A pope quote

I was going to say another big writing day but that is the way it is going to be for the next little while so I won't. Saying I'll be busy writing has an apologetic tone about it and there is no point in apologizing for what is normal.

Here is the quote from The Light of the World that jumped out at me yesterday:

Less clearly but nevertheless unmistakably, we find here in the West, too, a revival of new Catholic initiatives that are not ordered by a structure or bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is spent and tired. These initiatives come from within, from the joy of young people. Christianity is perhaps acquiring another face and, also, another cultural form.

That is real reformer talk. This is a Pope who expects and welcomes change. He isn't trying to drive and control change. He talks about it coming from somewhere else. Benedict is an old man and he knows he is an old man.

I remember when I did my first will, I had an instruction that required multiple steps to deal with conditionals. There was a piece of property i wanted to go to a certain kind of person, so I had this complicated set of steps. My lawyer looked at me and said, 'You can't legislate from the grave.'

I'm sure he has said this line before. It had a practiced ring about it. But it is so true. There is point where you have to let go of the world and it comes long before death. A big part of living successfully is dying successfully. If, like a certain recently deceased politician, you find yourself fighting for some piece of legacy legislation on your deathbed, you have failed at life.

Reading Benedict, you can see a man who has begun the renunciation necessary to die successfully long ago. He is ready to let go.

But perhaps the most telling, and true, line in that quote above is about the bureaucracy. That is the line about the people who haven't begun to let go, the people determined to legislate from the grave. The big irony of every generation is that the young Turks grow up to be Bourgeois. Jacques Brel has a song about this. Baby Boomers, however, refuse to accept that they are old, tired bureaucrats. Even now, when the youngest boomers are entering their fifties, they imagine that youth is on their side; they imagine that they have a natural affinity with youth.

But the old rebellion is now just an entrenched bureaucracy and, like all bureaucracies, it only cares about self preservation.

I was thinking last night about a friend of mine who was once quite the young rebel. She was, and remains, an anti-poverty advocate. She is a ,member of every anti-poverty group in the community. She hectors and badgers people to give more and accuses business people of being rich and selfish.

A few years ago, the Ontario government passed a law that said that a list of all the public employees paid over a  certain threshold must be made public along with their salaries. And my friend made the top ten list for her city. All ten were in the top two percent of earners for that city. The thing that staggered people, though, was that the others were administrators. My friend, however, is an elementary school teacher.

That, of course, was why she had gotten away with accusing others of being rich all these years. No one imagined that an elementary school teacher could make so much. One teacher who is also a union rep I met a few years ago, told me that the salary in question was impossible, pure fiction, when I told her the story. But it's not fiction. It's a matter of public record.

My friend still goes about hectoring "the rich". I suspect people take her a lot less seriously now that her status was revealed on page one of the local paper. She still takes herself as seriously as ever.

And so do the old "reformers" of the 1962 generation in the church. They aren't though. They are just another self-preserving bureaucracy.

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.