This from a long-time reader in Vienna, Austria:
With reference to Jonathan V. Last’s collection of media quotes referring to the new pope as a ”hard liner,” while I know that those who write these things often do not mean them in a complimentary manner, I believe we should whole-heartedly embrace the term and rejoice that the new pope is one who will ”hold fast” to “the faith once delivered to the saints.”
The only comments in the collection which I perceive to be unfair, and they are probably intentionally so, are Andrew Sullivan’s remarks.
The others, while they obviously employ ”hard-line” as a cliché are otherwise pretty value-free.
For example, I happen to know Bill Kole of AP personally, he is an evangelical Christian and certainly not a liberal, but he probably feels very much under pressure to not let any of his personal beliefs flow into his reporting—which is, after all, not the same as editorializing. So he reports what he perceives to be the general perception—that Benedict is uncompromising on doctrine, and that some Catholics don’t like that. That’s actually pretty accurate. He probably does not feel that he, as a reporter and as a non-catholic, should make any judgment on Catholics who disagree with the pope.
Anyway, I am quite happy to respond to anyone who calls Benedict a hard-liner with, ”Good! That’s a whole lot better than all the waffling and being blown about with every wind of doctrine which we see in the mainline Protestant churches. More power to him! He’s doing a great job in fulfilling his responsibilities! I wish Rowan Williams was more like this, or the Protestant bishops and superintendents in my own country.”
—Wolf Paul
Vienna, Austria
And another from a contributing editor to Touchstone, an Anglican priest:
That the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church have selected a man whose knowledge of God is clearly evidenced in his writings is not simply a “religious-political” signal of a “shift to the right” or a return to, as the cliche goes (over and over again) a “hard line.” It is more significant than anything the secular press can understand. It means that they chose for their Holy Father a man who is described by all of Saint Paul’s categories of ministry when writing to the Church in Ephesus; a man who is an apostle, a prophet, an evangelist a pastor and teacher (Eph. 5:11). More than signaling something that the carnal mind can grasp, a mere “shift to the right” or even “continuity” (though it is continuity), it signals their desire that the knowledge of God fill the earth. They are saying, “we will follow this holy man as he follows Christ (I Cor. 11: 1).”
Yes, it is a conservative message too, and all of those lesser things that the journalists may dimly perceive. But, it is of a depth and height, and length and breadth, that most of them cannot.
—Robert Hart
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