This quickie – one title page reads “Habemus papum”, which even the most inattentive participant in the media blitz would know is wrong – as sympathetic as it strives to be, is handicapped by the new Pope’s previous press. Virtually every positive quality Allen identifies in Ratzinger is described as surprising, or contrary to his image. The most telling of the off-the-record remarks Allen garners from the cardinals is by an American, on the new Pope. “I’m worried how to sell this back home,” he tells the prominent American Catholic opinion-former.
Give me an M. Give me an A. Give me an H.
I still think Cardinal Mahony received exactly one vote in each ballot in the conclave.
I had a friend give me the book to read, and it is indeed a ‘quickie.’ I don’t blame Allen in that if I were him and the chap I’d already written a biography about and other articles on became pope, I’d want to capitalize on the royalties as well; but still the book is little more than a repackaging of Allen’s biography (which, to his credit, he has altered and made less ideological and biased in its criticisms of Ratzinger, some of which Allen–again to his credit–recanted) and his “Word from Rome” columns leading up to and immediately following the election. If you were asleep in the entire month of April, this book might be good to help bring you up to speed, but otherwise there is absolutely nothing in here that is new or interesting.