Will the real Ratzinger please stand up?
John Allen’s “The Real Ratzinger Revealed” is free on the Tablet‘s Web site. Were you expecting a “fundamentalist” pope? If so, how are you coping with having the expectation confounded?
If the danger of the John XXIII and Paul VI era was throwing the baby
out with the bathwater, the chief risk in today’s politics of identity
cuts in the opposite direction, towards rigidity and exaggerated
defensiveness – a sort of “Taliban Catholicism” that knows only how to
excoriate and condemn. To be sure, one can see the stirrings of such a
spirit in today’s Church. Potentially, Benedict XVI’s legacy may lie in
pointing a way around these shoals. Given all that he represents,
Benedict is in a unique position to illustrate that one can embrace
Catholic fundamentals without becoming a fundamentalist, that reason
and faith are not opposed but inextricably linked. That, in fact, was
the argument he was trying to make in Regensburg, although the uproar
over the quotation occluded his effort.
I was struck by this bit: “Benedict XVI’s top priority, as stated on 22 March by his Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, during a lecture in Milan, is to complete his reassertion of Christian identity.”
Yesterday Reuters reported some remarks the Pope made about evolution. After wading through the first part of the story that seemed to indicate there was some type of showdown brewing between science and faith, the crux of the Pope’s message seemed to be some quite gentle reminders that science alone cannot reveal the purposes of God, and we should not think of God as simply the “gaps” in our scientific knowledge.
While the Pope and other Vatican officials have made some rather crabby, ill-timed or ill-considered remarks that have put some people off–including me at times–Allen’s article suggests the Pope listens as well as he directs.
Perhaps when a man knows what he believes and feels comfortable saying it without it being spruced up by the PR people, that’s a good thing.
Regarding the Pope’s book on evolution, the Yahoo article ( http://fe4.news.re3.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070411/sc_nm/pope_evolution_dc) states:
“Benedict argued that evolution had a rationality that the theory of purely random selection could not explain.”
Selection is not in fact random. Mutations are random. Selection operates on the products of mutation and rigorously reflects the constraints of the organism’s physical environment.
This statement as well as others made by the pope in the cited article suggest that he may be somewhat confused about how evolution works and the truth claims of science.
While one should suspend judgement until one has read the book, I hope this isn’t a preview of things to come.
Who Benedict is not so obscure. The problem is papolatry. We need to give due attentions to what the Bishop of Rome says and reserve worship for the Triune God.
May may bring more of the complexity of Benedict: his book,Jesus of Nazareth, will be out next month; also his visit to Brazil and the start of CELAM.
I don’t look for a one-dimensional Benedict after that .
The self-deputized police on behalf of any authority figure are most often the problem rather than the authority figure on their own.
Confounded? Who’s confounded?
I know of very few – in fact no – people who were excited by this pope’s election who are not still happy and pleased. Ratzinger the one-dimensional “enforcer” was always a myth, and anyone who read any of his work and interviews he gave knew this.
I’m so glad that we have a few brilliant folks who understood Benedict all along.
I thought the thread on the Sunday NYT Times article indicated otherwise.
Also John Allen’s piece seems far more incisive and predictive than say the AP wire piece that hit the papers this morning on BXVI’s potential impact in the US.
There is an almost chamelon like character to the gentle scholar at Rome, trapped by his hope to return to the glory days of the past yet yearning to present ou rfaith as a truly positive option.
I usupect we’ll see both sides as long as he sits in the chair of Peter.
I have to say that I’m puzzled by this sort of press. What did they expect? Did they expect to see Benedict actually shouting from the window at St. Peter’s? Anyone who knew anything about him before he became Pope could have told you that in person he’s charming, gracious, attentive and congenial, even to the thologians he has silenced for decades. Just because he “listens”, it doesn’t mean he still doesn’t consider himself the smartest guy in the room and the sole guardian of Truth.
As far as I can see, the Joseph Ratzinger we see now is entirely consistent with the one we’ve seen since 1968. The clampdown on the Jesuits and Liberation Theology continues (Roger Haight censured in the waning days on the JPII pontificate, the ousting of Thomas Reese at America, and the notification on Jon Sobrino), the support for Bishop Bruskewitz against CTA, the lack of pastoral experience evident in the Regensburg/Islamic brouhaha, the mostly banal and gloomy pronouncements coming out about Europe that reflect his pessimistic Augustinianism and show not the slightest bit of self-critical reflection, and the disturbing flirtation with the Lefebvrites which is about to result in a Motu Proprio on the Tridentine Mass that turns Paul VI’s 1969 declaration on it’s head.
Bob,
Far from brilliant, but just aware of the facts. Everything I read about or by the man before he became pope indicated that he was kind, thoughtful, charitable, and deliberate. The idea of the “Panzer” Cardinal was inaccurate to begin with. As an “enforcer” at the CDF, according to the NCR (hardly a hotbed of Ratzinger enthusiasts), he took official or unofficial action against fewer than one theologian a year. That’s hardly a conservative juggernaut.
My point is that this post and some of the articles recently published on the anniversary are based on a false assumption – that there is a substantial part of the Church looking for a “fundamentalist” pope who will make a dramatic clean sweep of heterodox miscreants who are now disappointed two years later.
Allen doesn’t deal with one thing Benedict has revealed to us in the past two years that may not bode well for his papal legacy: his attitude toward the modern world in which he– and all of the rest of us–must live. How can someone dialogue with a world he sees in the fearsome terms Benedict evoked in his Easter Homily, a modern age that is a sort of dreadful dark abyss?
For a harsher assessment of BXVI as a scholar out of touch see Newsweek’s “Benedict the Invisible.”
While harsh, it raises some useful points as to how Benedict is touching the catholic South while concerned with Europa.