This is the third article in the ilssusidiario.net 'mini=special' on Benedict XVI's fourth anniversary as Pope (See other two aricles in an earlier psot above]. For some reason, this is available in an English translation online - I didn't realize ilsussidiario had an English outlet for certain pieces. This is one of them.
I prefer the title used in the Italian version: "Benedict XVI: An inconvenient man who can use his enemies' megaphone to make himself heard".
John Waters is a journalist who writes for the Irish Times {I posted a recent piece of his about the condoms-and-AIDS controversy), who recently published a book called LAPSED ATHEIST, described as "the story of one man's journey from belief to un-belief and back again. The author explores his own spiritual and religious adventure and observes how this has been echoed in contemporary society".
BENEDICT XVI:
A modern and radical Pope
for an age in identity crisis
by John Waters
April 20, 2009
Benedict XVI, after four years as Pope, continues to confound his enemies and to enchant his admirers with a Pontificate that appears brilliant from any aspect.
How recent seem those momentous spring days of 2005 when his predecessor both saddened us by his going and uplifted us with the dignity of his dying, reminding us that only in faith can humanity see past the ineluctable frontier.
And then the moment of succession, the emergence of the resolute figure of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to take the staff of St Peter in a time of unprecedented doubting and growing terror.
Benedict was, by the secular media analysis, a stop-gap and a throwback, a "reactionary", a "right-winger", an obscurantist. But what has emerged is what was implicit in his majesterial writings over several decades: a supreme intellect within a lively personality, a man who in his lifetime has watched mankind lurch between great good and the great evils, and seeks to reconcile these observations with the truths he has inherited.
One of the many paradoxes of being Pope in the modern world is that you must speak through a megaphone controlled by your enemies.
If John Paul II was an actor who communicated by disarming the megaphone-holders with his charisma and charm, Benedict’s strategy is determined subversion of the cultural codes controlled by those who oppose virtually everything the Catholic Church and its leader now stand for.
From the outset Pope Benedict has confronted the culture of the age head on: his first two encyclicals confronted the two most pressing issues of our time - love and hope, two concepts that have been bled out of the public discourse.
"In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence ... I wish in my first Encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others", he wrote in
Deus Caritas Est. God is love, not hate.
This subtle and brilliant Pope has struggled to be heard in a media climate characterised by sabotage and diversion. Repeatedly the media has sought to distort or reduce his statements, to make them fit with their prejudices such as they unfurled themon his election.
But Benedict has emerged from the episodes of Regensburg and La Sapienza, and more recently, from attempted misrepresentations of his statements about human sexuality and condoms as a means of combating Aids, as a man of courage and grace, his message undiluted, his status enhanced in the human spaces beyond the news desks and broadcast studios of the international media.
The importance of Benedict is that he brings an intellectual rigour to the core of Christianity in the public square, expounding and illuminating the core connections, and disconnections, between Christianity and modern culture.
John Paul II was a charismatic figure and a brilliant philosopher but in his public persona tended to emit a dualistic message: soft and lovable on the one hand, but rigidly and even simplistically traditionalist on the other.
Of course, this had a lot to do with media treatment of his message and personality, largely overlooking his vast canon of philosophical writings.
Benedict is adept at bringing Catholic canons back to their core significance, at reaching out, in spite of the background noise created around him by the media, to the educated generations of young people who now, as he correctly identified, hunger for something to transform the lassitude invoked in them by a culture selling sensation and freedom but nothing approaching the kind of satisfaction they crave.
Pope Benedict is a man who cannot be put in any box. He has a reputation as a theological traditionalist, but culturally he appears a modernist
[Not a 'modernist' as much as someone who is so thoroughly acquainted with the culture of modernity that he can comfortably debate it with real modernists!], even at times as someone who comprehends the post-modernist impulse even better than many of its adherents.
Occasionally he strikes a wrong note, such as his criticism of the Harry Potter phenomenon, apparently at the prompting of a sole individual with an obsession in this connections, and which seemed to have been delivered without a thorough perusal of the books.
Such interventions occasionally serve to bolster the media caricature of a pope out of touch with modern society, when in truth they are simply
the inevitable blind spots of a man in his ninth decade.*
[Excuse me! See comment below!]
In truth he is the most modern and radical of popes. When he speaks, he does so as the head of the Roman Catholic Church, but his concern seems to be for the soul of society.
He faces an age in the throes of an identity crisis and seeks to show it the way out. His project is the restoration to Western culture of an integrated concept of reason, the re-separation of the metaphysical from the physical.
The unarmed coup of the 1960s, which sought to install scientific-rationalism as the guiding cultural light of the age, has failed to convince even its own adherents, who, alarmed by the listlessness of their children and the imminence of the darkness they have themselves summoned, now cry out for reassurance to neo-atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
But already, the idea that “God is dead” has become yesterday’s news, as modern societies seek to move beyond reductionist forms of reason to something that incorporates more of the human experience than merely the head.
As the ideologies of the Sixties' "freedom" project shatter on the rocks of reality; as the proponents of these ideologies begin to perceive that they do not, after all, have answers to the most fundamental dilemmas of humanity; as we slouch towards what my esteemed colleague Magdi Allam has called "the suicide of our civilization"; we may hope and pray that Benedict remains with us through the next crucial decade, whisperingly conveying his ancient truths through the megaphone of his enemies.
[I must interpolate here a prompt rejoinder by a reader to the Harry Potter reference in this article in which he writes:
The accusation that the comments of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger regarding Harry Potter reveal his "blind spots" may be a case of John Waters protecting his own "blind spots" onto the Pope. What the then Cardinal wrote [about Harry Potter] was:
My dear Ms. Kuby!... It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because there are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.”
So the issue was "subtle seductions" that can deceive children.
If the Pope is out of step on this fact then so too are several young Catholic priests who are exorcists. Because of their personal experiences with the Evil One and because during exorcisms they learn from the devil himself how he gained access to a soul, many of these priests likewise oppose Harry Potter.
Perhaps it is John Waters who suffers from "blind spots" about the tactics of the devil and about the influence that the cult of magic can have on a vulnerable soul "before it can grow properly."
