A problem with this story is that, in a forced analogy with the US Supreme Court's work calendar, it makes it appear that the Pope - and the Vatican with him - only function from October to June, which is an obvious fallacy. The justices of the Supreme Court actually do take off in July for the entire summer to reconvene and carry out their annual work calendar in October. On the other hand, the Holy Father takes his annual vacation in the month of July, which means he has no official or public events other than leading the Sunday Angelus. But like the President of the United States, he is never really off duty. Nothing significant can happen anywhere, including the Vatican, without the Pope expressing himself to the world about it. And, of course, although most of the Vatican staff, like most Italians, usually take off in the month of August, the Vatican offices are never without a key skeleton staff. In August, the Pope resumes his weekly general audiences, so with the Sunday Angelus, the world gets to see and hear him at least twice a week as they do for 11 months of the year. Also, important foreign visits usually are scheduled in September - Lebanon this, year, Germany last year, the United Kingdom year before last, etc.
As Pope's vacation begins,
taking stock of his work year
By Francis X. Rocca
VATICAN CITY, July 13 (CNS) -- Every year about this time, American legal journalists review the recently ended Supreme Court term, trying to identify trends and themes that cut across the court's most important rulings.
As it happens, the court's October-through-June term coincides almost exactly with what we might call the papal year, which starts when the Pope returns to the Vatican each fall and ends when he leaves for the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo (where he relocated this year July 3).
Almost all of the Vatican's important business gets done in this span, making it the most relevant unit of time to use when analyzing the papacy's activity and its implications for the church as a whole.
So what can the 2011-12 papal "term" tell us about where Pope Benedict XVI is leading the Church?
If there was one message that the Vatican's agenda and statements this year seemed designed to convey, it was that the world needs the Catholic Church's help to solve its most urgent social and economic problems.
[Once again, Rocca seems to be forcing a point. I don't think that message was specific to this particular 'year', nor that it is meant in the sense of providing solutions to social and economic problems! It has been part of the perennial Church message about the central function played by the Church instituted by Christ in the affairs of mankind, but in the sense of offering the ethical and moral standards by which mankind should conduct its affairs, because this would lead to justice and equitable use of resources by all, peace instead of conflict and violence, fraternal love in place of homicidal hatred,a sensed of the transcendent (God) to balance off material concerns.]
In five speeches over the course of six months to U.S. bishops on their "ad limina" visits to Rome, Pope Benedict said that the health and prosperity of American society as a whole require the engagement of its Catholic citizens, in fidelity to the Church's teaching on contentious matters, including marriage, abortion, euthanasia, immigration and education.
On a November visit to the West African country of Benin, the Pope said that "a church [correctly with a small-c because the reference is to '
a church' not '
the Church' reconciled within itself can become a prophetic sign of reconciliation in society," on a continent divided by often violent ethnic and religious conflicts.
Conceding no realm of human activity as beyond the Church's scope, the Vatican delved into the highly technical field of international finance with a controversial October document blaming the world's economic crisis on a "liberalism that spurns rules and controls" and proposing global regulation of the financial industry and international money supply.
[This is a very vague, unsatisfactory and ultimately misleading representation of the document published by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, which was not speaking for the Vatican, much less for the Church, but merely presenting the position paper of its leadership. Not to mention that it was a literal interpretation of a passage in the Pope's encyclical Caritas in veritate.]]
Pope Benedict [has] made it clear that the Church's appeals to secular society should be made not in terms of faith but in terms of the "natural moral law" accessible to all through the use of reason. He notably included prominent agnostic "seekers of the truth" alongside religious leaders at an October meeting to promote peace and justice in Assisi, Italy.
Yet the Pope also insisted that the Church's commitment to social justice must never be separated from a faith that transcends this world. During a trip to Mexico and Cuba in March, the Pope said that "the Church is not a political power, it is not a party," and told a crowd of more than 600,000 at an outdoor Mass that "human strategies will not suffice to save us" from war and injustice.
The following month, the Vatican published a "doctrinal assessment" of the U.S. Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The document, which had been expressly approved by Pope Benedict, recognized the LCWR's adherence to Catholic teaching in its promotion of social justice, but concluded that the group's neglect of the Church's doctrine on a number of important moral issues, including abortion and euthanasia, reflected a crisis "characterized by a diminution of the fundamental Christological center and focus of religious consecration."
Pope Benedict also emphasized a link between the Church's contributions to society and its right to freedom of religion, which he championed against varying degrees of restriction in communist Cuba, Mexico with its legacy of anti-clericalism, and the U.S., where the Obama administration seeks to make private Catholic institutions provide insurance covering sterilizations and contraception, in violation of the Church's moral teaching.
As always, of course, the Vatican made some of its biggest news this year in ways that it had not planned at all.
The biggest such story was undoubtedly the so-called "VatiLeaks" affair, the publication of dozens of confidential correspondence and reports, including letters to Pope Benedict himself, and the subsequent arrest of the Pope's butler on charges of "aggravated theft."
While the documents themselves fuel an image of the Vatican as plagued by infighting, Pope Benedict has said that he expects his collaborators to work together as a family.
In October, the Pope removed Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, author of several
[not several - TWO!] leaked letters accusing specific Vatican officials of corruption and incompetence, from his job as secretary-general of the governor's office of Vatican City.
In an apparent sign of esteem for the archbishop's ability and integrity, however, the Pope appointed him to the key post of nuncio to the U.S. [Sorry, Your Holiness, but I continue to think that the 'compromise solution' was a sorry compromise, precisely because it seemed to 'reward' someone whose character, as revealed by those two letters, seems appallingly dubious in a layman, let alone a man of the Church who seemed to believe he was entitled, by virtue of his ambition alone, to be named cardinal.]
After months of furor over the leaks, in July, Pope Benedict defended Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, against "unjust criticism" in the Italian media, thus showing his appreciation for his longtime lieutenant, who had served under the future Pope as secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, when then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the congregation's prefect.
The papal "term" marked another chapter in the ongoing narrative of the Vatican's relationship with the breakaway traditionalists of the Society of St. Pius X, who reject some teachings of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council and subsequent modernizing changes to the church.
In September, the Vatican presented the traditionalists with a "doctrinal preamble" outlining certain teachings, presumably including those of Vatican II, which the breakaway group would have to accept as a condition for reconciliation.
In June, the Vatican presented them with a draft document proposing that a reintegrated society would hold the canonical status of a personal prelature, in effect an international diocese under the direct authority of the Pope.
[The prelature offer is distinct from the preamble and is entirely dependent on whether the preamble would be accepted. It is meaningless without that condition. Besides, general accounts about the preamble in the past year, confirmed by the supposed actual text (leaked by parties on the side of the FSSPX) show that the so-called preamble is a version of the 1968 Profession of Faith drawn up by the CDF for new converts or disciplined heretics or near-heretics to profess upon admission (or re-admission) to the Church.
The difference seems to be that the part about adherence to the Magisterium inexplicably goes out of the way to specify Vatican-II, when there is no specific Magisterium singled out in the simple profession of faith. If this is the case, then it is unfair to demand this of the FSSPX. Other smaller traditionalist groups who came back to full communion with Rome were not asked to swear specifically to uphold Vatican II. Because now we get into the Everglades swamp of all those Catholics supposedly in full communion with Rome who oppose everything that the Church preaches and advocate everything that is anathema to the Church while professing to be represent the spirit of Vatican II! It troubles me greatly that abortion, contraception, euthanasia, all kinds of unnatural marriage, contempt and defiance of the Pope, and similar liberal causes are considered, in effect, far more OK than the FSSPX's reservations about the concepts of religious freedom, ecumenism, inter-religious dialog and collegiality! You don't have to be a theologian to see the abysmally great double standard here.]
As the Vatican awaited the traditionalists' final response to these overtures, in late June, Pope Benedict named U.S. Archbishop Augustine Di Noia to focus personally on the SSPX negotiations. The appointment of Archbishop Di Noia, a distinguished theologian and longtime collaborator of the pope, underscores Pope Benedict's extraordinary determination to bring a group of separated brethren back into the Catholic family.
When will news agencies learn that 'church' spelled with a small 'c' refers to an edifice built as a place of worship, or a generic reference to a community of believers, but that Church when it refers to the Catholic Church (or the Orthodox Church) must always be capitalized because it then becomes a proper noun, not a generic or common noun! The secular agencies might be cut some slack when it comes to this (although it follows from the rules of grammar about proper and common nouns] but for CNS to do it as - it seems - part of their newswriting 'style' [the word used in journalism to describe the conventions of word usage and spelling that each news outlet follows] - is almost unforgivable for a Catholic media outlet.
The same observation follows with the use of 'pope' when referring to the head of the Catholic Church without his name. I hew to the old-fashioned rule I grew up with in which generic titles when applied to a specific person even without mentioning his/her name ought to be capitalized. There is a small-p 'pope' in the English lexicon which refers to minor prelates of the Orthodox Churches, so to write about the Supreme Pontiff and refer to him as a small-p 'pope' is wrong. In the same way that when writing about Queen Elizabeth, for example, one writes 'the Queen' and not 'the queen' as if she were a chessboard piece.
I do have a selfish motive, as well for griping about this - since I have to go in and change every miswritten 'church' and 'pope' in every item that I post on this thread. (I realize quite a few still get past, as I am a very poor proofreader of my own posts, and sometimes I even forget to turn on spell check, and get a really sloppy post.}
