August 12-18, 2007 Issue |
Posted 8/7/07 at 11:28 AM
The media is a double-edged sword: It can lift you up, and
it can knock you down. Last year, headlines and commentators expressed surprise
at the gifts the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI had brought to the Church.
Now, their praise has been replaced by finger-pointing at the “gaffes” of the
same Holy Father.
The problem: There’s not that much difference between those
gifts and those gaffes. Consider:
A gift: Pope
Benedict’s theme of friendship with Jesus.
In his homily before the papal conclave, Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger introduced a theme that he would return to again after becoming Pope
Benedict XVI.
He called Catholics to “friendship with Jesus,” invoking the
Roman phrase that identified friends as those with the same likes and same
dislikes.
In his inaugural Mass as Pope, the Holy Father returned to
the same theme, saying, “If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing,
nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No!
Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation.”
He expanded on that theme in many ways afterward — in his
first encyclical, 2006’s Deus Cartias Est (God Is Love) and in his book Jesus
of Nazareth, which he wrote, he said,
“to help foster the growth of a living relationship” with Jesus Christ.
A so-called gaffe:
In his remarks to the bishops of Latin America meeting in Aparecida, Brazil,
Pope Benedict said, “The Utopia of going back to breathe life into the
pre-Columbian religions, separating them from Christ and from the universal
Church, would not be a step forward. Indeed, it would be a step back. In
reality, it would be a retreat towards a stage in history anchored in the
past.”
Later, the Holy Father was quick to acknowledge the
injustices that took place during the colonization of Latin America.
But his original remark was of a piece with the important
theme of his pontificate: Friendship with Jesus isn’t an imposition on a life
that would have been freer without it — it is a liberation for those who would
be diminished without it. Everyone is bettered by that friendship — Indians
included.
A gift: Pope
Benedict’s insistence that God is love.
Hand in hand with his concept of friendship with Jesus is
Pope Benedict’s emphasis on God as love. In his first encyclical, he had
startling things to say. He calls God’s love for his people not just agape love
but eros. In other words, he says God loves us with an almost romantic longing.
The Holy Father even writes: “God’s passionate love for his
people — for humanity — is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great
that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice.”
He has returned to the theme again and again in homilies. In
March 2006, he said: “God loves us in a way that we might call ‘obstinate’ and
enfolds us in his inexhaustible tenderness.”
A so-called gaffe:
On Sept. 12, 2006, the Holy Father gave a lecture about faith and reason — and
the need to reject violence — at the University of Regensburg, Germany. In it,
he quoted a 14th century emperor’s words about the incompatibility of faith and
violence. But he also quoted the emperor’s harsh words about Muhammad, the
founder of Islam — calling them “astonishingly brusque.”
Some Muslims reacted, ironically, with violence — but Pope
Benedict was doing nothing more in his Regensburg address than expressing in
concrete terms the consequences of the truth that God is love — renouncing
violence in the name of God.
A gift:
Benedict’s emphasis on the Eucharist.
All of these lessons are summed up in another constant theme
of the Pope: The Eucharist. In his first message after becoming Pope, Benedict
said: “I ask everyone in the coming months to intensify love and devotion for
Jesus in the Eucharist,” he said, “and to express courageously and clearly
faith in the Real Presence of the Lord, especially by the solemnity and the
correctness of the celebrations.”
It’s another theme he returned to several times, most
importantly in the recent post-synodal apostolic exhortation Sacramentum
Caritatis (The Sacrament of Charity).
A so-called gaffe:
In a Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith document, the Vatican
reiterated the fact that only those Churches that retain the Real Presence of
Christ are authentic.
The document was simply a reiteration of the key truth that
Christ is truly present in the Eucharist. The Vatican is saying that Churches
are Christians gathered with Christ — not gatherings of those who reject the
Eucharist.
Pope Benedict’s pontificate hasn’t been a series of gifts
and gaffes at all, but a consistent application of key themes of the Christian
life.
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