Here's a secular review from Down Under by Gerard Henderson, executive director of the Sydney Institute, a privately-funded Australian think tank that encourages debate and discussion of current affairs. How very welcome that Henderson cites a number of inconvenient truths that MSM hardly ever take into account - because they are inconvenient for secularists! It's 12/7 in Australia now, hence the date....
Don't mock the frock:
Benedict speaks from the heart
by Gerard Henderson
December 7, 2010
.
The Vatican, apparently like God, works in strange ways.
A series of official meetings at the Holy See last week served as a reminder that, in its governance function, the Catholic Church is very bureaucratic.
Yet Pope Benedict has just done what few government or religious leaders would do. He gave six interviews of one hour's duration each to the German journalist and author Peter Seewald.
The product of this conversation is contained in
Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times (Ignatius Press), which has just been published.
In the Western world, which is increasingly subsumed with sex and celebrity, media attention has focused on the Pope's answers to two questions about HIV/AIDS in Africa and the church forbidding condoms.
Commentators have homed in on Benedict's comment that in the case of some individuals - he cited the case of a male prostitute - the use of condoms may amount to "a first step in the direction of a moralisation, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way towards recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants". That was about it.
But commentators tended to ignore a more significant papal refrain in
Light of the World. Namely that "people can get condoms when they want them anyway".
And that's the essential point.
The Pope recognises that not all Catholics follow the teachings of the Church.
Moreover,
Africa is by no means a Catholic zone. The unfashionable fact is that HIV/AIDS is rife in large parts of Africa because many African men have multiple sex partners. Only some of them are baptised Catholic.
The Catholic Church has a good understanding of the devastation of HIV/AIDS. It is estimated about 15 per cent of the world's population is Catholic and that 25 per cent of all AIDS victims around the world are treated in Catholic institutions. That's an impressive statistic.
There is another inconvenient truth. The church's interaction with HIV/AIDS victims primarily focuses on caring for wounds and emptying bedpans - rather than writing opinion pieces in newspapers and attending international conferences.
The obsession with Catholicism in the Western media also impacts on discussion of world population growth. Last October, the presenter of Late Night Live, Phillip Adams, interviewed the former Catholic priest Paul Collins about his book
Judgment Day - The Struggle for Life on Earth.
As the title suggests, Collins's work is primarily about the environment, climate change and all that. But Adams introduced the interview with predictable comments about condoms and the ridicule-laced claim that Catholics believe "it's naughty to have contraception because it might eliminate a couple of babies and every sperm is sacred".
Collins did not object to Adams's sneers. But he did point out that Catholic fertility in Australia since the late 19th century has been pretty much the same as Australia's national fertility. Collins did refer to the fact that, in Australia, Catholics suffer an enormous amount from caricature. He added that in parts of Catholic Italy the population is in decline.
This suggests that
the Pope has a much better understanding of contemporary Catholics than do such secularists as Adams. [And yet sneering secularists would simply pigeohole him as an obscurantist marooned in a medieval ivory tower!]
As Francis Fukuyama pointed out in a lecture in Sydney in 2008, the huge increases in world population are taking place in sub-Saharan Africa where the Pope has little influence. If Adams was truly concerned about the need for condom advocacy as a form of birth control, he would take his cause to the Islamic nations - or, indeed, to Islamic settlements within Western societies.
It's just that it is easier to ridicule Christians in the West than Muslims anywhere.
During his visit to Britain in September, Benedict was subjected to more low-level abuse. The author Richard Dawkins described the Pope as a "leering old villain in a frock", the philosopher A.C. Grayling compared him to "the head of a drug cartel" and the humanist Andrew Copson accused him of undermining human rights.
Yet, as Bryan Appleyard reported in The Sunday Times, Geoffrey Robertson, QC, obtained a papal blessing in Rome a few months before joining the protests in London. [REALLY!!!!]
The evidence suggests the Pope is more considered than many of his critics. This is evident in
Light of the World where the former theology professor acknowledges the Church handles some issues poorly, concedes that "the Pope can have private opinions that are wrong" and accepts that "no one is forced to be a Christian". The Pope also apologises for the "filth" involved in the sexual abuse of young children by male priests and brothers.
The reader does not have to agree with the views of Benedict to be impressed by the fact he gave lengthy interviews in the absence of minders and that Light of the World was released without "talking points" memos being issued to bishops and priests.
This is the first 'ecumenical' reaction to LOTW that I have come across so far. The blogger, Adam A. J. DeVille, is an assistant professor of theology at the University of Saint Francis, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and apparently a scholar of Orthodox-Catholic relations.
The Bishop of Rome
on being the Bishop of Rome
by Adam DeVille
Nov. 23, 2010
As I noted during the interregnum in 2005, coverage of the papacy by the so-called mainstream media - always a dim lot at the best of times - is invariably tendentious and unreliable. I cannot improve on Conrad Black's acerbic description of most journalists as
ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and...arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight. The product of their impassioned intervention in public affairs is more often confusion than lucidity.
So it is completely unsurprising that the media has seized on excerpts from
Light of the World: The Pope, The Church and The Signs Of The Times, and then propagated aggressively the myth that the Pope has launched a wholesale change in Catholic teaching on contraception. This stupidity is too tedious to refute, especially when it has been done in such a pitch-perfect polemic as you can read here.
I look forward to reading this book and then discussing it on here.
To my great surprise, Benedict's papacy has done more to advance Orthodox-Catholic rapprochement, and more quickly, than I think even the most wild-eyed optimist expected.
We shall see what, if anything, he has to say about the East in this book-length interview - one of several he has done over the years with Seewald, who was
prompted to a conversion (reversion?) based on how moved he was by Ratzinger's gracious life and absorbing faith.
As promised, Dr. DeVille came through with his review on Dec. 1, providing a most useful perspective... NB: He gives the page number of LOTW from which he cites, in each case.
The Pope of Rome
and the Christian East
by Adam DeVille
Dec. 1, 2010
Peter Seewald's new book-length interview with the Pope... on which I briefly commented earlier, has of course already generated enormous discussion on--predictably and tiresomely--sex.
Some have said that the Pope allowed himself to be played by the media and should have known how these comments would be received. I would say, based on the entire book, that the Pope did know the likely reception his comments would receive, and proceeded anyway.
His previous interviews - especially the 1985
Ratzinger Report - as well as his 1997 volume of memoirs,
Milestones, set off firestorms so I'm sure he was not unaware that something similar would happen again - all the more so in an Internet age.
In any event, I've just finished reading the entire thing and have seen that the "condom comments" are so tiny that only the tendentious would be interested in repeating them.
Let me, instead, focus on those aspects of direct interest to Eastern Christians, of which there are about twenty or so passages in the book that are noteworthy. I would divide the comments into (i) the encouraging but not really surprising comments (not surprising, that is, to anyone who has read Ratzinger over the last 40 years); (ii) the truly surprising; and (iii) the disappointing. Of these, (i) is the largest category; (ii) the next largest; and (iii) has only one disappointment.
Let me take them in order. Not all treat Orthodoxy directly, but all of them, I believe, have clear and obvious bearing on issues about which Orthodoxy is concerned.
i) Encouraging Comments:
The Pope is not omnipotent: right at the outset (p.6), he underscores that notwithstanding the fact the Catholic Church is the largest such organization in the world, "the Pope does not have power because of these numbers." Indeed, he goes on to say that while the Pope bears "a great responsibility," he "is, on the one hand, a completely powerless man" (6). He cannot control or correct or confront everything, and it is not his job to keep the entire Church in being: "only the Lord himself has the power to keep people in the faith" (7).
The Pope is not exclusively the "vicar of Christ": this title, rather, belongs to "every priest" when he "speaks on behalf of Jesus Christ" (7). This is important, not only because history clearly bears him out in refusing to see the title as exclusively papal, but also because, in the furor in 2006 over papal titles (about which more presently), Orthodox commentators like Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) noted that other titles, including "vicar of Christ" needed critical examination.
Infallibility cannot be invoked arbitrarily:
Vatican I has, of course, been seen (often incorrectly, in my judgment) as a huge impediment to Orthodox-Catholic unity. Much of that is based on misunderstanding, which the Pope is at pains here briefly to correct, insisting that the Pope can never act "arbitrarily" but only in concert with other bishops and only "when tradition has been clarified" so as to proclaim "the faith of the Church" (8).
A papacy of martyrdom: Seewald quotes back to the Pope a paper the latter gave in 1977, with which he still agrees today, saying the papacy must first and foremost be understood to have and to exercise "a primacy of martyrdom" (9). In other words, "standing there as a glorious ruler is not part of being pope" (10).
Papal bibliophilia: not a major point, but on a blog about books, I was heartened and amused to read that after he moved into the papal apartments in 2005, he gave pride of place to his bookshelves: "in them all are my advisors, the books" (14). Only after they were installed did he give any thought to furniture, decorations, etc.
Curial criticism: In several places he very briefly (and in one place obliquely) criticizes the curial bureaucracy, calling it "spent and tired" (59); noting that "certainly John Paul II sometimes put off making decisions"; and agreeing that, while his predecessor "did undertake reform of the Curia," he "subsequently left many decisions to his collaborators" (79), not always, he seems to suggest, to good effect.
Synodality: saying he sees no need for a "Vatican III," he expresses his view that "I believe that at the moment the bishops' synods are the right instrument, in which the entire episcopate is represented and is, so to speak, 'searching,' keeping the whole Church together and at the same time leading her forward" (65-66).
This is not really surprising, though a little disappointing because the limits of the Roman "synods of bishops," as I have noted elsewhere, are considerable and perhaps most memorably summed up in the words of the late Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan Maxim Hermaniuk, who dismissed them as synods, archly calling them no more than "international study days of the Catholic bishops."
No Orthodox recognizes these synods as real synods in the sense in which that word is used in the East: i.e., as a legislative body, having real power exercised in conjunction with its (usually patriarchal) head.
Roman synods are purely consultative bodies. That being said, the Popes have so far not ignored the recommendations of all the synods held since Paul VI instituted them in 1965, but they are certainly free to do so, and that remains a point of concern to Eastern Christians.
On not being a busybody: Referring to a document written in the 12th century by Bernard of Clairvaux for Pope Eugene III, Benedict agrees with him that no Pope can allow himself to be consumed with files, meetings, decisions at the expense of "deeper examination, contemplation, time for interior pondering, vision...remaining with God and meditating about God" (71).
Remember, he says, the Pope is "not the successor of Emperor Constantine but...of a fisherman" (71). This is important because, as David Bentley Hart has memorably observed, many Orthodox fear the papacy as "the advance embassy of an omnivorous ecclesial empire."
It is good to have (as he notes below, and had done so previously) a "pared down" papacy, and thus
good to have a Pope who is not forever trying to insert himself into the business of his brother bishops around the world - unless, of course, a truly genuine emergency, that admits of no other solution, requires his intervention.
On not being a star: Some time ago, as those who follow him know, Cardinal Ratzinger expressed considerable unease with the fact that John Paul II was considered a "superstar." (He appeared on the cover of
Time more than a dozen times.). He reiterates that here, but more gently and circumspectly, asking "is it really right for someone to present himself again and again to the crowd in that way and allow oneself to be regarded as a star? On the other hand, people have an intense longing to see the pope" and not him personally so much as "this office...the representative of the Holy One" (73).
On dialogue with Orthodoxy: Noting that as a "professor in Bonn and Regensburg, I always had Orthodox among my students, and this gave me the opportunity to form many friendships in the Orthodox world," he goes on to note that it is with Orthodoxy "where there is...the most hope of reunion" in part because "Catholics and Orthodox both have the same basic structure inherited from the ancient Church" (86).
I confess I was slightly taken aback by this because Orthodox and Catholic structures - assuming the Pope means ecclesial structures - do vary considerably: the Roman is bipartite (the universal and local), while the East is usually tripartite (the local, the regional, and the "universal" in some sense,
pace the denials of some ignorant Orthodox polemicists who like to sneer at "universal" structures as purely Western and having no place in Orthodoxy, a risible claim to anyone who really knows what he is talking about).
[But when the Pope says 'the same basic structure inherited from the ancient Church', I certainly took it he meant the early Church, which surely did not have the 'regional' component of much later centuries, starting with the distinction betwen the Eastern and Western churches!]
But this is a very brief comment he does not develop so we should not read too much into it. His larger point is valid.
Cordial relations between Old and New Rome: he expresses delight in the "real friendship and sense of brotherhood between" him and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.
Russian relations: he notes his gratitude for "the friendship and the great cordiality that Patriarch Kirill has shown me," noting the latter has "such a joy about him, such a simple faith....So we understood each other well" (87). The interviewer presses him a little later as to whether there will be a meeting between the two "in the not too distant future", and the Pope responds: "I would say that, yes" (91).
The nature of the unity we seek: he notes that unity between Orthodoxy and Catholicism needs to happen in order to spread the Gospel and help the world believe, but that we must "truly relearn to see and understand our inner spiritual kinship with each other."
He is not, he says, concerned firstly with "tactical, political progress, but rapprochement on the level of our interior affinity" (87). He expands on this later, rightly noting that "beyond the doctrinal issues, there are still many steps to be taken at the level of the heart. God still needs to do some work on us here. For the same reason, I would also be shy about making any predictions about when reunion will happen. The important thing is that we truly love each other, that we have an interior unity, that we draw as close together and collaborate as much as we can--while trying to work through the remaining areas of open questions" (89-90).
This, of course, clearly echos John Paul II's oft-stated call for the "healing of memories," on which I've commented previously with reference to Orthodoxy (“The Healing of Memories: a Suggestion for Liturgical Enactment,” Ecumenical Trends 34 [2005]: 9-12), including here.
No new Uniates: Discussing the prospect of Anglicans entering the Catholic Church, the Pope notes that structures being set up for them will be flexible. "We don't want to create new uniate churches, but we do want to offer ways for local church traditions, traditions that have evolved outside of the Roman Church, to be brought into communion with the Pope and thus into Catholic communion" (97).
ii) Surprising Comments:
No hand kissing?: The interviewer enumerates things that changed in 2005 when Benedict took office, saying "you abolished the custom of kissing the Pope's hand--though no one followed the new protocol" (82). Is this true? I never heard or saw this anywhere.
[I don't remember seeing it in a formal dcument either, but it was one of those 'novelties' reported widely after Benedict XVI became Pope. And it is true that no one seems bound by the practice any more, even if many bishops, priests and laymen still do the 'baciamano' - which, of course, the Pope cannot very well refuse!]
Orthodoxy has objected to an over-exaltation of papal authority and some of its concrete expressions, but this would not be an objectionable practice given that Orthodox regularly kiss not only patriarchal and episcopal but also priestly hands.
The Pope does not respond to this comment, instead insisting that his removing the tiara from the papal coat of arms was not so original because already Paul VI had given it away (and none of his successors have worn one).
Frankly no Orthodox could object to the tiara (except, perhaps, the one Paul VI wore because it looked like some nasty cheap nursery-school project) unless we were prepared to renounce the use of imperial headgear on our bishops.
[The Orthodox episcopal headgear - and their variety - are certainly magnificent. And I have always felt it was most sensible of them to retain the tradition, which moreover, the Orthodox faithful appear not to mind in the least. The headgear and the sumptuous episcopal robes are as much part of the Orthodox tradition as the iconostasis that is such a wonderful feature of their churches.]
Backtracking from
Dominus Iesus?: Discussing the conciliar language of particular churches, the Pope notes that "the Eastern Churches are genuine particular churches, although they are not in communion with the pope. In this sense, unity with the Pope is not constitutive for the particular church" (89; my emphasis)!
When I have time I'll have to check this (especially the word "constitutive") against
Dominus Iesus and also the 1992 declaration on the Church as
communio, because it sounds like the Pope is introducing an important clarification or nuance here....
[I did not think it necessary to check out Dominus Iesus simply because I do not think Benedict XVI would alter an iota of that most carefully considered document. And certainly not informally, much less inadvertently!]
No nationalism or nationalist "autocephaly" in the Church: Noting that "there has always been a tendency toward national churches, and in fact some have actually been founded," he nonetheless notes that in today's world the need is "precisely" for "an interior unity": "the Church needs unity, that she needs something like a primacy. It was interesting for me that the Russian Orthodox theologian John Meyendorff, who lives [sic] in America, said that their autocephalies are their biggest problem; they could use like a first authority, a primate" (138-39).
Rhis is certainly true, as I have demonstrated at length in my book
Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press early next year.
But I was a little taken aback here by two things: others have said this more recently--e.g., Nicholas Lossky--so this suggested to me the pope has not followed the recent literature. (I'm sure he's kept sleepless at nights waiting for my book on this score!) And surely he knows that Meyendorff is...dead? Meyendorff died in 1992--perhaps this is a translation issue--or even a typo--and the present tense ("lives") should, of course, have been in the past: lived.
iii) Disappointing Comments:
Papal reform: the interviewer presses him to say more about why the title "Patriarch of the West" was abandoned and about how the papacy might be reformed to take account of Orthodox concerns, but the Pope will not say, arguing that "these are contentious issues, which I would have to say more about than I can right now..." (89).
I examined this question in my “On the Patriarchate of the West," Ecumenical Trends 35 (June 2006): 1-7. There I said we very much needed to hear from the Pope because the decision created such turmoil in the Orthodox world and the statement put out by Cardinal Kasper at the time was unhelpfully ambiguous--a concern I expressed in greater detail here. I very much stand by those comments.
The 2006 deletion of the title was, and is, a puzzling decision. Many of us have tried to remain hopeful about its intended import, but further developments and clarifications here would be most useful.
This book covers much else besides. The overall impression, right from the beginning, is confirmed for those of us who know and have read and met Ratzinger (as I did very briefly in 1998), but may be new to others, including the media:
he is a wonderfully gracious, humble, open man with a deeply affecting, inspiring simplicity of faith and trust in Providence.
It's worth looking at Dr. DeVille's forthcoming book, through its pre-sales blurb:
Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy
Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity
Adam A. J. DeVille
FORTHCOMING IN MARCH 2011
Among the issues that continue to divide the Catholic Church from the Orthodox Church — the two largest Christian bodies in the world, together comprising well over a billion faithful [the figure is closer to almost 2 billion, because Catholics alone make up 1.2 billion] — the question of the papacy is widely acknowledged to be the most significant stumbling block to their unification.
For nearly forty years, commentators, theologians, and hierarchs, from popes and patriarchs to ordinary believers of both churches, have acknowledged the problems posed by the papacy.
In Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, Adam A. J. DeVille offers the first comprehensive examination of the papacy from an Orthodox perspective that also seeks to find a way beyond this impasse, toward full Orthodox-Catholic unity.
He first surveys the major postwar Orthodox and Catholic theological perspectives on the Roman papacy and on patriarchates, enumerating Orthodox problems with the papacy and reviewing how Orthodox patriarchates function and are structured.
In response to Pope John Paul II’s 1995 request for a dialogue on Christian unity, set forth in the encyclical letter Ut Unum Sint, DeVille proposes a new model for the exercise of papal primacy.
DeVille suggests the establishment of a permanent ecumenical synod consisting of all the patriarchal heads of Churches under a papal presidency, and discusses how the Pope qua Pope would function in a reunited Church of both East and West, in full communion.
His analysis, involving the most detailed plan for Orthodox-Catholic unity yet offered by an Orthodox theologian, could not be more timely.
“In Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, not only does Adam A. J. DeVille give a historical and theological background to the thorny problem of the papacy in ecumenical dialogue; he also outlines what a reintegrated Church would look like by suggesting a way the papacy could function. Taking what both Orthodox and Catholic ecumenists have said, he paints a practical portrait of a unified Church. This is a novel and important contribution.”
—David Fagerberg, University of Notre Dame
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/12/2010 20:44]