Light of the World

A very kind person gave me the Pope's new book for Christmas. It's a great read so far (I'm on page 56).

A couple of thoughts. I've read a number of interviews praising Peter Seewald, the journalist who conducted the interviews that produced the book. That praise is misplaced. The book is good despite Seewald and not because of him. His questions are opinionated and the man is, for the most part, clueless. He has no understanding of the man he is interviewing and obviously either didn't listen to the answers he was getting or just isn't smart enough to adjust his interview questions to respond to answers he didn't expect.

During the chapter on Climate Change, for example. It rapidly becomes painfully obvious that Benedict just doesn't care about the issue. Seewald had a written list of questions, however, and he was going to read them out and get answers.

But I wonder if many people are listening all that carefully.

At one point, Seewald asks about the future of Catholicism in Europe and begins by citing statistics that establish that the overwhelming majority of people in some of these countries are Catholics. Seewald's point is that a small majority are pushing their secular viewpoint on others. Benedict is having none of this. Look at this bit from the beginning of Benedict's response:

... to what extent do these people still belong to the church in the first place?

Now there is an interesting question. A question, incidentally, that we don't ask nearly enough here in North America. For you can be baptized and confirmed and married in the church and not be a member in any meaningful sense. Heck, you can be all that and go to church most or all Sundays and still not really be a member.

And what is Benedict's diagnosis of the problem? The way he starts sounds very familiar; you think, I know where this is going:

On the one hand, they want to belong to her and do not want to lose this foundation. On the other hand, they are of course also shaped and formed interiorly by the modern way of thinking.

And you could finish that answer by yourself couldn't you? Feed that start to any traditionalist Catholic and they will tell you that the key thing is to reject modernity; that the church's role is to maintain tradition. Feed it to any liberal and they will tell you, "There he goes again trying to turn back the clock." That isn't where Benedict goes, however. To our surprise does quite the opposite (although the careful use of the modifier "interiorly" above might have warned us to expect more respect for the modern). The problem is not with the modern world:

Being a Christian must not become a sort of archaic stratum to which I cling somehow and on which I live to a certain extent alongside of modernity. Christianity is itself something living, something modern, which thoroughly shapes and forms all of my modernity—and in this sense actually embraces it.

Short version, abandon all hope ye who would see the Novus Ordo abandoned and the return of Mantillas and the culture that goes with that. It's not going to happen in this Pontificate (and if not in this Pontificate, then probably never).

I think it is increasingly clear that Benedict thinks the post Vatican 2 reforms were a failure. He is saying to the liberals, "Look, you blew it; your reforms failed." That part is clear.

What isn't so clear to many—even though Benedict says it over and over again for anyone with ears to hear—is that Benedict has no intention of abandoning Vatican 2. He wants a church that is modern but not modernist.