On his blog, Luigi Accattoli reprints a center-spread article published in LIBERAL on April 17, which is among other things, an eloquent retort to those like his erstwhile fellow Vaticanista Marco Politi who obstinately and preposterously portray Benedict XVI as a self-absorbed man who has isolated himself by preference, abdicating his duties, as it were, by preferring to read and write.... And you can tell Accattoli worked on this article - he did not just toss it off...
Let me tell you about Benedict XVI:
He is not solitary, but
the soloist in an ensemble
by Luigi Accattoli
Translated from
April 17, 2012
Benedict XVI is not a Pope as many think who is surrounded by a hostile Curia. Nor is he a solitary Pope by temperament: But he is a soloist by choice and in his way of governing.
[Soloist in the musical sense, where one plays a distinct solo role in relation to but part of an ensemble performance.]
This soloist Pope turned 85 yesterday, years which he carries very well. We saw him move agilely, with slight assistance from his acolytes, during the long telecasts of the Holy Week and Easter liturgies - his eyes thoughtful and concerned, his steps light as usual but more careful now, and his words vivid as ever.
He suffers from a weakness in the right hip, and last October, started using the moving platform that had been used by Papa Wojtyla. And he is no longer able to perform the prostration before the Cross on Good Fridays [as he did in his earlier years as Pope].
But all this merely speaks of his age: He was elected Pope at 76, and on Thursday, he enters the eighth year of his Pontificate. No other Pope in the past 100 years has lived be 85. Pius X lived to 79, Benedict XV t0 67, Pius XI to 81, Pius XII to 82, John XXIII to 81, Paul VI to 80, Papa Luciani to 65, and Papa Wojtyla to 84.
Benedict XVI's overall physical shape is demonstrated by his travels and by his many public commitments. He withstood the recent trip to Mexico and Cuba very well. On Easter, we saw him celebrate Mass at night and then again in the morning, for a total of six hours within a 14-hour period.
He will be going to Milan for the World Encounter of Families the first three days of June, and on September 14-16, he will be in Lebanon. (Where he will deliver to the bishops of the Middle East his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation* that synthesizes the conclusions of the Synodal Assembly on the Middle East in October 2010).
The visit to Mexico, a country caught up in the tsunami of drug trafficking, and to Cuba in the twilight years of the Castro brothers, and to the Middle East next September, in the aftermath of what was supposed to be an 'Arab spring', are extraordinary undertakings, but the following months will see the maturation of other signal commitments on the Pope's agenda: from the Synodal Assembly on the new evangelization in October, to the opening of the Year of Faith to mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vatican-II.
This year may also see the publication of his encyclical on faith to complete a trilogy on the cardinal virtues, after
Deus caritas est on love in 2006, and
Spe salvi on hope in 2007.
Also in 2012, we should be seeing the publication of the third and last volume of JESUS OF NAZARETH, signed Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, after the first two volumes published in 2007 and 2011. This will be dedicated to the birth and early years of the Nazarene, where the first two dealt with the public ministry of Jesus and then his passion, death and Resurrection.
This trilogy on Jesus is a work of major importance on which, first as cardinal and then as Pope, he has dedicated at least ten years of work. In his Preface to Volume 1, the Pope says he began writing the first volume during his summer vacation in 2004, and completed it after he became Pope, 'by using all his free time'. And so, we have the unprecedented fact, in the modern era, of a Pope who has published a theological work aftr becoming Pope.
It is relevant to how he has returned the figure of the Pope to its apostolic dimension and to preaching, with less emphasis on governing the Curia and the bishops - a displacement from governance to mission which has concerned all the Popes of our time, from Pius IX, and which made great progress with the Popes of the Council and after the Council.
His focus on Jesus is equally relevant to the degree of approval for the Pope within the Catholic world, where the appreciation of his teaching is great, whereas there persists a prejudice about his work of governance, despite the points he has gained in recent years with his excellent decisions regarding the pedophile-priest scandal and with the financial reforms in the Holy See.
Whoever still finds it difficult to like Benedict XVI - because of the image that the media had built of Cardinal Ratzinger as a 'fierce watchdog of the faith' for at least two decades before he became Pope - ought to read his books on Jesus. What greater thing can we expect of a Pope than to speak to us of the Nazarene?
Many point out that the Pope must 'nonetheless' govern, and that a Pope who publishes books and writes his homilies by hand ends up delegating governance to the Curia. It's a schematic idea that comes from the past.
It was said of Papa Wojtyla that he was busy being missionary to the world, leaving the routine governance of the Church to the Curia. And they say that now of Papa Ratzinger, that he keeps to his writing and relies on the Curia to do the work. But the analogy does not work.
I firmly believe that Benedict XVI must be given credit for having complete awareness at all times of the issues facing the Church - he spends hours at his desk studying files and reports - to take an example, in the naming of bishops.
It now seems clear that the uproar caused by the chattering crows at the Vatican - which seems to have quieted - was due to the Pope's decisions to institute financial reforms. In other words, it happened because the governance was too strong for some, not because there was no governance.
And in the matter of communications, as someone who is in the business, I can only find one difference of this Pontificate compared to the previous one, which however is not necessarily negative.
We have, as I said, a soloist Pope who nonetheless still has a Curia, substantially the same Curia as it has always been
[in terms of function, not in its major players) but it is no longer the sort of court that previous Popes had, who could trip up the Pope and impose their conditions, but rather help foresee, predispose and accompany papal activities.
I would say that the delta-like outflow of communications under Papa Wojtyla helped prepare the terrain for a detailed and relatively flexible reception of papal initiatives by media operators, whereas the estuary-like outflow [i.e., narrower] characteristic of Papa Ratzinger predisposes to media outcomes in which he does not have a safety net - either the reception is successful because of surprise effect and/or by consensus, or it goes very badly because a lack of concerted effort prevents taking negative eventualities into account.
And on the fact that this Pope is a soloist but not solitary, we can cite what he told newsmen in March 2009 on the way to Cameroon: "I don't feel alone in any way. Every time, I receive working visits from mu closest collaborators... I see all the Curial heads regularly, almost every day I meet with bishops visiting ad limina... Recently we had two plenary assemblies if these dicasteries. Then I have my contacts with friends, a network of friendship. Those who were ordained with me recently came to visit... So being alone is not one of my problems. I am surrounded by friends and I have a marvellous working relationship with bishops, my associates, and assorted laymen, and for this I am grateful".
He listens a great deal, to everyone, but he then decides by himself, and in this sense he is a soloist.
There are even those who claim that he does not have an adequate perception of the crisis in the Catholic Church, but this too is false. We have the curious situation of a Pope who says more negative things about the Church in his homilies than even his critics do with their pamphleteering.
[The important difference is that he couches these criticisms of the sins within the Church in gentle pastoral, 'tough love' terms, not as imprecations.]
These critics - let us say Hans Kueng, or the We are Church movement, or the Austrian priests who issued a 'Call for Disobedience' - always say that things wouldn't be going so bad for the Church if only she had the courage to make some reforms - i.e., more democracy in Church affairs, a more active ecclesiastical role for the laity and for women, a more positive tone in preaching
[Surely no one can fault Benedict XVI for his preaching, which is always positive even when he criticizes! It's the dissident priests who are relentlessly negative - if not against the Church, then in pursuing their liberal political causes], and less preoccupation with the prevailing sexual culture and with bioethics.
On the contrary, Pope Benedict maintains that the crisis in the Church is even more profound and that no organizational updating or preaching will remedy anything unless first there is a recovery of faith.
He spoke about this strongly in his address last December 22 to the Roman Curia, which was already feverish over internal issues which would then come to the light with the seeming gusher of confidential documents that would be leaked from the Vatican.
[It only seemed 'massive' at the time, because of the undue feeding frenzy in the media, but in fact, there were at most eight such documents that have come out so far, none of which were really major, but by their nature 'scandalous' enough for the media to exploit them as such! The most headlines were generated by the three documents which are for the most part made up of wild partisan charges, gossip and absurd speculation - the Vigano letters and the anonymous memorandum alleging, among other things, a plot to kill the pope.]
He spoke of 'the crisis of the Church in Europe' which arises from 'a crisis of faith', which he described as a 'fatigue' and 'the tedium of being Christian - strong terms, and hardly 'inadequate perception' by the Pope.
[Who, among other things, had already written quite a few books and many essays about the crisis of Europe, before he became Pope, in piercing analyses that leading intellectual figures in the secular world found perceptive - precisely - and challenging.]
Last Maundy Thursday, with the same dramatic effect, he addressed the call to disobedience by some Austrian parish priests as 'a desperate urge to do something'.
So the poor Pope has, on the one hand, these 'disobedients', and on the other, the Lefebvrians who, up to this point at least, have appeared to reject the hand he has held out to them.
But the tragedy is not in such tensions and ruptures. Rather it lies in the abandonment of the faith by so many. and by the filth committed by those who have distorted the face of the Church.
It is the Pope's call to penitence and for reform to start with individual purification. From this critical overview of the state of the faith, he has taken the attitude of radical trust in God, which he expressed in a most explicit way in the invocation that he pronounced at this last Christmas Eve Mass, perhaps the most beautiful of the prayers he has proposed since he became Pope.
He developed it from a verse by the prophet Isaiah who announced the birth of a 'son' who would liberate the People from the oppressors' boots, cloaks and rods:
At this hour, when the world is continually threatened by violence in so many places and in so many different ways, when over and over again there are oppressors’ rods and bloodstained cloaks, we cry out to the Lord:
O mighty God, you have appeared as a child and you have revealed yourself to us as the One who loves us, the One through whom love will triumph. And you have shown us that we must be peacemakers with you.
We love your childish state, your powerlessness, but we suffer from the continuing presence of violence in the world, and so we also ask you: Manifest your power, O God.
In this time of ours, in this world of ours, cause the oppressors’ rods, the cloaks rolled in blood and the footgear of battle to be burned, so that your peace may triumph in this world of ours.
*[It's a bit off-topic, but this is an occasion to say something about the post-synodal exhortations which are typically published two years after the event. I think we all fail to appreciate the effort that the Pope must put into these exhortations. Moreover, Sacramentum caritatis, on the Eucharist, Verbum Domini, on the Word of God, and Africae munus, on the special assembly on Africa, are all major and powerful documents of the Papal Magisterium that have simply been overshadowed in attention by the encyclicals. But they are no less significant (and beautifully written)as Magisterium - and a truly collegial act, rather than just a personal one - since they incorporate what the bishops of the world have concluded and recommended.
Each document must require a great deal of work - hence the two years gestation - since the Pope has to explain each of the dozens of recommendations made by the Synod, tie them together theologically and doctrinally, and then make concrete pastoral directives to carry out the recommendations. It's daunting!
Sometimes I think that even the bishops and priests, to whom these exhortations are primarily addressed, forget to refer to them constantly as they should. Or may never have read them, just as the vast majority, I suspect, of all those who profess to be 'the spirit of Vatican II' have never bothered to read the Vaticna II texts and have simply been attributing - wildly and without foundation - their own personal and ideological ideas about the Church to Vatican II.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/04/2012 08:29]