BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

It was hard to decide how to get back in the groove after having been away from the Forum for a week, but the decision was made easy for me, because in looking back to research Benedict XVI's first Divine Mercy Sunday as Pope, I came across all of the 'first year of Benedict XVI' articles written in those days - when Easter Sunday fell on April 16, Benedict XVI's 79th birthday, and the first anniversary of his Pontificate followed three days later. I thought I would start out with John Allen since he used the Pope's Holy Week homilies as a peg for his commentary, and one can relate his observations to the recent reporting on Pope Francis's first Holy Week. (Even just a quick scan of all the B16 Year-1 articles is so heady I kept reading on and on instead of getting to what I had to do...)



THE 'BACK TO BASICS' POPE
From the PAPA RATZINGER FORUM
Posted April 22, 2006

John Allen's Word from Rome for 4/21/06 begins with a wrap-up and evaluation of Benedict's first Holy Week as Pope. He is one of the few journalists today who actually listens to the Pope's words and studies the text of his homilies and messages.

If only the other journalists who report by rote, and those partisan observers who are none too Benedict-friendly ,would only take the time to do that, they would not be asking stupid questions like "What is this Pope really like?" and "Where is he taking the Church?"]

BENEDICT'S HOLY WEEK
by John Allen Jr.

April 21, 2006

Benedict XVI was elected in mid-April, which this year meant his first anniversary coincided with Easter. Last week, he had seven high-profile occasions to present himself: the Chrism Mass and the Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday, the service of the Passion of the Lord and the Via Crucis on Good Friday, the Easter vigil on Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday itself, and his Angelus address on what the Italians call Pasquetta, or the "little Easter," on Monday.

Asked endlessly during the same arc of time to comment for the global press on who the pope is and what he's doing, I was sometimes tempted to respond, "This isn't Kim Jong-Il … just listen!"

In summary form, Holy Week underscored at least four points about Benedict XVI: 1) His emphasis on the basics; 2) The centrality of love to his thought; 3) The distinction he draws between service and power; and 4) His "preferential option for Africa" with respect to the developing world.

Ticking off the topics Benedict covered during Holy Week, at first blush they seem entirely predictable -- the need for priests to be men of prayer, Jesus' washing the feet of the disciples as an act of love, the reality of evil, the link between Easter and Baptism, and so on. It's the nature of the liturgical season.

The striking thing, however, is that Benedict did not treat these subjects as a point of departure for other reflections, but rather as the very core of his concern. There was never a sense that he wanted to use the platform afforded by Holy Week to launch a message; Holy Week was the message.

In that sense, Benedict is a "back to basics" pope.

The church doesn't need new paradigms or initiatives, he believes, so much as the capacity to explain its core teachings well, and to inspire a desire to live them. Benedict's theology is never speculative, but pastoral and "kneeling."

This focus on the fundamentals is reflected in how he has approached the papacy. Statistics help tell the story: At the end of his first year, John Paul II had given 569 talks, and held 68 major public events. Benedict over his first twelve months gave 291 talks, and held 31 events. (One might profitably ask if the Church has really missed those other 278 papal speeches!)

Benedict has pared the papacy back to what he considers its core functions, and when he does take the stage, he is determined to get to the heart of the matter.

None of this, however, means Benedict is incapable of surprise.

In his homily during the Easter vigil, for example, he described the resurrection as a kind of evolutionary "leap," awakening echoes of the late French Jesuit theologian and scientist Teilhard de Chardin, whose thought indirectly influenced the document Gaudium et Spes at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and who saw physical evolution as part of a broader cosmic and spiritual process. At the time, then-Fr. Joseph Ratzinger was critical of what he saw as an overly optimistic thrust in Teilhard, and in French theology generally, but he never dismissed the core insight.

"If we may borrow the language of the theory of evolution," Benedict said, "it [the Resurrection] is the greatest 'mutation,' absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its development. … It is a qualitative leap … towards a new future life, towards a new world which, starting from Christ, already continuously permeates this world of ours, transforms it and draws it to itself."

One well-known theologian in Rome told me this week that he always holds his breath when Benedict XVI speaks, because he may hear something that will take him off guard -- generally in the sense of opening up a new perspective on a topic he thought he already understood.

This will not be a papacy of great innovation, but neither will it be about stagnation or "glorious repetition." Instead, it is shaping up as a case study in the "return to the sources," or ressourcement, which has always been Benedict XVI's theological and pastoral style.

In the aftermath of Benedict's election, many commentators, myself included, expected that "truth" would be the watchword of the new pope's struggle against the "Dictatorship of Relativism."

The surprise is that, if one were to select a single word to summarize Benedict's magisterium so far, it would have to be "love." Joseph Ratzinger, the erstwhile enforcer of the faith, has metamorphosed into the world's most ardent Apostle of Love.

In his six homilies and messages during Holy Week, totaling (in Italian) 6,958 words, Benedict managed to use the noun "love" 29 times, plus some form of the verb "to love" 10 times. That's one reference to love for every 178 words, meaning that it was rare for a paragraph to go by in which the pope didn't return to the theme. The word for "sin," by way of comparison, appeared only three times, the word "evil" only four times.

Pressing such numbers too far can turn into a kind of Kabbalah, but as a rough indicator of the pope's interests, they are indicative.

At the Lord's Supper on Thursday, for example, Benedict defined sin as "the refusal of love, not wanting to be loved, and not loving."

"The holiness of God is not just an incandescent power, before which we must draw back in terror," he said. "It's the power of love, and therefore a purifying and healing power."

At the Vigil Mass on Holy Saturday, Benedict described the resurrection as "an explosion of love, which broke the formerly indissoluble bond between 'dying and becoming.'"

Perhaps most tellingly, Benedict closed his message for the "Urbi et Orbi" blessing on Easter Sunday with the Latin formula Christus resurrexit, quia Deus caritas est (Christ is risen, because God is love!) Among other things, the line is an echo of Benedict's first encyclical, also on the theme of love.

Benedict returned during Holy Week to another favorite theme, which is a sharp disjunction between service and power. Priesthood, indeed any ministry in the name of Christ, must be about service, the pope insisted. Moreover, the Christian message, particularly its emphasis on the sovereignty and supremacy of God's law, sets limits to all forms of secular power.

Speaking to priests in the Chrism Mass, Benedict pressed the theme.

"Christ wants us to be instruments of service," the pope said. "If human hands represent human faculties, and, generally, the technical capacity to dispose of the world, then anointed hands must be a sign of the human person's capacity to give, of the creativity to shape the world with love."

In his Easter vigil homily, Benedict said the new life offered by Christ is "a formula of contradiction to all the ideologies of violence, and a program for opposition to corruption and to aspirations to power and possession."

As one implication, Benedict stressed that Christians cannot remain indifferent regarding injustice.

"On the Via Crucis, there is no possibility of being neutral," Benedict said. "Pilate, the skeptical intellectual, wanted to be neutral, to stay out of it; but in so doing he took a position against justice, for the sake of conformism and his career."

Typically, the pope offers a quick survey of current events in his "Urbi et Orbi" blessing on Easter, and Benedict XVI followed suit, ticking off a host of global hotspots: Darfur, the Great Lakes region in Africa, and Africa generally; Iraq; the Holy Land; Latin America; and the current nuclear crisis with Iran, though without mentioning that nation by name.

It's revealing that Benedict started with Africa, and that he mentioned more specific concerns in Africa than in any other part of the world. Over Holy Week, in fact, Benedict mentioned Africa as often as he did sin.

That builds on a track record.

Last June, Benedict announced plans for second Synod of Bishops for Africa. In a message to the clergy in Rome on May 13, he urged the priests and deacons from African not to allow their continent to be overcome by the vices exported from Europe. On May 25, at his regular weekly audience, he urged international leaders to be mindful of the material difficulties faced by the peoples of Africa, a message he's repeated on other occasions.

During the daily General Congregation meetings leading up to the conclave, several African cardinals delivered eloquent pleas for the next pope, whoever he might be, to put the suffering of their continent at the top of his pastoral agenda.

"The Pope sat through all of that," one African cardinal told me immediately after Benedict's election. "He has to know our concerns."

And how about this one from TIME's Jeff Israely, who early in Benedict XVI's Papp]acy wrote the test for a wonderful picture book entitled 'DAWN OF A NEW ERA' with photographs by the late Gianni Giansanti. But like Allen, after 2 or 3 years of being positive about Benedict, Israely soon reverted back to vicious type. The following was Israely's assessment of Year-1 of the Beendict XVI Pontificate:


The Pope's first year:
How he simplified his role
While Benedict XVI has drawn the line on doctrine,
he has streamlined his job to create a gentler, humbler papacy
By JEFF ISRAELY/ ROME

Apr. 18, 2006

Marking one year since the April 19 election of Pope Benedict XVI can make the two dominant figures from last spring — John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — already seem like ancient history. But it is a testament to both the Catholic church’s durability and continuity and the speed of the modern news cycle that the only man in white on our minds now is Pope Benedict, while images of the same Ratzinger in cardinal red appear almost odd and outdated.

For Catholicism, this is a necessary thing. The Church counts on the very earthly process of an election — aided by the grandeur of church rituals and the weight of its history — to pass on its highest powers from one man to the next with just a puff of white smoke.

The elevation of Ratzinger, who was probably the best-known cardinal ever to become Pope, has offered a particularly dramatic transformation. Our era of 24-hour information and instant analysis has no doubt helped.

Stepping into the papacy, Benedict quickly erased the stereotypes surrounding him from the quarter-century he spent overseeing orthodoxy for John Paul. Even in the first weeks, it was clear that he was not a chilly and unbending bureaucrat, but a basically gentle man with excellent listening skills and a gift with words.

He has welcomed his longtime theological nemesis Hans Küng for a long chat at the Pope's Castel Gandolfo. Benedict's first encyclical was not a finger-wagging treatise on doctrine, but a paean to Christian love.

The sometimes shy pontiff has even begun to enjoy all the adoration heaped upon him by the piazzas full of faithful. Still, Benedict has drawn the line on doctrine, pushing through a previously languishing document that bars homosexuals from entering the seminary, while encouraging Catholic politicians to condemn abortion-rights laws and gay marriage.

One could say that the substance is the same, just the style is different. Those who know him best say the man hasn’t changed; he has only changed jobs.

In fact, the papacy has allowed the once aspiring university star [????He was a 'star professor' in the German university system, even if he never sought to be! - attracting all sorts of laymen to come to his lectures because of what he said and the way he said it] to transmit his ideas with an assured public presence matured over his years in the upper ranks of the Vatican hierarchy.

And more than ever the piercing intellect of Professor Ratzinger will hold sway over the entire spectrum of Catholic Church life — its customs, policies, institutions and, naturally, the papacy itself.

The changes now on the way were being worked out well before a Benedict papacy was in the cards. In the throes of John Paul’s greatest popularity, Cardinal Ratzinger was looking for ways to rein in the papacy and its Curia, or papal court.

In his 2000 book God and the World, Ratzinger declares that the Vatican’s essential purpose is "to ensure that the Pope has sufficient freedom to carry out his ministry. Whether this could be simplified further is a question we may ask."

With the confluence of Catholic institutions in Rome and the quantity of papal writings and discourses and other responsibilities, he wonders "whether it is not all far too much." Meditating on the contemporary Pope, Ratzinger concludes: "The sheer quantity of personal contacts imposed on him by his relationship with the universal Church; the decisions that have to be made; and the necessity, amidst all this, of not losing his own contemplative footing, being rooted in prayer — all this poses an enormous dilemma."

These very practical (and spiritual) concerns of Cardinal Ratzinger are already being addressed by Pope Benedict. He halted John Paul’s practice of holding morning mass with visitors; there are fewer meetings with Church officials (apostolic nuncios visiting from around the world get a brief chat — on their feet — at the end of Wednesday general audiences); speeches are shorter; lunches tend to be restricted to his personal secretary and perhaps one or two visitors.

How far he extends this management policy into the heart of the entire Vatican bureaucracy remains to be seen, though already two Curia offices have been downsized away. It is nonetheless clear that the Pope himself — who already plans fewer encyclicals and fewer trips than his predecessor — is doing things differently, on a smaller scale.

Yet for all the apparent downsizing, we should remember that this master thinker is too smart not to appreciate the singular power of his new office or the importance of John Paul’s legacy. Benedict does not want to toss away the hard-won leap in relevance for the papacy achieved by his predecessor: for unifying and purifying the Church, for preaching to the world, and for inspiring the masses.

In this day and age, a strictly cerebral Pope, or administrator Pope, would waste much of what can be accomplished from this unique public perch. At the same time, a merely made-for-media papacy would empty the office of its sacredness.

It is a challenge that the 20th-century philosopher of modern communication theory Marshall McLuhan would comprehend. The Canadian-born writer, who coined the phrase "the medium is the message," was also a devout Catholic. In one conversation recorded by his wife, McLuhan said: "Christ came to demonstrate God's love for man and to call all men to Him through himself as Mediator, as Medium. And in so doing he became the proclamation of his Church, the message of God to man. God's medium became God's message."

A subtle clue of Benedict's approach was written last week into the Good Friday script for the Way of the Cross ceremony, an evening event at the Coliseum reintroduced by John Paul and an annual source of powerful television images and photography.


The new Pope would certainly not do away with the live coverage of the "Via Crucis," but would make one change: the actors who read the meditations along the stations would not be stars, and would not even have their faces shown on television. Benedict wanted nothing distracting the faithful from the story and meaning of the Passion.

One Vatican official who knows Benedict well, and admired John Paul, said soon after his election that Benedict "wants to simplify the papacy. Too many acts have become a simple devotion of the person of the Pope."

The new Pope’s challenge is to cut through the static interference of the modern world to connect the faithful directly to the very gospel he is preaching: to be, in other words, both messenger and message.



Of course, much of the above has been forgotten by the media, both Catholic and secular, even by Allen himself, in a mass affliction of opportunistic amnesia as they report now on Pope Francis as if he has re-invented Christianity no less by his personal style of being Pope (excuse me, Bishop of Rome)...And excuse the bitterness that I have never felt so strongly against the media than at this time....