The Retired Pope on His Life and Death

When his last book-length interview came out in 2010, I discussed the thoughts of Pope Benedict XVI in great detail here. Of course, at the time, none of us knew he would retire in 2013, an event that I found both disappointing but also tremendously heartening and useful in dealing a significant blow to the papaolatry which has, alas, only increased exponentially under his voluble successor, leading one, as Adrian Fortescue put it, to long for a pope who never speaks except when making an infallible utterance. Alas, we have not been blessed with such apophatic silence since 2013, notwithstanding my repeated calls for people to ignore the man.

Now we have what will surely be, perforce, the Last Testament of the retired pope in another interview with Peter Seewald, who has previously published several earlier interviews going back two decades. (For all my interest in all these interviews, I confess that I am not a fan of the genre.)

I read all of the Ratzinger-Seewald interviews for a variety of reasons, not least to track the trajectory of Ratzinger's ecclesiological thought on questions of papal primacy and patriarchates that I reviewed in detail in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy which, appearing as it did in 2011, featured one of my favourite photos of the then-reigning pope with the current Ecumenical Patriarch.

Turning now to this last interview and final testament, we find it opens with a very characteristic series of self-observations from Ratzinger. Though these may still come as a surprise to some especially dense and incorrigible journalists, they are not a surprise to the rest of us, who have never known Ratzinger to be some kind of arrogant bully or Panzerkardinal. 

I first met Ratzinger briefly at a conference in Rome in 1998, and could immediately see from a brief encounter with him that he was a gentle, shy man and a scholar, not the Savonarola of the S&M fantasies from the typists and excitable tea ladies of the New York Times. Later on I would come to appreciate just how much of an introvert he is, and this becomes very clear in this last testament, with his frequent references to how often he has to seek out silence, and how, accordingly, he made changes to the papal routine so that there could be more silence in his day with fewer people around at, e.g., mealtimes.

His longing to leave Rome, already by the early 1990s, in order to return once more to his scholarship and the writing of books, is well known and has emerged repeatedly in other interviews (Cf. his own Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977.) He was never able to leave, and I think that regardless of what one thinks of the man, and prescinding from any of his particular decisions as pope, one must respect his devotion to duty and his fidelity, loyalty, and long-suffering service to the Church even when he longed to be elsewhere--to be back home in his study.

His devotion reminds me of this powerful speech from Queen Mary to the new Queen Elizabeth II in the surprisingly excellent Netflix series The Crown:



Ratzinger's humility, never in doubt for me, marks the opening of this detailed interview as he is asked a question about whether he misses the trappings, power, and attention of the papacy, to which he responds: "I never accepted 'power' so that I would be in any way strong, but always as a responsibility, as something difficult and burdensome." A little later on he says of himself that "I am an entirely average Christian" and, reflecting on what he would say to the Lord at the time of his immediate post-mortem judgment, "I would plead with him to show leniency towards my wretchedness."

I confess that I did not, in 2005, fully appreciate how much his modesty would afflict his pontificate. Nor did I appreciate the question of his age and fatigue. I did not know that he had suffered a major brain hemorrhage in 1991 which would progressively destroy his sight in his left eye entirely, and affect his right eye, all the while leaving him extremely tired. Repeatedly here he reflects on how his hope, going into, and even during the early stages of, the 2005 conclave that as bishops have to retire at 75 there's no way the cardinals will elect a tired 78-year-old as bishop of a city he had been trying to leave for over a decade, each time told by John Paul II that he was needed in Rome and would not be released back to his book-lined study.

Because of his modesty, fatigue, and also, as it would emerge, his ecclesiology, he did not use the papacy in the way some of us at the time hoped and certainly thought he would. I was a graduate student in 2005 and together with a couple of other fellow students we had our own little ecclesial Committee of Union and Progress in which we fantasized about how many revolutionary changes we would hope to see, beginning with the liturgy. Truth be told, in our youthful zeal, we rather hoped that those Savonarola fantasies might just be true.

Those who have been reading Ratzinger for as long as I have know that the central priority of his life has been liturgy. As pope he made one of the most significant moves in the last 50 years on this question, and as a result deserves great and lasting credit, as I argued here. That 2007 decision, Summorum Pontificum, freed up celebrations of the older form of the Roman Rite. Here, in this last Testament, he says simply that he had to free up the older rite because it was simply absurd for any group of people--a Church or club or whatever--to be told that what they once held as central and sacrosanct was now forbidden. If it could so easily be declared forbidden, then obviously it was never so central and sacrosanct, a notion Ratzinger finds so absurd as to require no comment.

But Ratzinger's focus on the liturgy has always been wider than that. His first sustained attention came in a book from the early 1980s, The Feast of Faith. Longer and more detailed attention came in his 2000 book The Spirit of the Liturgy. This latter book is especially useful for his argument that the West never adequately received the spirit and decisions of Nicaea II, and therefore has never quite gotten iconoclasm out of its system, as seen in periodic outbursts of it, not least in the aftermath of Vatican II.

I confess that there was one brief bit of disappointment and disagreement here, though I understand and to some extent agree with Ratzinger. Pressed by Seewald to do more than just free up the older Roman Rite, but to take active measures to deal with wider, deeper problems in the Latin liturgy, Ratzinger firmly and repeatedly denies that he could or should have done any such thing. Ecclesiologically I agree with him, since the idea that the pope regulates everything, including how Fr. X celebrates Mass in little Parish Y in Village Z, is a monstrous modern myth I hope to live long enough to see destroyed.

But at the same time, since a centralized papacy inflicted the widespread and enormously damaging liturgical problems on the Latin Church in 1969, one could make an argument that using that same papacy to make some large-scale reversals of the damaging changes would be entirely in order. But pressed on this repeatedly, Ratzinger is having none of it:

As Prefect you complained about an impoverishment and misuse of the liturgy....Why has so little happened in this area? You certainly had all the authority to do something.

Institutionally and juridically one cannot do much about it at all. What is important is that an inward vision emerges, and that people learn what liturgy is from seeing inwardly....That is why I've just written books.....But one cannot just command that. 

One thinks the Pope has the authority; he can just put his foot down. 

No.

It won't work? 

It won't work, no!

I think, frankly, this is a bit short-sighted and self-serving. The pope could indeed do more, but Ratzinger made the prudential, human, and very defensible decision to lead by example in his own papal celebrations rather than to try to legislate for the entire Latin Church. Given that the Latins routinely ignore liturgical legislation anyway, Ratzinger's insistence that such a strategy would be ineffective is not without a good deal of evidence, alas. Still, fully aware of the paradox and problems of papal power, one would not be entirely unhappy to see sterner measures applied pour encourager les autres.

Ratzinger does not revisit most of the decisions made during his time, except briefly. Given the focus of my 2011 book Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, I looked for any final thoughts from him on the vexed handling of the title of Patriarch of the West. But he says nothing. Indeed, of the East he says very little other than to note that he had a good meeting after his election with Met. Kiril of the Russian Church, now that body's patriarch. He also notes how close the Catholic Church is to Orthodoxy unlike to Protestantism, which he sees as very much in a phase of terminal decline.

Seewald is a careful, tenacious interviewer who repeatedly circles back at least thrice to controverted questions to draw Ratzinger out further. But each time Ratzinger is consistent in his answer--whether about the Williamson affair, the theft of documents by the butler, the Regensburg lecture, or other events. Ratzinger sometimes notices where he was too naieve, or not active enough, and there are some decisions he wishes had been handled differently.

But the overall vision is of a man at peace at the end of his life. There are no bitter jabs at people, no acute pangs of regret or longing, no barbed comments, least of all towards his successor, whom he praises on a couple of occasions for being more extroverted, more able to interact with people, and for having more energy and vigor in pursuing reforms, some of which Ratzinger himself started (e.g., with the Vatican Bank).

Perhaps the most consistent, and certainly most moving, theme of the entire book is to be found in Ratzinger's constant references to how close to hand he has found God, the "loving God" as he almost always refers to Him. Whenever some decision or anxiety is near, God is nearer still to guide and strengthen a gracious man who has lived through some of the most pivotal events of the last 90 years in the history of Church and world alike.

As he now prepares, by his own admission, for his death, let us thank God for Joseph Ratzinger's many gifts, and pray God to forgive him whatever "wretchedness" is in need of divine pardon.

Pope Francis and Ecology: Late to the Party?

Far be it from me to try to steal some of the thunder of Pope Francis, but he has plenty of thunder to spare and is generous enough not to begrudge such efforts. I will therefore venture to suggest, amidst the increasing media hoopla over his encyclical on ecology--to be released tomorrow--that what he says is almost certainly going to be far from revolutionary or even very original in some respects. (This is as it should be for, as Fr. John Hunwicke rightly and repeatedly says, the job of the pope is to be a remora or a breakwater against innovation.) By that I mean that other Christian leaders, pre-eminent among them the Ecumenical ("Green") Patriarch Bartholomew, have been writing on ecological themes for decades, a fact that seems to have been acknowledged by the pope in having Met. John Zizioulas be one of the people involved with the official presentation of the encyclical on Thursday--and a fact, moreover, acknowledged in the text if the leaked draft's footnotes are anything to go by. Though one should not expect the dim and highly selective cheerleaders in the media to know this history of Eastern Christian theologizing about ecology, I drew attention to such Eastern Christian publications most recently in 2015. For earlier publications, see here but also here in 2014, and in 2011 here. (None of this, nota bene, is to gainsay what the pope will say, which deserves careful and respectful attention.)

In addition, for those seeking practical advice, His All-Holiness Bartholomew has written a preface to Greening the Orthodox Parish: A Handbook for Christian Ecological Practice.

Other Orthodox scholars have written on the topic, including Elizabeth Theokritoff, Living in God's Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology (SVS Press, 2009), 266pp.

The Orthodox scholar John Chryssavgiss has also edited a hefty collection, Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation (Fordham University Press, 2013), 508pp.

Chryssavgiss also authored an informative piece here on how the Ecumenical Patriarch came to be know as the "Green Patriarch." And he edited another important collection: In the World, Yet Not of the World: Social and Global Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.

Pope Francis, moreover, is not the only pope to write on these issues. Environmental issues began appearing, in their modern form, on the papal radar as far back as Paul VI in the 1960s. Much more recently, the unjustly maligned Pope Benedict XVI also addressed them, and a recent collection of his writings on the topic published by Our Sunday Visitor is very helpful here: The Environment.

Liturgy and Ecclesiology

The great moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre opened a 1976 essay on the bicentennial of the American Revolution with the amusing quip that surely everyone in that year had had quite enough of the commemorations, and the next author to utter "just one more platitude, one last cliché" will see "perhaps the population of the United States...run screaming into the oceans and the Great Lakes." A similar sentiment perhaps overtakes those familiar with the parade of books still emerging to celebrate the opening of Vatican II more than 50 years ago now. There is on the part of some an understandable, and likely increasing, sense that we have been sated with such books; but as the most important Christian event of the last century, whose effects continue to be felt and whose legacy is still far from settled, the council remains a topic of keen interest on the part of many. (For those feeling fatigued by all the turgid analysis of the council, I recommend taking a break with the hugely entertaining diaries of Yves Congar about the council, discussed here and especially here.) While we have seen many histories of the council written, including those by John O'Malley, there is still a need for an analysis of the unfinished and, in some ways, incoherent, liturgical and ecclesiological visions (and all their ecumenical implications, perforce) of the council. A recent book attempts to look critically at the connections between the liturgy and ecclesiology by analyzing Sacrosanctum Concilium and its aftermath (including the 2007 Summorum Pontificio): Massimo Faggioli, True Reform: Liturgy and Ecclesiology in Sacrosanctum Concilium (Liturgical Press, 2012), xi+188pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

For Massimo Faggioli, the debate about the meaning of Vatican II too often misses the profound significance of that council's first and perhaps most consequential document, Sacrosanctum Concilium. The result is a misunderstanding of both the council as a whole and the liturgical reform that followed from it. In True Reform, Faggioli takes Sacrosanctum Concilium as a hermeneutical key of the council. He offers a thorough reflection on the relationship between the liturgical constitution and the whole achievement of Vatican II and argues that the interconnections between the two must emerge if we want to understand the impact of the council on global Catholicism.

This is in some ways an enjoyable book precisely because it is so maddeningly confused, transparently tendentious, and on some crucial matters passionately wrong-headed. In other respects, however, Faggioli has advanced crucial, unique arguments that very much need and definitely merit a wider hearing. There are many gems buried in this book, but one must do a lot of spade-work to extract them. Since I shall criticize this book rather forcefully, let me begin by laying out where I think the author is correct:

• Faggioli is correct in his overall thesis that Sacrosanctum Concilium contains an ecclesiological vision, and that such a vision is a welcome correction to the vision coming out of Vatican I in 1870; 
• He is, further, correct that subsequent liturgical legislation, above all Summorum Pontificum, also has an ecclesiological vision--though, as we shall see, most certainly not the one Faggioli thinks it has;
• He is correct, albeit in a much narrower sense than he realizes, that some--but only some--of the opponents of the liturgical reforms of the council are motivated by nostalgic hankering for a romanticized past that never truly was;
• He is correct that some of the critics of the council criticize it above all for its moving away from an ultramontane, centralized, papalist vision of the Church, and that such critics are wrongheaded and must be resisted;
• He is, finally, correct that to return to such a papalist vision would be a disaster for ecumenical relations and, indeed, for the entire Catholic Church as such.

Now let us consider some of the weaknesses. He begins with the bald claim that "the liturgical debate at Vatican II was the first and most radical effort of modern Catholicism to cope with the dawn of the 'secular age'" (4). If this is so, then, following as I do Catherine Pickstock (whom Faggioli never cites), the liturgical constitution must be counted a failure. It remains a source of amazement to me that (so far as I have been able to discover to date) there has been almost no serious scholarly engagement in English of Pickstock's arguments in After Writing: On the Liturgical Cosummation of Philosophy, where she argues (cf. pp. 171-76 especially; but see also her essays "Asyndeton: Syntax and Insanity. A Study of the Revision of the Nicene Creed," Modern Theology 10 [1994]; "Liturgy and Modernity," Telos 113 [1998]; and more recently "The Ritual Birth of Sense," Telos 162 [Spring 2013]) that the Vatican II reforms were not, contrary to their usual portrayal, radical reforms. Rather, they “participated in an entirely more sinister conservatism. For they failed to challenge those structures of the modern secular world which are wholly inimical to liturgical purpose: those structures, indeed, which perpetuate a separation of everyday life from liturgical enactment.” The particular aspects of anti-ritual modernity that need challenging, according to Pickstock, include “such anachronistic structural concepts as ‘argument,’ ‘linear order,’ ‘segmentation,’ ‘discrete stages,’ and the notion of ‘new information’ outside ‘linguistic redundancy’ or repetition.”   For Pickstock the reformed Mass, in eliminating repetition and patterning itself on the ideas of modern communications, has lost its “apophatic liturgical ‘stammer,’ and oral spontaneity and ‘confusion’.”

Now, as I am aware (from having published an article on Pickstock and Byzantine liturgy more than a decade ago), there have been numerous reviews of her book and critical discussions of it, but I have not (yet) been able to find anybody who has seriously engaged her central points about the elimination of repetition, the substitution of linear order and segmentation, and the use of asyndeton rather than hypotactic and paratactic syntax in modern English liturgical translations (including Lutheran, Anglican, and RC translations). In failing to take up these arguments, liturgists have, it seems to me, irresponsibly overlooked what I regard as the most destructive legacy of the council, and the most critical part of her book. The book has been out for nearly fifteen years, but I cannot find people to have picked this argument up--either to reject or embrace it. And if that is the case, then I'm of the old school: qui tacet consentire videtur. 
 

Faggioli has no time for such arguments--or many others one could enumerate--it seems plain after reading this book: time and again he refuses to acknowledge that critics of the council even have arguments. (In this regard he clearly reminds one of Lionel Trilling's famously arch dismissal of political conservatives as not having ideas but "just irritable mental gestures."). In this spirit Faggioli  hurls what he seems (amusingly) to regard as a thunderous epithet at all critics of Vatican II: they are just indulging in "nostalgia" and nothing more. That word and its cognates appears dozens of times in the volume and is made unthinkingly and lazily to bear an enormous weight it could not, and does not, sustain. It becomes very silly after the second or third instance, rather like the child who cannot think of anything more cutting or original to say and so resorts repeatedly to deriding his enemy on the other side of the sandbox as a "dummy." Whatever you think of Pickstock's arguments--or dozens of others one could cite (e.g., Aidan Nichols' Looking at the Liturgy; Jonathan Robinson's The Mass and Modernity: Walking to Heaven Backward, or Joseph Ratzinger in his Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977, inter alia) but certainly not find, at least by name, in Faggioli--she is not engaged in "nostalgia" but in very high-level textual criticism worthy of a serious scholarly response.

Shortly after this, Faggioli makes a point that I wish he had spent more time developing: the real purpose of Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) was ecclesiology, and the real purpose of its ecclesiology was "to give 'completion and equilibrium' to the bishop, to the local Church, and to the overall theology of the Church that became prevalent after Vatican I." In other words, if I understand him correctly, SC was supposed to be a corrective to Pastor Aeternus. This is a novel argument very much worth exploring, which he does a little later (p.22) in noting that SC "is the...least dependent on recent papal teaching for its inner balance and core concepts." SC, in other words, was not the product of straitened Latin theologizing (whether neo-Scholastic or whatever) or papal magisterial thought: it was, Faggioli shows, the fruit of the ressourcement movement, including, he briefly acknowledges, certain figures of the Christian East (though not including Alexander Schmemann, one of many names one searches for in vain in this book). One discovery of the ressourcement movement was that of the role of the bishop in the early Church: "the ecclesiology of the liturgical constitution embodies the rediscovery of the ecclesiology of the monarchic episcopate in accordance with the model of the fathers of the Church" (51).

There are other bon mots Faggioli drops along the way, including this: "liturgical ressourcement at Vatican II meant the ripening of the ecumenical language of Catholicism and a powerful blow to every nostalgia [!] of 'Uniatism'" (36). He quickly drops this and never engages it again in the rest of the book--though he does cite, in somewhat truncated fashion, the influence of the Melkites at the council, which Robert Taft has of course discussed elsewhere. And he rightly notes in a variety of places the fact that more than Roman-rite liturgies were offered at the council had a major, if perhaps underappreciated, impact: "the liturgies (in rites different from the Roman) celebrated in St. Peter's contributed greatly to the development of a truly cathoilc, that is, 'universal,' ecclesiology in the council fathers" (63). I think this is sound, but such a sanguine assessment of these liturgies should be set alongside the rather weary comments on them recorded (rather astonishingly, I would add, given Congar's famous graciousness towards the Christian East, and his long, irenic, intelligent study of it) by Congar, which I note here.

There are other areas where the author does not develop his arguments in sufficient depth and detail to be convincing: e.g., he tries to suggest that SC's call for "noble simplicity" (no.34) was much more ecclesiological than "aesthetic" in nature. That is an intriguing line of argumentation that I wanted to hear more of, not least because I think--and have argued elsewhere--that that phrase was the single-most destructive thing in the entire document, and the cause of a renewed iconoclasm in the Roman Church over the last half-century--an argument made by others, including Joseph Ratzinger's The Spirit of the Liturgy.

But let us turn finally to the central thrust of the book: the ecclesiological implications of SC for the life and structure of the Church today. In this Eastern Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and many others have a considerable stake. The author starts off encouragingly by saying that "Lumen Gentium is silent on the practical application of episcopal collegiality whereas Sacrosanctum Concilium is not, and, as a matter of fact, it opened the door to the most important practical implementation of episcopal collegiality in modern Catholicism: national bishops conferences" (73). I have argued elsewhere at length that we need far more such practices in the Catholic Church today--not some anemic "collegiality" but a very robust synodality, and the fact we have seen less and less of it in some areas since Vatican II is very alarming. But the one area where, since 2007, we have not (pace Faggioli) seen more centralization is precisely the liturgy. The one area where we have seen greater freedom at the local level has been precisely the liturgy, thanks to Pope Benedict.

It is at this point that the author gets matters completely backwards. Faggioli is adamant that "questioning the liturgical reform of Vatican II means undoing also the ecclesiology of the liturgical reform and the ecclesiology of Vatican II. Benedict XVI's motu proprio Summorum Pontificum (July 7, 2007), which reintroduced the pre-Vatican II missal, entailed extraordinary consequences from an ecclesiological point of view" (86). And what are those consequences, lest we have misunderstood the author's tender sensibilities to this point? "A rejection of the liturgical reform of Vatican II would mean a premature death of the ecclesiology of the local Church in Catholic theology and its ecclesial praxis" (89); and "a great number of criticisms against the liturgical reform and its application come from a misunderstanding or from a refusal of a renewed ecclesiology" (91). Faggioli seems to think that merely repeating something enough times makes it so.

To this I can only respond, as the late Baroness Thatcher did in her fatal speech in Westminster in October 1990 discussing European federal institutions: no, no, no! I am staggered at just how backwards this argument is, at how impervious it is to actual evidence. (What's the old slogan? Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts?) The whole point of Summorum Pontificum (SP) is to take liturgy out of the hands of curial officials (whether at the Roman-universal or episcopal-local levels) and leave it in the hands of the priests and people in local communities. If there are ecclesiological implications to this decision, and there are, then they are the exact opposite of what Faggioli claims to fear: SP genuinely returns liturgy to the people, a decision I can only wholly welcome for that reason and many others (including the possibility of the "extraordinary" form influencing the ordinary form so that the manifold and manifest defects in the latter may, one hopes, be at least partially healed). This is, surely, the most radical decision not merely since the gross and unjust centralization begun after Pastor Aeternus but indeed since the Council of Trent. This is, surely, a profound ecclesiological blow to the forces of curial control and disastrous papal micromanaging of the liturgy, which should never have been allowed to run riot in the first place. This is, surely, the plain meaning of Article 2 of Summorum (my emphasis):

Art. 2. In Masses celebrated without the people, each Catholic priest of the Latin rite, whether secular or regular, may use the Roman Missal published by Bl. Pope John XXIII in 1962, or the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970, and may do so on any day with the exception of the Easter Triduum. For such celebrations, with either one Missal or the other, the priest has no need for permission from the Apostolic See or from his Ordinary.

How a Mass celebrated in private (a theologically suspect Latin practice, but that is another matter) could possibly deal a "death"-blow to an ecclesiology of the local Church is impossible to fathom.

Consider the other relevant provisions: Article 4 goes on to say that "Celebrations of Mass as mentioned above in art. 2 may - observing all the norms of law - also be attended by faithful who, of their own free will, ask to be admitted." And Article 5 (§ 1) notes that "In parishes, where there is a stable group of faithful who adhere to the earlier liturgical tradition, the pastor should willingly accept their requests to celebrate the Mass according to the rite of the Roman Missal published in 1962." Thus the law provides in at least three places that the priest and people do not need to grovel to the local bishop, still less to the bishop of Rome, in sorting out their liturgical life. I fail to see why this is a bad thing. He is right that there are ecclesiological consequences here, but any fair-minded analysis could (for lack of a better word) only call them "congregationalist" in nature--in other words, the exact opposite of what Faggioli alleges. Thus Faggioli's fearful claim that even criticizing Vatican II's liturgical reform is of a package with the "death" of a local-Church ecclesiology is simply absurd on its face. (The only plausibility this argument could have, which I readily grant, is in the hands of certain members of the SSPX, whose ecclesiology tends towards the most  risibly ultramontane and whose history is indeed bogus and the product of nostalgia for a past that never was. But Faggioli does not sufficiently differentiate between SSPX cranks, a tiny number, and other legitimate and more numerous critics.) Summorum is, if anything, a liturgical charter born precisely out of a solicitude for the local Church above all.

Remember SP's author: Pope Benedict saw, and denounced in his Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977, the fact that the liturgical life of local churches had been so rudely up-ended by the destructive interference of international committees of specialists enforcing their will by papal fiat, a process he rightly derided as an unprecedented and unjustified papal power-grab. He was also aware of how many curialists in Rome and bishops and their own curialists in dioceses around the world thwarted the desires of people to access the extraordinary form through the somewhat restricted provisions of Ecclesia Dei Adflicta so he cut this whole lot out of the chain of command, which was a brilliant tactical move and a rightful attempt to check the excesses of papal power (and curial meddling) in matters liturgical.

Finally, it does not seem to have occurred to Faggioli that one can hold multiple positions at the same time which are perfectly congruent and coherent. By that I mean that there are many critics of the reform who have no desire to return to any kind of yet more centralized ecclesiology of the pre-Vatican II variety. I am myself--and can easily think of many others--one such critic: I think the liturgical reforms were good in some ways, but hugely disastrous in most others and as a consequence I think that the extraordinary form should be used as widely as possible; at the same time I think the ecclesiological reforms were good in some ways though they did not even begin to go far enough. I want very much to see the liturgical and ecclesiological problems fixed, but I want at least as much to see that the council's eccelesiological and ecumenical gains are preserved and not rolled back. Why one cannot hold both sets of desires simultaneously is a mystery to Faggioli but not to me. It is a pity that his ham-fisted defense of one vision of Vatican II and his love of papal centralization (as long as it is used to enforce the favored causes) blinds him to this reality, and that his de haute en bas attitude would never condescend to engage such arguments, which are more complicated than the simplistic tale on offer in this little book.

On Papal Surprises

I just finished two TV interviews about the papal resignation in which I tried to suggest that this was not a total surprise to those who have read Joseph Ratzinger closely and known him to be a man who, very quietly, nonetheless insists on doing things his way where possible. He has never been one to go with the crowd; he has long been a man who refutes expectations; he has been a man of surprises who has often done things in a unique fashion. He was, e.g., the first prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to continue to publish under his own name and to contribute unofficially to debate and dialogue quite outside his official role as prefect. He was the first prefect to give multiple book-length interviews (e.g., Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium-  An Interview With Peter Seewald; or, more famously, and the book that started this unique "genre," The Ratzinger Report). He was the first, in those interviews and elsewhere, to voice very frank public criticism of the state of the Catholic Church in our time, and even to suggest that his predecessor had allowed himself to be turned into a "superstar," a prospect and status about which Ratzinger was palpably uneasy. He was the first sitting prefect to publish an autobiography in his wonderful 1997 book Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977.

In his memoirs, he makes no secret of his desire to leave Rome for a quiet scholarly retirement, a request his papal predecessor refused on several occasions. Now that he has no boss (except God of course) to constrain him, he has recognized that his energies are failing and his ability to do the job is suffering. So he has made the right decision not only for him but, typically, for the good of the Church which he has always tried to serve.

I think this decision is commendable for those two reasons, and also because it might help in a still desperately needed demythologization of the office, a process to which he himself has tried to contribute over the years. By resigning, is he not sending the message: "Catholic bishops the world over are expected to retire at 75. I am a Catholic bishop like them, and a human being also, not some superstar. So I will retire quietly as so many others do." He made it clear in interviews over the years--and in scholarly writings before that, dating back to the Second Vatican Council--that there was far too much focus on "Rome" and the pope, and that the Catholic Church very much needed some kind of decentralization and even perhaps the creation of regional patriarchates within the Latin Church to assist in her governance. In line with this thinking, he took another surprising step: in 2006 he deleted the title "Patriarch of the West" from the Annuario Pontificio, a surprise that was rather considerable and rather shocking in fact to many. But as I tried to argue in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity,

the decision to delete the title was in fact in line with his previous thinking, and was not a retrenchment or a re-centralization of a re-assertion of papal power. It was, I thought hopefully, part of a long-term plan to begin that decentralization he had written and spoken of, and to begin the creation of regional patriarchates. We could yet see both developments--the Church, after all, moves slowly ("we think in centuries here"). Whether we need those developments is a matter for fair argument. I think we do if unity with Orthodoxy is to be taken seriously--hence my book. And since I also think that there is no greater priority than unity with Orthodoxy, for the health of both, then we need to find ways to make that happen. And in fact the papacy is far more flexible than is often imagined, so we could achieve unity if we had the will to make those changes. To paraphrase Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, the aristocracy hasn't gotten where it is by intransigence but by knowing how to change with the times. The Catholic Church is the same.

As for what types of changes in the papal office itself--read my book. As for what type of pope we should hope to see, stay tuned for more thoughts later.

The Church in the Middle East

It's not a book exactly, but at nearly 90 pages it's certainly longer than an e-mail, letter, or blog post: the recent document on the Church in the Middle East, issued after a synod in Rome of Catholic leaders on that topic: Ecclesia in Medio Oriente. Written by the current bishop of Rome, Benedict XVI, and released on the occasion of his recent visit to Lebannon, it addresses issues of concern to all Christians, but Eastern Christians above all for we are on the front-lines of the encounter with Islam.

My Brother the Pope

Of the writing of books about the papacy there is no end. One may divide those into three broad and by no means exclusive categories at least: biography (of the incumbents), history (of the institution), and theology (of the munera or offices). I have of course had a few things to say about the latter in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity. 

One cannot separate the office entirely from the man, no matter how certain apologists for, say, Alexander VI or Honorius I may wish to do so. And the lives of the nearly 300 men who have held this office often make for fascinating, not to say titillating, reading. Individual biographies for many prominent popes abound while some languish in total, and often deserved, obscurity. Good surveys are notoriously hard to produce effectively, though I have argued that Eamon Duffy succeeds admirably in his Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (3rd ed.) (Yale, 2006).

Since the papacy of Pope John Paul II (for whom George Weigel's Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II--
notwithstanding its occasionally hagiographic tone and equally occasional propensity for exaggerated statements as, e.g., when treating that vastly over-rated "theology of the body" business--is far and away the best of the many biographies written about that pope, all of which I have suffered through as a penance for my myriad sins) we have had two additional categories of writings: book-length interviews and quasi-memoirs, the most recent of which, by Pope Benedict XVI, generated a great deal of sound and fury, as I noted in my lengthy discussion of it here. Now to this vast library of books, we may add a new genre: books by the pope's family--in this case, Georg Ratzinger: My Brother, the Pope (Ignatius, 2012), 

About this book, the publisher tells us:

It wasn't always the case that Msgr. Georg Ratzinger lived in the shadow of his younger brother, Joseph. Georg was an accomplished musician, who for over 30 years directed the Regensburger Domspatzchor, the world-famous boys choir of the Regensburg cathedral. Brother Joseph was a brilliant young professor, but mostly known in German academic circles.

Now Georg writes about the close friendship that has united these two brothers for more than 80 years. This book is a unique window on an extraordinary family that lived through the difficult period of National Socialism in Germany. Those interested in knowing more about the early life of Benedict XVI will not be disappointed. They will also learn of the admirable character and inspiring example of the parents, and see how the Catholic faith can shape not just a family, but an entire culture-in this case, that of Bavaria.

Georg's reminiscences are detailed, intimate, and warm. And while they begin with the earliest years of the Ratzinger family, they continue right up to the present day. This is not simply a book to satisfy curiosity about a "celebrity", though it certainly does that. It's a beautiful portrait of Catholic family life and, in the most literal sense, of enduring fraternal charity. Georg has a talent for telling a story, and the co-author fills in some of the larger historical background. The many photographs, both in black and white and in color, round out a thoroughly enjoyable and inspirational book. Illustrated with 47 photographs.

I look forward to reading this book, not least because I am sure it will continue to make known the charming, humble, and winsome man whom I briefly met in Rome in 1998 and who was elected nearly seven years ago now even though he never wanted to work in Rome at all and has for many years longed for release from those labors. Those who actually bestirred themselves to read Ratzinger--as I did, and not just his excellent books, especially The Spirit of the Liturgy, but also the several book-length interviews he has given, most famously in The Ratzinger Report--will have found in them, and even more fully in his charming if incomplete Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977, incontrovertible evidence of a man completely different from the media caricature of him as some vindictive, punitive Panzerkardinal. That mendacious and malevolent image of him, tediously and tendentiously generated and mindlessly recycled over many years, would be risible were it not so cruel and dishonest. 

Eastern Christians, in particular, should look on Benedict as someone who understands them perhaps even better than his famous Slavic predecessor, and who has for decades now been advancing arguments about the need for reform to the papacy (arguments I treat in my  Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy) very much along Orthodox lines. Famously, in 1976, while a simple priest, Ratzinger, at a lecture in Graz, uttered what has come to be called the "Ratzinger formula" (reprinted in the 1987 book Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology): 

Rome must not require more from the East with respect to the doctrine of primacy than what had been formulated and was lived in the first millennium . . . Rome need not ask for more. Reunion could take place in this context if, on the one hand, the East would cease to oppose as heretical the developments that took place in the West in the second millennium and would accept the Catholic Church as legitimate and orthodox in the form she had acquired in the course of that development, while, on the other hand, the West would recognize the Church of the East as orthodox and legitimate in the form she has always had.

The Pope of Rome and the Christian East

Peter Seewald's new book-length interview with the pope,

Light of the World: The Pope, The Church and The Signs Of The Times 


on which I briefly commented earlier, has of course already generated enormous discussion on--predictably and tiresomely--sex. Some have said that the pope allowed himself to be played by the media and should have known how these comments would be received. I would say, based on the entire book, that the pope did know the likely reception his comments would receive, and proceeded anyway. His previous interviews--especially the 1985 Ratzinger Report--as well as his 1997 volume of memoirs, Milestones set off firestorms so I'm sure he was not unaware that something similar would happen again--all the more so in an Internet age. In any event, I've just finished reading the entire thing and have seen that the "condom comments" are so tiny that only the tendentious would be interested in repeating them.

Let me, instead, focus on those aspects of direct interest to Eastern Christians, of which there are about twenty or so passages in the book that are noteworthy. I would divide the comments into (i) the encouraging but not really surprising comments (not surprising, that is, to anyone who has read Ratzinger over the last 40 years); (ii) the truly surprising; and (iii) the disappointing. Of these, (i) is the largest category; (ii) the next largest; and (iii) has only one disappointment. Let me take them in order. Not all treat Orthodoxy directly, but all of them, I believe, have clear and obvious bearing on issues about which Orthodoxy is concerned.

i) Encouraging Comments: 

• The pope is not omnipotent: right at the outset (p.6), he underscores that notwithstanding the fact the Catholic Church is the largest such organization in the world, "the Pope does not have power because of these numbers." Indeed, he goes on to say that while the pope bears "a great responsibility," he "is, on the one hand, a completely powerless man" (6). He cannot control or correct or confront everything, and it is not his job to keep the entire Church in being: "only the Lord himself has the power to keep people in the faith" (7).

• The pope is not exclusively the "vicar of Christ": this title, rather, belongs to "every priest" when he "speaks on behalf of Jesus Christ" (7). This is important, not only because history clearly bears him out in refusing to see the title as exclusively papal, but also because, in the furor in 2006 over papal titles (about which more presently), Orthodox commentators like Met. Hilarion (Alfeyev) noted that other titles, including "vicar of Christ" needed critical examination.

• Infallibility cannot be invoked arbitrarily: Vatican I has, of course, been seen (often incorrectly, in my judgment) as a huge impediment to Orthodox-Catholic unity. Much of that is based on misunderstanding, which the pope is at pains here briefly to correct, insisting that the pope can never act "arbitrarily" but only in concert with other bishops and only "when tradition has been clarified" so as to proclaim "the faith of the Church" (8).

• A papacy of martyrdom: Seewald quotes back to the pope a paper the latter gave in 1977, with which he still agrees today, saying the papacy must first and foremost be understood to have and to exercise "a primacy of martyrdom" (9). In other words, "standing there as a glorious ruler is not part of being pope" (10).

• Papal bibliophilia: not a major point, but on a blog about books, I was heartened and amused to read that after he moved into the papal apartments in 2005, he gave pride of place to his bookshelves: "in them all are my advisors, the books" (14). Only after they were installed did he give any thought to furniture, decorations, etc.

• Curial criticism: In several places he very briefly (and in one place obliquely) criticizes the curial bureaucracy, calling it "spent and tired" (59); noting that "certainly John Paul II sometimes put off making decisions"; and agreeing that, while his predecessor "did undertake reform of the Curia," he "subsequently left many decisions to his collaborators" (79), not always, he seems to suggest, to good effect.  

• Synodality: saying he sees no need for a "Vatican III," he expresses his view that "I believe that at the moment the bishops' synods are the right instrument, in which the entire episcopate is represented and is, so to speak, 'searching,' keeping the whole Church together and at the same time leading her forward" (65-66). This is not really surprising, though a little disappointing because the limits of the Roman "synods of bishops," as I have noted elsewhere, are considerable and perhaps most memorably summed up in the words of the late Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan Maxim Hermaniuk, who dismissed them as synods, archly calling them no more than "international study days of the Catholic bishops." No Orthodox recognizes these synods as real synods in the sense in which that word is used in the East: i.e., as a legislative body, having real power exercised in conjunction with its (usually patriarchal) head. Roman synods are purely consultative bodies. That being said, the popes have so far not ignored the recommendations of all the synods held since Paul VI instituted them in 1965, but they are certainly free to do so, and that remains a point of concern to Eastern Christians. 

• On not being a busybody: Referring to a document written in the 12th century by Bernard of Clairvaux for Pope Eugene III, Benedict agrees with him that no pope can allow himself to be consumed with files, meetings, decisions at the expense of "deeper examination, contemplation, time for interior pondering, vision...remaining with God and meditating about God" (71). Remember, he says, the pope is "not the successor of Emperor Constantine but...of a fisherman" (71). This is important because, as David Bentley Hart has memorably observed, many Orthodox fear the papacy as "the advance embassy of an omnivorous ecclesial empire." It is good to have (as he notes below, and had done so previously) a "pared down" papacy, and thus good to have a pope who is not forever trying to insert himself into the business of his brother bishops around the world--unless, of course, a truly genuine emergency, that admits of no other solution, requires his intervention.

• On not being a star: Some time ago, as those who follow him know, Cardinal Ratzinger expressed considerable unease with the fact that John Paul II was considered a "superstar." (He appeared on the cover of Time more than a dozen times.). He reiterates that here, but more gently and circumspectly, asking "is it really right for someone to present himself again and again to the crowd in that way and allow oneself to be regarded as a star? On the other hand, people have an intense longing to see the pope" and not him personally so much as "this office...the representative of the Holy One" (73).
• On dialogue with Orthodoxy: Noting that as a "professor in Bonn and Regensburg, I always had Orthodox among my students, and this gave me the opportunity to form many friendships in the Orthodox world," he goes on to note that it is with Orthodoxy "where there is...the most hope of reunion" in part because "Catholics and Orthodox both have the same basic structure inherited from the ancient Church" (86). I confess I was slightly taken aback by this because Orthodox and Catholic structures--assuming the pope means ecclesial structures--do vary considerably: the Roman is bipartite (the universal and local), while the East is usually tripartite (the local, the regional, and the "universal" in some sense, pace the denials of some ignorant Orthodox polemicists who like to sneer at "universal" structures as purely Western and having no place in Orthodoxy, a risible claim to anyone who really knows what he is talking about). But this is a very brief comment he does not develop so we should not read too much into it. His larger point is valid.
• Cordial relations between Old and New Rome: he expresses delight in the "real friendship and sense of brotherhood between" him and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.
• Russian relations: he notes his gratitude for "the friendship and the great cordiality that Patriarch Kirill has shown me," noting the latter has "such a joy about him, such a simple faith....So we understood each other well" (87).  The interviewer presses him a little later as to whether there will be a meeting between the two "in the not too distant future", and the pope responds: "I would say that, yes" (91). 
• The nature of the unity we seek: he notes that unity between Orthodoxy and Catholicism needs to happen in order to spread the gospel and help the world believe, but that we must "truly relearn to see and understand our inner spiritual kinship with each other." He is not, he says, concerned firstly with "tactical, political progress, but rapprochement on the level of our interior affinity" (87). He expands on this later, rightly noting that 'beyond the doctrinal issues, there are still many steps to be taken at the level of the heart. God still needs to do some work on us here. For the same reason, I would also be shy about making any predictions about when reunion will happen. The important thing is that we truly love each other, that we have an interior unity, that we draw as close together and collaborate as much as we can--while trying to work through the remaining areas of open questions" (89-90).This, of course, clearly echos John Paul II's oft-stated call for the "healing of memories," on which I've commented previously with reference to Orthodoxy (“The Healing of Memories: a Suggestion for Liturgical Enactment,” Ecumenical Trends 34 [2005]: 9-12), including here.
• No new Uniates: Discussing the prospect of Anglicans entering the Catholic Church, the pope notes that structures being set up for them will be flexible. "We don't want to create new uniate churches, but we do want to offer ways for local church traditions, traditions that have evolved outside of the Roman Church, to be brought into communion with the pope and thus into Catholic communion" (97).

ii) Surprising Comments:

• No hand kissing? The interviewer enumerates things that changed in 2005 when Benedict took office, saying "you abolished the custom of kissing the Pope's hand--though no one followed the new protocol" (82). Is this true? I never heard or saw this anywhere. Orthodoxy has objected to an over-exaltation of papal authority and some of its concrete expressions, but this would not be an objectionable practice given that Orthodox regularly kiss not only patriarchal and episcopal but also priestly hands.  The pope does not respond to this comment, instead insisting that his removing the tiara from the papal coat of arms was not so original because already Paul VI had given it away (and none of his successors have worn one). Frankly no Orthodox could object to the tiara (except, perhaps, the one Paul VI wore because it looked like some nasty cheap nursery-school project) unless we were prepared to renounce the use of imperial headgear on our bishops.
• Backtracking from Dominus Iesus?  Discussing the conciliar language of particular churches, the pope notes that "the Eastern Churches are genuine particular churches, although they are not in communion with the pope. In this sense, unity with the pope is not constitutive for the particular church" (89; my emphasis)! When I have time I'll have to check this (especially the word "constitutive") against Dominus Iesus and also the 1992 declaration on the Church as communio because it sounds like the pope is introducing an important clarification or nuance here....  
• No nationalism or nationalist "autocephaly" in the Church: Noting that "there has always been a tendency toward national churches, and in fact some have actually been founded," he nonetheless notes that in today's world the need is "precisely" for "an interior unity": "the Church needs unity, that she needs something like a primacy. It was interesting for me that the Russian Orthodox theologian John Meyendorff, who lives [sic] in America, said that their autocephalies are their biggest problem; they could use like a first authority, a primate" (138-39).
• this is certainly true, as I have demonstrated at length in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press early next year. But I was a little taken aback here by two things: others have said this more recently--e.g., Nicholas Lossky--so this suggested to me the pope has not followed the recent literature. (I'm sure he's kept sleepless at nights waiting for my book on this score!) And surely he knows that Meyendorff is...dead? Meyendorff died in 1992--perhaps this is a translation issue--or even a typo--and the present tense ("lives") should, of course, have been in the past: lived.

iii) Disappointing Comments: 

• Papal reform: the interviewer presses him to say more about why the title "Patriarch of the West" was abandoned and about how the papacy might be reformed to take account of Orthodox concerns, but the pope will not say, arguing that "these are contentious issues, which I would have to say more about than I can right now..." (89). I examined this question in  my “On the Patriarchate of the West," Ecumenical Trends 35 (June 2006): 1-7. There I said we very much needed to hear from the pope because the decision created such turmoil in the Orthodox world and the statement put out by Cardinal Kasper at the time was unhelpfully ambiguous--a concern I expressed in greater detail here. I very much stand by those comments. The 2006 deletion of the title was, and is, a puzzling decision. Many of us have tried to remain hopeful about its intended import, but further developments and clarifications here would be most useful.

This book covers much else besides. The overall impression, right from the beginning, is confirmed for those of us who know and have read and met Ratzinger (as I did very briefly in 1998), but may be new to others, including the media: he is a wonderfully gracious, humble, open man with a deeply affecting, inspiring simplicity of faith and trust in Providence.