I had to make a random choice for the first major German article I would translate, and this is it... Along with Peter Seewald - but years before him - Paul Badde, longtime Rome correspondent for Die Welt, has been Joseph Ratzinger's most ardent German admirer. His anniversary commentary on Benedict XVI is original, insightful, poetic and moving.
The German Pope at 85:
Why Benedict XVI remains an 'outsider'
by Paul Badde
Translated from
Benedict XVI uses a cane. Not surprising since he is after all 85.
The wonder is, rather, that seven years after he was elected Pope, he still has all the energy he has. The burden of his office is enormous, especially with respect to the usual physical decline that comes with age.
His brother Georg, now 88, has been suffering for some time what old age can bring - a hip replacement, near blindness, various bone complaints.
Benedict XVI is in good health for his age and lives his life with rational order. Meanwhile, for someone who was always physically frail, he has become one of the oldest Popes in history. His predecessor John Paul II, the Pope who had been famously athletic
[until the major gunshot injury in May 1981], died six weeks before his 85th birthday, but last March, Benedict XVI overtook 'God's marathon-man' in longevity.
He is now truly old, despite moments when he seems eternally young, as on the afternoon of March 24, recently, when he met the children
[and people of all ages] of Guanajuato at the Plaza de la Paz.
The place was bursting with people - including orchestras, various musicmakers, trumpeteers. The Pope had just finished a speech to the President, cardinals and bishops of Mexico, some 24 hours after he reached Leon on a flight that lasted almost 14 hours from Rome.
Now he addressed the children and said:
Dear children, I am happy to be able to meet with you and to see your smiling faces as you fill this beautiful square. You have a very special place in the Pope’s heart. And in these moments, I would like all the children of Mexico to know this... I am grateful for this encounter of faith, and for the festive and joyful presence expressed in song. Today we are full of jubilation, and this is important. God wants us to be happy always. He knows us and he loves us. If we allow the love of Christ to change our heart, then we can change the world. This is the secret of authentic happiness.
All the exhaustion was gone. He was happy. But this is not always so.
Is this Pope, as his detractors say, 'out of this world'?
[Badde uses the adjective 'weltfremd', literally 'hostile to the world' but is a German term for someone who lives in fairyland.]
This 'friend of these little friends' has always been a master teacher of Church doctrine, a missionary and a pastor. He was once a professor. Now he is the Bishop of Rome and the monarch of Vatican City State.
But above all, he has been for seven years, as Successor of the Apostle Peter, the universal pastor to an immense flock of Catholics, many of whom are currently threatened with dispersion in all directions.
But being Pope is not a calling you can learn in any school. And pulling strings or moving levers of influence, gathering a 'house court' around him, or establishing networks for his own advantage are things that Joseph Ratzinger never learned, not as Archbishop of Munich-Freising, nor in his 22 years as Prefect of the leading Curial dicastery in Rome. All that is contrary to who he is.
So in this sense he has always been an outsider. Already. when he was 31, he called for a radical rejection by the Church "of power, of cronyism, of counterfeit, of Mammon, of deception and self-deception".
That was decades before, in Freiburg last fall, he called on German Catholics for this same 'Entweltichung' - a rejection of worldliness - and what he meant by it: that German Catholics must reject it as unhealthy if they are to effect a necessary renewal of the Church in Germany. This is a matter that has been close to his heart since the Second Vatican Council.
Is that being out of this world? Only in the way he meant it. He himself has never engaged in worldly pursuits. And yet, he has seen everything.
Benedict XVI often comes across as an amateur
He has never been a careerist. And that is why even now, he often seems an amateur to many. He has called people to work with him whom he already knows and whom he knows he can trust, but none of his close associates are tacticians, politicians or organizational geniuses.
And yet, even without programming, his Pontificate has been blessed with spectacular successes, such as his three encyclicals, his travels, and his books on
Jesus of Nazareth.
And in the twilight decline of the post-modern world, Benedict XVI seems to be increasingly like that Little Prince from another star
[a reference to Antoine de Saint-Exupery's famous fable]. Like a child prodigy who follows his own path, without looking right or left, yet with great perseverance. regardless of success or failure.
He has never lacked for enemies
For instance, he has pursued the idea of reconciliation with the Lefebvrians unswervingly - seeking, seemingly against all historical and human probabilities, to prevent a schism in the Catholic Church - since the late 1980s when he first became involved with them.
And no one in the Church has so singlemindedly carried out the battle against sexual abuse by priests and the unconditional disclosure of this dark side of the Church.
That he himself is incorrupt is something that even his harshest critics and enemies acknowledge
[but not the malicious ones like AP and the New York Times, who seem to have made it their institutional crusade to find any 'smoking gun' they can present to the court of public opinion to impugn the Pope] - and all his life, he has not lacked for such enemies. And yet, he was never a zealous Jacobin
[as the media long before he was Pope delighted to depict him].
But what both his friends and opponents within and outside the Church must expect of him in the future, he made clear once again most recently, as in an open book, in his homilies during the major liturgies of the Paachal Triduum and Easter.
Truly amazing physical discipline
Holy Week celebrations are the high point of the liturgical year, starting with Palm Sunday on St. Peter's Square to the papal blessing
urbi et orbi - to Rome and to the world - on Easter Sunday. The Pope is never missing and is the protagonist in all these liturgies, not at St. Peter's nor at the Lateran Basilica or the Colosseum.
But these liturgies demand great discipline, as during the reading of 'The Passion and Death of the Lord', in which the chapter from the Gospel of St. John is not only read out, but chanted word for word in Latin on Good Friday. It requires the celebrant to stand for about 40 minutes, with just one genuflection at the mention of the death of Christ.
This year, even the Swiss Guard marvelled at how serenely Benedict XVI stood, hands folded in front of him, as if standing guard like one of them, though dressed in liturgical robes, admitting no distraction much like an Indian fakir in deep meditation.
Both his papal master of ceremonies, one on each side, seemed far more anxious next to this much older man. He stood between them like a tree. But the Catholic Church can continue to expect this same unruffled serenity from him in the future. A future which may be longer than one might expect.
The Pope and his lifelong theme
Later in his Easter Vigil homily, he would - as if announcing his testament - emphasize the 'identifiable-ness' of God as the unique characteristic of Christendom. This has been his lifelong theme - the invincible light of God, which Christians can experience like a new Creation at Easter. An expression he first used in a 1959 article in the German magazine
Hochland.
For his Easter greeting card, he chose a painting of the Resurrection by Johann Heninrich Tischbein from 1793, in which a resplendent Christ ascends from his tomb on that first Easter, in some sort of reversal of Plato's image of the cave. It's the painting of a vision.
He ends his homily with: "Let us pray to the Lord at this time that he may grant us to experience the joy of his light... and that through the Church, Christ’s radiant face may enter our world"
Outlook from the 'crucifixion hill' of the first Pope
Benedict is not a corporate executive. He has limited space for maneuver in his governance - far from being unfailingly almighty as Popes are usually thought to be. He is more like the president of a foundation who cannot express his private convictions but only that which the founder himself has said.
Nothing has changed about this. And it will remain so for this 85-year-old theologian as it was from his days as young consultant at Vatican II to his present position as Pope. It will remain his leitmotif.
And this will be his task - a 'lifelong' assignment for a Pope
[i.e., a Pope remains Pope as long as he lives] - as he saw and experienced at first hand with John Paul II.
When he looks out of his window at St. Peter's Square, he sees the same obelisk that Peter saw when he was crucified head down in what was then Nero's Circus. The splendid buildings now on Vatican hill are simply accoutrements to what was the gallows for the first Pope.
It's an outlook that Benedict contemplates without fear. His duty as the Successor of Peter is one he will not shirk as long as he lives. And that makes him more free than most people think, especially in his homeland.
Yes, meanwhile he is using a walking stick. But it is above all a shepherd's staff with which this 85-year-old man intends to keep together the world's more than a billion Catholics.
I've always thought that those who lament too much about how the Pope, in particular this Pope, must be suffering because of the unending slings and arrows directed at him from the media and his detractors, forget perhaps that if you were the Pope - and only 265 individuals have been so far in history - how could you claim to 'suffer' such outrages when you realize what Jesus had to undergo, and what Peter and all the subsequent martyrs of the Church, named and unknown, had to undergo, as do the Christians today who live in constant threat of persecution, if not actual persecution?
And that if the Pope suffers from the attacks against him, as he might to some degree at a purely human and personal level, it is an offering he must surely welcome as his participation in the Passion of Christ, the way John Paul II experienced his long physical agony? It was always evident from Day One that a major Cross this Pope would have to bear was the inherent malice and unfairness of today's generally unprincipled media, but that is surely preferable - considering how wrong and deceitful they are - to the grinding agony of irreversible physical affliction. And that surely, the greater Cross he has to bear is the failure of many bishops and priests to live up to their vows as consecrated men of God.
We must be able to distinguish our personal concern over Benedict XVI and our empathy with him as a human being, from the Christian awareness not just of what suffering means, but also of the resources and graces that the Holy Spirit gives to the Vicar of Christ that are not given to ordinary mortals.
Ultimately, it is our continuing prayers for his spiritual and physical wellbeing at all times, offered by all those who love, admire and venerate the Pope, that mean more to him and that truly matter - more than just the token, much less automatic, public expressions of support from those who are supposed to be on his side anyway (but do not always speak up spontaneously.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/04/2012 17:35]