A birthday book for Benedict XVI on his 86th from the Vatican publishing house LEV and Vatican correspondent Angela Ambrogetti, editor of the online Catholic magazine korazym...I do have a few comments on some of her observations which I consider inexact based on my having followed all of these inflight interviews, from the initial reports filed by about them to translating them into English immediately from the first transcripts posted by the newsmen travelling with the Pope (mostly Andrea Tornielli and John Allen).
Benedict's inflight interviews:
Introduction to the book
by Angela Ambrogetti, ed.
Translated from
April 16, 2013
Today, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI turns 86. Beyond our greetings for his birthday, we wish to pay him homage by publishing excerpts from the Introduction to the book
Sull'aereo di Papa Benedetto edited by Angela Ambrogettti and published by Libreria Editrice Vaticana, the Vatican publishing house.
The book contains the texts of the news conferences that Benedict XVI has had with newsmen travelling with him on the way to his 24 apostolic visits outside Italy. The Preface of the book is by Mons, Georg Gaenswein, private secretary of the emeritus Pope and Prefect of the Pontifical Household, with an introduction from Fr. Federico Lombardi, Vatican news director.
When Benedict XVI went to Mexico and Cuba, he registered a first in the Papacy - he became the oldest Pope ever to travel outside Italy. This explains much of the significance of the foreign travels of the theologian Pope who inherited the Papacy from the traveler Pope John Paul II.
When, on April 19,2005, the cardinal electors chose Joseph Ratzinger as the 264th Successor of Peter, no one had imagined that Benedict XVI would travel as much as his immediate predecessor. He had just turned 78, and as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for almost a quarter century, he had dedicated his time primarily to examining texts [though surely that was not the main task of the CDF Prefect!] - he was the theological soul of John Paul II's Pontificate, and he was certainly no traveler.
But the world knew him well. Around the world, the faithful met him every day through the stories of the bishops who came to see him in Rome during their ad-limina visits to confide their problems and to seek his advice. That is how the Bavarian cardinal kept in touch with all the churches around the world during his almost 25 years as CDF Prefect.
As Pope, Benedict XVI wished to respond to all the invitations sent to him from abroad by sending his Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone, instead. Outside of those for which he had to be present in person.
As in Cologne, for World Youth Day in August 2005, the first such assembly since the death of the father of WYD, John Paul II. Benedict XVI took on the assignment and introduced a 'novelty' to WYD - Eucharistic Adoration.
It marked the start of a new history for WYD and for the style of papal trips. Slowly, the organizational mechanism at the Vatican adapted to the new style. There were those who feared that Benedict XVI's characteristically minimal style would result in empty squares and streets.
Instead, in one trip after another, the modest and reserved Benedict XVI amazed everyone as each of his trips became a huge success. One could almost say that Benedict XVI gave the best of himself on the great stage of the world, far from a certain atmosphere that was Italian, Roman and curial.
[I would disagree that Benedict XVI's public appearances - or those of any Pope, for that matter - are particularly associated with the Curia in the minds of the faithful. The Pope is so distinct and far above and beyond any other figure in the Church that it is unlikely the faithful would even think of any other Church figure in his presence! Besides, his reception in all the Italian dioceses he visited was just as successful as his foreign trips.]]
Among the 'legacies' that Benedict XVI carried on from John Paul II and transformed was his relationship with the newsmen who travelled with him on the trips abroad.
John Paul II had 'created' a new way of dialog with the media in utilizing the in-flight hours on the way to a travel destination. It was a very direct way, initially somewhat chaotic even - questions and answers on every topic, eventually becoming true and proper news conferences.
Benedict XVI, who as cardinal, had freely given interviews to newsmen in an organized way, made himself available to the media for these in-flight interviews.
His answers soon became small lessons offered by Professor Ratzinger to the media. But these were not arid or academic words, but words full of emotion, of recollections and of personal comments. He wove together history, theology and ecclesiology to offer the media a key to reading the trip he was undertaking, but he also faced 'thorny' issues that are daily raised in the media.
This way, he established a relationship that was calm and at times, distant. He knows that communications is important, but did not wish to be drawn into specious controversies over Church issues.
Nonetheless, each inflight news conference became a media event. The newsmen on the flight hastened to report the highlights, and some even sought to transcribe the half-hour event for immediate posting on the Internet, with the result that often, this story tended to overshadow the Pope's arrival statement at his destination. A media dynamic that Benedict XVI apparently did not mind.
As a cardinal, he was always open to any question asked of him during a news conference. But if he was asked for an individual interview, he requested to be sent the questions beforehand. As Pope, Benedict XVI was interviewed by Peter Seewald for the book-length
Light of the World, in which one notes that he continued to pay extreme attention and care to prepare for the interview.
Besides, Benedict XVI also allowed himself to be questioned by regular folk in the Good Friday 2011 broadcast of RAI Italian state TV's program 'A Suo Immagine'. He answered three questions on the courage of faith in the face of great sorrow and persecution, and four questions on the truth of the faith.
To a seven-year-old Japanese girl, who had been among those displaced by the Fukushima earthquake and nuclear crisis, he said, "At this moment, it is important that you remember this - God loves me, even if he seems not to know me". To the mother of a boy in coma, he said: "I an certain that his hidden soul feels your love profoundly, even if he does not understand details or words - the presence of love is felt". To the Christians of Baghdad, he said, "We wish to work for reconciliation, for understanding, even with the government, to help it in the difficult job of repairing a lacerated society".
He spoke of dialog with Islam, of peace, of life after death, what the Resurrection is: "Jesus will not die again - he is above the laws of biology and physics, because under such laws, a person dies. So there is a new and different condition that we do not know but which is actually demonstrated by Jesus - it is thereat promise for us all that there is a new world, a new life, towards which we are journeying".
Difficult topics that Benedict XVI faced with clarity and simplicity. Words which reach the mind and the heart.
And yet, Joseph Ratzinger seems to have been little understood by the media. Despite his directness and h is availability to the media, many among them nonetheless wrote about his 'communicative inability'. The truth is that Prof. Ratzinger wants to be listened to in calm.
He has confronted difficult topics with clarity and simplicity. Words which reach the mind and the heart.
The discourses of Benedict XVI require attention and preparation. As a professor who was used to address students as well as to interact with other professors, he developed an ample and complete discourse which requires to be followed in its entirety. Whereas the media has mostly sought only to catch an easy soundbite, a sort of slogan, in 140 characters since Twitter began, that can be launched quickly on the social networks.
Here is were the mistakes arise. Just as it was in Regensburg with his historic lecture at the University. Superficiality and haste threatened to destroy one of the most important steps forward made for the dialog between Christians and Muslims.
The media chaos caused real chaos which placed human lives in danger
[and did cost the life of an Italian nun working in Somalia] All of this obviously farthest from what Benedict XVI had intended.
After this 'incident', the Pope had to face other similar episodes. In part, the Pope himself acknowledged, the responsibility lay with him and the Curia. As in the announcement that he had lifted the excommunication of the four FSSPX bishops, one of whom was a Holocaust denier.
[In fact, the 'acknowledgment of responsibility' was only made for this particular case, not for any of the other misreporting 'episodes'.]
But even the Williamson episode was an obvious case of media manipulation of facts which, if they had been explained in their entirety, would not have had the same consequences.
Moreover these media episodes were highlighted much more than in previous Pontificates when Benedict XVI's predecessors had their own problems with the media.
Even John Paul II, who was considered the media Pope par excellence, was for many years referred to as 'a Polish bigot' by some media circles, and many of his gestures were misinterpreted.
[One would have welcomed it if Ambrogetti had cited a couple of examples]
But for the media, the years of his illness transformed him into a silent icon of suffering and the fiery words directed against him in the 1980s were forgotten.
Benedict XVI liked his intimate and direct relationship with the faithful. In the parishes of Rome that he visited, he often did not simply read his homilies but spoke extemporaneously to express his reflections on the readings for the day.
Before large crowds, he read his texts
which were distributed to everyone so they could follow him. [Is this a fact? I have never come across it before! I know Peter Seewald reports in his 2005 biography of Joseph Ratzinger that when he was Archbishop of Munich, the diocese had to print as many as 50,000 copies of each of his very popular homilies in response to public requests. Journalists had the duty to read these texts at leisure, but they apparently did not do so, because they were only looking for whatever was 'newsy', forgetting that for a Pope, the only news is the Gospel.
[The Pope's regular texts, but not the inflight interviews, were usually available promptly in their original version on the Vatican site, and in English translation in the English service of Vatican Radio.]
John Paul II's Pontificate in its later years had accustomed the media to gleaning 'political slogans' from his discourses which spoke of human rights, social justice, and the presence of the Church in the world. All this as a natural consequence of announcing the Gospel. But the consequence received far more attention than what motivated it.
In the new historical era we are living
[post John Paul II and at the dawn of the new millennium], Benedict XVI explained to the world why the Church speaks of human rights, peace and social justice. But the media world seemed even less prepared to convey these explanations. And so news became newsbites, which led in the long run to losing the more ample meaning of his Pontificate.
The year 2012, 60th anniversary of the opening of the second Vatican Council, also marked the moment when
the media started once more to speak about ideas and facts rather than indiscretions and gossip. [How can anyone say this about the year of Vatileaks???? And what ideas and facts about the Pontificate and the Church did the media discuss in 2012?]
Let us try to reread the words that Benedict XVI said directly to the international media in his inflight interviews, following the example of John Paul II but in a way appropriate to his own personal traits.
It was a personal communication, man to man, a dialog that involved reason and intelligence despite the simplicity of his expositions. The texts of Benedict XVI's inflight encounters with the media were immediately made public on the Vatican website.
[Not until the last few trips! Before then, one had to rely on the tape transcriptions by some of the newsmen travelling with the Pope.]
In his first few trips, these consisted of brief greetings when spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls
[who continued for 15 months as Vatican news director under Benedict XVI] reprised the practice that had been discontinued since 2000 with the worsening of John Paul II's ailment.
In fact, Benedict XVI's first foreign trips were preceded by televised interviews with selected journalists from the countries he was visiting - before WYD in Cologne in 2005, and before his visits to Poland and Bavaria in 2006.
This book was born precisely in order to set forth the ideas and reflections that Benedict XVI offered to the world media as he set off on his apostolic trips abroad.
These are integral texts which allow the reader to understand more fully the thinking of the theologian Joseph Ratzinger who was also Pope Benedict XVI, but also to recognize his profound humanity and his desire to communicate to the world the only true news which changed history.
In some cases, the newsmen themselves asked the questions, but eventually, Fr. Federico Lombardi chose to pool the various questions submitted by the journalists and summarize the essential questions to the Pope in various languages.
The Pope replied most often in Italian, the working language of Vaticanistas, but also used French, Spanish, English or German as needed.
But the Pope is a perfectionist, and the transcripts were generally reviewed by the Secretariat of State before being published by the Vatican, but without modifying the freshness of the style.
[In fact, the Vatican transcripts were generally faithful to those published earlier by the journalists who taped the sessions, except for the misbegotten attempt to 'soften' what he said about condoms on the way to Cameroon in March 2009.]
Obviously, these conversations do not begin to cover the richness of themes that the Pope would address in the discourses made during the actual visit, but they do provide an easier orientation to his Magisterium.
They are also a journey into the heard of the 'great lover' who made love and joy the key words of his entire Pontificate.