Someone at National Catholic Reporter has committed a heresy to his publication's credo! But let me not delay -
here are two remarkable blog entries by Michael Winters that are self-explanatory....
On devotion to the papacy
Oct. 04, 2010
The USCCB has issued a new book about the Holy Father,
Pope Benedict: Essays and Reflections on His Papacy, edited by
Sr. Mary Ann Walsh, the director of media relations for the Conference. It is a splendid book not least because it will make
a perfect Christmas gift for my Dad. (Oops – there goes the surprise!)
My Dad would not read a book of theology. But he loves the Pope. He loves this Pope. He loved Pope John Paul II, in part
because of ethnic pride: Our family name was Wojtczuk before they anglicanized it. He loved Pope John Paul I, as did we all,
in the few weeks he was given to us. He loved Pope Paul VI. You get the picture.
In the 1960s, many American Catholic homes were adorned with pictures of both President Kennedy and Pope John XXIII. Good
Pope John was the first Pope of the television age, and his warm smile and grandfatherly ways reached a worldwide audience.
But popular devotion to the papacy is older than the age of television.
[And this, as I have often remarked on this Forum, is what most people,
especially non-Catholics, do not realize. Looking up to the Pope as Christ's Vicar on earth is no small veneration!]
In 1782, Pope Pius VI ventured to Vienna in an effort to improve relations with the Hapsburg Emperor. The Emperor exposed him
to a series of petty humiliations, but the thing that is most remembered about that visit, and which was something of a surprise
to both Pope and Emperor, was the fact that devoted Catholics lined the Pope’s route to beg for his blessing. Pius VI was not
a very good Pope, but he was a rock star before there were rock stars.
I recall the first time I went to a General Audience in the early 1980s. It was a slightly disconcerting experience. Held in the Paul
VI Hall in the Vatican, the crowd was maddeningly intent on pushing and shoving to get a slightly better glimpse of the Pontiff as
he entered. (The good sisters were the most pushy as I remember, with elbows as sharp as a too tart pinot grigio.)
There was no recognizable liturgy, although we recited the Lord’s Prayer. I recall entertaining the impious thought that the scene
was too rife with the cult of personality, that it resembled too much for comfort the scene that accompanied the funerals of
Nasser or Stalin. I have always been suspicious of cults of personality, no matter whom their object, and everyone should be
suspicious of mobs of any variety.
But, my suspicions were wrong. I came to realize that what the crowd in the Paul VI Hall wanted was to be close to the successor
of the man who is the direct descendant of the man who was Jesus’ best friend when he walked upon the earth.
It was not Pope John Paul II’s out-sized personality that drew the people to the hall and they would have been just
as eager, and just as pushy, if they were waiting for a more reserved Pope.
We Catholics like to touch our faith. We like the smell of incense in our nostrils. We like the taste of the Most Previous Blood
on our lips. We like the feel of Holy oils on our foreheads. We like the kiss of peace with our brethren. We want to worship in a
beautiful church that excites our eyes as well as our imaginations.
Our faith is decidedly incarnational because our God is incarnational. The papacy is a part of that. Our tradition is
not only held in our minds as a great principle of faith. You can see the successors of the apostles. You can shake
their hands. And you can fill the Paul VI Hall and stand on your chair, and scream and shout when the successor of
Peter enters the room.
One is tempted to say that it is not the man, but the office, that the people love but that is precisely wrong too. That day in the
Vatican, the crowd wanted, and I have come to desire too, to be close to the man. We Catholics want to touch the human face
of our faith.
The crowds would not have assembled to acclaim a book. They would not have been so ecstatic over the arrival of some
abstraction. Just as our Lord took on human flesh, we Catholics cling to the human in our lives and seek to bless it.
We bless our fleets at great ceremonies and with great celebrations. We bless our meals with grace. We bless our calendar and
our clocks with the Calendar of the Saints and the Liturgy of the Hours. We bless the gifts of bread and wine and offer them, and
our lives, to be transformed on the Altar. We crave to be united into the community of love that we call the Trinity. The quotidian
is where we find God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and, through the ministry of the Church, we believe He dwells
among us still.
This new book brings the man who is Pope closer to us still. It contains short essays in which those who have met with him
describe him, his personal kindness and understated charm, his keen intellect, his sense of pastoral solicitude.
Cardinal Sean O’Malley offers a beautiful, if painful, recollection of Pope Benedict’s meeting with the victims of clergy sex abuse
during his 2008 visit to the United States.
Archbishop Gregory Aymond recalls meeting the Holy Father after receiving the pallium this year. He told the Holy Father
he brought the prayers of the people of New Orleans with him and the Pope replied immediately by asking about how the rebuilding
was proceeding, five years after Katrina!
I admit it. I am a huge, make that HUGE, fan of this Pope. I was among those progressive Catholics who worried what
a Ratzinger papacy would look like when he was elected in 2005, but as Pope Benedict demonstrated recently in his trip to
the United Kingdom, he has become an extraordinary pastor, gently guiding the flock, proposing a renewal of Christian faith
to cultures that have lost their sense of the divine, presenting thoughtful dissertations on the role of the Church in society.
He has not been the kind of “in your face” pastor some feared and for which others hoped. His encyclicals are masterpieces
of thoughtful engagement not thunderbolts of condemnation.
His appointments to the hierarchy have been outstanding, elevating pastors, not apparatchiks considered mostly for their
presumed loyalty to an agenda, to the ranks of the hierarchy.
He has encouraged the new ecclesial movements that bring together clergy and laity to preach the new evangelization.
People may quibble with this decision or that, and the Vatican is still maddeningly slow in facing certain crises and in perceiving
the way our hyper-ventilating media age works, but I think any fair-minded person must recognize that the papacy of Pope
Benedict is
proving to be a blessing to the Church.
[What an understatement!]
This new book will help all Catholics, from the most simple to the most sophisticated, appreciate the many faces of Pope
Benedict’s papacy, but most of all, this book brings the human face of our faith, in the person of the Pope, closer to us.
To commemorate this new book, the Q & A segment of this blog will feature discussions of Pope Benedict’s contributions to the
Church for the next two weeks.
I contacted ten people via email to comment on Pope Benedict’s papacy and tune back in later today to find a first submission
from Father Robert Imbelli of Boston College. Bishop Jaime Soto, Father Ken Himes, CUA President John Garvey and Father
Julian Carron of Communioe e Liberazione will be included during the rest of the week.
Next week, we will get to hear from the young theologians who participated in the Fordham Conversation Project about their
thoughts on Pope Benedict. And, tomorrow, I shall write about this Pope specifically in these pages.
Why I love Benedict
Oct. 05, 2010
I can recall precisely where I was when I realized that Joseph Ratzinger had been elected Pope. I was jogging on Varnum Street,
near Providence Hospital.
For those familiar with Washington, D.C., the Brookland section of town, where I then lived, is known as “little Rome” because
it is home to so many Catholic institutions: CUA, the Shrine, the Franciscan monastery and other religious houses, Providence
hospital, etc. The bells in the Shrine began to ring. It was close to noon, so I assumed they were pealing the Angelus. But, they
kept ringing.
I cut my run short and as I got closer to my home, the thought occurred that if the cardinal electors had reached their decision
so quickly – it was the first full day of the conclave – they had to have selected the frontrunner, Cardinal Ratzinger. I got inside
and turned on the television and shortly thereafter, Cardinal Medina Estevez stepped on to the loggia of St. Peter’s and
announced that, indeed, the cardinals had elected Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope.
I admit that my first thoughts were not well disposed to this new fact in the life of our Church. I shared the general – and we
now know mistaken – belief that Cardinal Ratzinger had been one of John Paul II’s most conservative advisers, that he had been
one of these pleading for a rollback of the reforms of Vatican II, that if anything it was John Paul II who had reined in Ratzinger
rather than the other way round. I admit it – the thought occurred that this election could prove a disaster.
But, in those first few days, I also heard someone wiser than myself make an observation that would be borne out in the months
and years ahead: “Do not confuse Cardinal Ratzinger with Pope Benedict.” Still, I remained concerned at first, especially when
people like George Weigel were gloating that “The ‘progressive’ project is over,” and Bill Donohue predicted that the “gnashing of
teeth” had already begun in liberal circles.
Those of us who had been aghast at the way certain American bishops had used Sen. John Kerry’s Catholicism against him in the
recently completed presidential campaign feared the worst.
But, then a funny thing happened. There was gnashing of teeth alright, but most of it came from those same conservatives who
had rejoiced at Benedict’s election.
First, he appointed William Levada to his old post as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Cardinal Levada is
no liberal, to be sure, but he also was no culture warrior.
The right was appalled by his appointment because he had, in the 1990s, reached agreement with San Francisco’s mayor about
the extension of health care benefits to same sex couples employed by agencies that contract with the city government. The
right had wanted a showdown but Levada deftly avoided one, and did so without an ounce of compromise of any doctrines of the
Church. This appointment was cited by the late Father Richard John Neuhaus as a principal reason for a “palpable uneasiness”
among Ratzinger’s former admirers.
There were other hints that the
crazy cons [That's not nice!] had misjudged their man.
During EWTN’s coverage of the papal Mass at Washingon’s Nationals Park, Neuhaus and host Raymond Arroyo mocked the “multi-
cultural exhibitionism” of the Mass but Benedict appeared to be thrilled by the rich tapestry of American Catholicism on display.
[Their remarks were shocking to me, too, watching the replays later, still rapt in the euphoric high of a most exhilarating and uplifting day in Washington
and two 'close encounters' of a kind with Benedict XVI - my very first. And hhe Mass I had watched on the jumbo screens outside Washington Stadium
was part of that high. Whatever 'quarerel' one may have had with the choice of music, it all came across as very authentic and genuinely
spiritual.]
That same day, I was among those waiting to hear the Pope give his address to educators at the CUA and before the event,
Neuhaus’s comments on the Mass were already causing disgust and dismay among the assembled hierarchs.
Then came the encyclicals.
[Actually, the first two encyclicals preceded the US visit!] They were powerfully and beautifully written and they
shared a common thread and theme, that the Church and individual believers must orient ourselves to Christ first. This is the
point of departure for Christian witness in each and every aspect of human life.
In his encyclical on social justice,
Caritas in Veritate, he clearly challenged those of us on the left to ask ourselves to explicitly
link our concern for social justice with the cause of the unborn.
In that same encyclical he challenged those on the right to stop worshipping at the pagan altar of the free market. Both sides
often start with their politics and look for justification in the Scripture and magisterial teaching, but Benedict insisted that
approach was wrong, irrespective of whether one started on the political right or the political left. Our politics must grow out
of our faith, not the other way round.
The response to
Caritas in Veritate showed how wrong I was to be afraid on that April morning when I heard the Shrine’s bells.
As I wrote at the time:
“Unsurprisingly, Weigel celebrates
Centesimus Annus which he claims ‘jettisoned the idea of a “Catholic third way” that was
somehow 'between or beyond or above capitalism and socialism – a favorite dream of Catholics ranging from G.K. Chesterton to
John A. Ryan to Ivan Illich'.
"Actually, both
Centesimus and even more so,
Caritas in Veritate. stress that the "Catholic way" must be prior to the claims
of any economic theory, that the disposition for grace and communion must be part of the system, not a mere add-on, that unjust
systems produce unjust results, and that a system that produces – at the same time - material wealth and spiritual poverty
must be seen as morally and humanly suspect.”
Indeed, Benedict’s critique of capitalism is very radical, in that it goes to the core, the radix, in pointing out that insofar as the
system is built on the manipulation of a human vice, greed, it is just so unchristian.
It is not just that this Wall Street banker was corrupt or that employer was exploitative. The system itself stands in the docket.
There is not an American politician alive today with the courage to say such a thing.
Of course, the other thing that Benedict did shortly after assuming the See of Peter was cashier Father Maciel. It has become
clear that as a cardinal, Ratzinger had pushed for tougher action against Maciel but he was frustrated by those closest to Pope
John Paul II.
I would suggest that the episode must also serve to qualify our judgments about Ratzinger’s time at the CDF. We do not know
what battles he fought and lost. We do know, from Jason Berry’s excellent, if painful to accept, reporting here at NCR, that some
of those close to the late Pontiff were frankly corrupt and it will be decades before we have access to the archival information
that will tell us the true story of what happened in John Paul II’s final years, when he was too ill to manage affairs.
Finally, the thing that most distinguishes Pope Benedict’s papacy from the hopes heaped upon it by the right has been his
example. On the flight to the United Kingdom, Pope Benedict was asked about the impending protests of anti-religious zealots.
He replied that he would face anti-Catholicism “with confidence and joy” which is precisely what he did.
In his speeches in the UK, Benedict spoke clearly, but without a hint of triumphalism or condemnation, about the role of the Church
in society.
His thoughtful, challenging speech at Westminster Hall was vintage Benedict: He made his points beautifully, but did so in a way
that invited his listeners in to his mind and heart. He did not beat up on his opponents. He did not mischaracterize the positions
of others. He did not impugn anyone’s motives. And, lo and behold, people listened.
His speech was not only thoughtful, it was effective. I hope that some American bishops who fancy themselves brilliant
expostulators on the role of the Church in society, but who evidence a penchant for slamming their opponents and demeaning
those who dare to disagree, took notice. They bemoan the press. Benedict won them over.
There have been missteps to be sure. I do not understand all the politics behind the revival of the Tridentine Rite, and on the
merits, I have no problem with it.
[No politics there! Just a matter of doing the right thing by correcting a blatant historical error.]
But chasing after the Lefebvrists is a fool’s errand: That crowd has been disloyal to the papacy since Leo XIII. [No, Michael, it's not
a fool's errand, and it never is a fool's errand, for the Successor of Peter to seek to repair schisms and safeguard the unity of the Church!]
I think way too much has been made of the apostolic visitation of women’s religious orders here in the U.S. – these things come
and go and are quickly forgotten – but Rome should have done a better job explaining its purposes beforehand because there is
no justification for insulting, or even appearing to insult, women who have dedicated their entire lives to the Church.
And, of course, the response to the sex abuse crisis, although better than before, should be more robust.
I will leave it to the fine theologians we have at Q & A this week and next to discuss Pope Benedict’s specific theological
contributions to the life of the Church.
But, I ask all those – and they are many – on the left who have a visceral dislike for Pope Benedict to think again, to take
another look, to be open to the possibility that they may find more in his papacy to admire than they thought.
I have come to the conclusion that
the Holy Father is not interested in pursuing an ideological agenda one way or
the other. His goals are, properly, not easily given to ideological classification. [That would have been evident to anyone
who read his fundamental writings before he became Pope!]
This, combined with his extraordinary theological vision, has made me a fan of his papacy and of his person.
Those fears I entertained on that April morning when I heard the bells announcing his election were profoundly misplaced.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/10/2010 06:53]