PECCATA MUNDI

 

Lamb of God, mosaic in Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna

 

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

miserere nobis

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

miserere nobis

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi

dona nobis pacem

 

It’s a beautiful text in the liturgy, and the English version was, for 400+ years, “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world”. As such, many loved it, for the world’s many sins have always needed removal through forgiveness. Then came the (19)Sixties, when everything was felt to need change, and suddenly the Lamb of God was taking away the “sin of the world”. Was, and is, that more, or less? And why the change?

            Well, said modern churchmen, it is based on John 1:29, where John the Baptist says “Behold the Lamb of God, ho airōn tèn hamartian tou kosmou” (who takes away the sin of the world). So we are just correcting the Latin. Of course, the Latin comes from the Vulgate, some manuscripts of which read peccatum (singular) and some peccata. And the liturgy, which adopted the Agnus Dei in the late 7^th century, took the peccata text.

            So the singular is the Gospel version, and thus “correct”. And it makes sense, because the Meshiach does deal with the Sin of the world, original sin, the worm in the apple of every human endeavour. 

            And yet there are those, I know, who feel a real sense of loss with the disappearance of the peccata. (It remains in Latin masses.) Because we are taught to examine our own consciences, not for Sin, but for sins; sins in their depressing plurality are what weighs us down; sins in their multitude are what we confront each Lent. And it is a constant comfort to hear, to be reminded, that they are what He takes away, they are what He forgives and, in His infinite mercy, forgets.

            So while I read St John’s Gospel with undiminished love for that wonderfully poetic text of salvation, I am happy still to recite in the Liturgy “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi”, in the comforting assurance that even peccata smaller but knottier than the Sin of the World may not escape the notice of the Lamb.

ITE, MISSA INLICITA EST?

Pope Francis’s recently-published limitations on the use of the Tridentine (Latin) liturgy for the Mass appear to have occasioned exactly the reactions he was doubtless expecting and may have hoped for: joy among the modernists, outrage among the “tradis”. It is useful to remember that he has not cancelled the Latin Mass, or Benedict XVI’s decree permitting its use. He has merely subjected its use in any parish or community to the authority of the local bishop. 

            Apparently, Francis decided on this measure out of alarm at what he saw as being an incipient schismatic cleavage in the Church, especially in America where the increasing political polarization of society is now seen as augmenting the existing divisions within the Catholic community – to the point where liturgy was being weaponized in the struggle about other things such as abortion, the role of women in the Church, gay marriage and so forth. What he either did not realise or weighed but found worth while is that he hemself, with this decree, is doing exactly the same thing, and thus in a sense already conceding a victory to his adversaries. 

            Exceedingly interesting in this regard is the 2018-9 study of Fr Donald Kloster, a Connecticut priest from the Diocese of Bridgeport who specialises in the study of the traditionalist movement, and who found that 99% of the those favouring the Tridentine Mass attended every week, whole of those favouring the modern Mass only 22% did so. Moreover, he found that the Tridentine Mass was particularly favoured by the 18-39-year-olds – which contradicts precisely the arguments of those who think that vernacular, familiar, happy-clappy liturgies will appeal to the young. Of the reasons given by the Millennials and Gen Z lovers of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) by far the most important (35%) was “reverence”.

            One of the rules of life that were dinned into me at an early age was “It’s rude to say ‘I told you so’”. Yet it is very tempting in this case to utter those words. I have been trying to tell people for decades that the continual modernizing and de-solemnizing of the liturgy, so far from counteracting the emptying of churches, encourages and increases it. Certainly, some people prefer a jolly, informal, cheerful Mass or Eucharist; but at least as many, if not more, people of faith love and long for a sense of reverence, or solemnity, of significant form. And this is every bit as true for Anglicans/Episcopalians as it is for Roman Catholics. 

            What seems to me of crucial importance is that, first, we should abandon the terminology of “modernists” vs. “traditionalists” when referring to liturgy and replace it with something like “informalists” vs. “formalists” or “proponents of togetherness” vs “proponents of reverence/solemnity”. Second, and even more important: all sides should be brought to agree to divorce discussions of liturgy from discussions of other aspects of religion in society. It is perfectly possible to love solemnity and reverence and tradition in a celebration of the Eucharist while accepting that such a celebration may be performed by a female priest or a gay priest, either or both of them married, and believing that abortion, while always sad and often traumatic, is permissible and not a sin. 

            Finally, a word to Anglicans and Episcopalians. While we do not use the ancient Latin liturgy, we have an equivalent. Like the Latin texts, the sixteenth/seventeenth-century words of the Book of Common Prayer (1662) are in a language that, while comprehensible, is distant from everyday modern usage and was specifically designed to convey the reverence of the older Latin. Moreover, even more than Latin, this liturgical language has shaped English usage for over three centuries: “to have and to hold”, “till death us depart”, “we are as the beasts that perish”, “devices and desires”, “peace in our time”, “sudden death”, “the kindly fruits of the earth”, “our bounden duty and service” – centuries of worshippers have repeated and loved these words so that they have acquired the patina and glow of handed-down family treasures. And thus and so, they allow us to combine reverence and solemnity with familiarity in a way that destroys and cancels neither.

            

 

SWEPT AND GARNISHED

 This morning, Lent III, I had the joy of a liturgy that combines the best of two worlds: the pomp and circumstance, the glorious theatre, of a Tridentine Mass with the immortal texts of Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer; as well as the Kyrie, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei from Tomas Luis da Victoria's Mass Trahe me post te, sung by a superb choir of 8 voices; and, of course, Communion in both kinds. (I weekly curse the Council of Constance which forbade that in 1417.)

 The only fly in the ointment was the sermon -- unusually so, for the Rector of this church is usually superb as a preacher. But he frankly admitted that he hadn't a clue as to the meaning of this morning's Gospel (Luke 11:14-28), that the commentaries he had read didn't seem to either, that something seemed to have got lost in translation; and so he confined himself to helpful if platitudinous hints for a "good Lent".

So, walking back through a gloriously sunny if cool Upper East Side of Manhattan, I pondered that thorny passage. As you will remember, it starts with Jesus driving out demons. Some magically inclined bystanders mutter that he must be doing this through the King of demons, Beel-Zebub, the Lord of the Flies. To which he crisply replies that for the king of demons to drive out demons would be like a civil war in the Nation of Evil: "a house divided against itself cannot stand". No: the only way a strong individual (man or demon) can be driven out is by a stronger one; after which he concludes, superbly: "If I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the Kingdom of God is come upon you." You can meditate on just that last phrase for days: the Kingdom is not to come, it is come. It is come in him. The Meshiach does not just announce the Kingdom -- the reign -- of God, he is the Kingdom, the kingship.

 But then comes the passage that is both gripping, unforgegttable, and difficult. First: "He that is not with me is against me." Then, and I think as an illustration: "When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh unto him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first." Ouch.

 This is not a parable, and in Jesus' time I think not even an allegory. Jesus did not use Beel-Zebub, but he knew him and all his tribe through and through; so this, I'm convinced, is his story of what actually happens when a demon is cast out. For the demon, the man is a house from which he has been expelled. Like all demons, this one is fundamentally miserable; uprooted, he seeks rest and, like all his ilk, cannot find rest anywhere. So he goes back to his former house and finds it, now "swept and garnished": thoroughly cleaned, and ornamented with bouquets of fresh flowers and sweet-smelling herbs everywhere. BUT. BUT. Not only is it swept and garnished, it is EMPTY. Empty, clean, spacious, and inviting. SO the demon goes and finds seven other demons worse then he, and they all move in. Before, the man was possessed by only one devil; now he has eight, quarrelling (as demons will) inside his head, his heart and soul.

 And the moral of the story? Surely not difficult. Even if it is Jesus himself, the Son of God, who has cast out the demon from you, you do not, ever, leave your house -- your heart, your soul -- empty. Nothing is more dangerous. You put all the power prayer gives you to work to invite the Ruach, the Pneuma, the spiritus sanctus, to come in and dwell in you, to fill your space with His presence.

As I said above, the whole story is an illustration of "he who is not for me is against me". That phrase is one we tend to misunderstand. To many of us, it sounds aggressive and unkind: I (or my brother, my wife, or my teenager) may not be an active disciple, but I'm certainly not against Him. Can't you leave me a neutral space where I can call myself an agnostic (which someone defined as "you're something, but you don't have to go to church")?

As so often, Jesus doesn't prescribe, he describes. He's been telling you not what he and the Father are going to do to you to punish you; he's been telling you a natural consequence, as we do to a child. If you put your hand over a lit gas ring, you'll get burnt and it'll hurt horribly. If, once the police have helped you get rid of the criminal squatters, you clean and redecorate the desirable property that is your spirit and then leave it standing empty with the door unlocked, you will in the nature of things get new squatters, and more, and worse. If, on the other hand, you at once invite the very best of tenants in -- and, moreover those who have said that if invited they will come -- your house's foundations will be rock-solid and its windows will shine for miles around.

 "If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." (John 14:23)

FROM CATS TO SLAVES: WARMTH AND WISDOM

One of the great joys this year has brought me is a small book written by a nonagenarian: Ronald Blythe's The Circling Year: Perspectives from a Country Parish (Norwich: the Canterbury Press, 2001, repr. 2006). Blythe, a writer and essayist who will be 94 on November 6, made a name for himself with Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village in 1969. Apart from a number of delightful books, he has for many years written a column in the English Church Times, titled 'Word from Wormingford'; he is a Reader in the Church of England and a lay Canon of St Edmundsbury Cathedral.

The Circling Year loosely follows the liturgical year from Advent to Advent in a series of brief chapters that could almost be (and may in fact have been) homilies at Matins or Evensong. Some of the titles: 'The Women in the Lord's Life', 'The Passport to the Kingdom' (on childhood), 'The Brother Slave' (on Philemon), 'The Frightened Walkers' (on the road to Emmaus), 'Holy Cats' (on the parish cat, Christopher Smart, and Julian of Norwich's cat), and 'The Singer of Sad Songs' (on Jeremiah). Blythe writes with complete and unostentatious charm, not only about faith but about Suffolk and its flat, windy and watery countryside where he has spent most of his life and where he still lives in an Elizabethan farmhouse left to him by the painter John Nash whom he had nursed through his final illness.

From 'About Not Forgetting' (at Epiphany): "It is the common experience to have running together side by side religious conventions and personal religious beliefs which are far from conventional, and it is the mixing of the two which makes each of us what we are. An honest memory is the only asset we have which can show us the self that God recognizes. It is the Epiphany when Christ is shown to us in a full light and when we approach him feeling rather exposed by the pure illumination of these winter days. The collect asks God to look upon our infirmities -- and how unhidable they are!" And later, when the leper presents himself, "Christ touches him and says, 'Be clean.' The one-time leper would never forget what he had been, so ill, so outcast. And in Christ's memory too there would have remained a sight of an unhealed and healed man.
     A popular inscription for a sundial is, 'I tell only the sunny hours'. Being a sundial, that is all it can do. Given half a chance our memory would do the same, for it is human to seek oblivion for some of the happenings in our lives. But at the altar we remember our wickedness before we remember our goodness in Christ."

This, as one review put it, "is a book to be given to a friend who has a discriminating ear and an affection for things local." It accompanies you through the year like a wise and unpretentious acquaintance whom it is a privilege to know.

ON OUR OWN

This morning I attended what the French Church now calls an A.D.A.P.: Assemblée dominicale en l’absence d’un prêtre, a Sunday assembly in the absence of a priest. This is relatively new: it was foreseen by Vatican II, but it is growing in importance as the number of priests declines and the number of clochers (literally ‘spires’) served by each increases. Our local parish priest now has 48 spires, which obviously borders on the ridiculous, indeed the monstrous. 

In the little modern missal-cum-hymnbook I found the official passage explaining ADAPs and giving some idea as to what they should be like. Some of the points I remember: congregations should be reminded that where two or three are gathered together, Christ is in the midst of them, and should therefore rate such events at their proper value (read: don’t complain because there’s no Mass); there should be readings from Scripture and prayers; but on the whole there should not be communion (from previously consecrated Hosts), because then people might end up thinking of the Mass as only one of several available ways to receive communion. 

What fascinated me was that for the form of such assemblies, no rules are given at all: ‘they can take many different forms’ is all that is said. They appear to have no consciousness of, or no interest in, the fact that in the Anglican Church, for example, there are beautifully-structured ADAPs called Matins and Evensong, which can perfectly well be celebrated without a priest: the only difference is that in such a case the Absolution is replaced by the glorious Collect for Trinity 21:

Grant, we beseech thee,

merciful Lord,

to thy faithful people

pardon and peace;

that they may be cleansed from all their sins

and serve thee with a quiet mind

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I don’t believe that the way ADAPs are conceived here includes a Confession and Absolution of any kind; at least this morning’s had none. (What I found alarming was the first intercessory prayer: ‘for those who confuse the Faith with a collection of rituals to practice: for those whose prideful obstinacy divides the Church and the World and imperils Peace; for them, Lord, we pray.')

I once owned (and have now, alas, misplaced) a beautiful little French translation of the Book of Common Prayer, published (curiously) in Dublin in 1777. Later I discovered that many Huguenots (French Protestants) who had fled France when their faith was proscribed by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 had gone to England but had then continued on to Ireland and joined the Church of Ireland. Being French, they were clearly not known for their ability to learn languages, so the CofI decided to print French Prayer Books, just for them. I should rustle up the texts of Matins and Evensong from that book again, remove the prayers for the Queen and Royal Family, and present them to the organisers of the next ADAP . . .

NB: the exquisite little painting above represents a village congregation coming from Evensong. It is by Samuel Palmer, a pupil of William Blake's, and was painted during his mystical year at the village of Shoreham in Kent. 

THE JOYS OF TRANSLATION

My priestly daughter suggested I translate into English the admirable little French book on the Mass about which I wrote here in October 2014, Missa Est by Daniel-Rops with stunning photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot. Little did I think what joy the work would give me. One may read a book, which is already an improvement to skimming it; but when you translate it you read it a far more profound way: you have not only to find the words' equivalents but their meaning, which includes their resonance and their overtones. It is this meaning that must be recreated in the new language.
   (I have since discovered that there exists a 1950s American translation put out under the aegis of the very media-oriented Bishop Fulton Sheen, with photographs by the great Canadian Yousuf Karsh; but I don't want to see it before finishing my own, as you can perhaps imagine.)
   Apart from a whole new appreciation of Daniel-Rops's writing, both in the historical explanations and in the fervent meditations on each part of the ceremony, I've been struck by the intricacy, the structure, the profundity of significance and the potential for spirituality of the 1570 Tridentine Roman Mass. We non-Roman Catholics often grew up with an apprehension of things Papist on the one hand; and on the other, our Roman brethren have now, since the Second Vatican Council, so altered the liturgy that it often bears only the faintest, reminiscent resemblance to its magnificent forebear.

   The intricacy, first: as Daniel-Rops explains in his Preface, not one of its 30 parts can be considered, as the Tridentine Catechism puts it, 'as useless or superfluous'. 'The smallest versicle, the sentence it takes only seconds to pronounce, are an integral part of a whole where are associated and proclaimed the gift of God, the oblation of Christ and the Grace we receive. It is like a spiritual symphony, where all the themes come back, complete one another, and unite in a single intention.'
   The structure, second: we enter with anticipated joy; find our emphatically-imperfect inner mess a block, so confess; are absolved; hear the Church's teaching in readings and homily; include the world in our preparatory prayers; offer the fruits of the earth that will be transformed; assist, in wonder and prayer, at the Consecration; communicate; are brought back to the world in the Postcommunion; are blessed, and go back to our lives. It is as structured as a great play. 
   Profundity of significance. There is not a detail -- as I once explained to student to whom all this was new and fascinating -- that does not have at least six centuries of meaning attached to it; that does not come from years, decades or centuries of intelligence feeding devotion. Take the Confiteor, the General Confession: the priest who leads it, and who is sometimes followed in this by members of the congregation, strikes his breast three times, an ancient sign of humility. These three strikes are knocks: Christ's knocking at the door of our closed and stubborn heart. If we open to them in the Confession, we may be freed from our burden by the Absolution. 
   Finally, the potential for spirituality. If we participate entirely, with our whole being, in such a Mass, we will emerge as from a great tragedy: scoured and cleansed, washed and slightly trembling, but with a renewal of joy, hope and courage for the days to come. 

But where to find such a Mass, today? The international and universal intelligibility of Latin has gone, and visitors can barely follow what is going on. The Mass as I experience it in my cluster of French villages is a travesty; the gestures are hurried if not suppressed, half the words are missing, the atmosphere is that of an amicable chat among friends; the texts are half improvised, the homilies bellowed into an unnecessary microphone --- and yet the villagers are happy. The flow of the liturgy is brutally checked by the exchange of the Peace, as if King Lear were interrupted in the middle of Act IV by a loquacious bumpkin engaging the audience; yet the elderly peasants smile and say 'La paix du Christ' to their neighbours. It is all very Evangelical and sort of Baptist in atmosphere. It is, apparently, what the Council Fathers in the Sixties wanted, and one suspects it suits our present Pope perfectly. 

Yet those who want something else, who need, who crave a true, silent, adoring worship; who need time and stillness for intense prayer but time and stillness not alone but in community; they are short-changed. Those who yearn for worship of the Highest in reverence, in beauty, in quiet, in a movement of the spirit they can join in, in a 'spiritual symphony', are neglected and, if they are not close to some major city where there is an eccentric Church more or less frowned upon by the authorities, have nowhere to go.

   I do not know the answer to this. I simply hope that those of us who have the need for such a Mass (or Eucharist), replete with the history of our faith and of our Church, filled with the wealth of symbolism it carries, will have the courage to make our needs felt and not to let ourselves be treated as antisocial, egocentric and reactionary aesthetes. 
   As for us Anglicans, who have long had good reason to feel dubious (to say the least) about the Council of Trent, perhaps we should look again at this Mass, which our otherwise admirable ancestors dismissed as diabolical flummery: if we look again, with a devout eye and an open mind, we shall find such a wealth of nourishment for the soul as will last us days, weeks, months, and even years.    

A GOOD ASKING

This mosaic of St Ephrem is the oldest image I could find: an 11C mosaic from the Nea Moni monastery 
on the Greek island of Chios. He looks as if he has just seen the ghost of Mani threatening him. 

I was looking up the 4th-century St Ephrem of Syria, nicknamed "the harp of the Holy Spirit" for his Syriac hymns, and came across "the Prayer of St Ephrem" which is part of the Orthodox liturgy and which I found simple and touching:

O Lord and Master of my life, give me not the spirit of idleness, meddling, lust for power and idle talk.

But grant unto me, Thy servant, a spirit of wisdom, humility, patience and love.

Truly, Lord and King, grant me to see mine own faults and not to judge my brother. For blessed art Thou, world without end. Amen.

The "wisdom" in the second line is sophrosunè in Greek, which is a kind of general intelligent sanity of life: it is traditionally translated as "chastity" but in modern terms something like "wisdom, discernment, integrity, simplicity" and/or a mixture of all of those seems more accurate. 

ANTI-GRAVITY?

"SOLEMN" (Oxford English Dictionary)

1.   a.  Associated or connected with religious rites or observances; performed with      due ceremony and reverence; having a religious character; sacred.

The seruice daylie doon..so deuoute, solempne, and full of Armonye. (Thos. Cromwell)

3.   a. Performed with, accompanied by, due formality or ceremony; of a formal or ceremonious character.

Watching the glorious Kristin Scott Thomas perform Sophocles’ ‘Electra’ recently, I was reminded of the Catholic Mass as practiced in the village churches in my area in rural France. The theatre performance was filled with passion, vast floods of it; there were occasional flashes of humour, but the semiotic of the whole production was “(Greek) Tragedy is Passion” – rip-roaring, throat-tearing, rolling-on-the-ground passion.  The Mass – the modern, post-Vatican-II Mass as presided over by our hyperactive, charming, big-hearted Algerian priest – has, obviously, a different kind of passion, but that is not its main characteristic. Its main feature is upbeat intimacy: the semiotic here is “the Mass is a family get-together – God’s family”. There are flashes of humour, and the moment of the Peace, where the liturgy is interrupted while everyone shakes hands with or kisses neighbours, here is not nearly as invasive an interruption as in some more formal Masses: it preserves the mood that has been there all along.

            Well, so what? In Electra, we are caught up in an uncontrollable hatred and grief; in the village Mass, we are absorbed into a good-humoured communal celebration. And yet, and yet. In both manifestations, something huge and important is missing, and it is the same thing: solemnity. Greek tragedies were solemn occasions, not religious services but performed and beheld with reverence and gravity. The performers wore masks. The ending comprised katharsis, a cleansing, a purification of the emotions of pity and terror that the story had called forth.

            The Mass is a religious service. It is the supreme moment of meeting between man and God, between Man and God-made-Man, between an ordinary person and the Resurrected Christ. Few people have said this better that John Henry Newman, the Anglican who became a Roman Catholic – and what he wrote is equally true for Anglo-Catholics:

To me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Masses forever, and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words -- it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. Here becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity.

Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on, as if impatient to fulfill their mission. Quickly they go, the whole is quick, for they are all parts of one integral action, for they are awful words of sacrifice, they are a work too great to delay upon, as when it was said in the beginning, "What thou doest, do quickly".

Quickly they pass, for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as He passed along the lake in the days of His flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. Quickly they pass, because as the lightning which shineth from one part of the heaven into the other, so is the coming of the Son of Man. Quickly they pass, for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in the cloud, calling on the name of the Lord as He passed by, "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth". And as Moses on the mountain, so we too "make haste to bow our heads to the earth, and adore".

So we, all around, each in his place, look out for the great Advent, "waiting for the moving of the water", each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intentions, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation; not painfully and hopelessly, following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our place with God's priest, supporting him, yet guided by him.

There are little children there, and old men, and simple laborers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving, there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one Eucharistic hymn, and the great Action is the measure and the scope of it.

What Newman wrote still supposes a congregation, a community; but it is a congregation united in a joy that is solemn, in a solemn hour of celebration. “Here becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble.” I have seldom if ever attended a post-Vatican-II Mass, or indeed an Anglican Common Worship Eucharist, where this sense was expressed. Solemnity is not boring, nor is it old-fashioned: it is gravitas, the expression of the respect and awe due to what is greater than our sloppy humanity. An expression that picks up and involves our sloppy human selves and catches us up, for all too short a moment, into the portals of eternity. Please, can we have our solemnity back?

QUICK WORD

Words that sprang into my head upon waking, and that I share because they seem truly fruitful:

O Lord Holy Spirit, be close to me today,
that wherever I am may be Thy temple,
and whatever I do may be Thy liturgy.

AN OLD EXPLORER

             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.

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 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.