 20/12/2008 22:25 |
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It's that time of year when editors and assorted enterprises decide to confer their recognition on the chosen few they consider to be people who matter in the affairs of mankind today. The choices are usually as arbitrary as the various criteria employed to make these choices. For what it's worth, apparently Pope Benedict XVI makes it to Newsweek's 'GLOBAL ELITE' described by the editor as
NEWSWEEK's highly subjective list of the most powerful people who will figure in the era over which Obama will preside.
It is arbitrary, but the choices are well considered, and each, we believe, represents a thread in the new global tapestry. Some are utterly surprising; others are not.
Perhaps most important, each meets the test of power as we have just defined it: they are men and women who are either in the business of bending others to their will or seeking to rearrange reality in ways they find more congenial. They are in command, or they seek control.
There is, naturally, more than a little overlap; the features are not mutually exclusive. (The reprehensible are also here — Osama bin Laden is one example — as an acknowledgment that evil can affect us, too.)
Unfortunately, the online presentation does not allow one to know who the rest of the 50 names are - without navigating from one presentation to another, which I haven't time to do - and whether the #37 before the Pope's name means he is ranked #37 in importance among the 50. Here's what they say about him:
American Catholics in particular, still bruised by the sex-abuse scandals of 2002, regarded the current Pope's election in 2005 with suspicion and worse.
They feared that Joseph Ratzinger (known to some as "God's Rottweiler," John Paul II's theological enforcer) would turn out to be a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy.
But Benedict XVI's U.S. visit earlier this year — his first as Pope —bolstered one of his most traumatized flocks and added immeasurably to his stature. He came off as empathic, gentle, direct.
He addressed the sex scandal not once but repeatedly — finally in a tearful private meeting with a small group of victims.
Having convinced the world of his remorse, Benedict next year will travel to Jerusalem, where he will have to perform a delicate dance: welcoming interfaith debate while affirming his belief that the events described in the Gospels are real and his is the One True Church.
As usual, the blurb must have been written by a non-professing person or a non-Christian, otherwise he would not consider interfaith dialog [not debate, as the writer puts it] something that needs to be balanced against affirming the truth of one's own faith!
Also, there's the characterization 'having convinced the world of his remorse' - which makes it look as though whatever the Pope did was an exercise in 'convincing the world' rather than doing what is right and proper.
I wonder what TIME magazine will do - or has done - about the Pope's 'derby ranking' this year. In 2007, he was a non-entity as far as they were concerned - not on their list at all!
P.S. I have checked out TIME magazine. Their POTY was predictable, of course, and they had four runners-up to the incoming AMerican President. But this time, they limited themselves to just TWENTY other PEOPLE WHO MATTERED IN 2008 - and the Pope was not one of them. Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe was, and the woman who wrote the new vampire book series that appears to have taken over the Harry Potter frahcnise among young readers, and George Bush who was not even among the 100 people who mattered to TIME in 2006 (he was back in the list the next year, 2007, when Pope Benedict was nowhere in sight)....And so on....Why am I bothering? I'm almost ashamed of myself for this weird kind of voyeurism....
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/12/2008 23:15] |
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