Benedict XVI used to be a pope of paradoxes: the progressive peritus in Vatican II turned conservative gatekeeper of Council teaching, the extraordinarily gifted theologian who limited debate and silenced Catholic academics, above all of the guardian of reform whose startling resignation reformed the Roman Catholic Church in probably the most fundamental way.
His death on the age of 95 was truly the top of an era: He’s the last of the popes (after John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II) directly involved within the Second Vatican Council, which convened from 1962 to 1965. Pope Francis, who was still a Jesuit scholastic on the time, was ordained a priest only in 1969.
It is usually possible that, if the pope who succeeds Pope Francis comes from the Global South again, Benedict often is the last European to function pope for a while to return. It is sort of certain that the age of European dominance within the Church ended with Benedict’s death. Or to be more precise, the dominance of the considering that understands the Church as a European institution, highlighted by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s second reason for selecting Benedict as his papal name—to honor the nice St. Benedict, he said, who “evokes the Christian roots of Europe.”
But one other generation to which Benedict belongs, that of the lads and girls who were scandalized by the worldwide youth protests of 1968 and channeled their shock and concern into conservative movements in culture and politics and religion, stays influential.
Old habits
Within the immediate aftermath of his death, heightened emotions and old habits led to some exaggerated claims.
Jean-Pierre Denis, publisher of the international editions of the La Croix newspaper, began his thoughtful appreciation of Benedict’s considerable mental legacy by describing him as “the last great European mental of the twentieth century” – a remarkable claim, considering that other influential thinkers who made their mark within the last century, including one with whom Benedict engaged in a crucial dialogue, Jurgen Habermas, remain very much alive.
It is usually remarkable that a scholar of the very best quality served as pope; perhaps that is all that Denis meant, that Benedict was a theologian of great influence and consequence, who earned the esteem of other scholars even outside the discipline of theology.
Michael Sean Winters, writing insightfully for the National Catholic Reporter, described Benedict’s decision to resign as “an awesome act of demystification” of the papal office (objectively true) but additionally as “an implicit, unspoken rebuke” to Pope, now Saint, John Paul II and his decision to stay in office “despite the incapacities of old age” (an interpretation, not a fact, which discounts Benedict’s own well-considered reason).
It is feasible to learn from the instance of others without the educational necessarily being an act of criticism, much less a rebuke. It’s true that Benedict didn’t need to wither in office as John Paul II did. As he himself said, in his Latin message announcing his resignation: “I actually have come to the knowledge that my strengths, because of advanced age, aren’t any longer suitable for the right exercise of the Petrine ministry.” But that was his own charism, or special gift: The humility to step aside. His predecessor’s was altogether different: The gift to suffer in public. As Benedict said in his homily at John Paul II’s funeral mass: “he increasingly entered into the communion of Christ’s sufferings … And on this very communion with the suffering Lord, tirelessly and with renewed intensity, he proclaimed the gospel, the mystery of that love which matches to the top.”
Describing the resignation as a rebuke is an old habit of journalism, storifying conflict even when none exists.
Latest York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in a chunk that characteristically offered an alternate history of the fashionable Church, rued that Benedict had “conducted a postpapacy of ambiguous gestures in response to a Vatican that had been delivered, by the mysteries of God’s windfall, to his longtime foes.” That is an old habit of partisans and ideologues, framing reality as a relentless struggle. But Douthat makes it sound as if Benedict’s retirement (at almost 10 years, longer than his papacy) was spent conducting these ambiguous gestures, as a substitute of the virtually uninterrupted lifetime of prayer, contemplation – and unequivocal support for Pope Francis – that it mainly was.
Latest media
As a journalist and a Catholic, I actually have at all times been fascinated by Benedict’s understanding of the best way the media works.
I understand that other people helped within the drafting of, say, his messages for World Communications Day, but comparing his messages with those of Pope Francis, to provide an example, immediately shows that their considering, their personalities, are reflected within the words they decide to release under their very own name.
Lots of Benedict’s WCD messages centered on what he called the “digital continent,” the brand new “agora” created by digital technology. In 2009, he touched on an important feature of social media networks like Facebook. “The concept of friendship has enjoyed a renewed prominence within the vocabulary of the brand new digital social networks which have emerged in the previous couple of years … We should always watch out … never to trivialize the concept or the experience of friendship.”
In 2011, he noted that the brand new digital technologies “allow people to fulfill one another beyond the confines of space and of their very own culture,” after which asked: “Who’s my ‘neighbor’ on this latest world?” In 2013, in his last message, he warned us: “Believers are increasingly aware that, unless the Good News is made known also within the digital world, it might be absent within the experience of many individuals for whom this existential space is essential.”
These insights deepen my disappointment at his alternative history of Vatican II, since it is confoundingly media-centric. In 2013, addressing Roman clergy, Benedict asserted that “there was the Council of the Fathers – the true Council – but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council apart, and the world perceived the Council through the latter, through the media.” He added: “For the media, the Council was a political struggle, an influence struggle between different trends int he Church.”
But the truth is, the Council was also an influence struggle. As insider accounts prove, there was a “fierce battle” (Time’s Robert Blair Kaiser), a duel between nearly all of the bishops and the reactionary Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani and his allies (peddling “papalist nonsense,” the peritus Yves Congar wrote in his diary). Sometimes, conflict does exist, and journalists do right to report on it.
True legacy
Where does this paradoxical pope’s true legacy lie?
While he has been criticized for his own handling of clerical sexual abuse cases when he was Archbishop of Munich, and continues to be criticized for his predecessor’s inaction, he acted decisively when he was head of the Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith. Thomas Reese, the Jesuit editor who was forced to resign from America magazine due to Benedict, wrote: “When his congregation was assigned abuse cases, the disciplinarian tendencies that led him to police theologians allowed him to chop through canonical niceties to expel a whole bunch, perhaps hundreds, of abusers from the priesthood. His response was never perfect, but he did understand and cope with the issue quicker than another Vatican official, including John Paul.” When he was pope, he removed an abusive religious founder from the ministry, and met with victims of abuse.
His writings will proceed to encourage many. His Introduction to Christianity, first published in 1968, stays a model of clarity; his many books, his three encyclicals, his Jesus trilogy (written when he was already pope), will proceed to attract latest readers (and old ones ready for rereading). He had the teacher’s gift for explaining even probably the most complicated of subjects. It should come as no surprise that he was the person in command of John Paul’s project to publish the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “The undeniable fact that after an era of very strong theological and ecclesial debates and tensions, inside just a few years, that’s, already by 1992, the work got here to fruition in a largely convincing way has something miraculous about it,” wrote his former spokesman, Federico Lombardi SJ.
Finally, his assertion of what he called the “hermeneutic of continuity and reform” will for a very long time be heard otherwise, by those preferring continuity and by those that seek reform of and within the Church, but his decision to resign the papacy, the primary such instance in 600 years, could only have been possible because he followed that hermeneutic to the very end. He believed in each; he could resign since the Church allows reform, and he could resign in full confidence since the Church guarantees continuity.
Truly a pope of paradoxes. – Rappler.com
Veteran journalist John Nery is a Rappler columnist, editorial consultant, and program host. “Within the Public Square” airs on Rappler social media platforms every Wednesday at 8 pm.