BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Benedict XVI: 5 years under attack
From Regensburg to the Lefebvrians, from Vatican II to pedophilia.
Without the media shield of John Paul II,
the professor Pope governs with 'thought and prayer',
fragile-looking but strong on substance
by PAOLO RODARI
Translated from

March 27, 2010


Last March 10, while Germany was awash in the waves of newly uncovered cases of priests who had abused minors, Benedict XVI was in St. Peter's Square, telling the faithful his idea of governing the Church.

He took the example of St. Bonaventure, for whom "governing was not simply doing something, but above all, thinking and praying".

"For Bonaventure," he said, "the Church cannot be governed only through commands and structures, but by guiding and enlightening souls".

Since March 10 to the present, Benedict XVI has not had occasion to return to the subject. But in the face of accusations for his governing of the Church which have been mounting in recent days - the last assault being from the New York Times which has reported on the cases of two priest-offenders, the American Lawrence Murphy (deceased in 1998) and the German Peter Hullermann, to question Joseph Ratzinger's own actions, as Archbishop of Munich and as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 1982, with regard to pedophile priests - his response has been to put into practice Bonaventure's words: most significantly by sharing his own 'enlightened thinking' to the faithful in the Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland.

It has always been so during his Pontificate, which marks its fifth anniversary on April 19.

Words are the primary way through which this Pope guides and orients the Church, well aware that the transmission of authentic Christian thought is the true 'sword' carried aloft in the world.

"Let us be clear about one thing," says veteran Vaticanista Luigi Accattoli, "this is not new. Furious reactions to a Pope's thinking have taken place before, and recently."

What is the trigger then?

"The idea that this Pope wants to turn back, to the time before Vatican II, to the supposed 'dark ages' of the Tridentine Mass. That his words are retrograde compared to contemporary culture, to the progressivism of the new times.

"Paul VI wrote Humanae vitae, and after the first years when the liberal media saw him as the conciliar Pope,
A Pope of hope, all of a sudden he was the devil!

"'The Pope and the devil', said a headline by Vittorio Gorresio in 1973. 'Paul VI's turnabout', wrote the Vaticanista of L'espresso in 1978, the ex-priest Carlo Falconi. What he meant by turnabout was the 'pre-Conciliar' stamp that they believed Papa Montini now wanted to place on his Pontificate!

"The same accusations were turned on John Paul II. Until 1989, Wojtyla represented hope for everyone. After the Berlin Wall fell, his thought was suddenly questionable, and the criticisms started. [Hmm... I can't judge that one way or the other. I am not familiar with the evidence nor the timeline]

"But for the media, the most retrograde of all is Papa Ratzinger. 'Restoration!' - all the newspapers headlined when his Rapporto sulla Fede [English edition, The Ratzinger Report] with Vittorio Messori came out in 1985. To them, the word is near synonymous with infamy."

Remember December 22, 2005. Benedict XVI was giving his first Christmas address to the Roman Curia.

And he launched a challenge to those who wish a Church that is not so much 'for the world' or 'close to the world' but 'of the world'.

Ratzinger spoke of Vatican-II. He said it was not a rupture with the past. He said that whoever advocated this interpretation was simply aligning with "the mass media and even with part of modern theology".

"On that December 22," says one of the most veteran of Vaticanistas, Benny Lai, "the media understood definitively who Joseph Ratzinger is. They all knew this is who they had to deal with. Until then, there were still those who hoped that the Joseph Ratzinger of Vatican-II, the one they thought to be progressive, would surface in the Pope. They were wrong.

"They were wrong when, during the Council, they considered him a progressive theologian. Even Cardinal Giuseppe Siri [Lai wrote a biography of the late great conservative Archbishop of Genoa, who had been the leading conservative papabile in the Conclaves that elected the two John Pauls] thought that - he did not have a good first impression of him. But then Ratzinger proved to be anything but the label they had tagged on him. It is this supposed change in his orientation that even today raises a lot of hackles in the Church and outside it."

From that address to the Roman Curia to the present, 'Ratzinger thought' has manifested itself in so many other ways that have triggered indignation in different circles.

"Of course," observes Benny Lai, "Ratzinger started with a handicap compared to Wojtyla, because for him, the crowd serves no therapeutic function as it did for the Polish Pope. But the problem for his critics is really with what he says. Crowds or no crowds, what he says annoys them and generates aversion. Even on the pedophilia issue, how much annoyance there is, within the Vatican and within the Church, that this Pope continues to insist on the rule of priestly celibacy!"

Not that any of their annoyance bothers him. When he was refused by a small minority the right to speak at La Sapienza University, he did not show up, all right, but he sent the text of his address in which he clearly said, "I do not want to impose the faith". Which became the headline in all the newspapers.

The same thing happened when he went to Africa last year. He said that AIDS cannot be overcome by distributing condoms.

Let the skies fall down! The secular intelligentsia of Western Europe rushed to the attack. Even if he did state a fact: to fight AIDS, man has to be educated to consider his body as other than just a vessel for pleasure. In short,
the opposite of the contemporary narcissistic self-referential idea of sexuality.

Benedict had experienced an earlier reaction of like outrage, after an academic lecture in Regensburg in 2006. He spoke on the relationship between faith and reason. He touched the nexus between religion and civilization, saying that to convert others by the use of force was contrary to reason and therefore to God.

But his citation of a sentence by Manuel II Paleologue - who said that Mohammed had brought nothing but "inhuman and evil things, such as his instruction to spread Islam with the sword" - triggered off indignation from the Muslim world.

"That episode," says Piero Gheddo, missionary, journalist and writer for PIME, the Vatican institute for foreign missions, "was emblematic of what this Pontificate is. Part of the Muslim world was indignant. And yet the Pope's words are remembered. Because he says truths that are inescapable.

"In fact, Regensburg has borne much fruit. One year ago, for example, I was in Bangladesh. Several Muslim thinkers were studying the Regensburg address for what it said about the relationship that must exist between faith and reason."

Not just his words have caused his critics to flinch, but also decisions he has made that go the heart of the life of the Church itself. Among this is his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum which liberalized the use of the traditional Mass, and lifting the excommunication of four bishops who had been consecrated in 1988 by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre without the Pope's concurrence.

Ratzinger's revival of the traditional Mass angered the Vatican-II progressives, especially in France.

"What do you say to those in France who fear that Summorum Pontificum marks a step backward from the great initiatives of Vatican II?", he was asked in September 2008, enroute to Paris.

"It is unfounded," he said. "Because this motu proprio is simply a gesture of tolerance, with pastoral ends, for persons who were formed or who grew up in that liturgy, who love it, who know it well, and wish to follow that liturgy".

The accusation always comes to this: that this Pope wants to bring back the Church to its pre-Vatican II status. Therefore, he is against modernity.

So it was when he lifted the Lefebvrian bishops' excommunication. And the Pope explained it simply. First, he made it clear that the Magisterium of the Church "cannot be frozen as of 1962" (the year Vatican II opened). But on the other hand, "whoever wishes to be obedient to Vatican II must accept the faith that was professed for centuries - one cannot cut off the roots through which the tree lives".

Always Vatican II. For the Jewish world, the Pope's opening to the Lefebvrians is a return to a Church that is ‘hostile’ to them. One of the four Lefebvrian bishops is Richard Williamson, who has made statements minimizing or denying the Holocaust.

Benedict XVI had to reaffirm explicitly something that is obvious - that he does not share Williamson's views in any way. But many Jews are still unhappy.

In addition, his visit to Auschwitz and his pilgrimage to the Holy Land were highly criticized by Jews in some of Europe's largest cities who think that anything he has said about the Jews is, at the very least, insufficient.

From the German Pope, they demand more, even if he has done more than any theologian to bring Christians and Jews together. But despite all the pressures, the Pope has kept to his own course, and less than a month before visiting the Synagogue of Rome, he signed the decree proclaiming the heroic virtues of Pope Pius XII, a step closer to beatification. The Jewish world reacted. But the Pope had decided, and at the Synagogue, he told the Jews simply - without mentioning Pius XII: "(During the war), the Holy See carried out acts of assistance to the Jews, though these were often discreet and hidden".

Part of the Protestant world certainly does not understand Ratzinger. Last November, the Vatican issued the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus which provides for groups of Anglicans desiring to return to the Roman Church.

The Pope explained this gesture as a response to requests made by various Anglican groups. But many Anglicans and even part of the Catholic world have refused to understand the Pope's decision and have accused him of poaching in waters 'only of the right', namely those sectors of Christianity who are unhappy with the progressivist and 'liberal' trends of their own Churches.

Last February 1, meeting with the bishops of England and Wales who were making their ad-limina visit, the Pope said: "I ask you to be generous in carrying out the directives of the Apostolic Constitution in order to help those Anglican groups who wish to come into full communion with the Catholic Church. I am convinced that these groups will be a blessing for all the Church".

Piero Gheddo says: "I have gone around the world and have known various Anglican groups. Why do they want to return to communion with Rome? Because a Church that opens to the world indiscriminately, accepting female ordination and gay marriage, makes no sense. The Pope is fighting to safeguard a Church anchored on truth, and because of this, he has enemies".



HEY GUYS! Thanks for keeping the thread 'blazing'... I woke up early this morning to watch the Palm Sunday Mass, and just as I got EWTN on, my screen suddenly went blank, my phone went dead, and my modem to Time Warner Cable, which provides me with TV, phone and Internet service, had no lights on.... With my cell phone, I called up to find out why, and just my luck, I was within the radius of a service outage that they were still trying to troubleshoot... Now, 13 hours later, I'm back on... so I have to scramble and get myself updated first through my usual sources what else has been happening, and I suppose I will spend the rest of the night trying to catch up....

Meanwhile, I was working on the above translation last night when I couldn't manage to keep from dozing off.... I finished translating but I didn't have the juice to read it through and make my corrections, typos and language and all, so I carefully copied the post to WORD, went to bed...and here it is....