04/20/2005
Anyone who has read my postings Cardinal Joe and Papabile: Would That It Were Ratzinger should have no trouble imagining how delighted I am that Cardinal Ratzinger has become Supreme Pontiff. As much as I loved John Paul II, Benedict XVI is more of a kindred spirit.

There will be differences. John Paul II was a nice old man who sat the world down like a friend and said: These are our problems; here's how we can solve them together. He usually detached the problems from specific culprits and therefore sounded as if the problems were caused by somebody else.

Expect to hear this a lot from Benedict: We suck.

He will use the first person plural "We." The former Cardinal truly lives poverty and humility. No Rome apartment for him; he lived in a monastery. Poverty and humility are great signs in a religious. All those priests who buggered kids, all those bishops who covered it up, did not, I can tell you, live in poverty and humility.

Not only will Benedict be more blunt, he will also be a lot less "sound-bitey" than John Paul II, as you can tell from reading his quotes at the right. I suspect that if he remains his true humble soft-spoken self, he will have no trouble keeping John Paul's young folks on track.

Years ago, I read the interviews that Cardinal Ratzinger gave published as The Ratzinger Report and Salt of The Earth. They are the most Post-It-noted books I have and I look forward to reading them again. There are a couple of things that stick in my mind from those readings.

First of all, dissenters who are now foaming at the mouth that the one guy worse than JPII is now pope will not be disappointed: There will be no discussion about women priests, married priests, a more democratic Church that says whatever you want is OK.

Benedict does not believe in even trying to argue with people about these things as so many conservative Catholics, especially in the U.S. are wasting a lot of energy, paper and bytes doing. He believes the dissenters are a Maginot Line: You just go around them. At most, you holler over, "What parts of sacrifice, witnessing to eternal life and being in persona Christi don't you idiots understand? The Episcopal Church welcomes you. They have priests of all three sexes and they desperately need members!"

He has spoken of bourgeois mentality as being the source of dissent and he is quite right. Blue-collar people with high-school educations don't kick about the sex of the priests or about having "a greater voice." More affluent, "educated" people who think their MBAs make them experts on everything, and entitled to everything, and who live to see what kind of exotic clams Balducci's is offering, are the biggest gripers.

Our new pope seems to be quite aware that digging in on certain issues may lead to widespread defections from the Church. Indeed, he seems to be prepared for a much smaller church. Good for him! He sees opportunity in what most people would consider a disaster. Conventional wisdom holds that a successful organization is always growing. It is, in fact, always quality and never quantity that fulfills the purpose.

We tend to think of the mustard seed as something tiny that transforms into something huge, but Benedict XVI seems to think that the mustard seed has a huge effect when it is tiny. Hold that thought and stay tuned!

See also:

Cardinal Joe

Papabile: Would That It Were Ratzinger

The core of the temptation for man and of his fall is contained in this programmatic statement: 'You will be like God" (Gen 3:5). Like God: That means free of the law of the Creator, free of the laws of nature herself, absolute Lord of one's own destiny. Man continually desires only one thing: to be his own creator and his own master. But what awaits us at the end of this road is certainly not paradise. -Ratzinger Report, --p. 91

Maybe we are facing a new and different kind of epoch in the Church's history, where Christianity will again be characterized more by the mustard seed, where it will exist in small, seemingly insignificant groups that nonetheless live an intensive struggle against evil and bring good into the world--that let God in. Salt of The Earth, p. 16

[The Church] will live in small, vital circles of really convinced believers who live their faith. --SOE p. 22

Peace is not the first civic duty and a bishop whose only concern is to not have any problems and to gloss over as many conflicts as possible is an image I find repulsive.-- SOE -p.82

But when I conceive of the Good News only as self-affirmation...it is meaningless....we must become familiar again with the dimension of judgement precisely with a view to those who suffer and those who have received no justice and who have a right to it--and then also to agree to put ourselves under this standard and to try not to belong to the doers of injustice. --SOE , p. 185

The experience with female priests in the Anglican Church has, [Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza] says, led to the realization that ordination is not a solution: it isn't what we wanted...She says, "Ordination is subordination and that's exactly what we don't want."--SOE, p.210