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POPE-POURRI: 'Light' news items, anecdotes about Pope Benedict now

Ultimo Aggiornamento: 20/12/2012 06:50
30/11/2005 23:10
 
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TERESA BENEDETTA
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More anecdotes
We owe this all to Ratzigirl who posted them in the main forum.
Herewith are my translations from the Italian-

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A WHIP TO DRIVE OUT EVIL THOUGHTS
”I gave the Pope a traditional whip made of fiber from coconut bark, with which every chief [in Samoan society] has the task of shooing off bad thoughts and prejudices so that each one can express himself constructively, thus getting rid of obstacles which get in the way of dialogue.”

[There was a news agency picture of the Pope receiving the whip but it is no longer online.]

The Prime Minister of Samoa and president of the Pacific Islands Forum, Tuilaepa Mlielegaoi, explained to newsmen the gifts which he brought Pope Benedict when he met him on November 28 at the Vatican.

“I also gave him a ceremonial cup for kava, a drink extracted from the root of the pepper plant which one sips during the assemblies of village chiefs in Polynesia,” he added.

”The Pope is very much more than a village chief,” he said in an itnerview with Telepace [a Catholic broadcasting service). “He is a Tai-Tai, a chief of chiefs, leader of a community that extends over the whole world. AS a Prime Minister and as a Catholic, I am very honored to be in Rome and to meet him.”


THE FACE OF A BOY

Mons. Loris Capovilla, who turned 90 on October 14, was the private secretary of Pope John XXIII for 10 years. He recounts his experiences with six Popes whom he has known up close,in an article written by Princess Alessandra Borghese for the November 30 issue of Gente magazine.

“Pope Benedict XVI like John XXIII has the face of a boy. He has a transparent look. He is a sensible and courteous man, a true gentleman [un vero signore].”

John XXIII was “Papa Buono” not because he kissed children, but because he was childlike himself, without calculation or cunning.” Angelo Roncalli, he says of the Pope he most closely served, was "the son of simple country folk, but he was truly a prince.”

“Wojtyla and Ratzinger are following the same line," he adds. “John Paul II had spoken about re-evangelizing Europe, and Benedict has said the same. But they have different styles. Just think of Ratzinger, who in the space of a few days, met with the head of the Lefebvrians, Msgr. Fellay, with the theologian Hans Kueng and with the writer Oriana Fallacci.”

(The blurb is frustratingly sketchy, but I suppose they want
you to buy the magazine. It may be available here in New York, as it is a People-like magazine.)

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FALLACCI BREAKS HER SILENCE
Speaking of Fallacci, she broke her silence on her much-reported private meeting with the Pope last summer, during a long address she delivered in New York City last night after receiving the Annie Taylor Award.

Fallacci’s speech, delivered in English, was reprinted in full today on 1-1/2 pages of the Italian newspaper Il Foglio, and is entitled “Jumping Over Niagara Falls: All about my right to hate and the despotism of weak democracies”. [It can be downloaded as a PDF file]. What follows is not exactly an anecdote, but interesting nevertheless...


[The Annie Taylor Award is given to a person “who has shown and continues to show exceptional courage in gravely adverse circumstances and in the face of grave danger.” It is named after a woman who jumped over Niagara Falls. Presentors were David Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum and noted Mideast expert, as well as Daniel Horowitz, founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, editor of Front Page amagzine, and author of the book “The Unholy Alliance; Radical Islam and the American Left.” Fallacci said at the start of her speech that she found this "little award" much more meaningful than the Nobel Prize or the Oscars which she described as "discredited gratuities given exclusively to Islamophile and Westphobic and anti-American devotees."]

Here are the excerpts in which she talked about the Pope:

“..Last August I was received in a very private audience by Ratzinger – I mean, Pope Benedict XVI. A Pope who loves my work since he read 'Letter to a Child Never Born' and whom I deeply respect since I read his intelligent books. Moreover, with whom I happen to agree on many occasions.

"For example, when he writes that the West has developed a sort of hate towards itself. That it no longer loves itself, that it has lost its spirituality, and risks to lose its identity too. (Exactly what I write when I write that the West is sick with a moral and intellectual cancer. In fact, I often remark: 'If a Pope and an atheist say the same thing, in that thing there must be something tremendously true.')

"New parenthesis: I am an atheist, yes. A Christian-atheist, as I always point out, but an atheist. And Pope Ratzinger knows it very well: In 'The Force of Reason' I devote a whole chapter to explaining the apparent paradox of such self-definition.

"Yet do you know what he says to atheists like me? He says- 'Okay (the Okay is mine, of course), then Veluti si Deus daretur. Behave as if God existed.'

"Words from which one assumes that in the religious community, there are more open-minded and smarter people than in the secular one I belong to. So open-minded and so smart that they don’t even try, not even dream, to save my soul. (I mean, to convert me).

"This why I also state that in selling itself to theocratic Islam, laicism (you say secularism) has missed the most important appointment offered to it by History. And in doing so, it has opened a void, an abyss, that only spirituality can fill.

"This is also why in the Church of today, I see an unexpected partner, an unexpected ally. In Ratzinger and in anyone who accepts my disquieting independence of thought and behavior, I see a compagnon-de-route. (Unless, of course, the Church too misses its appointment with History. Something I don’t foresee…)

"So we met, this smartly righteous gentleman and I. Free of ceremonials, formalities, all by ourselves. In his study room of Castel Gandolfo, we conversed for a while. And the non-professional encounter was supposed to stay secret. In my obsession for privacy, I asked it to be so.

"But the rumor spread all the same. Like a nuclear bomb, it reached the Italian press. And guess what a petulant idiot with academic requisites wrote in a most notorious and leftist newspaper in Rome. He wrote that the Pope can see as much as he wants of people 'as trashy and as impious and as sinful and as mentally ill' as Oriana Fallacci because 'the Pope is not
una persona perbene'– not a decent person….”

She next makes reference to the Pope when she says:
“…I don’t believe in dialogue with Islam… I sustain that such a dialogue is monologue, a soliloquy nourished by our naivete or unconfessed despair. (About this topic, I strongly dissent from Pope Ratzinger who insists on that monologue with dismaying hope. Once again, Holy Father: Of course, I too, want a world where everybody loves everybody and nobody is an enemy of anybody. But the enemy is there. And it has no intention to dialogue with you and with us)….
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Make of it what you will.
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