While Pope Benedict XVI is undoubtedly a much different pope than John Paul II was, the depth of the current pontiff’s pastoral concerns are, surprisingly to some, as deep as his predecessor’s. Few would have foreseen that such a brilliant, often polemical man could possess these qualities.
Yet writer after writer in “Benedict XVI: Essays and Reflections on His Papacy,” a collection of the thoughts from Catholic America, extols not the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s intellect, as formidable as that is, but his personality.
Contributors tell of their encounters with Benedict the pastoral pope, as when he came to the United States and reached out to victims of abusive priests. Or when he wrote a pastoral letter to Chinese Catholics, again reaching out and asking for unity within the Chinese Catholic Church fractured into the underground and the governmentally sanctioned parts.
Or when he began to be seen as a “green pope” for putting solar panels on the Vatican and appealing to safeguard the environment.
As one writer notes, he has made a unique contribution to the environmental movement by linking “natural ecology” with “human ecology.”
In other words, how it goes with our families and communities is how it goes with our treatment of nature.
The current pontiff has continued Pope John Paul II’s concern for human rights, as when he linked human rights with forgiveness, and noted that peace was “relational.”
Yet the contributors to “Essays and Reflections on His Papacy” are nonetheless impressed by the former Cardinal Ratzinger’s deep intellect. He critiques the Protestant over-reliance on Scripture (“sola scriptura”) for undervaluing tradition and making “faith depend on the always-changing findings of scholars.”
This traditionalist pope therefore appreciates liturgy, sharing in the concern of many American Catholics over the sloppiness in postconciliar worship.
Pope Benedict’s traditional stance is likewise apparent in “The Ratzinger Reader,” a collection of his writings as a “private theologian,” that is, when he publishes essays and books as an individual rather than when speaking as a Vatican official.
The reader includes succinct commentaries by the editors, which helpfully situate Cardinal Ratzinger’s thoughts within the secular versus Catholic battleground in the decades following the Second Vatican Council.
The commentators, Lieven Boeve and Gerard Mannion, argue that Cardinal Ratzinger has not deeply changed his basic positions, even though many others, such as Father Hans Kung, have accused the current pontiff of just that.
Cardinal Ratzinger highlighted a more traditionalist position as the 1970s wore on.
However, this was not so much a reactionary stance as it was the position of a priest who was deeply concerned with the secularization not only of Western society, but within the church itself, as many seminaries, religious orders and Catholic schools lost a sense of being Catholic.
In one writing, Cardinal Ratzinger calls on the faithful to become more deliberate in the way in which Catholic education or health care is indeed Catholic.
Some of the writings testify to the polemical style with which Cardinal Ratzinger often defended the faith. His strong words extend to his ecclesiastical brethren who misunderstood the council: “The tragic one-sidedness of the last conciliar debates came about because they were controlled by the trauma of underdevelopment and by a pathos of ‘caught-up modernity.’”
The polemical nature of some selections in no way reduces the elegance, precision and clarity of Cardinal Ratzinger’s writings.
This reader also indicates why he is becoming so popular with Catholics. Not only is he the pastoral pope, as witnessed by “Essays and Reflections on His Papacy,” but he is one of the last truly great European voices against the continent’s wholesale rejection of its Christian heritage.
SIC: CSF/USA