BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Thanks to Lella who on her blog ran a story by AGI's Salvatore Izzo which led me to this article by an Argentine writer and journalist who is apparently a close friend of the Pope who was once his professor. I was wide-eyed with wonder and profound gratitude for the words attributed to Pope Francis here about Benedict XVI, until the writer quotes the Pope on what he finds wrong about his own 'life' at the Vatican, and sends me crashing down with an excruciating thud from that opening high...

'The Pope called me on the phone -
or rather, he called me again'
It may not sound humble to say that
but that's just how it was
by Jorge Milia
Translated from a posting on

an Italian website about Latin America run by Alver Metalli
July 11, 2013

...It is a privilege that fate has allowed me, and perhaps because of this, I must share it with those who can appreciate it, because goodness, when it is shared in common, multiplies.

"Twelve pages - to write me a letter 12 pages long!", he [Pope Francis] began, referring to a letter I had written him.

"But you cannot deny that I made you laugh", I replied. [Milia uses the second person familiar 'you' (tu), not the respectful third-person Usted, or Vos, as the Argentines say, with the Pope. I remember the anecdotes by Cardinal Meisner and Kasper, I belive, about when they first approached Benedict XVI after he was elected Pope, and they asked him how they should address him now. He said, "Just like before" (using the familiar 'Du']]

He laughed. For reasons that no one can explain, least of all me, he still 'tolerates' my prose as he did years and years ago when we were professor and student, respectively.

I told him I had started to read the encyclical Lumen fidei, and he declined any personal merit for it. He said that Benedict XVI had done the major work, that he was a sublime thinker who was not known or understood by many people.

"Today I was with 'el viejo' [the old man]" - so he called him, as we do in Argentina, with an affectionate connotation ew give to words - "and we talked a lot. It is a pleasure for me to exchange ideas with him".

And really, when he speaks of Ratzinger, he does so with acknowledgment and tenderness, It seems to me like the phenomenon is that of someone who has met an old friend, perhaps an old schoolmate, someone he has only seen now and then afterwards, someone who was not in the same class but whom we always admired, with whom one now renews old ties, despite the differences that time has made...

"You cannot imagine the humility and wisdom of this man." he told me.

"Then keep him close to you," I replied.

But he went on, "One cannot even think of doing without the advice of a person like him - it would be foolish of me to do so!"

The story goes abruptly downhill from here. What Francis gives with one hand, he takes away with the other. How can a person he says he admires as wise have been so unwise as to have followed traditional practices in the Papacy that Francis obviously thinks are not just unwise but downright wrong?]

I told him that the difference between them was that the people see him [Francis] as more human, someone they can touch, someone they can speak to. [Milia obviously never watched the TV coverage and videos of Benedict's interactions with people on all sorts of occasion duering his eight years as Pope, or he would not say that! He is simply buying the media line about Francis 'in contrast' to Benedict.]

"And why not? Of course, they must be able to do that. It is my duty to listen to them, to comfort them, to pray with them, to hold their hand so that they will feel alone..." [Here, unfortunately, Pope Francis seems to revert to what I have come to call his 'self referential' mode, to use one of his favorite terms. In this case, he appears to be accepting Livia’s statement on the difference between him and Benedict in the popular perception, but his answer is totally about himself – what he feels to be his duty to the people, as though no other Pope before him had felt dutybound in the same way, even if their way of showing it was not to make a 90-minute Popemobile tour preceding a ten-minute catechesis at the Wednesday general audiences. Even worse, he implies that Benedict and other Popes were perhaps negligent of this aspect of the papal duties. An inference that is reinforced by his next statements.]

But he assured me that it has not been easy to have this accepted by so many of those who are around him. [Who, exactly, and what does it matter what other people tell him he must or must not do? He’s the Pope – no one else calls the tune but him. Security has done all it can to accommodate his ‘people-friendly’ approach. The driver of the Popemobile cannot possibly disobey him when he says, “Stop here, I want to get off”, or “Let me get this child onto the vehicle”. Andrea Tornielli claims that at Casa Santa Marta, Francis prefers to be unattended by his secretaries or his valet as he goes about doing what he wants to do. Who then is there to stop him – the sovereign monarch of the Vatican – from doing as he pleases? For that matter, who was there to stop Benedict XVI or John Paul II or the Popes before them?

What is this myth perpetrated by the media – and now seemingly taken up and reinforced by Pope Francis – that there are ‘people’ who can stop the Pope from doing what he thinks is right! The myth includes the contradictory claims that living in the papal apartment of the Apostolic Palace ‘isolates’ the Pope from the world - there is no such thing as isolation anymore in this age of ubiquitous communication – and that it subjects him to unworthy pressures from ‘them’ – people never specified but occasionally identified as ‘Vatican officials who do not agree with the Pope and want their own way done’. That is all bullshit.

People lobbying for anything will lobby just as well in Casa Santa Marta as they do in the Apostolic Palace. The faulty myth suggests that anyone who cares can just drop in on the Pope in the Apostolic Palace, and yet in Tornielli’s latest Francis encomium two days ago, he said that the biggest complaint by Vatican officials against Benedict XVI was how hard it was to get to see him! And that on the contrary, at Casa Santa Marta, practically anyone is free to walk up to the Pope if he sees him [assuming they have a legitimate reason to be in the hotel] So which is it? Pressure groups somehow have more access to the Pope at the Apostolic Palace just because their offices are in the same building, but they complain because they cannot get to see the Pope? On the other hand, at Santa Marta, anyone in the building can literally walk up to the Pope, so presumably those who have causes to lobby for can do so directly with him? Either way, special interests will always find a way to get through to the Pope, but all he has to do is swat them down!

He started laughing again when I told him that if my grandparents were alive and knew that I was using the familiar ‘tu’ with the Pope, they would stop praying for me and would consider me definiteively ‘lost’. Their idea of a Pope was one who was inaccessible and distant, the same as their parents and grandparents before them had.

[That was before the age of mass media and the global village. Before Leo XIII, Catholics around the world knew of the Popes only what they saw in the rare ‘holy pictures’ disseminated about them, based on portraits not actual photographs. Leo XIII was probably the first Pope who had actual photographs of him more or less widely seen by those who read newspapers.]

But he reiterated to me: “It has not been easy, Jorge – here there are too many ’masters’ of the Pope, people who have served a long time in the Vatican” [molto anzianita di servizio]. [Frankly, I do not understand the sense of this statement, nor who is being referred to. Those who count with long years of service in the Vatican would consist of two categories: the bureaucrats of the Curia who have held on to their middle-level positions through a succession of Popes, or the volunteers who work as ushers for papal visitors or during papal liturgies in jobs often handed down from generation to generation. Other than some bureaucrats snaggling some papal initiative in red tape to slow it down, how could any of the persons in these categories be capable of imposing their will in any way on what the Pope does or does not do? And how can they in any way be considered ‘masters’ of the Pope? Can anyone imagine Benedict XVI, or any of the Popes in our lifetime, deciding for or against something just because a papal usher belonging to one of Rome’s noblest families has a personal preference one way or the other?

I have been disturbed by the Pope’s penchant – as in his homilies - for categorizing people by negative stereotypes, even with the best of intentions. Not that anyone has minded so far what would have been a never-ending source of calumnies against B16 for what they would, in his case, consider ‘over-the-top and habitual moralizing’].

Then he commented that every change he has introduced cost him great efforts (and, I suppose, many enemies…) [Enemies? Of Francis? Mr Milia, you must be hallucinating! Who would dare to declare ‘enmity’ for the most popular Pope ever, easily eclipsing even Papa Wojtyla, a ‘celebrity’ without rival or parallel who makes the Obamamania of five years ago look paltry – even if, in both cases, they have been greeted by their most ardent admirers as the ‘second coming’ of Jesus!]

Among these efforts, the most difficult has been for him not to allow ‘others’ to manage his agenda for him. And that is why he has not wanted to live in the Apostolic Palace because many Popes have become ‘prisoners’ of their secretaries. [OUCH! Does he mean John Paul II and Benedict XVI were ‘prisoners’ of Mons. Dsiwisz and Mons. Gaenswein, respectively? Papal secretaries have the duty and function of filtering requests for access and other favors addressed to their boss, who cannot possibly see everyone who wants to see him nor do everything everyone wants him to do. In the case of the last two papal secretaries, did anyone doubt that they knew their respective bosses well enough – and were reciprocally trusted totally by them – to do what they thought their boss would decide if he had to do the filtering himself? But the secretaries are still just secretaries, and nothing stops – nor would have ever stopped - John Paul II and Benedict XVI from deciding differently if they had to.

These Popes, and those that went before them in the modern era, were hardly cretins or average Joes whom their subordinates could play as they wanted to, or lead where they did not want to go (in the case of JPII, at least not before his illness made him totally dependent on those around him). Imagine, for instance, what John XXIII's secretary, the redoubtable nonagenarian Mons Capovilla, would feel about such a remark from the current Pope, which is not really so much against the secretaries as against the Popes who had secretaries!]

“It is I who decide whom I want to see, not my secretaries… Sometimes I cannot see whom I want to see because I must first find out what someone else wants of me”. [If he were to personally screen every request to see him, he would not have time to do more important things. And why can't he tell whoever makes the schedule - Mons. Gaenswein, in this case, who one must presume, consults the Pope before finalizing any schedule - "I want to see So-and-So, Fit him in somewhere!" As for finding out what someone wants from the Pope, secretaries do that as part of their filtering function - to determine what might be the requesting person’s ulterior motive for meeting the Pope. Can we have some sense of priorities here?]

This statement struck me very much. I, who am not Pope and do not have his power, feel my heart rate speed up when I am awaiting a dear friend and do not know whether to give someone else precedence before him. Whereas he must deprive himself of the meeting he wants to be with someone who has asked for one. [None of this makes sense at all. Pope Francis is supposed to be the 'take charge' guy. Why is he then complaining that he is being imposed on by his subordinates? And yet, he goes on to call his predecessors 'prisoners' of their secretaries!]

He told me that Popes have been isolated for centuries, which is not a good thing at all, because the shepherd must be with his flock…. [But there are countless ways for the shepherd of Rome to be with his flock and they are not necessarily literal, because a literal interpretation would be impossible! The Pope can be with his flock in as many meaningful ways as he wants to, including all the symbolic kissing of babies, and compassionate gestures for the handicapped, the sick and the aged, the poor and the needy, the unwanted and the neglected – previous Popes have done so as well, whenever the occasion -arose, or created occasions to be able to show their pastoral and paternal solicitude - even if the media report on what Francis does as if no one had ever done it before him.

But even a super-Pope like Francis has only so many hours in a day to do everything he must do – much of which has to do with tending his worldwide flock of 1.2 billion. Why even talk about the impossible?... And that judgment, "Popes have been isolated for centuries" - does it have any objective basis at all, any more than Marco Politi's judgment that of all the Popes in the modern era, Benedict XVI was the most isolated - and by his own choice?]

Then we talked of two or three personal matters. Always concerned about the situation in Argentina, he could not believe tthat there is not enough wheat to make bread. I recalled to him paradoxically those lines that say “One cannot die of hunger in a land blessed with bread”. He agreed with some bitterness, by the did not make a comment about anyone.

In the end, he asked me, as always, to pray for him. I did not want to be the one to have to end the conversation but suddenly he said, “Well, we shall see each other,or better yet, I will read what you wrote. Ciao – be well, all of you, and pray for me”.

I was left with the telephone in hand. And I thought, Francis spoke to me, the pope spoke to me. I was a bit confused. Fortunately, I remembered he had told me, “Don’t get too many airs, Jorge. It is just a friend who has spoken to you”.


Of course, you would have read by now that the Italian edition of Vanity Fair has chosen Pope Francis as its Man of the Year 2013, though the year is just halfway through. [And what could be more paradoxical than the paragon of humility being chosen Man of the Year by a magazine called Vanity Fair? The magazine is simply beating everyone else to the tape because one can almost bet that every magazine or periodical or popular poll at the end of the year will choose the Pope as Man of the Year.

Meanwhile, there's this story from The UK Daily Mail,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2359424/Pope-demands-brand-new-life-size-statue-Buenos-Aires-cathedral-taken-does-wish-celebrity.html
to which Aqua provided the link:/DIM]



The statue is of fiberglas and is said to be 5'6" tall. But he's not 5'6", probably 5'8" or 5'9" to judge from how much he is taller than our 5'7" Benedict.


The one-dimensional cutout seems to be a better likeness than the statue.


The real Francis, in Lampedusa.

I don't know that he can have very much say about the full=blown personality cult that has already been erected about him. Very much facilitated by all the unprecedented 'firsts' he has been registering in the history of the Papacy. And his great talent for playing to the crowd, never missing a cue and hitting all the right notes. As long as the faithful keep in mind that he is just the finger pointing to the moon, and not the moon itself. And God forbid Francis-fever should go the way of Obamamania!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/07/2013 11:39]