From the Inbox I 22 April 2005

Today I have a big selection of stories on Benedict XVIth. (Saying that name gives me such pleasure.) In a day or two he will, for the secular media, become just the pope, so read up on him now. Or just the pope until he says something secular editors dislike or succeeds in a way they can't ignore. Or, they're hoping, fails. Stories on other subjects appear in "From the Inbox II" below.

But first, one item on John Paul the Great: From National Review Online, Colleen Carroll Campbell's No "Mixed" Legacy. Among the cheering news she reports:

They may also be more committed. Last year, the Vatican announced that there were nearly 50,000 more seminarians in 2001 than in 1978, and the attrition rate for seminarians had fallen during John Paul's pontificate from 9 percent in 1978 to 6.9 percent in 2004. In his Holy Thursday letter to priests that year, the pope acknowledged that there is still a serious shortage of priests in many parts of the world, but he also thanked God for this "promising springtime of vocations" that had begun to bloom.

Now to Benedict XVIth: First, an e-mail friend who is among the elders of the Bruderhof Community in England wrote:

Many Greetings! I imagine there will be celebrations in the Mills house tonight! We were all very happy to hear the glad news — a man after our heart as well! We actually know him quite well and have had some correspondence over the years. We have met him on a couple of occasions in Rome and Germany. We thank God for what was given.

He sent the link to an article on Benedict they've just published.

Christianity Today's website offers an article on the cardinal written in 1998 by Richard John Neuhaus.

Also from CT, From "Erstwhile Liberal" to "Vatican Enforcer", a review of John Allen's biography of the cardinal, published in 2000. (Reading Allen now — he's the very good Vatican correspondent for the otherwise wretched National Catholic Reporter — I suspect he'd write a very different book today.) The review contains one sour note:

Hans Küng . . . once suggested "Ratzinger had sold his soul for power." That's a scathing, and probably unfair, indictment.

"Probably unfair." Nice of him.

Sandro Magister offers his usually interesting analysis in Benedict XVI: The Pope and His Agenda. He explains the pope's conservatism, which is vastly more insightful and supple than his critics claim:

His was a strange conservatism, in any case. It was apt to disturb, rather than pacify, the Church. One of his favorite models is Saint Charles Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan who, after the Council of Trent, did nothing less than “reconstruct the Catholic Church, which was almost destroyed in the area around Milan as well, without returning to the Middle Ages to do so; on the contrary, he created a modern form of the Church.”

. . . Benedict XVI does not dream of the mass conversion of whole peoples for the Church of tomorrow. For many regions, he foresees a minority Christianity, but he wants this to be “creative.” He prefers the missionary impulse to timid dialogue with nonbelievers and men of other faiths.

Magister goes on to list the ways in which then-Cardinal Ratzinger publicly disagreed with John Paul II, and his argument with Cardinal Walter Kasper about the relation of the universal church and the local churches, ending with a description of "The Ratzinger formula" for relations with Orthodoxy:

the thesis maintained by the present pope on relations with separated Christians, and called this “fundamental for ecumenical dialogue.” One written form of this thesis maintains that “in regard to papal primacy, Rome must demand from the Orthodox Churches nothing more than was established and practiced during the first millennium.”

And following that is Magister's very helpful analysis of the challenges facing Benedict XVIth.

Jonathan Witt, author of The Gods Must Be Tidy! in the July/August, sends this: Science May Have a New Friend and Neo-Darwinism a New Foe.

From the New York Times, Pope May Color Debate in U.S. Over "Life" Issues Like Abortion. The liberal Catholics it quotes all repeat the established line that current Catholic attention to abortion and marriage — the issues on which they prefer to be Democrats rather than Catholics — is "selective." Which means, "I don't have to defend the unborn because a lot of Republicans support the death penalty and the war in Iraq."

The story contains some good news, though not surprising good news.

Professor Green [John Green of the University of Akron] said the new pope was unlikely to disappoint those conservative American Catholics."The new pope is very much likely to continue the policies of the late pope," he said."This developing alliance of religious traditionalists will continue, with the blessing of the Catholic hierarchy. Also, I think we'll see the Catholic hierarchy continue to be very visible and active on political issues, with the 'life' issues and the marriage issue front and center."

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan declares in Why They Ran,
"The new pope speaks to the inner adult in all of us."

Also from the WSJ, George Weigel's Light in a New Dark Age compares Benedict XVIth with St. Benedict. Among his observations:

As with the program, so with the man: He is a Benedict in the depths of his interior life and in his intellectual accomplishment. Benedict XVI has an encyclopedic knowledge of two millennia of theology, and indeed of the cultural history of the West. He is more the shy, monastic scholar than the ebullient public personality of his predecessor; yet he has shown an impressive capacity for a different type of public "presence" in his brilliantly simple homily at John Paul II's funeral and in his first appearance as pope.

He has known hardship: He knows the modern temptations of totalitarianism (paganism wedded to technology) from inside the Third Reich; he has been betrayed by former students (like the splenetic Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff) and former colleagues (like Hans Kung, a man of far less scholarly accomplishment and infinitely less charity). His critics say he is dour and pessimistic.

Yet I take it as an iron law of human personality that a man is known by his musical preferences; and Benedict XVI is a Mozart man, who knows that Mozart is what the angels play when they perform for the sheer joy of it. Indeed, and notwithstanding the cartoon Joseph Ratzinger, the new pope is a man of Christian happiness who has long asked why, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, summoned to be a "new Pentecost" for the Catholic Church, so much of the joy has gone out of Catholicism.

Over some 17 years of conversation with him, I have come to know him as a man who likes to laugh, and who can laugh because he is convinced that the human drama is, in the final analysis, a divine comedy.

In Culture in Crisis published on National Review Online, Michael Novak describes the new pope's analysis of relativism.

In today’s liberal democracies, Ratzinger has observed, the move to atheism is not, as it was in the 19th century, a move toward the objective world of the scientific rationalist. That was the “modern” way, and it is now being rejected, in favor of a new “post-modern” way. The new way is not toward objectivity, but toward subjectivism; not toward truth as its criterion, but toward power. This, Ratzinger fears, is a move back toward the justification of murder in the name of “tolerance” and subjective choice.

He continues to explain what Ratzinger is defending, which is not the simple dogmatism of which his critics accuse him.

From the English newspaper The Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore, a Catholic convert, describes the hopeful mind of the new pope in Pope Benedict has a sense of history. Benedict's isn't a thoughtless hopefulness, of course, but all the stronger and more compelling for that:

In his cast of mind the new Pope is rather more sombre than his predecessor. He is more disturbed by false argument, less optimistic about the immediate prospects for mankind. He believes, as he told the conclave this week, that the "dictatorship of relativism" is tyrannising the modern world.

And so his favoured images are of survival, preservation of treasure, and of the regrowth of the Church from a tiny grain of mustard seed. He admires Englishmen such as Thomas More and Cardinal Newman - "a man who listens to his conscience and for whom the truth that he has recognised... is above approval and acceptance, is really an ideal and a model for me".

The Catholic weblog Thumos has several good items, including the "Sullivan Alert Level," referring to Andrew Sullivan, who has taken as a great blow the election of another pope who accepts the moral law. There is a certain hysterical self-pity in Sullivan's reaction that is, unfortunately from his point of view, almost stereotypically homosexual. As unsympathetic as I am with his point of view, when I read him I want to take him aside and say, "For you own good, take it like a man, Andrew."

A very interesting article from the Asia Times' "Spengler": The crescent and the conclave. He suggests the conversion of Muslims an answer for Europe's demographic decline.

Islam surrounds traditional society with a spear-wall, and proposes to extend the realm of traditional society, the ummah, by dominating the world around it through jihad (see Islam: Religion or political ideology?, August 10, 2004). Christian missionaries will get nowhere in Muslim countries except into trouble. But Muslims in Europe no longer live in traditional society, much as they might attempt to re-create it on European soil. As long as they are strangers on European soil, they are vulnerable to Christian proselytizing, if there exist a Christian agency with the temerity to attempt it.

After developing this argument, he suggests that "If the Church were to devote its shrunken but still formidable intellectual apparatus to such matters as Koranic criticism, all heaven would break loose, if I mix my metaphors right.":

Years ago I argued that Koranic criticism "yet may turn out to be the worm in the foundation of radical Islam" (You say you want a reformation?,
August 5, 2003). Unlike the Christian and Jewish scriptures, revealed to men who heard the revelation in their own voices, the Archangel Gabriel dictated every word of the Holy Koran to the Prophet Mohammed. As Toby Lester reported in the January 1999 edition of The Atlantic Monthly:

"To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community," says R Stephen Humphreys, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "The Koran is the charter for the community, the document that called it into existence. And ideally — though obviously not always in reality — Islamic history has been the effort to pursue and work out the commandments of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of 14 centuries is effectively meaningless."

Describing some of the challenges the new pope will face is Clifford Longley's The Lost Continent, which I found on the always helpful Orthodoxy Today website. He makes an interesting point that conservatives should not reject out of hand:

The Church must also honestly admit that it misunderstood many of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, even Voltaire and Rousseau, for all their anticlericalism. Could the Church come to see that their demand to install reason in place of superstition, say, was at root a desire to break the spell by which the clergy kept the simple faithful in ignorance and fear, in defence of clerical and feudal privilege and power that had nothing to do with the Gospel? Were not Voltaire and Rousseau “anonymous Christians” too? And is not contemporary feminism, say, even at its most secular, true for what it affirms, untrue only for what it denies (to use G.K. Chesterton’s definition of heresy).

The last, by the way, is hardly something Chesterton would have said. The idea is generally ascribed to the 19th century English Anglican theologian F. D. Maurice.