BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Here is another excellent synthetic overview of LOTW, by R.R. Reno, a Senior Editor at First Things and Professor of Theology at Creighton University. He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible and author of the volume on Genesis.


The Pontificate of continuity
by R.R. Reno

Dec 9, 2010


I’ve never met Benedict XVI, but I feel as though I have. Or at least I think I have a pretty good sense of how his mind works: clear, to the point, and earthy. OK, maybe not D. H. Lawrence earthy, but for a German university professor - very direct, concrete, and capable of a memorable turn of phrase.

These qualities are very much in evidence in an extended interview of Benedict by Peter Seewald, recently published under the title Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times.

Seewald is a sympathetic interlocutor, and this new book is his third published interview with Benedict, with the previous two taking place when the present pope was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for Doctrine and the Faith. The topics vary, but one theme is clear throughout. This papacy wants to italicize and underline and put into bold one word: continuity.

First, the continuity of his vocation.

As many who know him have observed, Benedict very much loved his work as a university professor. In fact, when he moved into the papal apartment, some Vatican officials were a bit taken aback when he brought along some beat up used furniture — his desk and the bookshelves that he has had since his days as a young faculty member. And of course his books, “my advisors” as he calls them. These familiar reminders of his beloved years as a professor are clearly dear to Benedict.

Bishops and cardinals and popes don’t have much time to spend communing with their books. They have memos to read and meetings to run — lots of them. Benedict doesn’t pretend that he doesn’t pine for more time with his “advisors.” And yet, he sees an essential continuity in his life.

“It is like this,” he says, “When a man says Yes during his priestly ordination, he may have some idea of what his own charism could be, but he also knows: I have placed myself into the hands of the bishops and ultimately of the Lord.”

Professor, yes, but priest first. He can take along his old furniture. Popes, after all, have prerogatives. But, as Benedict points out, the continuity of his priestly vocation has always meant something both simple and fundamental: I cannot pick and choose what I want.

Second, there is what I call his ministry of continuity, which has been much (and rightly) commented upon and has a number of different dimensions.

Joseph Ratzinger was a Young Turk at the Second Vatican Council, a peritus (official advisor) to Cardinal Frings of Cologne. Ratzinger was among those who urged the rejection of the official schemas or draft documents that had been prepared by Vatican theologians in advance of the Council. These documents would have enshrined the Neo-Scholasticism then dominant.

And Ratzinger subsequently participated in the preparation of the new documents, which were debated, revised, and eventually adopted.

By my reckoning, Ratzinger may have been the most “radical” of the theologians who advised the bishops, if the measure of “radical” is one’s distance from the modes and mentalities of the scholastic theology of the day.

Historians can point to Karl Rahner as a powerful voice. But he was and remained a theologian out of the old mold, making very subtle interpretations of official Church doctrine and expressing theological positions with recondite philosophical concepts.

By contrast, Ratzinger gravitated toward biblical language and images, an evangelical mode in theology quite different from the forms that dominated prior to the Council.

However, in the aftermath of the Council, Ratzinger criticized an overly disjunctive reading of Vatican II. Again and again he has urged us to adopt a “hermeneutics of continuity,” which means an approach to Vatican II that sees it as strengthening and purifying an already vibrant Catholic witness in the modern world.

In other words, yes, of course the Church had in some respects gone off course (as she always does). And, yes, there were problems (as there always are), some very significant, which is why John XXIII called the Council in the first place.

But a “hermeneutics of continuity” assumes that the fathers at Vatican II drew on the inner strengths of the Church in order address her weaknesses. It was a renewal from within.

This emphasis on continuity lay behind Benedict’s decision to regularize the use of the Tridentine Mass (so named because it was mandated by the Council of Trent in the late sixteenth century) as an extraordinary form.

“My main reasons for making the [Tridentine] form more available,” Benedict explains, “was to preserve the internal continuity of Church history. We cannot say: Before, everything was wrong, but now everything is right. The issue was internal reconciliation with our own past, the intrinsic continuity of faith and prayer in the Church.”

As a Cardinal, Ratzinger endorsed and encouraged a general trend toward greater formality in worship, as well as the reintroduction of Latin into parts of the Mass (for example, the Sanctus and Agnus Dei). The spiritual rationale for these modifications corresponds to his approach to the Tridentine Mass: We need to participate in a continuous tradition of faith and prayer.

The desire to create a Catholic culture of continuity may lie behind Benedict’s support for the beatification of Pius XII, the Pope most closely identified with the “bad” Church that many want to imagine was set aside by Vatican II.

The same holds for Benedict’s view of the ordination of women. An all male priesthood “is not something we ourselves have produced.” The Church must remain obedient to a continuous tradition instituted by Christ.

When asked to compare himself to Karol Wojtyla, the charismatic and world-changing man who became John Paul II, Benedict declines to assign to himself a decisive role in history.

“Not every pontificate has to have a brand new task,” he says. “Now it is a matter of continuing this and grasping the drama of the time, holding fast in that drama to the Word of God as the decisive word.”

“Hold fast,” St. Paul urges, to “that word which I preached to you” (1 Cor 15:2). Again: “Stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught.” (2 Thess. 2:15). This urgent exhortation echoes through the Bible: “Let us hold fast to our confession” (Heb. 4:14). In the book of Revelation, the voice of the Lord says to the churches that await his final triumph: “Behold, I am coming quickly! Hold fast what you have, that no one may take your crown.” (Rev. 3:11).

Holding fast to the faith of apostles was the key to John Paul II’s epochal pontificate. An emphasis on continuity will very likely make the papacy of Benedict XVI significant as well.

Indeed, a commitment to continue in the truth — and not futile efforts to become relevant — forms the basis of a Christian witness that has the evangelical power to make a dramatic difference in the world.

We believe a faith once delivered, not one renegotiated every generation. A truth powerful enough to refashion the world, not one remolded in accord with changing political or moral or cultural fashions.



Here's a commentary on the condom issue that I missed earlier, and yet, from its date, it came out almost as soon as the OR 'excerpt of an excerpt' was posted online on the afternoon of Nov. 20. It's one of the most effective presentations I have read on the controversy, and a clearheaded way to look at the issue, one that I can agree with. Especially about the elephant! Dr, Mirus is the president of catholicculture.org


The Pope, the condom, and
the elephant in the room
By Dr. Jeff Mirus

November 22, 2010


We’ve been paying close attention to the reports of Pope Benedict’s comments regarding the use of condoms in certain special circumstances. Among sound Catholic commentators, Janet Smith and Jimmy Akin were the first to weigh in, and they’ve both made important points.

But nobody has responded effectively to the elephant in the room, perhaps because even most Catholic commentators are just a little bit afraid the elephant is real. Let me explain.

It is true, as Jimmy Akin says, that the Pope’s remarks were not an exercise of his teaching authority. But to bring that up is to admit at least a mild fear that what he said somehow calls into question the clear and consistent teaching of the Church against contraception.

It is also true that, as Janet Smith notices immediately, the Pope’s prime example for a possible acceptable or humanly positive use of condoms appeared to be a homosexual example, in which no contraception is involved.

And as Smith also stresses, the Pope did note that the promotion of condom use to reduce the spread of AIDS is not regarded by the Church as a “moral” solution. But Smith seems just a little hasty in jumping on this, rather than on the succeeding clause (which begins “but, in this or that case….”). Am I only imagining a temptation to “spin” the Pope’s remarks lest they somehow undermine the previous clear teaching of the Church?

In other words, Jimmy Akin does an excellent job of showing the limits of the Pope’s comments. Janet Smith does an excellent job of showing by analogy what the Pope was trying to express. Both did a far better job than the Vatican’s own Press Office Director, Fr. Federico Lombardi, SJ, who tried to explain away the uproar by asserting the Pope was merely repeating commonly held Catholic ideas—without troubling to shed any light on these ideas whatsoever.

But from the best to the worst, Catholic commentators seem to be rather deliberately ignoring the elephant in the room, as if to look at it directly could somehow endanger the Church.

So let’s stare it straight in the eye. The elephant in the room is the conviction that if Pope Benedict acknowledges the possible moral good of using a condom in one situation, then he is fundamentally weakening or retreating from the Church’s teaching that contraception is intrinsically evil. [Perhaps 'conviction' is too strong a term - 'opinion', IMHO, is more appropriate. Conviction implies that whatever the commentator espouses has become an article of faith for him or her. Which I do not think was the case with either Smith or Akin, or any of those who have weighed in to say flatly that the Pope was opening the door to condom use one way or the other, on the issue, including disparate types like Sandro Magister, John Allen and Luigi Accattoli, who have been expressing their interpretation of what the Pope said. That's far from being a conviction.]

This conviction is a great and gleeful hope among those who uphold contraception, but it is also an intense fear among those who have perceived the evil of contraception all along. The elephant, then, is this huge, gigantic, enormous conviction [in this case, the sense of the word is 'assumption' or 'conclusion'] — whether welcome or unwelcome — that the Pope has put the Church’s teaching on contraception in jeopardy.

But this elephant exists only in the minds of those, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who do not fully understand the Church’s teaching on contraception.

Note this well. The Church’s teaching on contraception is that contraception is intrinsically evil when used to frustrate the procreative purpose of the marital act. The point to remember is that contraception is intrinsically evil only within marriage.

Outside of marriage, sexual intercourse itself is intrinsically evil; outside of marriage, there is no marital act that must be kept open to life and love.

This is exactly the kind of moral analysis the Pope was doing in the discussion which is now so much in the news. When, with respect to the distribution of condoms to reduce the risk of AIDS, the Pope says the Church “of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality”, he is doing exactly the sort of extrinsic moral analysis required for this case.

He does not say, “Wait, stop right here, contraception is intrinsically immoral, there can be no further discussion.” He does not say this because that thinking applies only within marriage. Rather, he says we need to look at the circumstances, the moral context, and the moral trajectory.

The vast majority of Churchman have rejected the idea of fighting AIDS with condoms because the public promotion of condoms tends to dehumanize sexual relations, emphasizing only the selfish pleasure to be gained, and bypassing altogether the responsibility called for in a truly human vision of sexuality.

The Pope alludes to this when he mentions “a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality”. It is possible that in some specific cases, the use of a condom might be a step in the right direction (think of a rapist, for example).

But Pope Benedict and most other Churchmen over the years have seen that the public promotion of condoms takes us in exactly the wrong direction overall, so that our last state is worse than our first.

It further cheapens sexuality, and in so doing undermines the very values which alone can solve the AIDS problem - and with it the more fundamental problems which AIDS represents.

But none of this has any bearing on the Church’s traditional teaching against contraception in marriage. Indeed, no matter what position the Pope or any other moralist may take on the use of condoms in particular situations which are already fundamentally disordered situations in which sexual activity is already intrinsically immoral that position cannot affect the Church’s teaching on the use of condoms in sexual acts which are otherwise properly ordered and moral, that is, within marriage.

In each and every properly ordered and therefore moral sexual act (that is, in each and every marital act), deliberate contraception remains intrinsically immoral.

There are many other aspects of this story that need to be addressed (see Phil Lawler's 'The Vatican newspaper has betrayed the Pope]). But the purity of Catholic doctrine is not one of them.

Unfortunately, there really is an elephant in the room, and this elephant does dominate the vision of both secularists and Catholics —if they do not properly understand the Church’s teaching on contraception. But the moment they do, the elephant disappears. Look it in the eye, and it is gone.