Pope Benedict XVI uses a cane as he arrives for an audience with priests of the Diocese of Rome in Paul VI hall at the Vatican Feb. 14. (CNS photo/Paul Haring; Feb. 14, 2013)
— Lord
Acton
It has been quite a week. My head is still spinning, and I'm
sure that only half of it is due to the flu, fever, and medication I've been
fighting, enduring, and imbibing (respectively) since last Sunday afternoon.
I.
Where to start? How about with the head of the Catholic
Church?
Consider: He is brilliant, yet enigmatic. Some find him
inspiring; others think he is frightening. Some insist his reign is the result
of mythology, superstition, and ignorance. Others claim he is the
personification of humility, service, and true charity. In some corners, he is
rejected for his politically incorrect views about marriage and sexuality, and
his insistence that only certain men, no women at all, can be priests or
bishops. His talk of sin and of eternal judgment has upset many, but his call
to discipleship, sacrifice, and humble worship resonates with countless
millions.
But there has often been talk of scandal. One of those
closest to him betrayed his trust, exposing him to ridicule. There was even
talk of arrest and prosecution. Some within his inner circle have apparently
been more interested in pursuing power than in service. He is, in short,
controversial—a lightning rod for debate, discussion and, sadly, division.
Yes, I think you get what I'm getting at and the man I am
describing: Jesus of Nazareth, The Head
of the Catholic Church. He is central to the events of the past week for many
reasons, not least because he established the Church, founded the papacy upon
the petra of the flawed fisherman
Petros, and promised to preserve
the Church against the gates of Hades, never mind the flailing assaults of
clueless pundits and minor heretics.
This same crucified and risen Jesus, of course, is central
to the thought, work, and life of his current Vicar of Rome, Pope Benedict XVI.
It’s not that previous pontiffs haven’t loved Christ deeply and fully—far from
it. But, to give just one obvious example, Joseph Ratzinger’s Jesus of
Nazareth “trilogy”, written during his
eight short years as pope, was a rather unusual enterprise. It tells us
something essential about the man, to the degree that Fr. James Martin, SJ, suggests,
with merit, that the three books may prove to be Benedict’s “greatest legacy”.
There has already been much talk of Benedict’s “legacy”. I
suspect that many Americans think of a legacy in terms of “what something or
someone means to me”, that is, in ways
mostly subjective, personal, and quite immediate. There is a partial truth to
this perspective, but by itself it misses the deep sense of continuity and
inheritance implicit in the word “legacy”, which derives from the Latin words (legatia,
legatus) referring to a body of
persons—ambassadors—sent on a particular mission. The word “mission” is a
significant one in Catholic theology, used to refer to the missions of the
three Divine Persons, supernatural and saving missions “which are continued in
the mission of the Church” (CCC, 257). Mission, in other words, flows from
Trinitarian communion, which in turn shapes the communion of the Church, which
then goes forth with her missio,
sent to proclaim the Gospel and to make disciples of all nations.
In short, the greatest legacy of any pope is that he
upholds, promotes, carries out, encourages, explains, desires, seeks, and
proclaims this mission, which is simply the constant, insistent invitation to
accept God’s freely offered gift of “the glory of his blessed life” (CCC, 257;
cf. 1), that is, communion with the Triune God. Or, as the Holy Father put in his
final homily, given on Ash Wednesday:
May the invitation to conversion,
to “return to God with all our heart”, resonate strongly in us, accepting His
grace that makes us new men and women, with the surprising news that is
participating in the very life of Jesus.
This legacy, it goes without saying, is not of much interest
to the networks and the news shapers.
II.
My point is that if we begin by accepting the criteria of
the world, we will not only see Benedict’s pontificate through warped and
soiled lenses, we will struggle to see the bigger picture, not just the
panorama of Church history, but of salvation history. The Church certainly
struggles today, as she has struggled every single day since her founding. But
the Church also thinks in terms of decades and centuries. More importantly, the
Church truly lives for and, finally, in eternity. Only the faithful can read
and savor and marvel at this startling passage:
Christians of the first centuries
said, “The world was created for the sake of the Church.” God
created the world for the sake of communion with his divine life, a communion
brought about by the “convocation” of men in Christ, and this “convocation” is
the Church. The Church is the goal of all things, and God permitted such
painful upheavals as the angels’ fall and man’s sin only as occasions and means
for displaying all the power of his arm and the whole measure of the love he
wanted to give the world… (CCC, 760)
I emphasize the above because, having now read far too many
pieces about Benedict’s renouncement of the papal office, I am fairly resigned
(pun intended!) to the fact that most of the talk and conversation—certainly in
the secular media—will be about intrigue, scandal, secrecy, power, politics,
and so forth. It’s expected; it doesn’t surprise me and, surprisingly, it
doesn’t even really upset me (yes, that’s how under the weather I am). What
else but personalities, politics, and power will pundits discuss when all they
know are personalities, politics, and power?
Sadly, even those who should know better apparently do not.
In an essay, “As
Vatican leader Pope Benedict never had a chance” (Feb. 11, 2013), John
Moody, Executive Vice President and Executive Editor at Fox News, broke the
shocking news that Benedict XVI “was not John Paul II.” This was, he insists, “an
insurmountable problem”, ramping up a strange and wildly skewed game of “JPII
vs. B16” (no word yet about a possible phone app). Among Benedict’s alleged
failures: “He did not unite the conservative and progressive wings of the
Catholic Church.” Perhaps I missed it, but neither did Blessed John Paul II,
and his pontificate was a bit longer than Benedict’s. More to the point, there
is the reality of the Church itself—the matter of the wheat and tares, a deeply
meaningful image that dates back to a man who prayed for unity among his
disciples (Jn 17) but also said he came to “set the earth on fire” and to
establish “division” (Lk 12:51ff). Establish division? Would a meek and mild
and cajoling Jesus ever do such a thing? Of course not. But the true and living Jesus Christ surely would, and did, and
does. Moody’s piece, in the end, is a disturbing exercise in the cult of
personality, as obsessed with John Paul II’s obvious external abilities as he
with Benedict’s supposed failure to develop a winning smile: “His smile, though
genuine, looked somehow sinister, as if he were about to bite his audience.”
The usual news pieces made certain to highlight
controversies and criticisms. Nothing wrong with that, but the tone in some
suggests that any hint of controversy or actions drawing criticism is bad form.
One wonders: has there ever been a pope and papacy free of controversy or
criticism? (I, for one, hope not!) One bit of Benedict’s history that has now
been worked into a well-polished media nugget is the Regensburg Address, which
is presented as a heady pontiff failing to appreciate the sensitivities of the
time. For example, from a
February 12th Wall Street Journal piece:
Pope Benedict's efforts to address
the cultural divisions between Islam and Christianity briefly stirred
controversy in 2006 when the pontiff delivered an academic speech that quoted a
Byzantine emperor making deprecating remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. A wave
of deadly riots washed across the Muslim world, prompting an apology from the
pope.
The address was about culture, but it was about much more: the
theological and philosophical roots of culture, and how flawed
understandings of God’s nature have far-reaching and often serious, even deadly,
implications. And Benedict’s apology was a small revelation in itself, for he
didn’t retract anything he had said: “At this time, I wish also to add that I
am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my
address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the
sensibility of Muslims.” Unfortunately, the violent actions of various Islamic
groups following the address only validated Benedict’s argument—a point ignored
by virtually all non-Catholic news outlets.
In many cases, Benedict could never “win”, and I doubt
he was ever blind to his difficult situation. Throughout his pontificate, he
has been criticized by many for being heavy-handed and authoritarian. Then
again, he has been derided for being weak, timid, and incapable of handling the
reins of the wild steed named “the Vatican”. Surely only a man of diverse and
inscrutable talents could be both so powerful and so weak! (Does anyone else
see any parallels with how the American media often portrayed Pres. George W.
Bush?) Most people have been fed a series of images—either visual or painted
with words—portraying Benedict XVI as out of touch, backwards, narrow-minded,
reactionary, anti-woman, and so forth. As Ryan N. S. Topping notes in his
exceptional new book, Rebuilding Catholic Culture (Sophia,
2012), “Each age nurses its own vices; one of ours is to
substitute images for ideas. … But the study of doctrine, to reduce
principles merely to politics would be simply to miss a great deal. …
Theology
is, ultimately, the study not of personalities but of reality—in fact
the most
real reality of all.” That "real reality" has always been Benedict's
focus; it's hardly his fault that the world is overrun by hordes of
delicately scented barbarians who care not one whit about the same.
III.
I’ve learned over the years that more than a few people who
express a vague admiration for John Paul II actually know little or nothing
about his writings and teachings. They are attracted to him—or to a particular
image of him they have obtained through one media source or another. But, then,
the rich young ruler was also attracted to Jesus. The essential question, always,
is: will you take up the Cross? Will you follow the Master?
Following an attractive image with your eyes for a few
moments is not the same as following Christ to the very end. Which is one
reason why the public death, so to speak, of John Paul II was such a profound
witness: the once handsome and dynamic pope did not shy away from showing his
feeble, anguished figure and face to the world. Benedict has taken a different
route. Why? Fr. George Rutler offers
some beautifully expressed insights:
As everyone dies, it was important
that John Paul defied the aimless Culture of Death by showing how to die, but
that witness also came at the cost of care of the churches. There were times
then when the Church Militant seemed in freefall, and the man who then was
Cardinal Ratzinger must have anguished much in silence. … A most
attractive charism of Benedict XVI has been his desire to vanish so that the
faithful might see only Christ: “cupio dissolvi.” He strengthened the
papacy by vaulting sanctity over celebrity. In a grand paradox, nothing
in him has become so conspicuous as his desire to disappear.
Cardinal Francis Arinze put it more directly, but just as
well. “Our faith is not in the pope,” he
said shortly after Benedict’s announcement, “it is in Christ… So this event
can help all of us to be deeper in our faith. To be, shall we say, less
sentimental.” The last bit is more important than it might appear initially.
Benedict XVI is, by all accounts, a very warm and personable man, but I’ve
never heard the word “sentimental” associated with him. The fact is, we live
not in the Information Age, but in the Sentimental Age, driven not by good
thinking, tested prudence, or treasured wisdom, but by sentiments, feelings,
emotions. Everywhere we turn, there are voices and texts and tweets flooding us
with feelings and opinions.
But what of truth? Of reason? It says volumes (literally, if
printed) that the greatest champion of reason today, the Vicar of Christ, is
judged and mocked as “unreasonable” by a world that scorns reason like a junkie
scorns rehab. Those who deny the transcendent and who wish to make (or re-make)
man in their own image cannot and will not engage with this voice of reason for
the simple reason that they will not stand to be exposed for the charlatans they
are. As Samuel Gregg put it in an excellent post, “Benedict
XVI: Reason’s Revolutionary”:
But we need to remember that
Benedict XVI is arguably the most
intellectual pope to sit in Peter’s Chair for centuries—even more so than his
saintly predecessor, who was certainly no slouch in the world of ideas. And if
there is one single thing that stands out in Benedict’s papacy, it’s this: his
laser-like focus on the root-cause of the intellectual crisis that explains not only Western culture’s
present wallowing in facile relativism that’s on full display in the
content-free rhetoric of your average EU politician, but also the trauma that
explains the violence and rage that continues to shake the Islamic world and
which Islam seems incapable of resolving on its own terms.
And that problem is one of reason.
As Benedict spelt out in four key addresses that repay careful re-reading—the
famous 2006 Regensburg
lecture, his 2008 address to
the French intellectual world, his speech to
the Bundestag in 2011, and his remarks to
the world of British politics in 2010 in Westminster Hall (the site, not
coincidentally, of St Thomas More’s show-trial in 1535)—man, especially Western
man, has lost confidence in reason’s power to know more-than-empirical truth.
(For a shorter, more humorous take on the same theme, by a
non-Catholic writer, see
this post by Andrew Klavan.) Personally, I have benefited most deeply from
Benedict’s explication of Scripture and his analysis of the current intellectual
and spiritual crises. I don’t see the two as somehow separate from another; on
the contrary, I find Benedict’s penetrating and nuanced apprehension of the
failings of our age to be rooted in a deeply biblical vision of God and man,
creation and society, family and politics, Church and state. The first
Ratzinger book I ever read was Daughter Zion, and after reading it, I realized the author did not just know
Scripture, but breathed it. He is a man who loves and lives the Word of God.
IV.
"The figure of Peter is an impossibility, made possible
only by the will of the One who created him.” So wrote Fr. Hans Urs von
Balthasar in The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church (Ignatius, 1986). At some point, in some way, we
have to distinguish between the man and the office. Every man who has been
given the office has had flaws and failures; some of them, we must admit, have
been rogues and even vile sinners. But the Petrine office, gifted by Jesus
Christ, endures precisely because of the grace and power of the Head of the
Church. And what does Christ ask of Peter? “Simon, do you love me?” (Jn 21). In
a
May 2006 audience, Benedict XVI remarked on the thrice-repeated question
from Jesus, saying, “Simon understands that his poor love is enough for Jesus,
it is the only one of which he is capable, nonetheless he is grieved that the
Lord spoke to him in this way. He thus replies: ‘Lord, you know
everything; you know that I love you (filo-se)’.” And:
From that day, Peter
"followed" the Master with the precise awareness of his own
fragility; but this understanding did not discourage him. Indeed, he knew that
he could count on the presence of the Risen One beside him.
From the naïve enthusiasm of
initial acceptance, passing though the sorrowful experience of denial and the
weeping of conversion, Peter succeeded in entrusting himself to that Jesus who
adapted himself to his poor capacity of love. And in this way he shows us the
way, notwithstanding all of our weakness. We know that Jesus adapts himself to
this weakness of ours.
Benedict has recognized his weakness and, without any
sentimentality or political posturing, is handing the office back to the
One
who founded it. He knows that he was Peter for a while only by the will
of the
One who created him, and he trusts completely that the Church, however
battered
and embattled today, will carry on toward the eschaton precisely because
of the will, grace, and love of Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church.