I don't think it is possible for any Benaddict to read this and not weep - as George Weigel masterfully describes the man and Pope who emerges from the book. Thank you, Mr. Weigel, and thank you, Ignatius Press, for asking Mr. Weigel to write the Foreword, and God bless...
Foreword to
'Light of the World'
by George Weigel
Courtesy of
Nov. 22, 2010
The Chair of Peter affords its occupant a unique view of the human condition, unlike that offered to any other global figure from any other vantage point.
World political leaders see the flow of history in terms of interests, alliances, and power. Intellectuals of international repute perceive humanity in terms of their philosophical, historical, or scientific theories. Leaders of great commercial enterprises analyze the world in terms of markets to be penetrated. World-renowned entertainers imagine their audiences in terms of the emotions they seek to evoke.
Popes, if they have the wit and the stomach for it, see the whole picture — the entirety of the human drama, in both its nobility and its wickedness. And they see it through the prism of humanity’s origins and humanity’s ultimate destiny.
It can be a dizzying, even disorienting, view. Over almost two millennia of papal history, some Popes have indeed bent history to their wills — or, perhaps more accurately, to the power of their faith; one thinks immediately of John Paul II’s pivotal role in the collapse of European Communism.
Other Popes have seemed overwhelmed by the tides of history, their papacies swamped by riptides they were unable to channel or resist. Novelist Morris West once wrote that the Chair of Peter “. . . was a high leap, halfway out of the world and into a vestibule of divinity. The man who wore the Fisherman’s ring and the triple tiara carried also the sins of the world like a leaden cope on his shoulders. He stood on a lonely pinnacle, alone, with the spread carpet of the nations before him, and above, the naked face of the Almighty. Only a fool would envy him the power and the glory and the terror of such a principality.”
West exaggerated, as novelists tend to do, but he caught something of the unique perspective on humanity and its pilgrimage through history that the papacy thrusts before a man.
Having worked closely with John Paul II for almost a quarter-century, and having written incisively about the Office of Peter for decades before that, Joseph Ratzinger knew all this when the question was put to him on April 19, 2005, two days after his seventy-eighth birthday: “Acceptasne electionem de te canonice factam in Summum Pontificem?” [Do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff?]
The world and the Church can be grateful that, once again, Ratzinger put his own plans on hold — this time, permanently — by saying Yes to that awesome query. For Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, brings both a clear-eyed view and the courage of convictions born in faith and honed by reason to the papacy’s unique vantage point on the human race in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
What the Pope sees, and what he discusses with frankness, clarity, and compassion in this stimulating conversation with Peter Seewald, is a world that (to borrow from Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson) has lost its story: a world in which the progress promised by the humanisms of the past three centuries is now gravely threatened by understandings of the human person that reduce our humanity to a congeries of cosmic chemical accidents: a humanity with no intentional origin, no noble destiny, and thus no path to take through history.
This is not, it must be emphasized, the cranky view of a man ill at ease in the postmodern world. Rather, as Benedict XVI takes pains to underscore in this conversation,
his challenge to postmodernity is one intended to preserve and extend the achievements of modernity, not least in the sphere of political freedom — and to do so by encouraging postmodernity to rediscover some ancient truths about itself.
Those truths include the necessary dialogue between faith and reason. Faith devoid of reason risks becoming superstition and blind prejudice. Reason inattentive to faith risks solipsism, self-absorption, detachment from reality.
The effects of faith detached from reason are all around us: thus Benedict’s urgent challenge to Islam. So are the effects of reason inattentive to faith: thus Benedict’s challenge, to a West in cultural disarray, to rediscover the biblical roots of the Western civilizational project.
Like John Paul II, Benedict XVI sees both facets of this dual crisis of world civilization clearly; and, again like the predecessor to whom he pays touching tribute in this book, he has put these issues on the table of the world’s conversation as no one else has or can.
Benedict XVI brought to the papacy more than a half-century of reflection on the truths of biblical faith and a master teacher’s capacity to explicate those truths and bring them to bear on contemporary situations in a luminously clear way.
I have had the privilege of knowing many men and women of high intelligence, even genius, in my lifetime; I have never known anyone like Benedict XVI, who, when one asks him a question, pauses, thinks carefully, and then answers in complete paragraphs — often in his third, fourth, or fifth language.
Peter Seewald’s well-crafted questions give Benedict XVI good material with which to work. But it is the remarkably lucid and precise mind of Joseph Ratzinger that makes the papal answers here sing.
Those who had known Joseph Ratzinger in his pre-papal days knew this about him, as they had known him for a man of exquisite manners and a pastor’s kind heart. Which is to say, those who knew the man knew that the caricature of him in the world press — a caricature created by his ecclesiastical enemies in a particularly nasty exercise of
odium theologicum — was just that: a caricature, a cartoon, with no tether to the real man. Happily, the world has been able to discover this since April 19, 2005.
Those with eyes to see and ears to hear have discovered a pastor who meets, prays, and weeps with those suffering the after0effects of being abused by men they thought were their shepherds; and by the victims’ own testimony, the tears were real, as was the Pope’s horror and anguish at what his brothers in the priesthood had done and what his brothers in the episcopate had failed to address.
Those willing to hear and see have met a world-class intellectual who, in addressing British Catholic schoolchildren, distills sixty years of higher learning into a winsome and compelling catechetical message on
how important it is to become a twenty-first-century saint.
Those who come to Rome to attend one of Benedict XVI’s general audiences have encountered a master catechist, whose command of the Bible, the Fathers, and the theological traditions of Christian West and Christian East is simply unparalleled — as is his capacity to explicate what he has learned in ways that virtually everyone can understand and engage.
That is the Benedict XVI whom the reader will meet in
Light of the World: a teacher to whom any sensible person would want to give a fair hearing.
That this teacher is also a pastor, and a thoroughgoing Christian disciple who believes that friendship with Jesus is the key to human happiness, suggests that, like his predecessor, Benedict XVI is reforming the papacy by returning it to its evangelical roots as an office of witness to the truth of God in Christ.
Benedict XVI lived through the trauma of the mid-twentieth century, in which false conceptions of the human person and human destiny almost destroyed civilization, as he lived through the drama of the late twentieth century, which saw the end of Communism and a brief moment of optimism about the human future.
He sees a world that, contrary to that optimism, has tended to shutter its windows and lock its doors against the light: the light of truth, the light of Christ, the light of God in whom there is no darkness.
To vary the imagery,
Benedict, from the unique vantage point of the papacy, sees a world yearning for love but attaching itself to false loves. To this, he counterposes that with which Dante closed the greatest poem ever written: “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” [the Love that moves the sun and the other stars].
Benedict XVI has met this Love, embraced it, and given his life to sharing it. It is loving this Love that has made Joseph Ratzinger — again, contrary to the cartoon — a joyful man, who wants others to share in the joy of the Lord.
He knows full well, as he puts it to Peter Seewald, that we all live “the Christian situation, this battle between two kinds of love.”
At the moment, it seems to him that, in many parts of the world he surveys, the false loves have gained the upper hand. But he also knows that “love is the key to Christianity” and that true loves, and Love itself, will win the final triumph, which has already been revealed in the Resurrection.
Our task, he reminds us, is not to demand immediate victories, but to bear witness to the truth, the love, and the joy that comes from conversion to Christ.
For such a reminder, and for such a witness, Christians, and indeed all men and women of good will, can only be grateful.
GEORGE WEIGEL
Distinguished Senior Fellow
William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Washington, D.C.
And from Ignatius Press's other 'blurb-writer' for LOTW, his usual wise and interesting insights....
Benedict XVI: Open, disarming,
and inevitably misunderstood
Nov 21, 2010
Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap.
Archbishop of Denver
Nov. 21, 2010
In his foreword to this remarkable book — structured as a conversation between Benedict XVI and journalist Peter Seewald — George Weigel praises the German Pope for his “frankness, clarity and compassion.” This is very true. It's also an understatement.
No serving bishop of Rome has ever spoken so openly and disarmingly as Benedict XVI does in Light
of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times.
Benedict (as then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) and Seewald have worked together in the past. While Seewald asks blunt questions, the Pope's trust in him is clearly high. The resulting exchange between the two men is bracing and memorable, an absolutely mandatory read for anyone who wants a sense of the Petrine ministry and its burdens from the inside.
And yet, one comes away from this text with a mix of exhilaration and sympathy. The exhilaration springs from meeting in Benedict an extraordinary Christian intellect, articulate and unfiltered; a man prudent, generous, and penetrating in his judgment, candid in his self-criticism, brilliant but accessible in his thinking, and unshakeable in his faith.
The sympathy flows from knowing that, in the current media climate, almost anything Benedict says may be hijacked to serve other agendas. And exactly this happened even before the book's formal release — but more on that in a moment.
Seewald covers a lot of terrain with his questions, from China to liturgy to Fatima to the theology of the End Times. Each reader will gravitate to the themes that most interest him or her. But a few are worth special attention.
First, Seewald deals early and extensively with the Church's sexual abuse scandal. Benedict's answers are patient, tranquil, humble, and honest.
This Pope is not a leader who downplays the damage done to innocent children and families, or evades responsibility, or makes excuses for evil actions. He is well aware of the scope of sexual abuse in other religious communities and public institutions, but he does not use that as an alibi for the sins of Catholic clergy. Nor does he ever stray from the priority of healing for victims.
Second, for a man once thuggishly caricatured as Rome's doctrine police, Benedict speaks with convincing sensitivity about the sanctity of human freedom and conscience, and the dignity of other religious believers.
Like his predecessor, John Paul II, Benedict has a profound respect for Judaism as the root of Christianity and the Jewish people as our “fathers in faith.” His discussion of the challenges inherent in dialogue with modern Protestantism, which takes so many different forms, is masterly for its fraternal charity and candor.
And while some readers may find his assessment of Islam too optimistic and irenic — time will tell whether secularism or Islam poses the greater challenge to today's Christian believers — Benedict wisely notes that
Islam is lived in very different ways, depending on its various historical traditions. . . . The important thing [is] to remain in close contact with all the currents within Islam that are open to, and capable of, dialogue so as to give a change of mentality a chance to happen even where Islamism still couples a claim to truth with violence.
Finally, and maybe most powerfully, Benedict offers a withering critique of modern notions of “progress” and the practical atheism that infects nearly every developed society, beginning with Europe.
For the Pope, the real battle lines in the modern world do not divide Christianity from other religious traditions.
Rather, “In [today's] world, radical secularism stands on one side, and the question of God, in its various forms, stands on the other.”
When secular society seeks to reduce progress to material development, to exile God from public life and to ignore humanity's profoundly religious needs, then it starves the human spirit and attacks real human progress, which always has a moral dimension.
Ironically, the message of this good and brilliant Pope has been hobbled nearly as much by the baffling failures of some of his own aides as by unfriendly coverage from the world's media.
One of the sensitive issues that Benedict treats in this book is the question of AIDS in Africa and the use of condoms to prevent the spread of infection. No institution in Africa has done more to combat AIDS and support its victims than the Catholic Church.
But intense controversy — at least in Europe and the United States —has always surrounded the Catholic rejection of condom use in AIDS prevention.
The Church holds that condom use is morally flawed by its nature, and that, equally important, condom use does not prevent AIDS and can actually enable its spread by creating a false sense of security.
In the context of the book's later discussion of contraception and Catholic teaching on sexuality, the Pope's comments are morally insightful. But taken out of context, they can easily be inferred as approving condoms under certain circumstances.
One might reasonably expect the Holy Father's assistants to have an advance communications plan in place, and to involve bishops and Catholic media in a timely way to explain and defend the Holy Father's remarks.
Instead, the Vatican's own semi-official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, violated the book's publication embargo and released excerpts of the content early.
Not surprisingly, news media instantly zeroed in on the issue of condoms, and the rest of this marvelous book already seems like an afterthought.
Don't let that happen. Don't let confusion in the secular press deter you from buying, reading for yourself, and then sharing this extraordinary text. It's an astonishing portrait of an astonishing man.
[A double 'Thank you, Abp. Chaput'. In addition to the wonderful review, for stating an appropriate criticism of the OR and these last comments.]
Let me park this here for the time being. Deacon Greg Kandra on his blog laconically cited this paragraph from Humanae Vitae:
“The Church does not consider at all illicit the use of those therapeutic means necessary to cure bodily diseases, even if a foreseeable impediment to procreation should result there from–provided such impediment is not directly intended for any motive whatsoever.”
I think his point is that Paul VI anticipated the condom-against-infection possibility with this paragraph. Apparently, the Vatican did not think so, otherwise the Pontifical Council for pastoral Ministry to Healthcare Workers would not have undertaken its 2006 study. Maybe they are taking a too-literal reading of the words 'therapeutic means necessary to cure bodily disease' because the condom is by no means a therapeutic means - it does not cure anything, it can only help prevent.... Nonetheless, I personally believe the more compelling argument against condoms as the automatic preventive measure for couples when one of them is HIV-infected is that abstinence is the first alternative for Catholics, and one that is dogmatically impregnable (pun not intended).
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/11/2010 02:20]