Growing into role of Benedict

By Lisa Palmieri-Billig

Pope Benedict XVI, or Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the media continue to refer to him, is no stranger to Israel or to the Catholic Church's present commitment to serious, respectful dialogue with Judaism.

In 1994, he came to Jerusalem as a guest speaker at an international, interreligious conference on "Religious Leadership in a Secular Society" organized by Rabbi David Rosen, presently the international director for interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee. His opening remark was: "The history of relations between Israel and Christianity is filled with blood and tears... After Auschwitz, the mission of reconciliation and acceptance cannot be delayed."

Paradoxically, it is most probably his German background that has made Ratzinger especially sensitive to the Jewish people. One could compare his sensitivity, born of the soul-searching of a man born into German society, with the sensitivity of his predecessor, John Paul II, who was born in Poland, a victim of Nazi Germany. The past and future popes can thus be said to be bound by common personal memories of the evils of the Holocaust.

When I interviewed him for the Italian monthly Studi Cattolici during his stay in Jerusalem, Ratzinger referred to the return of Jews to the Land of Israel: "I think it is very important that Jews, even if they live all over the world, have a homeland, a point of reference, live in the land of their fathers as a people in continuity with their own history and the promise given to their forefathers."

A short while after this, Pope John Paul II uncoincidentally stated that "the Jewish people have a right to a land of their own" – adding that Palestinians too have a right to their own state.

Since Ratzinger has served as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 1981, thus furnishing the theological guidelines for the papacy, his influence on (or agreement with) John Paul II's outreach to Israel and Judaism has been evident.

Asked at the time, whether Israel had special meaning for Christianity, he replied, "I think yes, certainly, but without rushing to theological conclusions, because the State of Israel was created by secular thought and is in itself a secular state. However, this fact has a great religious value because this people is not simply a people like any other. They have always maintained ties with their great history and therefore find themselves in this Holy Land, the Holy Land of the history of all three monotheistic religions. This, of course, also bears a message for Christians."

Ratzinger is also capable of wide smiles. He smiled widely during his acceptance speech when he referred to himself as "a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord," following the papacy of "the great pope, John Paul II." This same wide smile was present when he sat in the front row at the Jerusalem conference, between France's former chief rabbi, Rene-Samuel Sirat, and the Greek Orthodox ecumenical metropolitan, Patriarch Damaskimos.

In his 1994 speech, which reflected theological positions not yet abreast of the Jewish-Catholic dialogue taking place in the US and elsewhere, he asked himself whether there can be a true reconciliation between Christianity and Judaism without abandoning faith.

"An affirmative reply", he said, "is not only fruit of a personal opinion but can be found in the message of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published by the Catholic Church as an authentic article of faith."

In an interview published in the June/July 1990 issue of Midstream, Ratzinger reflected on what was then the draft version of the Catechism. He spoke about his efforts in "overcoming – going beyond – those old legalistic interpretations of the scriptures that are typical of certain so-called liberal Catholic circles – which portray Jesus as breaking with the pharasaic interpretations of the scriptures, presented as overly legalistic... the old stereotypes continue to survive even after the Second Vatican Council and despite successive documents in some of these groups that defined themselves as liberal. But we do not accept these views. We want to support the Secretariat [the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with Jews] "in pointing out that these views are not correct."

Ratzinger sees a "profound continuity" between the Old and New Testaments, while at the same time admits to profound differences.

"But our intentions in writing the Catechism were to make it very clear that without the Old Testament, without continuous contacts with an ever-living and ever-enduring Judaism, Christianity could not be true to its own origins," he said.

"The people of Israel have always, and justly so, maintained their conviction that they are 'the chosen people.' Yet it was our one and only God who made this choice – wasn't it? – in the context of a universal plan, as we can see in the Old Testament. But this fact of being a chosen people did not prevent rabbis in ancient or medieval times, or above all, in modern times, from believing at the same time that God gives his love equally to all human beings."

Ratzinger's conservative theological positions have, admittedly, raised concern among Protestants, Buddhists, other religions and even among Jews. Publications he edited caused controversy in the past. However, his basic beliefs and commitments regarding Jews and Israel are expressed well in these personal statements.

His public speeches after John Paul II's death were deemed by observers here as containing moral depth and cultural richness. Apparently, he was considered by his peers to the leader to "bring the people back into the churches after John Paul II succeeded in calling them out into the squares," as one TV announcer stated.

It will be difficult for many people in Rome who know him personally to call him Pope Benedict XVI. Vatican correspondents with whom he has had many conversations, continue to refer to him as Cardinal Ratzinger in their reports.

It can be expected that Ratzinger's personal background, his world views and deep convictions will allow him to grow into the role of pope, as growth and transformation frequently characterize the change that comes over persons invested with the responsibilities of power.

The news of his election is good news for those concerned that relations between the Vatican and Israel, between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people, continue along the road so diligently and fervidly paved by John Paul II.

The Remarkable Patrick Henry College

By Anthony Esolen

Today I received a request to write a short article on Pope Benedict XVI from a club called the De Tocqueville Society, in a small college in Northern Virginia.

That such a request came was no surprise. Its provenance is, and cheeringly so. For this De Tocqueville Society is made up of a group of students at the new Patrick Henry College, founded by Mike Farris, the President of the Home School Legal Defense Association. More than ninety percent of the college’s students were homeschooled. If there’s a Roman Catholic in the bunch, I’ve yet to hear about it, and I’ve been to that campus twice to give lectures.

More on that in a moment. I could spend all evening singing the praises of PHC (as the students fondly call it), but let me share one discovery I made that should gratify Touchstone readers. The first time I spoke there, two years ago, I was stunned to meet young men and women who—who were young men and women. I am not stretching the truth; go to Purcellville and see it for yourselves if you doubt it; I believe my wife took a couple of pictures, just to quiet the naysayers. The young men stand tall and look you in the eye—they don’t skulk, they don’t scowl and squirm uncomfortably in the back chairs as they listen to yet another analysis of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, or one of the healthier poems of Sylvia Plath. They’re frank and generous and respectful, but they hold their own in an argument, and they are eager to engage you in those. They are comfortable in their skins; they wear their manhood easily. And the young ladies are beautiful. They don’t wither away in class, far from it; but they wear skirts, they are modest in their voices and their smiles, they clearly admire the young men and are esteemed in turn; they are like creatures from a faraway planet, one sweeter and saner than ours.

Two years ago I spoke to them about medieval Catholic drama. They are evangelicals, half of them majors in Government, the rest, majors in Liberal Arts. They kept me and my wife in that room for nearly three hours after the talk was over. “Doctor Esolen, what you say about the habits of everyday life—to what extent is it like what Jean Pierre de Coussade calls ‘the sacrament of the present moment’?” “Doctor Esolen, do you see any connections between the bodiliness of this drama and the theology of Aleksandr Schmemann?” “Doctor Esolen, you have spoken a great deal about our recovery of a sense of beauty, but don’t you think that artists can also use the grotesque as a means of bringing people to the truth?” “You’ve suggested to us that Christians need to reclaim the Renaissance as our heritage, yet we are told that that was an age of the worship of man for his own sake. To what extent is the art of that period ours to reclaim?” And on and on, until nearly midnight.

The questions were superior to any that I have ever heard from a gathering of professors—and alas, I’ve been to many of those. I mean not only superior in their enthusiasm and their insistence, but in their penetrating to the heart of the problem, their willingness to make connections apparently far afield but really quite apropos, and their sheer beauty—I can think of no better word for it.

A few weeks ago I was in town for another talk, on the resurrection of the body. The Holy Father had passed away. At supper, ten or fifteen of the students packed our table, to ask questions before the talk. They were reverent and extraordinarily well informed; most especially they were interested in the Theology of the Body. The questions on that topic continued after the lecture, and I had the same experience I’d had before, but now without the surprise.

And these are the young people who are devoting an entire issue of their journal to the thought of Cardinal Ratzinger, now the new head of the Roman Catholic Church. They are hungry to know about him; in the next week or two they will do what our slatternly tarts and knaves, I mean our journalists, have never done and will not trouble themselves to do, and that is to read what Benedict XVI has said, read it with due appreciation for their differences with him, and due deference to a holy and humble man called by Christ to be a light not only to Roman Catholics but to all the nations.

These students don’t know it, but in their devotion to their new school (they are themselves the guards, the groundskeepers, the janitors; they ‘own’ the school in a way that is hard to explain to outsiders), they live the community life extolled by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum; in their steadfastness to the truth they are stalwart participators in the quest set out by John Paul II in Fides et Ratio; in their welcoming of me and, God bless them, of the good Benedict XVI, they live in the true spirit of Lumen Gentium, that greathearted document of the council so often invoked for the lame tolerance of every betrayal of the ancient faith. And for what it’s worth, they are readers of Touchstone Magazine.

Be silent, Greeleys and Dowds of the world. These young people have you whipped, if for no other reason than that they believe in the One who is Truth, and who sets us free. How can I praise these my young brothers and sisters any more highly? God bless them and Patrick Henry College. And the rest of us, let’s keep an eye on them. We’ll be seeing quite a harvest from that seedbed!

Benedict XVI

By Richard Neuhaus

Within hours of the announcement Habemus Papam from the loggia of St. Peter's, those who have for years viewed Joseph Ratzinger as the embodiment of all they think is wrong with the Church were publicly exhibiting (to paraphrase Churchill) magnanimity in defeat. Led by Hans Küng, Ratzinger's self-anointed nemesis, they proposed that Ratzinger should be given a grace period, perhaps a hundred days, to demonstrate that he has repented of his reactionary ways.

The responsibilities of his old work, as a prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the responsibilities of his new work, as pope, are significantly different. The pope, it is rightly said, must strive to be the father (as in "pope") of all the faithful--which is a challenge for him but a greater challenge to those who are dubiously faithful.

With the election of Pope Benedict XVI, the curtain has fallen on the long-running drama of the myth of "the spirit of Vatican II," in which the revolution mandated by the Council was delayed by the timidity of Paul VI and temporarily derailed for twenty-plus years by the regressive John Paul II, as the Church inexorably moved toward the happy denouement of "the next pope" who would resume the course of progressive accommodation to the wisdom of the modern world. The curtain has fallen and the audience has long since left, except for a few diehards who say they are giving the new management a hundred days to revive the show. Some of them are perhaps thinking of going to another theater. There are worse things than not being a Catholic--when it is made unmistakably clear that being a Catholic is not what one is.

I very much doubt that Pope Benedict is going to engage in wholesale excommunications, but I have no doubt he will encourage people to ponder anew what is entailed in being in communion with the Church. He has over the years made evident that he believes we are engaged in a great battle for the soul of Western Civilization and, indeed, the soul of the world. The choice of the name is important. He is not John Paul III. That might have invited invidious comparisons with his illustrious and inimitable predecessor, John Paul the Great, now entombed close by St. Peter. It might also have suggested that the curtain has not fallen on the dramatization of the mythology of "the spirit of Vatican II." The first round of commentaries proposed that the choice of a name is an allusion is Benedict XV, an early twentieth-century pope of limited distinction apart from his failed effort to stop World War I. I am rather confident, however, that the proper allusion is to the original St. Benedict, the father of western monasticism. In a time of deep shadows, the Benedictine movement sparked the spiritual, cultural, and moral rejuvenation of Europe.

Much has been made of the supposed contrast between John Paul II's confident expectation of a "springtime of evangelization" and Joseph Ratzinger's frequent references to a smaller but more faithful Church which has internalized the words of Jesus that the seed must fall into the ground and die before it can bear much fruit. In this account, John Paul the ebullient is to be contrasted with Ratzinger the dour.

There is a measure of truth in that contrast. Some of it is related to differences in personality, some of it to differences in intellectual formation. Avery Cardinal Dulles summarized the witness of John Paul in the phrase "prophetic humanism." The Ratzinger of the past gave--and the Benedict of the future, will, I expect, continue to give--voice to a more explicit and insistent Christocentric humanism.

This is not to say that John Paul was not Christocentric. There were few passages from the Council that he quoted more often than declaration from Gaudium et Spes that Jesus Christ is not only the revelation of God to man but the revelation of man to himself. The suggested contrast between John Paul and Benedict is not a disagreement, but Ratzinger's accent has been more explicitly on the crucified Christ and the necessarily cruciform experience of the Church through time.

It has been suggested that the different accents may reflect the fact that Ratzinger is more Augustinian in his theology while John Paul was more of a Thomist. Both accents issue in the bold admonition, "Be not afraid." That signature phrase of John Paul has been emphatically repeated by Benedict XVI. The crucified Christ is the risen and victorious Christ who, in a favorite passage of Ratzinger's, tells the disciples, "Fear not little flock, it is the Father's good pleasure to give to you the kingdom." With an emphasis on the little in the little flock.

On the basis of his copious writings as Ratzinger, we know that Benedict is robustly skeptical of sociological depictions and analyses of the Church. The general media, as well as many scholars, are obsessed with statistical assessments of the Church's fortunes and misfortunes in history. For Pope Benedict these assessments are almost beside the point. The media will have a hard time adjusting to this. They do not want to talk about revealed truth or the redemption worked by Jesus Christ. Benedict insists that to speak of the Church is to speak of Christ. Which may result in the secular elites in control of the commanding heights of culture declining to talk about either.

The circumstance was nicely summed up by a comment of Ted Koppel on Nightline the night of the election. The subject turned to interreligious dialogue, and I had referred to the radical Christocentrism of the new pope. "So which is it, Father," Koppel asked, "Christ or interreligious dialogue?"

But, of course, it is interreligious dialogue because of, and upon the premise of, Jesus Christ as the redeemer of the whole world, including the world's religions in which, as Catholic teaching holds, elements of truth and grace are to be discovered. The same confusion arises with respect to Dominus Iesus, a document issued by Ratzinger's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith a few years ago, which is regularly cited as claiming that "Catholicism is more true than other religions and even other Christian churches." But of course. There is but one Christ and therefore, at the deep level of theological understanding, there can be only one Church, and the Catholic Church claims to be that Church most fully and rightly ordered through time. That is not in tension with ecumenism; it is the foundation of the ecumenical quest for full communion among all Christians.

The argument that Ratzinger has tried to make through these many years, and the argument that Benedict will undoubtedly be making, is that there is no tension, never mind conflict, between truth and love. The caricature is that liberals are big on love while conservatives are big on truth. As Ratzinger said in his homily before the conclave, love without truth is blind and truth without love is empty. Without truth, love is mere sentimentality and, without love, truth is sterile.

This is, of course. in perfect continuity with John Paul's favored passage from Gaudium et Spes that Christ--who is the way, the truth, and the life--is the revelation of man to himself. If Christ is the truth about everyone and every thing, then the way forward is by following the way of Christ. This is the genuine progressivism proposed to the Church and the world by John Paul and by Benedict. The Church does not seek to be counter-cultural, but it is unavoidably counter to the modern mindset in proposing that fidelity and continuity, not autonomy and novelty, are the paths toward a more promising future.

The chatter goes on as to whether Benedict will change this or that "policy" of John Paul, as though each new pope reinvents Catholicism. There is, beyond doubt, development in the life of the Church, but on questions of great theological and moral moment there is not change. The office of the papacy is very limited. The pope's job is to defend, preserve, and transmit the "faith once delivered to the saints," as that faith is received in Scripture and Spirit-guided tradition. A pope who acts as though doctrine is no more than a policy option is a very bad pope.

Within the continuing tradition, the Second Vatican Council is an extraordinary moment of development and refinement. Among the many achievements of the pontificate of John Paul II, some would say the most important achievement, was to secure the hermeneutic for the interpretation of that great council. Joseph Ratzinger was an invaluable partner in that achievement, and the partner has now become the heir who will build upon that achievement.

The day of his election was, in the calendar of the Church, the day of Leo IX, the last great German pope. Ratzinger is more a Bavarian than a German, Bavaria having a distinct identity that goes back long before the Prussian invention of modern Germany in the nineteenth century. But I am sure he sees some striking parallels between the eleventh-century reign of Leo and the needs of our time. Which is, once again, to recognize the bond with the first Benedict who set out to reconstruct, beginning with the Church, a civilization that had fallen into ruins. The new pope's most determined opponents will be those who, in the words of St. Paul, boast of their shame and demand that the Church not only acquiesce in but give her blessing to the devastation conventionally called progress. The achievements of modernity, which are considerable, are fragile and prone to self-destruction unless grounded in the truth, and the truth, ultimately, is the Son of God who, as St. John puts it, was sent not to condemn the world but to save the world.

Pope Benedict XVI is seventy-eight years old, and some speak of a brief transitional pontificate. I do not expect it will be brief, and I am sure it will not be transitional, if transitional means a holding action until the next pontificate. He has very definite views on what needs to be reformed in the Church, including much that in recent decades was called reform, and he will in his self-effacing but determined way press for changes in the service of a continuity that has too often been recklessly violated.

In this respect, he will be carrying forward the work of John Paul the Great in bringing together again the great themes of the Second Vatican Council: ressourcement and aggiornamento. The reappropriation of the tradition and the conversation with the contemporary world are not two agendas, one dubbed conservative and the other liberal, but the two essential dimensions of the renewal of the Church.

And, if the Council is right in saying that the Church is the sacrament of the world, the renewal of Church is the way toward the renewal of the world, as the first Benedict believed and so powerfully demonstrated.

Cardinals Sing a Tough Tune

by Rema Rahman

Hardline Catholics got their man Tuesday, when the College of Cardinals elected its dean, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as the 265th pope.

Soon after the white smoke appeared from a Sistine Chapel chimney—at about 5:50 p.m. Italian time, 11:50 a.m. on the East Coast of the U.S.—a cardinal announced to the throng gathered in St. Peter's Square that Ratzinger was the pick, and that he would take the papal name of Benedict XVI.

Ratzinger had been considered a strong but perhaps not strong enough candidate at the outset. He had made a high-profile push for declaring the previous pope, John Paul II, a saint in the days immediately following his April 2 death.

Something of a liberal at the beginning of his career, Ratzinger is generally considered to have been a driving force behind several of the Catholic Church's strictest and most social divisive moves in recent years. In particular, he has held the line on homosexuality, women's ordination, and the vein of progressive thinking known as liberation theology.

Going into the secret conclave, many observers wondered whether the cardinals would seek a kind of compromise figure, but that was not to be. Ratzinger secured the necessary two-thirds of the vote, from the 115 cardinals, in only the second ballot on the second day of voting.

Ratzinger, 78, made his first appearance shortly after the white smoke and ringing bells signaled his election. He gave his first blessing as pope to the cheering crowd. The new pope called himself "a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord" and said he was consoled that "the Lord can work and act even with insufficient means."

Cardinal Ratzinger's Challenge

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

ROME -- The words broke like a thunderclap inside St. Peter's Basilica. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, addressing the world's cardinals just hours before they sequestered themselves Monday to choose the next leader of the world's 1 billion Catholics, decided to define this conclave.

"We are moving," he declared, toward "a dictatorship of relativism . . . that recognizes nothing definite and leaves only one's own ego and one's own desires as the final measure."

The modern world, Ratzinger insisted, has jumped "from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, up to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and on and on."

Those are fighting words. They guaranteed that Ratzinger, who was Pope John Paul II's enforcer of orthodoxy, will either set the church's course -- or offer his fellow cardinals the ideas they choose to react against. Decades from now many conservative Catholics will see the war against the "dictatorship of relativism" as their central mission. It's not a line you forget.

What makes this papal election so unusual is not the normal disagreement over specific issues. The odd part is that the cardinals disagree fundamentally over what the election is really about because they differ in their judgments of what are the most important issues confronting the church.

Ratzinger, who is German, spoke for the conservative side of a culture-war argument that is of primary interest to Europe and North America. When Ratzinger said on Monday that "to have a clear faith according to the church's creed is today often labeled fundamentalism," his words were undoubtedly welcomed by religious conservatives far outside the ranks of the Catholic Church. One can also imagine that liberals of various stripes shuddered.

But for the many cardinals here from the Third World -- 20 of the 115 voting are from Latin America, 11 from Africa, 10 from Asia -- the battle over relativism is far less important than the poverty that afflicts so many of their flock. Some of these cardinals -- Claudio Hummes of Brazil is a representative figure -- may share points in common with Ratzinger on doctrine. But for them the struggle against suffering and social injustice is part of their lives every single day.

Many of these same cardinals, and some in Europe and the United States, place a higher priority on Christianity's rekindled competition with Islam and the urgency of Muslim-Christian dialogue. It's not clear where Ratzinger's approach would take these efforts.

Ratzinger, in other words, is now central to two very different dynamics inside the conclave. Cardinals will be asked to decide -- by voting for or against him or someone he favors -- whether Ratzinger's theological approach is right. And they will decide whether Ratzinger's priorities involve the things that matter.

It makes perfect sense that Ratzinger would be the decisive player in defining the church after the papacy of John Paul II. Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the Vatican spokesman, once said that John Paul's choice of Ratzinger as his doctrinal chief was "one of the most personal choices of his pontificate."

Ratzinger is a brilliant, tough-minded intellectual who started out as moderately liberal and -- like so many American neoconservatives -- developed a mistrust of the left because of the student revolt of the 1960s. He once said that "the 1968 revolution" turned into "a radical attack on human freedom and dignity, a deep threat to all that is human." The pope knew what he was getting with Ratzinger, and he got what he wanted.

With Ratzinger playing the tough cop against dissent, John Paul was free to be more expansive. Rocco Buttiglione, a philosopher who was close to the late pope, captured their division of labor perfectly in an interview some years ago. "The pope has more the gift of synthesis, because of his office," Buttiglione said. "Cardinal Ratzinger has more the gift of polemic."

There was also the matter of their personalities. Where John Paul was sunny, Ratzinger was serious -- and a worrier. Walls in Rome are plastered with memorial posters to John Paul that carry his famous quotation, "Be not afraid." Cardinal Ratzinger declared yesterday that the church has much to fear.

Ratzinger now carries on his battle without the charismatic support of his friend. He is proposing that the church take one aspect of John Paul's synthesis -- the battle against relativism reflected in doctrinal rigor -- and make it the late pope's central legacy. The cardinals who marched solemnly into the Sistine Chapel yesterday afternoon will be deciding if that is the right fight for the future.