Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger
I think I have the current Pope figured out, at least to my satisfaction. Everything he says and does, and what is more his way of doing it, of appearing, even his physical type, seem to me consistent with a kind of person I have met, and, in so far as I can understand them at all, I have admired.
It is a rare kind of person, and one I have met more often among women than among men. That is not to say that there is anything about the German Pope that is in any way effeminate or feeble; quite the contrary, in fact. If I say that he reminds me of Debbie Wallace and Paula Radcliffe, regular readers of this blog will understand the kind of strength I see in him.
By all accounts, the Pope is a warm-hearted, friendly and rather shy person with simple tastes. He is not a natural with crowds, unlike his heroically-sized predecessor, and, if rumours of his native shyness are true, one expects that he must rather steel himself for events such as the papal funeral and World Youth Day. He is more tactile than one would imagine from a German professor (if, of course, one did not know real-life academics), though not to the extent of losing dignity; small in person and with a ready smile. And yet it is this man who earned, through twenty-one years as the Church's penultimate judge and jury, the title of "God's Rottweiler", known for rockbound adhesion to dogma, refusal to compromise, and, during the recent US elections, a letter to the US Council of Bishops that so horrified the chairman of that body that he hid it from the other bishops; for it was practically an order to deny Communion to Candidate Kerry and to any other politician who supported abortion. As I write, a hysterical Channel Four journalist is predicting "the destruction of the Church" that has dared to choose this hated reactionary as Pope, and has found no shortage of "liberal Catholic" types to back him up.
And the truth that nobody will understand until they meet a Debbie Wallace in their lives, is that just because the Pope is sensitive, unassuming, perhaps shy, even a bit touchy-feely in his personal behaviour, that one can expect absolute lack of fear and total adhesion to whatever it is that his keen sense of right and wrong has come to feel is right. Enrico Berlinguer, the great Italian Communist leader, was a man of this kind, and nobody who ever saw it shall forget how, in a meeting of the Communist International, surrounded by the most imperial tokens of Communist power, in a vast echoing hall packed to the rafters with careerists, hypocrites, secret policemen, and True Believers, he stood up, small, slight, and alone, and, under Brezhnev's increasingly irate and lowering eye, calmly and fluently denounced the lack of freedom and basic rights in the Soviet Union and its satellites. That he could believe that Communism and liberty were compatible may be seen as a sad mistake (and a waste of a good mind and a noble heart); but that he did believe it, and took the consequences, was clear to anyone who saw him.
Of such stuff are heroes made. It is their same warmth of heart, their feeling for people as people, that brings life and breath to their sense of values. Because injustice genuinely hurts them, not in their vanity, but in their deepest self - which is always open to the world, heart worn everlastingly on sleeve - that they do not even conceive of giving an inch when something strikes them as wrong. The thought that the Church might suffer if Kerry was antagonized and still won, would not stop Cardinal Ratzinger from doing what seemed to him the right thing. Homosexual leaders and other PC persons have him totally wrong, except for one thing: they expect him not to compromise on Christian doctrine, and he will not. But when they represent him as a ruthless, insensitive, brutal semi-Nazi, they only show their inability to understand the opponent. I have no doubt that he would be the first to lend a ready ear and all possible help to an opponent in distress; anything, that is, except compromise with what he holds to be the truth.
That being the case, I believe him (as I rarely would with any churchman) when he claims that he really did not want the papacy, and, for that matter, the post of prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith; and that he asked at least four times to resign to return to academic life, only to be refused by John Paul. Nolo episcopari is of course the expected reaction, the polite attitude and often fiction, of any ecclesiastic offered preferment. But in the case of Pope Benedict, I think it was a fact. The self-image of such men and women, of this rare kind of people without vanity, is genuinely as small as their achievements are great. When Tito, the Yugoslav Communist leader, was asked what he would have been if he had been born in the USA instead of Montenegro, he answered: "An American billionaire, of course." When Berlinguer was asked the same question, he thought about it for a while, and then answered: "some sort of minor lecturer in a very minor university college." And he was one of the greatest party leaders Italy has ever had, whose death unleashed national mourning such as was never seen again until John Paul II's. The academic bent, personal warmth, and lack of ambition, of the slight, even weedy agnostic Communist chief, is mirrored in the equally slight and academic Christian leader. In short, I believe that the Pope really did want to go back to being a professor, if not in a small American college, then at least in a German university.
But he never had a chance. No man was ever more propelled by his gifts. A book he wrote in the fateful year 1968, won him, once Pope Paul VI had read it, promotion from academic middle rank to Archbishop and Cardinal; even before his friend Woytila became Pope, the old, battle-worn Pope Montini had recognized the unique clarity and strength of mind of Professor Ratzinger's writing. As professor, Archbishop, Cardinal, Prefect, and Pope, he drew from his experience as lecturer a wonderful ability to present complicated issues plainly, precisely, and yet clearly, and with an ability to often catch a surprising angle or unexpected connection of ideas. Having a man of such talents at hand, of course John Paul II (whose high and even ruthless view of the duty owed to a priestly vocation was seen when he refused to stop doing his duty even when his body was no longer responding) would not consider just letting him retire to his desired academic berth. The Church had need of him. And so the slight, kind-hearted academic was for twenty-one years, the last bulwark of orthodoxy, the Enforcer, the Rottweiler, the Panzerkardinal, taking in his own person all the hatred coming from anyone who did not want to be told that Catholicism has a doctrine and holds certain things right and certain things wrong.
And it was not over yet. Just as his books had made him Cardinal, his sermons at the papal funeral and at the opening of the Conclave made him Pope. By all accounts, most Cardinals were immensely impressed; his supporters were confirmed, the waverers were reassured, and only the irreducible few ended up voting against at the third ballot. And the world who had learned to think of this man as the dour, grim German shepherd, was faced with a small, smiling figure in white, with a lovely thatch of silver hair.
What will he do? The one thing that is not to be expected of such a man is that he will spare himself. If you want a parallel, look at Paula Radcliffe's monstrous workload. When these people believe that something needs to be done, they do it, no matter what it costs them. If, for instance, the Pope holds it part of the Pope's job to face large crowds and inspire them, he will ignore his own innate shyness and just go and do it anyway. And he will find a way. He will not, perhaps, draw the love and passion of the crowd on himself as his predecessor did; instead, he will argue with them, make them think, convey to them the clarity of his thougths and the golden insights he found in Church doctrine. The effect will be different, but I believe there will be one, and that it will be in its own way very powerful.
For the last two centuries at least, he role of the Pope has been growing increasingly important, as the Church ceased to be - even in Catholic countries - the simple atmosphere in which men and women lived and moved, without thinking that an alternative was possible, and became simply a component - though most often the largest and most influential - of society. In the past, the Church could survive bad or nondescript Popes, because it was a reality that it did not occur to most people to challenge; now the need to prove its value to the eyes of men is constant, and it follows that the Pope must be an outstanding figure. It is my view that, in this changing world, the College of Cardinals never put a foot wrong; that at least since 1878, practically every choice they made has proved exactly what the Church needed at that particular time. I am increasingly hopeful that they, or the Holy Spirit, will prove once again, and in the face of all the secular nonsense from the media, to have judged right.
It is a rare kind of person, and one I have met more often among women than among men. That is not to say that there is anything about the German Pope that is in any way effeminate or feeble; quite the contrary, in fact. If I say that he reminds me of Debbie Wallace and Paula Radcliffe, regular readers of this blog will understand the kind of strength I see in him.
By all accounts, the Pope is a warm-hearted, friendly and rather shy person with simple tastes. He is not a natural with crowds, unlike his heroically-sized predecessor, and, if rumours of his native shyness are true, one expects that he must rather steel himself for events such as the papal funeral and World Youth Day. He is more tactile than one would imagine from a German professor (if, of course, one did not know real-life academics), though not to the extent of losing dignity; small in person and with a ready smile. And yet it is this man who earned, through twenty-one years as the Church's penultimate judge and jury, the title of "God's Rottweiler", known for rockbound adhesion to dogma, refusal to compromise, and, during the recent US elections, a letter to the US Council of Bishops that so horrified the chairman of that body that he hid it from the other bishops; for it was practically an order to deny Communion to Candidate Kerry and to any other politician who supported abortion. As I write, a hysterical Channel Four journalist is predicting "the destruction of the Church" that has dared to choose this hated reactionary as Pope, and has found no shortage of "liberal Catholic" types to back him up.
And the truth that nobody will understand until they meet a Debbie Wallace in their lives, is that just because the Pope is sensitive, unassuming, perhaps shy, even a bit touchy-feely in his personal behaviour, that one can expect absolute lack of fear and total adhesion to whatever it is that his keen sense of right and wrong has come to feel is right. Enrico Berlinguer, the great Italian Communist leader, was a man of this kind, and nobody who ever saw it shall forget how, in a meeting of the Communist International, surrounded by the most imperial tokens of Communist power, in a vast echoing hall packed to the rafters with careerists, hypocrites, secret policemen, and True Believers, he stood up, small, slight, and alone, and, under Brezhnev's increasingly irate and lowering eye, calmly and fluently denounced the lack of freedom and basic rights in the Soviet Union and its satellites. That he could believe that Communism and liberty were compatible may be seen as a sad mistake (and a waste of a good mind and a noble heart); but that he did believe it, and took the consequences, was clear to anyone who saw him.
Of such stuff are heroes made. It is their same warmth of heart, their feeling for people as people, that brings life and breath to their sense of values. Because injustice genuinely hurts them, not in their vanity, but in their deepest self - which is always open to the world, heart worn everlastingly on sleeve - that they do not even conceive of giving an inch when something strikes them as wrong. The thought that the Church might suffer if Kerry was antagonized and still won, would not stop Cardinal Ratzinger from doing what seemed to him the right thing. Homosexual leaders and other PC persons have him totally wrong, except for one thing: they expect him not to compromise on Christian doctrine, and he will not. But when they represent him as a ruthless, insensitive, brutal semi-Nazi, they only show their inability to understand the opponent. I have no doubt that he would be the first to lend a ready ear and all possible help to an opponent in distress; anything, that is, except compromise with what he holds to be the truth.
That being the case, I believe him (as I rarely would with any churchman) when he claims that he really did not want the papacy, and, for that matter, the post of prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith; and that he asked at least four times to resign to return to academic life, only to be refused by John Paul. Nolo episcopari is of course the expected reaction, the polite attitude and often fiction, of any ecclesiastic offered preferment. But in the case of Pope Benedict, I think it was a fact. The self-image of such men and women, of this rare kind of people without vanity, is genuinely as small as their achievements are great. When Tito, the Yugoslav Communist leader, was asked what he would have been if he had been born in the USA instead of Montenegro, he answered: "An American billionaire, of course." When Berlinguer was asked the same question, he thought about it for a while, and then answered: "some sort of minor lecturer in a very minor university college." And he was one of the greatest party leaders Italy has ever had, whose death unleashed national mourning such as was never seen again until John Paul II's. The academic bent, personal warmth, and lack of ambition, of the slight, even weedy agnostic Communist chief, is mirrored in the equally slight and academic Christian leader. In short, I believe that the Pope really did want to go back to being a professor, if not in a small American college, then at least in a German university.
But he never had a chance. No man was ever more propelled by his gifts. A book he wrote in the fateful year 1968, won him, once Pope Paul VI had read it, promotion from academic middle rank to Archbishop and Cardinal; even before his friend Woytila became Pope, the old, battle-worn Pope Montini had recognized the unique clarity and strength of mind of Professor Ratzinger's writing. As professor, Archbishop, Cardinal, Prefect, and Pope, he drew from his experience as lecturer a wonderful ability to present complicated issues plainly, precisely, and yet clearly, and with an ability to often catch a surprising angle or unexpected connection of ideas. Having a man of such talents at hand, of course John Paul II (whose high and even ruthless view of the duty owed to a priestly vocation was seen when he refused to stop doing his duty even when his body was no longer responding) would not consider just letting him retire to his desired academic berth. The Church had need of him. And so the slight, kind-hearted academic was for twenty-one years, the last bulwark of orthodoxy, the Enforcer, the Rottweiler, the Panzerkardinal, taking in his own person all the hatred coming from anyone who did not want to be told that Catholicism has a doctrine and holds certain things right and certain things wrong.
And it was not over yet. Just as his books had made him Cardinal, his sermons at the papal funeral and at the opening of the Conclave made him Pope. By all accounts, most Cardinals were immensely impressed; his supporters were confirmed, the waverers were reassured, and only the irreducible few ended up voting against at the third ballot. And the world who had learned to think of this man as the dour, grim German shepherd, was faced with a small, smiling figure in white, with a lovely thatch of silver hair.
What will he do? The one thing that is not to be expected of such a man is that he will spare himself. If you want a parallel, look at Paula Radcliffe's monstrous workload. When these people believe that something needs to be done, they do it, no matter what it costs them. If, for instance, the Pope holds it part of the Pope's job to face large crowds and inspire them, he will ignore his own innate shyness and just go and do it anyway. And he will find a way. He will not, perhaps, draw the love and passion of the crowd on himself as his predecessor did; instead, he will argue with them, make them think, convey to them the clarity of his thougths and the golden insights he found in Church doctrine. The effect will be different, but I believe there will be one, and that it will be in its own way very powerful.
For the last two centuries at least, he role of the Pope has been growing increasingly important, as the Church ceased to be - even in Catholic countries - the simple atmosphere in which men and women lived and moved, without thinking that an alternative was possible, and became simply a component - though most often the largest and most influential - of society. In the past, the Church could survive bad or nondescript Popes, because it was a reality that it did not occur to most people to challenge; now the need to prove its value to the eyes of men is constant, and it follows that the Pope must be an outstanding figure. It is my view that, in this changing world, the College of Cardinals never put a foot wrong; that at least since 1878, practically every choice they made has proved exactly what the Church needed at that particular time. I am increasingly hopeful that they, or the Holy Spirit, will prove once again, and in the face of all the secular nonsense from the media, to have judged right.