THE OTHER POPE

It is intriguing, in current Catholic Masses, to hear prayers for "le Pape François", and to see him everywhere referred to by his title AND his name. But that should remind us that there is, for the first time since the Avignon schism, another Pope, a "Pope emeritus", living in well-earned peace and quiet in a small ugly convent in the Vatican and occupied in prayer. Going through some old MSS on my computer I found this note I wrote on him at the time of his abdication, which I here repeat with pleasure and with deep affection for that saintly scholar.

BENEDICT XVI

Everyone remembers that he was known as ‘the Panzer Cardinal’, and almost everyone has been surprised at the Pope he turned out to be. This exquisitely sensitive man, with the spirit of a true scholar, met a turning-point in his life ca. 1968, when at his beloved University of Tübingen he saw fine scholars howled out of the classroom and physically molested for expressing facts and insights deemed politically incorrect by an army of ignorant and so-called progressive taliban. Having realised that certain ideologies, certain prejudices and certain ignorances are the enemies of reason as well as of true faith, he devoted the rest of his scholarly life until now to the convergence of those two human qualities, so often thought irreconcileable.

His famous “Regensburg address”, which the media and the “Arab street” – without, of course, bothering to read it -- interpreted as insulting Islam, was in fact a powerful meditation on the topic of reason and faith (which I read in German, translated into English, published on my old blog, and will now re-publish here). His short catecheses, given as mini-homilies in Rome, on the great minds of Christendom have now been published as Doctors of the Church, and may go some way to helping Christians close up the lamentable gulf that separates us from devout Jews and their knowledge of their faith’s great thinkers. And his three short books on Jesus – the life, the Passion, and the infancy narratives – are both distinguished and eminently readable.

As long as he has been Pope I, as a non-Catholic and a scholar, felt that here was a man I understood, respected, and liked. Yes, he was austere in his liturgical tastes, but there a lover of the Book of Common Prayer can follow him. Yes, he was strict in his traditional dogmas, and there we would differ. But I am as glad to differ as to agree with one whose mind I can not only respect but regard with admiration bordering on awe.

Moreover, there has been about him since he acceded to the Chair of Peter a kind of gentleness, a kindness, a sensitivity that many would not have expected. And this, I believe, comes from the fact that apart from being a scholar he is a man of prayer, genuinely and absolutely concerned with the things of the spirit and of the soul. It is this that seems to have allowed him to bring out the vulnerable young man he was, and to connect (in a way so very different from the ebullient John Paul II) with simple and humble people. When he speaks German it is a soft, intelligent, mostly kind murmur that reminds those of us whose childhood was marked by the Nazi bark, the Schnauze, of the German language’s other registers, of simple courtesy and of the poetry of deep feeling.

A religious boffin on French TV said that the negative side of his papacy would be remembered in his attempts to reconcile the Lefebvrists, which struck me as both one-sided and short-sighted. Few people care much about the Fraternity of Pius X; lovers of Latin liturgy feel a sneaking sympathy for them; and only those who dig a little deeper see the essential gloom of their grim and uncompromising nineteenth-century Catholicism. (I went to a Latin Mass in Venice where all was delicious until the elderly priest, biretta- and lace-clad, gave to the small elderly congregation a morose sermon on sexual purity.) The fact that one of their number was also a Holocaust denier just means that they have nuts just like all insitutions.

I suspect that in his heart of hearts Benedict XVI, like many devout Christians both Roman and other, is not a full-fledged enthusiast for Vatican II, its evangelical mateyness and its lamentable liturgical and aesthetic taste; but I am sure that he has also seen the way in which it has begun to renew the Church, to banish some of the gloom and doom, to make parishioners smile at one another during Mass, and to enthuse hundreds of thousands of young people to travel thousands of miles for the experience of the World Youth Days.

He is not a man easily understood by a 24/7 media culture (“What Made Benedict Conservative?” trumpeted an American journal, introducing its story with the words “according to the media . . .”). He is, I believe, private, profound, prayerful, bookish, and shy. His decision to abdicate is both innovative and personally courageous. He is now very frail, and eminently deserves to end his earthly life in the peace of a monastery. One can only hope that his successor will proclaim him, as he has been for many decades, a Doctor Ecclesiae, a Doctor of the Church.