reflect: "Let us - as the text so splendidly set to music by the Maestro, ever more abandon works of darkness and take up the weapons of light".

Thank you to everyone, and good night.

---

Apropos, Marcianum Press of Venice recently published an anthology of all the post-concert remarks made by Benedict XVI during his Pontificate - one of the 'dozens' of books that have been published since February 11 about our beloved Benedict. I shall have an appropriate post later.

As I was gone all day yesterday, I missed this big but long-awaited news...

Vatican medical consultants approve
the miracle needed for
the canonization of John Paul II
by Andrea Tornielli

April 22, 2013

The medical council of experts for the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood has recognized one healing attributed to John Paul II's intercession as inexplicable, and If the theologians likewise give their approval, Karol Wojtyla would become a Saint only eight years after his death, and could be celebrated next October ont the 35th anniversary of his election as Pope.

The evaluation of the canonization /miracle' all happened in great secrecy, with maximum confidentiality. In January, the postulator of the cause, Mgr. Slawomir Oder, submitted a presumed miraculous healing to the Vatican Congregation for a preliminary opinion.

By the rules of the Church, after the approval of a miracle for the proclamation of a blessed, the canonical procedures include the recognition of a second miracle that must have occurred after the beatification ceremony.

Two doctors of the Vatican council had previously examined this new case, and both gave a favourable opinion. The dossier with the medical records and the testimonies was then officially presented to the Congregation, which immediately included the examination in its agenda.

In the past few days it was discussed by a committee of seven doctors, the council (presided over by Dr. Patrick Polisca, Pope John Paul II's cardiologist), Pope Benedict XVI's personal physicians and now Pope Francis's. The medical council also gave a favourable opinion, the first official go-ahead by the Vatican, by defining as inexplicable the healing attributed to the intercession of the Blessed Karol Wojtyla.

This overcomes the first fundamental hurdle, and the presumed miracle must now be approved by theologians and then by the cardinals and bishops of the Congregation, before being presented to the Pope for the definitive "yes".

In any case, the approval of the medical council is considered the most important step; in fact, neither the theologians nor the cardinals are involved in the clinical evaluations concerning the case.

From the steps that have been taken so far with regard to the cause of John Paul II, the desire of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to work quickly is evident, as it was in his beatification, h celebrated by his successor Benedict XVI on May 1, 2011, six years after his death.

Presumably, Pope Francis will act expeditiously once the final cause for canonization is presented to him.

It is still premature to talk about dates for the canonization, but the rapidity with which the examination of the miracle process is happening still leaves open the possibility of celebrating it on Sunday, October 20th, very close to the liturgical holiday assigned to the blessed Wojtyla, which is on October 22nd (the date of the inauguration of his Petrine ministry).

2 Orthodox biahops
kidnapped in Syria

Apr 22, 2013

The Orthodoxy Cognate PAGE Media Network is reporting that Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Aleppo and Iskanderun, Metropolitan Boulos Yazigi and the Syriac Orthodox Metropolitan of Aleppo, Metropolitan Youhanna Ibrahm. were kidnapped while traveling near Aleppo. From their news release:

---

Armed men have kidnapped the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Aleppo and Iskanderun, Metropolitan Boulos Yazigi and the Syriac Orthodox Metropolitan of Aleppo, Metropolitan Youhanna Ibrahm near the city of Aleppo.

An-Nahar has learned that the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, which recieved news of the kidnapping of the two metropolitans this evening, will not issue any statement before tomorrow, pending their receiving complete and precise information about the kidnapping.

According to details relayed to an-Nahar by specific sources, Metropolitan Yazigi was on the Turkish side of his archdiocese, which extends from Aleppo to Antakya and Metropolitan Ibrahim and gone to accompany him.

Along the road on their return to Aleppo, an armed group stopped them before they could arrive to the city, killing Ibrahim’s driver and kidnapping the two metropolitans.

The Orthodox metropolitan’s office relates that the two metropolitans were not injured. Metropolitan Boulos Yaziji is the brother of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East John X Yazigi.

---

Vatican statement
on kidnapped bishops

April 23, 2013

Fr. Federico Lombardi, Director of the Vatican Press Office, released this statement on the kidnapping of the Orthodox bishops in Syria, translated to English by Vatican Radio.

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The kidnapping of the two Metropolitan bishops of Aleppo, Mar Gregorios Ibrahim of the Syriac Orthodox Church, and Paul Yazigi of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, and the killing of their driver whilst they were carrying out a humanitarian mission, is a dramatic confirmation of the tragic situation in which the Syrian population and the Christian communities in Syria are living.

The Holy Father has been informed of this recent, extremely grave act, which comes on top of the increasing violence of the past days and a humanitarian emergency of enormous proportions.

Pope Francis is following the events with deep participation and he is praying for the health and the liberation of the two kidnapped bishops.

He is also praying so that, with the support and prayers of all, the Syrian people may finally see tangible responses to the humanitarian drama and real hopes of peace and reconciliation rise on the horizon.

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Fifty years later -
Vatican II’s unfinished business
By Fr. Regis Scanlon, O.F.M. Cap.

April 22, 2013

The author (ordained in 1972) has been working with Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in various capacities since 1997 and is now carrying out his ministry in metro Denver.

Today, 50 years after the opening of Vatican II, the misinterpretation of one of its most salient documents, Lumen Gentium, continues to drive a number of Catholics in the United States into one of two camps, the “right” or the “left.”

Fifty years after the opening of the Second Vatican Council, the Church in the United States is in the throes of a struggle. Loyal Catholics are showing renewed vigor and vitality, and are helping the Church to move forward in unity.

At the same time, the Church is also being exhausted and drained from within by a vocal movement of other Catholics who continue to dissent from Church teachings, particularly the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

For most American Catholics over 50, it is an accepted fact that dissent from the magisterium of the Church is widespread, tolerated, and, in some quarters, even welcomed. The breaking point, of course, was Paul VI’s 1968 prophetic encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which condemned contraception as “intrinsically disordered.”

The encyclical became one of the most controversial documents of the century, if not many centuries. The widespread dissent by Catholics was led with enthusiasm by huge numbers of Catholic theologians, professors and intellectuals. The onslaught of bright, articulate academics turning on the Pope encouraged many Catholics in the pews to do the same.

Why would so many educated Catholics - who should have been ready and able to defend the teaching authority of the Church - turn against the Pope with such force? How could they justify it?

The most popular argument was that permission to dissent had been given by none other than the Second Vatican Council. The dissenters claimed that “the spirit of Vatican II,” along with theological perspectives of the Council, supported their argument that individual Catholics have a right to dissent from “non-infallible” Church teachings — even authoritative encyclicals like Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae — if they felt they had a good enough reason. [But as a teaching on both morals and doctrine, the encyclical falls under the two categories of 'infallible' pronouncements made by a Pope.]

Unfortunately, this false notion was unwittingly given a boost by none other than the bishops of the United States. On November 15, 1968, a few months after the promulgation of Humanae Vitae, the bishops issued their pastoral letter, “Human Life in Our Day,” to help Catholics interpret the Pope’s encyclical.

The bishops said in no. 51 of that document that in some cases, a Catholic could dissent from “non-infallible authentic doctrine” of the magisterium. They explained: “The expression of theological dissent from the magisterium is in order only if the reasons are serious and well-founded, if the manner of the dissent does not question or impugn the teaching authority of the Church, and is such as not to give scandal.”

So, the bishops did approve of limited dissent from papal teaching in faith and morals.

This position was given even more credence later by the powerful and widely quoted Cardinal Bernardin when he was Archbishop of Chicago. Shortly before his death in 1996, Cardinal Bernardin initiated his Catholic Common Ground Project, to bring factions of the church together in “dialogue.”

According to a Nov. 14, 1996, article in Origins (pp. 353-356), the axis of Cardinal Bernardin’s legacy was the belief that “limited and occasional dissent” from the magisterium of the Church was “legitimate.”

So, the intellectual community and even high-ranking Church leaders were reinforcing the idea that dissent from Church teachings was to be expected, even welcomed — and that permission to do so came straight from Vatican II.

However, had they really read the documents of Vatican II?

The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium), no. 25, presents a far different answer from the dissenters. This carefully reasoned Vatican II document states that, even though the bishops of the Catholic Church are not individually infallible, they do teach infallibly the Church’s doctrines of faith and morals “when, gathered together in an ecumenical council, they are teachers and judges of faith and morals for the universal Church, whose definitions must be adhered to with the submission of faith.” [As I understand it, an ecumenical council is led by a Pope who promulgates the Council documents, and therefore does so with the mantle of infallibility on matters of faith and morals. The Catholic understanding of papal infallibility is that the Holy Spirit acts so that the Successor of Peter does not say or do anything contrary to what Christ taught.]

What could be clearer? Lumen Gentium, no. 25, explicitly states that one such case of the bishops teaching infallibly is when they teach a matter of faith and morals in “an ecumenical council.” Vatican II was “an ecumenical Council.”

The Council also taught in no. 25 of Lumen Gentium that these definitions of the bishops on matters of faith and morals must be held with a “religious assent.” Furthermore: “This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra …”

The Council goes on to explain this required assent to the Pope’s non-ex cathedra teaching: “…that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will.”

But how does one know the Pope’s “manifest mind and will?” Again, the Council clarifies it by saying that: “… His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking.”

Clearly according to the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, there is no room for dissent from even the non-ex-cathedra or “non-infallible” decisions of the Pope on matters of faith and morals — not even “limited and occasional” dissent.

This means that there is no room for dissent from the Pope’s teaching on contraception in Humanae Vitae. A Catholic, therefore, who would maintain that one could dissent from a non-ex cathedra or non-infallible decision of a pope, would be implicitly dissenting from Lumen Gentium no. 25 and the Second Vatican Council itself.

Although Lumen Gentium, no. 25, speaks clearly, it should not come as a surprise that it was misinterpreted. Part of the confusion arose from an interpretation of Paul VI’s statement about the authority of the decisions of the Council. As found in vol. 11 of The Pope Speaks, Paul VI stated in “After the Council: New Tasks,”

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In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided any extraordinary statement of dogmas that would be endowed with the note of infallibility, but it still provided its teaching with the authority of the supreme ordinary magisterium. This ordinary magisterium, which is so obviously official, has to be accepted with docility and sincerity by all the faithful, in accordance with the mind of the Council on the nature and aims of the individual documents.

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For the dissenters, the Pope’s careful parsing of the Council’s mission o avoid “any extraordinary statement of dogmas that would be endowed with the note of infallibility” - was apparently just enough of a loophole to keep the fires of their argument alive.

However, note that the Council titled Lumen Gentium, as the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. That indicates that the “nature” of Lumen Gentium is “dogmatic” per se, and its “aim” is to point out to Catholics those dogmas of divine faith which have always been part of the belief of the Church!

So, while there are no “extraordinary” dogmas in Vatican II, there are ordinary dogmas which are drawn from Scripture, Tradition, or previous teachings of the magisterium. Thus, even though the Pope and the Council did not exercise their infallible authority to teach Lumen Gentium, the contents (teachings) in Lumen Gentium are, by their very sources, clearly dogmatic. Thus, each Catholic must accept no. 25 of Lumen Gentium as a matter of faith, even though the form of the document itself is not infallible.

Of course, the fact remains that none of the documents of Vatican II are taught ex cathedra. Therefore, none of the teachings of Vatican II are formally pronounced as dogmas by the Second Vatican Council itself. So, very strictly speaking, a person can dissent from Vatican II itself without being a formal heretic. However, to dissent from an ecumenical council is no small matter. To put it informally, one may avoid being a heretic, but still may be a “bad” Catholic.

How did this confusion take root? It can best be explained as rising from the concept of conciliar self-verification. In other words, the Second Vatican Council teaches that the fathers at an “ecumenical council” are teachers of faith and morals, and their “definitions must be adhered to with the submission of faith.”

The problem is, the ecumenical council making this statement is itself an ecumenical council — and, therefore, is making statements about itself - and not making it with the highest authority, i.e., ex cathedra.

In other words, one might say this is the conciliar version of chasing one’s own theological tail. The fallout has been that, for several generations of Catholics, from academics and Church leaders to the laity in the pews, the lasting impression is, “Vatican II said it was okay to disagree with the Pope.”

Thus began the era of “taking sides.” It was as if the Catholic faith became no more than a grand game — Pope and established Church teachings versus the dissenters — and individual Catholics could simply pick which team to root for. Some called themselves liberals (the “left”) while others called themselves conservatives (the “right.”) Each group dissented from Vatican II, but for different reasons.

Many liberal nuns in the U.S., for example, continue to sympathize with anti-life groups that claim they are helping the poor by promoting the poor’s right to funds for abortion and contraception. They claim to be supporting social justice by defending, or, at least, sympathizing with, the gay agenda. They are especially vocal in demanding that the Church ordain women to the priesthood—even after John Paul II informed them that the Church teaching on an all male priesthood is infallible and, therefore, cannot be changed.

On the other hand, the Society of St. Pius X, founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, continues to err on the side of utter conservative rigidity. They reject the Second Vatican Council as a movement of the Holy Spirit, and cling to the minutiae of 500-year-old rituals as necessary, for their own sake. The change of the liturgy from Latin to English, or the vernacular of each particular country, is their most well-known objection.

Therefore, today, 50 years after the opening of Vatican II, the misinterpretation of one of its most salient documents, Lumen Gentium, continues to drive a number of Catholics in the United States into one of two camps, the “right” or the “left.”

However, the age of confusion may be coming to an end. According to a July, 2012, article in Catholic World Report, the widespread errors that had grown up about papal authority was addressed head-on by Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller, the newly-appointed prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“We also have the problem of groups — of the right and the left, as is usually said — which take up much of our time and our attention,” Archbishop Müller was quoted as saying. “Here, the danger easily arises of losing sight of our main task, which is to proclaim the Gospel and to explain concretely the doctrine of the Church.”

The archbishop was clear: dissenters do not belong solely to one camp or the other, despite the fact that each one would claim it to be so. Rather, dissenting Catholics on both the “right” and on the “left” are soaking up the energy of the Church by demanding attention to grievances and stifling the apostolate.

One way out of this dilemma is clear and simple. Obviously, the Second Vatican Council’s self-verification of Lumen Gentium, no. 25, was not sufficient to bring about the hoped for unity in faith and morals in the Church.

Therefore, Lumen Gentium, no. 25, should be verified outside of the Second Vatican Council. This could come either by the Pope, using his infallible authority to define Lumen Gentium, no. 25, as ex cathedra, or by another ecumenical council doing so.

Given the deep, lasting errors which inadvertently took root after Vatican II—clearly, a great Council which has been unfairly besmirched by controversy — is it too much to think that the solution may be another, clarifying Council, perhaps Vatican III?

Some may argue that requiring all Catholics, even theologians, to make an absolute assent to Lumen Gentium, no.25, to remain in the Church would be severe. It would be a retreat from the spirit of John XXIII’s promise, which he made when he opened Vatican II in 1962, that the worldwide Council would use “the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity.” In other words, the Church would guide her flock without condemnations” — known in earlier centuries as the much dreaded “anathema sit” (“let him be excommunicated”).

However, if this confusion is faced, either through a ringing papal document, or the dramatic convening of a new Council, the outcome will absolutely follow Pope John XXIII’s call for “mercy rather than severity.”

Consider that it is Mercy itself for the Church to clearly proclaim her true nature and teaching authority. If she puts an end to the confusion of several generations, she can turn her entire strength and authority to attract people to the Catholic faith. And by doing so, how can we not say that she will be extending the Mercy of Christ himself?

As Christ said, “The Truth will set you free”—and what greater act of mercy is there, than to free those enslaved by error? Finally, dissenters on both the “right” and the “left” will have the Truth clearly presented to them, so that they can freely decide whether or not they are going to join the Church’s mission into the future.

The beauty of this approach is that no one needs to be explicitly condemned. The proclamation would be equivalent to the definition of “papal infallibility” or the “Immaculate Conception” or the “Assumption.” It would be a dogma defining the Church. A person who could not assent to Lumen Gentium, no. 25, would finally know—clearly and without equivocation—that they are no longer Catholic. The decision would be theirs.

Will this happen? We have reason to hope.

Perhaps, the first inklings of a definitive move by the Church came in the words of Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller, the new Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Asked by an interviewer, “What do you think of the discussions with the Lefebvrists, and with the religious sisters of the United States?”

The archbishop replied: “There are no negotiations on the Word of God, and one cannot “believe and not believe” at the same time. One cannot pronounce the three religious vows, and then not take them seriously. I cannot make reference to the tradition of the Church, and then accept it only in some of its parts.”

The Archbishop went on to say: “The path of the Church leads ahead, and all are invited not to enclose themselves in a self-referential way of thinking, but rather to accept the full life and the full faith of the Church.”

In the archbishop’s words are the seeds of rebirth, a rooting out of error, and the beginning of a new era of faith.

In decreeing the Year of Faith on the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vatican-II, Benedict XVI intended for the ministers of the Church along with catechists to focus the faithful on the essential teachings of Vatican II as well as the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I very much fear that the pastoral program recommended by the CDF at the time of the decree in order to carry out this monumental task effectively at all levels of Church jurisdiction has been largely ignored.

A systematic presentation for the ordinary Catholic of the 16 Vatican II documents - or at least, the four dogmatic constitutions at its core (on the Church itself, on the Church in the modern world, on the Word of God, and on liturgy) - ought to have been undertaken by the CDF itself or the Council for New Evangelization, but in any case, by some responsible authority at the vertex of the Church - since this is the kind of undertaking we cannot expect the dioceses or parishes to carry out.

In particular, such primers should focus on the essential points most widely misinterpreted by the 'Council of the Media' and the progressivists from whom they have been taking their cues, as this article has tried to do with a specific passage in Lumen gentium.

Not exactly an illustration for 'humility' because how do you illustrate that without looking Pharisaic? But I love the evident modesty of Benedict XVI, and I welcomed an opportunity to use this montage of the informal B16, who, BTW, was not above wearing a baseball cap whenever he could, not because he wanted to be 'cool' but for the same practical reason he wore the camauro - in this case, to protect his head from the heat and his eyes from glare... Anyway, I did find this new article online about our beloved Pope emeritus.

Modern media and why
they do not appreciate
Benedict the Humble
by Louis Beckett
Guest Contributor

April 21, 2013

Benedict XVI spent his 86th birthday earlier this week without the fanfare of his former office --- without the Bavarian dance troupe, without the symphonies, without the company of that affable host, George W. Bush. Of course, he gave up such trappings and more when he abdicated the papacy.

Yet, in light of the asceticism of Pope Francis, most seem to remember Benedict for the red shoes and regalia. But have we adequately appreciated Benedict's humility?

Our modern media, driven by image, loves outward signs of humility. The incongruity of a Pope riding the bus and moving out of the palace creates a spectacle that viewers can instantly digest as “good,” even though these are only external acts.

Now, I don't doubt that these acts are spurred by Francis's genuine virtue, but they should mean less if humility, as Aquinas and Augustine insisted, is only a virtue as an inward movement of the soul.

In Benedict’s pre-papacy book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, he wrote that the Pope should be a “humble servant” to the "Tradition of the faith" [written long before anyone even began thinking of Joseph Ratzinger as a possible Pope! - in fact, an anthology of everything Joseph Ratzinger wrote about the Papacy as an institution as a ministry would make an instructive manual to educate and sober up a hysterical media that is completely oblivious to the role of Tradition in the Church and pretty much uninformed (and uninterested in being informed) about the Papac throughout history, and why it matters] - a deliberately inconspicuous goal that a headline cannot capture, and which those unfamiliar with that tradition cannot fully appreciate

Again, I do not wish to criticize Pope Francis, but rather to suggest that we, as viewers, keep our idea of "humility" in proper perspective. Humility is not the greatest virtue proposed by Christianity --- it is just a prerequisite, an interior attitude of other-worldliness, for receiving the rest of the Faith.

The media also leads us astray by making no distinction between the man who is Pope and the office of the papacy. Glorifying the office with regalia (or a birthday party, for that matter) is not really about the man, but about what he stands for. When we feel a Pope is "more Christian" for the spectacle of his asceticism, we downplay the stature of the office. Similarly, when we perceive Francis as more humble because he ditched the red shoes, we probably miss what humility is all about.

As Father George Rutler wrote, "a most attractive charism of Benedict XVI has been his desire to vanish so that the faithful might see only Christ." How often does our modern media want to see or celebrate Christ? [And he 'vanished' precisely because he never called attention to his person by doing anything 'unconventional', much less headline-grabbing, that is, nothing outside of, much less against, the traditional but harmless (and on the contrary, significant) practices followed by all of his predecessors.]



Here is one I completely failed to see post February 11...The author, Timothy George, is the founding dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University, a member of the First Things advisory council, and co-chair with Fr. Thomas Guarino of Evangelicals and Catholics Together.

Benedict XVI, the great Augustinian:
A Protestant appreciation of the 'Pope of grace'

by Timothy George

February 19, 2013

Not long ago, Pope Benedict XVI made a personal donation to the restoration of the Basilica of St. Augustine in Annaba, Algeria, the site of the ancient town of Hippo Regius, where the greatest theologian of the ancient Church served as bishop from 395 to 430. It was here on September 26, 426, that Augustine met with his flock to name his successor as the bishop of Hippo, the presbyter Heraclitus.

Looking back over his long life of service in the Church, Augustine ruminated, “How long old age may be prolonged is uncertain. . . . I came to this town — for such was the will of God — when I was in the prime of life. I was young then, but now I am old” (Ep. 213, 1). He wanted to spend the rest of his days, Augustine said, in prayer and the study of the Scriptures (Ep. 213, 6).

Popes are not allowed to choose their successor, though Benedict and his predecessor have chosen all the people who will choose his successor. However, one suspects that the precedent of Augustine’s retirement was not absent from the Pope’s thinking as he considered how he could best fulfill his calling during his remaining days on earth.

Pope Benedict was once asked which two books he would take with him to read on a deserted island. His answer was the Bible and Augustine’s Confessions — precisely the two I would choose (though I would also like to sneak in Luther’s two catechisms and Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and maybe a Baptist hymnal).

As he retires to his monastic retreat near St. Peter’s to devote himself to meditation, prayer, and reflection, the Holy Father — we can still call him that until February 28 — will not be restricted to such a limited canon.

With the Vatican library at his fingertips, its inventory increasingly online for the newly computer-savvy Pope, Benedict will perhaps continue to serve the Church by fulfilling his first calling as a theologian, a vocation he received prior to his summons to serve as bishop, cardinal, and Pope.

Soon after Benedict emerged as the surprise choice of the most recent papal conclave in 2005, I wrote an essay on why Evangelical Protestants, among orthodox believers of all persuasions, should be pleased at his election. I summarized the promise of his new pontificate in five points. I emphasized that:

• He takes truth seriously, an antidote to what he called on the eve of his papal election “the dictatorship of relativism”;

• His theology is Bible-focused, building on the declaration of Vatican II that “easy access to sacred Scripture should be provided for all the Christian faithful”;

• His message is Christocentric, boldly asserting that Jesus Christ is the divine Son of God and the only Redeemer of the world;

• He is a fierce champion of the culture of life, advocating for the most vulnerable members of the human community, the children still waiting to be born.

To these four items I added a fifth: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is an Augustinian. Those familiar with his intellectual biography will find no surprise in this statement. As he himself noted, “I have developed my theology in a dialogue with Augustine.”

His doctoral dissertation was on “The People and the House of God in Augustine’s Doctrine of the Church.” His Habilitationsschrift was on the great medieval Augustinian Bonaventure, whose theology he found more agreeable than that of Thomas Aquinas.

His bent toward Augustine was early and deep, arising in part from his encounter with the thought of Martin Buber, whose personalism he found both winsome and in keeping with the Gospel.

Benedict’s Augustinian orientation has led him to emphasize the triumph of grace in God’s salvific work in Jesus Christ. If St. Augustine is the doctor gratiae (doctor of grace) then Pope Benedict has been the papa gratiae par excellence.

As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger played a key role in the historic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999), the most important ecumenical statement since Vatican II.

The Joint Declaration was a statement of differentiated consensus that left many important issues remaining to be resolved. However, for the first time since the sixteenth century, Catholics and Protestants were able to say together, “By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and received the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.”

Other motifs from St. Augustine that have marked the pontificate of Benedict XVI are the priority of love (the theme of his first encyclical) and the co-inherence of faith and reason.

Protestants, especially those with Barthian proclivities, might want to ask whether the Pope’s emphasis on reason has fully taken on board the reality of human sinfulness and the (other) Augustinian idea that concupiscence corrupts not only the body and the will but also the mind.

Theological anthropology is one of the loci on which confessional Protestants and traditional Catholics still have different emphases. But who can deny the Pope’s understanding of reason as a good gift of God, something to be harnessed in the service of faith, and used to advance the common good including the stewardship of creation.

The Churches of the East have found a common platform with “green” Pope Benedict on this point.

St. Augustine is the granddaddy of us all. Pope Benedict has done the entire Church a great service by inviting us to become a “traveling companion” with the most contemporary of the ancient Fathers.

Benedict is the greatest theologian to become Pope since the Reformation. The only other pope to come close in comparable depth and breadth is Leo XIII (1878–1903). When we become students in the school of Pope Benedict, we sit at the feet of St. Augustine.

The New Evangelization to which he has called the Church includes a strong focus on Christian unity, a renewed commitment to religious freedom, and the unshackled proclamation of God’s good news, news that the world is literally dying to hear afresh: that the almighty Creator of all that is has acted in space and time to reveal himself in nature and history and to redeem the world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For his bold advocacy of this truth, Evangelical Christians, with all believers everywhere, must say Grazie Santità!

As Augustine lay dying in August 430, the Vandals had already reached the coasts of North Africa and were pillaging the city of Hippo. Augustine had the penitential Psalms printed in large letters, and he prayed them constantly as his eyes dimmed and his world fell apart. The world has grown old with age, he said.

This is something Augustine’s disciple, Pope Benedict, also knows. He affirmed this on Ash Wednesday by receiving the mark of the cross on his forehead, a sign of true humility and mortality—but also a confession of the deepest meaning of the paschal mystery: that if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).

In this Lenten moment, both Benedict and Augustine admonish the Church, in the words of the great saint: “Do not refuse to be rejuvenated, united to Christ, even in the old world. He tells you: Do not fear, your youth will be renewed like that of the eagle” (Serm. 81, 8; Is. 40:30-31).

The photo was taken in September 2006 when the brothers visited the graves of their parents and sister during Benedict XVI's visit to Bavaria.

By Tom Kington, Rome

23 April 2013

Father Georg Ratzinger [his proper title is Monsignor, and the journalist ought to have known that], himself a priest, told the Daily Telegraph his younger brother was "very happy" to be living at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer retreat south of Rome he moved to after stepping down in February, becoming the first pope to resign in 600 years.

Fr Ratzinger, 88, who travelled from Germany to celebrate Benedict's 86th birthday with him on April 16, said his brother "still suffers the problems of the Church, but is really relieved to no longer have the weight of the Church on his shoulders."

Speaking by telephone from his house in Regensburg, Mr Ratzinger denied the former Pope was suffering from major ailments. [Did he go home then ahead of his name day today????]

"He is now very old, he does not have any particular illness, but he is weakening due to his age," he said.

Joseph Ratzinger cited advancing age when he announced his shock resignation amid reports that his hearing and sight were failing. It also emerged he had a pacemaker fitted a decade ago.

I am surprised the Telegraph took the initiative to call up Mons. Georg in Regensburg to get news about Benedict XVI, especially since it seems no one else has thought to do so. Perhaps the German media? I think not. Unless the international media do not think it is news to be told Benedict XVI really has no specific ailment other than old age. There is a reason medicine has a branch called geriatrics, to deal specifically with the general health problems of older people.

The other point I take away from this item is that the media do not seem to have had any problem using the title 'emeritus Pope' as Benedict XVI himself decided he ought to be referred as.