I caught the last half of the papal installation Mass today, but missed the Holy Father's homily. Here is the text if you missed it, too. It is truly magnificent and transcendent.
In particular, I am interested to know what non-Catholics think of Benedict's words. Anyone care to comment?
Discussions about the papacy revolve mainly around the duties of the office, and its function within the Catholic faith. That is not the only essential aspect of the pope's role, however. The papacy is not solely an instrument that performs certain actions, it is good and beautiful in its own right.
It is a sign of God's providence that he would entrust the Gospel to an unbroken line of successors, who are God's primary liaisons to mankind until Christ comes again. The charism of infallibility, often misunderstood and derided, is a gift not only to the pope, but to all of us. Jesus went to the trouble of becoming incarnate, teaching his disciples, getting crucified for our sins, and rising from the dead. Having gone to all that effort, the Good Shepherd wants to ensure that his truth will remain intact, pure and entire.
Too often, that gets buried in media coverage that emphasizes the political aspect of the papacy to the exclusion of the central fact: God loved the world so much that he gave his only son, and the protection of his saving message are manifestations of God's perpetual love.
A little more about Pope Benedict's "Nazi past." When membership in an immoral political party is compulsory, and you are not obliged to commit any heinous acts, then I do not think joining it is morally wrong. Since everyone living under the party's regime understands the rules, and that membership is not a personal statement backing the party's crimes, they cannot possibly be scandalized.
A personal anecdote: When I was in Iraq, one of our translators invited us to dinner with his family. His brother was a teenager who loved everything about America, which he had learned about on the Internet. He loved our laws, our music and movies, our guns, and our freedoms. He completely hated the Ba'athist Party, but to go to high school, he had to join it. The brother didn't have to gas Kurds or feed women into industrial shredders, he just had to go through the motions. I don't think he did anything wrong, either.
The Jerusalem Post had an editorial on Monday defending the new pope's reputation against slanderers: "Ratzinger a Nazi? Don't believe it":
London's Sunday Times would have us believe that one of the leading contenders for the papacy is a closet Nazi. In if-only-they-knew tones, the newspaper informs readers that German-born Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and suggests that, because of this, the "panzer cardinal" would be quite a contrast to his predecessor, John Paul II.Read the article here (registration required.)The article also classifies Ratzinger as a "theological anti-Semite" for believing in Jesus so strongly that – gasp! – he thinks that everyone, even Jews, should accept him as the messiah.
To all this we should say, "This is news?!"...
As the Sunday Times article admits, Ratzinger's membership in the Hitler Youth was not voluntary but compulsory; also admitted are the facts that the cardinal – only a teenager during the period in question – was the son of an anti-Nazi policeman, that he was given a dispensation from Hitler Youth activities because of his religious studies, and that he deserted the German army....
The only significant complaint that the Times makes against Ratzinger's wartime conduct is that he resisted quietly and passively, rather than having done something drastic enough to earn him a trip to a concentration camp. Of course, whenever it is said that a German failed the exceptional-resistance-to-the-Nazis test, it would behoove us all to recognize that too many Jews failed it, as well.
(This was taken from a comment I made in an earlier thread that deserves its very own post.)
We keep hearing about how the new pope must reach "progressives," but who are these people, and how many of them are there? The world at large is not "progressive." Africa isn't, nor the Middle East. India and China are not, and that's a third of the world's population right there. Nor is Latin America, or most of Asia.
There are pockets of "progessive" people in all those regions, but by and large, they have not signed on to the liberal-secularist project. The "progressives" that need to be pleased are thus white Western elites with college educations — which is, what, maybe one percent of the world's population? That's a rather narrow perspective.
I have another word for "progressive": it's "decadent," a word that means "falling down" in Latin. The people who embrace this agenda are not advocating a more just and prosperous society, which are the measures of true earthly progress. The main objectives are simultaneously to remove any stigma against practically any sexual activity, and to get the state to pay for life's necessities. This has resulted, among the "progressive" societies of Western Europe, in the declining birthrates that are dooming their own existences. It's an unsustainable societal model, and it's collapsing as we speak.
How is that progress, exactly?
Everybody gets to be a papal expert today, so here are my observations, worth precisely what you paid for them.
1. The choice is not a sentimental one. It does not play to the crowd, much less to the zeitgeist's desire for a nice, kind, "flexible" man.
2. The choice is a safe one. The cardinals all know the new pope and they know what to expect (or at least they think they do.)
3. The speed of the choice indicates that if the cardinals did not know who they wanted, they at least knew what they wanted.
3. The problems within the Church stem from a lack of orthodoxy, compounded by insufficient and often flawed leadership. Cardinal Ratzinger is intimately familiar with both shortcomings, has been dealing with them for years, and now has the power to correct them at the higher levels.
4. This does not absolve us, the laity, from correcting the flaws at our lower level. Indeed, that is our job. We should start with the lowest level of all — our own hearts.
5. Orthodox Catholics may be hoping for a Götterdämmerung of the heterodox liberals, when the internal enemies of the True Faith will be cast out into the darkness. We should instead hope for their conversion and repentence for whatever misunderstandings they have created, and for the faiths they have stifled. (I say this as someone who is infuriated every time a priest, religious, or Church employee questions Catholic teaching in public.) The Holy Father will sort things out the way he deems prudent, and we should be careful not to indulge ourselves in revenge fantasies, however psychologically satisfying they may be. "For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you" (Matt. 7:2).
Let the work begun with Pope John Paul II find its consummation in the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI.
CORRECTION: I hope it was clear from the original text, but I was saying we should not indulge in revenge fantasies. I left out the "not" in the original.
