I find the following article truly appalling. Not only is it gratuitously and unnecessarily offensive to Benedict XVI. It is also dishonestly tendentious, selecting to present only information that supports his hostility to the present Pope. It's not the first time that I find an article in the Wall Street Journal by this writer to be questionable and unworthy of the newspaper, which surely can pay other more sensible writers. And surely, the WSJ editors should know better than to indulge his cock-eyed perspective with the headline they provided.
Rocca is the Vatican correspondent for an agency called Religion News Service. His leaps of illogic are egregious examples of non sequitur, and the article as a whole is a blatant and shameless example of bad faith! I'm for freedom of speech and all that, but there's also such a thing as good faith and good taste, neither of which this article has. And the WSJ editors are equally guilty of poor taste.
Pope Benedict beatifies his star predecessor:
The current Pontiff lacks the presence
and popularity of John Paul II,
the former actor and Cold Warrior
By FRANCIS X. ROCCA
Vatican City , Jan. 21 - When Pope Benedict XVI declares Pope John Paul II "blessed" on May 1, bestowing on his predecessor the Catholic Church's highest honor short of sainthood, millions will watch from St. Peter's Square, on television and on the Internet.
John Paul's beatification, which was officially announced last week, will be an occasion for recalling his eventful reign, and
it will inevitably inspire comparisons with the man who now sits in his place. In many eyes, those comparisons will not prove favorable to Benedict.
The current Pope is low-key, as Americans discovered during his 2008 visit. For all his charm, he lacks the gregariousness, physical presence and gift for the dramatic gesture with which the former actor John Paul could win over crowds. [Rocca chooses to ignore the well-dcoumented fact - to the continuing surprise of many who inexplicably refuse to recognize Benedict's superior endowments as a man, priest and intellectual! - that Benedict has consistently attracted more crowds to Rome than his predecessor did, not to mention the great popular success of his trips within Italy and abroad!]
Although a clearer and more accessible writer than John Paul,
Benedict is far less at home in the age of electronic communications. His reign has been marked by a chain of public-relations disasters, most recently the widespread confusion over his remarks about the morality of condom use. [What does the willful misreading of his words about condoms have anything to do with electronic commnications?]
John Paul was also a much more commanding leader than his successor. It is impossible to imagine the late Pope giving an interview of the kind that Benedict granted the German journalist Peter Seewald last year, in which he repeatedly admitted personal error and suggested that he is largely impotent to enforce many of his own policies within the Church. [He never said that! It's a stretch to extrapolate that from his realistic statement that the Pope is a completely powerless man because he does not run a business in which the faithful are neither his employees nor subordinates/ See Page 6 of LOTW. Rocca has got to be one of the most naive of reporters to conclude that because Benedict XVI gives an interview in which he admits to errors, John Paul was therefore 'a more commanding leader'! Genuine humility does not make anybody a less commanding anything!]]
Nor has Benedict matched his predecessor's popularity among non-Catholics. An enthusiastic participant in inter-religious dialogue of all kinds, John Paul appealed to Muslims and Jews with historic apologies for Christian anti-Semitism and the sins of Catholics during the Inquisition and the Crusades. [Rocca cannot be more sophomoric than this! Benedict is not into inter-religious dialog to curry popularity with anyone - he wants to establish straight talk, authenticity and truth as the basis for any dialog, not empty platitudes or a pointless repetition of apologies for events in the past. John Paul made those apologies with as much ceremony and grand gestures as he could so that the world would not miss that they were made. For Catholics to continue beating their breasts about these apologies would be very much like the attention-getting Pharisee in the temple.]
The current papacy has been marked by heightened tensions with Muslims and Jews. Benedict's 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, in which he quoted a medieval description of the teachings of Islam's prophet Muhammad as "evil and inhuman," was followed by violent protests in several Muslim countries.
[You would think Rocca never heard of the COMMON WORD initiative that Regensburg prompted among Muslim moderates, or earlier than that, of Benedict's amazingly succesful visit to Turkey just a few weeks after Regensburg.]
Benedict has also irritated Jews by readmitting an ultra-traditionalist bishop who turned out to be a Holocaust denier, and by honoring Pope Pius XII, who critics say failed to do or say enough against the Nazi genocide.
[That's all Rocca can find to say about Benedict's relations with Jews? Not his visit to synagogues and to the Holy Land, not the fact that he invited the first Jews - and Muslims, for that matter - to address gatherings of the Bishops' Synod? Not his continuing and highly informative tributes to Christianity's legacy from the Old Testament?]
In secular eyes, John Paul ranks as one of the principal heroes of the Cold War, identified with scenes of striking Polish workers and the fall of the Berlin Wall. By contrast, Benedict's campaign to reverse the tide of secularism in Europe strikes most observers as quixotic.
[The two goals are apples and oranges!]
Of course, the fall of the Soviet Union hardly seemed a realistic goal when John Paul assumed the papal throne in 1978, and Benedict is one who thinks in centuries. But for the moment, in the crude terms of our politics and pop culture, John Paul comes off as much more of a "winner."
[In your crude way of thinking, yes! It's hard to imagine a Vaticanista as crude, crass and well-nigh ignorant as Rocca. Not even Richard Owen at his worst was so offensive! How can one compare an ongoing pontificate that is barely six years old compared to the completed 26 years of John Paul's Pontificate? And Communism did not collapse simply because of John Paul's moral leadership - it would not have happened without the practicel strategic superiority, military and economic, that Ronald Reagan and the USA, and Margaret Thatcher and the UK, invested with equal moral certainty into bringing down the evil empire.]
There is one important area in which Benedict's reputation stands to gain from comparison with his predecessor: his record on clergy sex abuse. It was Benedict, when still a cardinal, who took the initiative to launch the church's first unified process for investigating and punishing pedophile priests. Facing strong resistance within the Vatican, he pursued the powerful Rev. Marcial Maciel, the late founder of the Legion of Christ, who abused numerous children over his career. He was disciplined only after Benedict was elected Pope. Whereas John Paul never met with victims of clergy sex abuse, Benedict has done so five times and has offered repeated public apologies for the crimes they suffered.
[We are supposed to be grateful for this concession, as superficial as it is? As if the most important thing in Benedict's actions on the sex abuse scandal is to have met with victims!]
Overall, Benedict has shown himself content to be overshadowed by John Paul. [What would Rocca have him do? Strut about and beat his breasts, saying "me Tarzan too!"????] Rocca is beyond simply naive. he is CLUELESS on anything!] /DIM] He has described himself as one of the "little popes," a "simple and humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord," in contrast to his "great predecessor."
Yet in his deference to John Paul one can see perhaps the most important difference between the two men. The celebrity aura that surrounds the modern papacy clearly makes Benedict uneasy. "Standing there as a glorious ruler is not part of being Pope," he told Mr. Seewald. "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?"
Of course, Benedict has never repudiated the spectacular pastoral approach of John Paul. But his more modest style turns attention away from himself and toward the essence, as he sees it, of his role as Pontiff, as nothing more or less than "the representative of the Holy One."
[EEEEEWWWW! Rocca's sophomoric thinking makes me cringe - it makes me think of a brain crawling with maggots!!!! Sorry to be so categorically dismissive of this article by Rocca, and consequently, of Rocca himself as a journalist. The article is so skewed, and makes me all the more outraged that the WSJ could find no better writer on this topic. It should have kept to the subject of John Paul II alone and his beatification, not turned into an occasion to diss Benedict XVI so disgracefully and tastelessly.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/12/2011 00:47]