Last night in NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT, Benefan posted one of the better wrap-up articles written so far about Benedict XVI in the Australian MSM, under the title KING OF GOD'S COUNTRY, as it appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. I use the adjective 'better' in a relative sense, of course, because its context and premise still rest on all those false stereotypes that had been fabricated about Joseph Ratzinger, and therefore presents itself as some sort of a corrective, and a welcome one.
I am cross-posting it here, with the note that the first part of the article also came out in The Age which belongs to the same media corporate family as the Herald, except that the Herald fleshed out the report with a biographical sketch of Joseph Ratzinger which will be useful to the general reader who has little prior knowledge about the Pope (even if it limits itself to a recitation of facts and does not say enough about Joseph Ratzinger's role as a thinker and theologian). I wish Tracey Rowland who, by all accounts, does a masterful job of this in her book on Ratzinger's thought, could write such pieces for the Australian newspapers during the visit.
Out of John Paul's shadow
Barney Zwartz
Religious Editor
July 12, 2008
Pope Benedict, who arrives in Australia tomorrow, has defied his image as "God's rottweiler" and disproved fears he would be a pale imitation of his predecessor.
WORLD Youth Day in Cologne three years ago was perhaps the defining experience of Liz Hamilton's life so far. The then 20-year-old from the outer-Melbourne suburb of Greensborough went to observe the newly elected Benedict XVI, and was not disappointed.
"It was fantastic. About 800,000 people came, there were people everywhere. It was so festive, celebratory. People were singing and laughing, swapping cultural tokens like badges, hats and T-shirts," she recalled this week. Based on his depiction in the media, she expected Benedict to be stern, even hard, but she found him surprisingly warm. "I thought he was a beautiful man with a real gentleness and humanness, so thoughtful. He spoke in five languages, and when he spoke in English I just cried — it was really moving."
Having the Pope celebrate Mass for her, even as one in a million, was a thrill she is determined to repeat in Sydney, where he arrives tomorrow. "I'm looking forward hugely to seeing him again, even if he is just a speck on a stage."
When Joseph Ratzinger was elected the 266th pope on April 19, 2005, and took the name Benedict, there were many in the church who thought he would be just a speck on the stage. They expected a pale shadow of John Paul II, mimicking his policies and priorities but without the charisma or the charm. Nicknamed "God's rottweiler", "the Panzerkardinal" and an ecclesiastical "Darth Vader", as Ratzinger he was seen as the church's mailed fist.
As Benedict, the reality has been more velvet glove, and he has proved very much his own man. There have been continuities, but in many ways he has been a stark contrast — more self-effacing, gentle and intellectual — to the previous pope, for whom he was chief adviser and doctrinal watchdog.
There have been no heresy hunts, few confrontations, a much less visible presence and much less travel. His writings, including encyclicals on love and hope, have been optimistic. A profound and subtle theologian, he has sought to engage and to persuade — inside and outside the church.
"He's an outstanding public teacher, and the educated world is listening," says Sydney Archbishop Cardinal George Pell, a former close colleague at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. "One interesting fact, almost counter-intuitive, is that more people are coming to hear him on his Wednesday audience and on Sunday than came to hear John Paul II."
According to Pell, what has surprised the watching world is how affable, serene and successful Benedict has been as a public personality. "As pope, one's entitled once in a while to be angst ridden, but he's remarkably serene," Pell says. (Of course, that serenity might be a little ruffled as news of this week's sexual abuse controversy involving the cardinal reached Rome.)
[Swartz doesn't get the nature of the 'serenity' that possesses a spiritual man: It doesn't get fazed by crises, and allows the person so endowed to respond with grace under pressure.]
Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen is also impressed. "He's a very different leader from his predecessor, but from a Roman Catholic point of view, he's an excellent successor. He's clearly not just an interim, as some thought, because of his age" (at 78, he was the oldest man elected pope in 275 years).
"I recently read his work on hope. It was beautiful, it was eloquent, it was effective," Jensen says, while also citing caveats.
According to Paul Collins, an Australian former priest who ran foul of Ratzinger at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, this is a much lower key and more traditional papacy: "He doesn't see himself as the king of the universe, and that's a relief from his predecessor, who had almost messianic pretensions."
[Why do some people feel they have to put down John Paul II - and in the most unfair way????]
Describing Benedict as God's rottweiler was grossly unfair when he was at the CDF, and is even more unfair now, Collins says. "Benedict is a gentle man. He sees himself quite correctly as a father figure in the church and is not punitive."
An anecdote highlighting the difference in the cat-loving and Mozart-playing pontiff's approach is the treatment of the great progressive theologian Hans Kung, a former colleague at Tubingen University. In 1979 the Vatican stripped Kung of his licence to teach as a Catholic theologian after he challenged the doctrine of papal infallibility.
For 26 years, Kung wrote repeatedly to John Paul II seeking a meeting, and never even received a reply. When Benedict got the same request, he quickly met Kung in a friendly four-hour discussion of common ground.
"Pope Wojtyla (John Paul II) wanted to be the big high priest and reduced the bishops to film extras who have nothing to say but who have just to applaud," Kung told British Catholic weekly newspaper
The Tablet last month.
[And Swartz in effect 'reinforces' Collins's comment on John Paul II with Kueng's well-known and often-expressed hostility to the Polish Pope.]
"Benedict would tell you he talks to the bishops all the time. He's very attentive. He doesn't bang the table like Pope Wojtyla and say, 'I don't want to hear about the lack of vocations.' But he is different in tone, not substance."
[Father Kueng, how can they be different in substance? A Pope affirms, upholds, defends and protects the deposit of the faith. The problem is you think the Church should discard some of this deposit, which, of course, you are free to think, but which a Pope may not even think about!]
In his memoirs, Kung wrote: "What you have to remember about Joseph Ratzinger is that he was brought up in a police station."
[And what does that mean? Negative in that he would be authoritarian, or positive in that he would be disciplined?]
Benedict was born on April 16, 1927, in a Bavarian village where his father was a police officer whose devout Catholicism made him strongly anti-Nazi. At 14, like all German boys, he was forced to join the Hitler Youth and at 16 was sent to an anti-aircraft unit.
After the war, he spent a few months in a prisoner of war camp, then entered a seminary and was ordained in 1951. He spent the next 26 years as an academic and theologian, and played an important role as adviser to Cardinal Frings of Cologne at the reforming Vatican II council in the 1960s.
He was regarded as a reformer, but he gradually identified less with the progressives, especially after the student riots that swept Europe in 1968. He became archbishop of Munich in 1977. John Paul II brought him to the Vatican to head the CDF in 1981 — and there he is still, despite three attempts to retire before he became Pope.
On his election, Benedict identified halting the collapse of the faith in Europe as his top priority: challenging the "dictatorship of relativism" (as he put it in a famous sermon), secularism and rationalism. His chief weapons have been intellectual and theological, particularly his two encyclicals on love and hope.
According to Sydney theologian Neil Omerod, they show a consummate scholarship and take a remarkably optimistic view of humanity, which is why people have responded so well.
"What has surprised is what he isn't saying. The dark shadow of Augustinian pessimism that seemed to be part of his approach at the CDF has been replaced by a greater openness," says Omerod, professor of theology at the Australian Catholic University.
[I really have problems with the term 'Augustinian pessimism' and this assumptyion that Joseph Ratzinger's attitude was ever pessimistic. I think he once said he was simply being realistic, not pessimistic. And in any case, the man who wrote Spe salvi has made it clear what the differnce is between optimism and hope!]
"There's a luminous aspect to what he's presenting, which is not just to a Christian readership but to the world. He's trying to reach out to everyone and attract them to the Christian message. It's not just theological, it's evangelical in that sense."
The widening fault line with Islam also needed attention, and here Benedict has been firmer than John Paul II, arguing for reciprocity — the idea that if the Saudis can build a mosque in Rome, they should allow a church in Saudi Arabia.
Greg Barton, professor of religion and society at Monash University, says Benedict has made some faux pas, particularly the speech at Regensburg University in 2006 in which he quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor's criticism of Islam, sparking a furious and violent response in parts of the Muslim world.
[I am immediately distrustful of anyone who thinks Regensburg's was a 'faux pas'; his attitude about Benedict wiill be very predictable!]
"I'm told he relied a lot for his insight into Islam on Lebanese Christians, who didn't necessarily serve him well for a more enlightened engagement," Barton says. "The fact that he called in Islamic leaders after the Regensburg debacle and opened up lines of communication suggests he recognised he needs to work on these facets. But he has a long way to go in understanding the issues."
[Gee, how condescending! And how predictable!]
Vatican watcher Sam Gregg disagrees, suggesting the Regensburg address was the key to understanding Benedict's approach to both secularism and Islam. Gregg — director of research for an American think tank, the Acton Institute — says the speech was not aimed at Muslims.
"It's actually primarily directed at Europe, and the crisis of faith and reason, which Benedict believes is at the intellectual core of the attempt to abolish religion from public life."
After that speech, Gregg says, European secular thinkers started taking Benedict seriously.
[They had the luxury of ignoring what he had to say before he became Pope, but as Pope, he commands the global pulpit - modern Popes really are uncontested in this respect - so they have no choice, do they?]
"I'm pleasantly surprised by the degree to which many people, including non-Christians, pay attention to what he has to say. It doesn't mean they are becoming Christian, but that they are engaging in the question with a new seriousness.
"This Pope thinks in terms of centuries. It may not be that what he says will revive Christianity in Europe in the next decade, but over the next century the dynamic may change significantly."
If the Pope has pleasantly surprised many, there are some whom he has disappointed. Melbourne Jesuit theologian Bill Uren winces when he hears talk of secularism and relativism. "You need to pick these labels apart and find out what's good and not so good.
He tends to confront the modern world, rather than engage with it."
[That's a semantic quibble that also happens to be fallacious, especially about someone who is unfailingly careful to present his statements in a reasoned manner that even secularists can appreciate. No one is engaging modernity and post-modernity more consistently and in such a constructively challenging manner!]
Uren appreciated the encyclicals — "homiletic, moderate and very welcome" — and that Benedict has softened the "witch-hunt mentality". If he has not been progressive, he has not been as regressive as some feared, Uren feels.
"He's much more a churchman than John Paul II was. He knows the ropes of the church and, rather than issuing thunderbolts, he prefers to work the system." But he hasn't, as many hoped, reformed the Vatican bureaucracy. Nor, Uren complains, has there been
any moderating of any church doctrine.
[Another Jesuit theologian gone far astray. It all goes back to the contradictory stand of Catholic dissidents who believe that Catholic doctrine can be moderated in any way, shape, or form. To 'moderate' anything is to change it!]
"There were whispers about admitting divorced Catholics to communion, but nothing has happened.
The ecumenical movement has to some degree withered on the vine.
[What, pray tell, is Uren's basis for saying this? Benedict's ecumenical initatives in the past 3 years have been remarkable and considerable, and in keeping with what he spontaneously vowed the day after he was elected.] There's been a reversion to some of the pomp and ceremony, the vestments and liturgy." [
Which is, of course, a deliberately deprecatory manner of dismissing any such changes as merely cosmetic rather than symbolic!]
LEADING Australian laywoman Juliette Hughes says the Pope has done nothing to stop the exodus from the church thanks to its strictures on gender, the body and family life.
"For women in particular, who are well over half the congregations, our lack of position in decision-making about matters that intimately affect our own lives is ludicrous."
[She may be a 'leading Australian laywoman' but certainly, not an authentic Catholic!]
Hughes says
most of the Catholics she knows do not respect the church's magisterium (authoritative teaching).
[Birds of a feather....] "They long, as I do, for some sanity to prevail with condoms against AIDS in Africa, the use of contraception full stop, with people who want to end marriages, with women joining the priesthood. Their response has been to gag the messenger. They think they are in damage control and don't realise they are the damage. People like me love our community, our church and our God. We hang on and hope," she says.
[UGH!!! Spoken like a full-blooded feminist who believes she and those who think like her have cornered the 'truth', that 'they are the Church'. and - once again - that the Church can change its teachings to suit their preferences.]
Paul Collins welcomed Benedict's election three years ago, saying only a conservative pope could bring reform. But he now believes Benedict is not the one.
"He's a very good theologian, and he understands the nature of pluralism, which John Paul didn't. But tackling basic questions, such as the shortage of priests or women in the church, these questions that can't be sidestepped aren't even on the agenda, and won't be during this papacy.
"Collegiality (decentralising Vatican power) is so far off the agenda, it's tragic. Local bishops were just altar boys as far as John Paul was concerned. While Benedict sees himself as first among equals,
Rome still wants to micromanage absolutely everything."
[Mr. Collins, you have never been a bishop. You do not speak from personal experience. Have you spoken to some of your former colleagues lately? And have you not read how not a few bishops around the world have issued decrees contradicting the Pope's Summorum Pontificum in their respective dioceses?]
That "everything" certainly includes World Youth Day, which means — as former federal government minister and seminarian Tony Abbott pointed out recently — in Australia, Benedict is more likely to be seen than heard. He won't be giving any news conferences, and is unlikely to explain
why he told Italian priests that Australia is one of the most irreligious countries in the West.
[HE DID???? I must have missed that completely!]
All this means
the Pope generally gets a great run in the media.
[Now, that is news!] As David Richardson, the former Anglican dean of Melbourne and now the Archbishop of Canterbury's ambassador to the Vatican, put it somewhat plaintively: for Anglicans every scandal is a crisis bringing schism ever closer; with the Roman Catholics, "we just move on".
[HUH???? Since when have the media ever given the Roman Catholic Church a pass? If Anglican problems are getting more media attention these days, it is because the Anglican Communion has far more critical issues threatening it now than does the Roman Catholic Church!]
With public anger about the latest abuse controversy, and the cost to the taxpayer of World Youth Day
[What about the well-documented projections of the economic fallout that should more than compensate for what the government is spending - which is, by the way, for public services like infrastructure, transport and security, not for the Church coffers], plenty of Catholics will be hoping Richardson is right.
Barney Zwartz is religion editor.
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The story posted by Benefan as it appeared in the SMH:
The king of God's country
Sydney Morning Herald
July 12, 2008
Joseph Ratzinger has surprised many since becoming Benedict XVI three years ago, writes Barney Zwartz on the eve of the Pope's arrival.
[
The rest is as it appeared in THE AGE, except it does not have the last two paragraphs of Zwartz's article.]
Here is the biographical sketch added by the SMH:
LONG PATH TO THE PAPACY
BORN Joseph Alois Ratzinger on April 16, 1927, in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria, southern Germany, he was the third and youngest child of a policeman.
After his 14th birthday in 1941, he was enrolled by the principal of his boarding school in the Hitler Youth - as required of all 14-year-old German boys - but never attended a meeting.
At 16, he was drafted into the anti-aircraft corps, later training in the infantry, but saw little war action, deserting back to the family home ahead of the Allied advance. He spent a few months in a POW camp, was released at war's end and, with his brother Georg, entered St Michael Seminary in Traunstein. The two were ordained on June 29, 1951.
In 1959, Joseph was made a lecturer at the University of Bonn, beginning a long career as an academic theologian.
In the Second Vatican Council, when he was seen as a reformer, he served as theological consultant to a German cardinal, and in 1966 took the chair in dogmatic theology at Tubingen University, where he penned Introduction To Christianity and wrote that the papal duty was to consider voices of dissent. The church, he said, was too centralised and rule-bound.
In 1977, he became archbishop of Munich and Freising, and in 1981 the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Holy Office, the doctrinal watchdog. By 2000, he was dean of the College of Cardinals, and on April 19, 2005, was elected John Paul II's successor as Pope. He took the name Benedict XVI. He has said the papal role is more like that of a constitutional monarch, rather than an absolute monarch.