Carl Olson does a nice job with this one:
What happens when an American journalist with a typically dualistic “conservative vs. liberal”, politics-are-everything perspective tries to understand Pope Benedict XVI? He becomes a bit befuddled, as does Gerry Stern, in a piece posted by USA Today titled, “Benedict still a mystery after 3 years as pope”:
I have a suggestion for other befuddled journos out there:
Okay, a few suggestions:
1) Questions assumptions. Part of the paradigm that’s being constructed in B16-coverage is that JPII was a “Rock star” who was beloved by many and B16 is more of a…mystery. It might be fruitful to consider the possibility that
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some, if not many of those who were truly inspired by John Paul II are, indeed not mystified by Benedict and might even understand what he’s about. It’s just that anyone who would have taken the time to read at least some of JPII’s writings and learn from them was probably (I’m just guessing here) not going to shut down once JPII passed away, plug up their ears and sing “la-la-la” when B16 started to speak.
2) So, given that possibility…might we try to find some of these people?
I’m serious. This is not a joke post. This is for real, because this “no one really gets Benedict” meme is out there and getting reinforced by the day. You have to go beyond the rolodex of Catholic punditry, but you might try the following:
1) The books and other works of Benedict have sold very well in the three years since he was elected Pope. Talk to people at Our Sunday Visitor, Ignatius, Doubleday and the Vatican publishing house about this. People are buying works by and about him, and they are not all “Church insiders.” And they are not buying the books because they are befuddled by the mysterious Benedict and darned if they’re not going to figure the guy out.
2) Explore the Internet – the Papa Ratzinger Forum. The Pope Benedict XVI Fan Club Discussion Board, leaping over the ocean if you want, check out the Petrus news site. Look at this list of blogging Catholic clergy and religious and contact some of them about what they know about and think of Benedict.
3) Look at this thread – a modest thread from this blog (and I’d invite you folks to add to it!) in which readers discuss their own impressions of Pope Benedict.
The point is, claiming that “Benedict is still a mystery” doesn’t seem to me to be an assertion that belongs in a news article. It’s in the same category (or even worse) as claiming that “many believe” something without any evidence that, in fact, “many believe” that thing at all. (Just as the phrase “critics say” can function as a way of framing a story around a writer’s own opnion or agenda). I mean, how is “Benedict is still a mystery” a news story? Are there big questions being raised on Catholic blogs or in Catholic parishes or chanceries in which people are sitting around scratching their heads wondering, “Who is Benedict? I just don’t get him?” Are they publishing articles and holding meetings to address the mystery?
To begin a news article with the assertion that “Benedict is still a mystery” is not, in fact, news reporting. It’s the creation of a thesis and then finding voices to support the thesis. It would be fantastic if, over the next month, journalists could get back to basics, stop trying to create stories and simply report: This is who Benedict is. This is what he writes about. This is what he talks about. These are the ideas that have formed his intellectual life and spirituality.
Mystery solved.
SNIP “He doesn’t want the pope to be the object of people’s faith or veneration. He wants that to be Jesus.”
So true – we watched the broadcast of the Vigil live and were very moved, thinking how wonderful that mere “commoners” were privileged with the pomp normally reserved for Royal weddings and such…
Was I alone in experiencing the two or three Phillipino (_?_guessing_?_) communicants as quite off-putting, almost stumbling in unseemly haste to gulp down the Eucharist to afford themselves the opportunity to rudely steal a grasp at the Pope’s hand and detain it long enough to smooch obsequiously upon his Signet Ring?
Yeew… memo to Mariani (or USCCB Master of Ceremonies): make sure the privileged souls selected for the NY and DC Papal “altar call” are instructed to keep their hands to themselves after receiving communion!
oops me and my enchant for emphatic Latin italics sorry
One of the many coherent themes of Pope Benedict XVI is his prolonging and expanding the discussion of the relationship between Faith and Reason in the modern world, a theme which Pope John Paul II began in the encyclical entitled, of all things, “Faith and Reason”.
It saddened me much that his Regensberg speech was hijacked — even by Catholics, and some of them right here on this blog! — by a discussion about Islamic terrorism, thereby burying the central theme of that speech, which was the relationship between Faith and Reason.
I remember it well. The day the speech came out, or perhaps the next day, a furious discussion broke out at Amy’s other site about his mentioning Islam in the speech. I was absolutely dumbfounded. Were we reading the same speech?
No question the world and the MSM was in arms because the the muslim reference — but that’s not what the speech was about, so why in the world did Catholics — faithful Catholics — take the bait and buy into the MSM meme? I’ll never understand.
I wrote a comment that day, kindly pointing out that he was talking about positivism, rationalism, and the struggle against unreason. My little comment was a tiny meaningless speck in what turned out to be a wildfire of political speculation and hand wringing about “oh my, should the Pope have attacked Islam?” etc. etc. We were our own worst enemy. It still pains me that Catholics worked the muslim meme just as hard as MSM because it was sexy. Who cares if that was what the speech was about?
Hee! The most well-documented set of pre-papal opinions ever, along with a set of homilies and audience addresses that practically come with their own index and footnotes… and they can’t figure out what he’s thinking about?
Ooh, it’s so mysteeeerious to say what you mean and mean what you say! And God forbid people should pay attention when you take the trouble to tell people when you’ve changed your mind or added depth and details to your ideas!
But I shouldn’t laugh. A lot of Catholics on all sides of the issues do the same, mostly because they’re too busy thinking about their own opinions to read what the man (or anybody else) is actually saying.
Now, if you’re looking for mystery, there’s often no telling when he’s going to forward his plans in a specific way. But honestly, I think he does that like a farmer checking his field — he does what he can when the time is ripe for it, gets ready to do other stuff, and (after doing his research, and before checking his yields) doesn’t worry much about what other people think is the best way to grow crops.
Many, many years ago, I was selected to be interviewed for a Time magazine story about the American Church ten years after Vatican II. (I said, many, many years ago.) So, two friends and I, all college students, got interviewed.
The interviewer asked repeatedly, “Don’t you think that …?” “Wouldn’t you agree that…?”, etc. The woman never, ever, in the whole interview ever asked, “What do you think?” “How do you experience the church?”
She seemed to get more and more frustrated that our quotes didn’t bolster her already formed theses about what college students thought about the American church.
So, in the end, one of my friends’ quotes was pulled out of context and put in. My friend had actually made the point opposite to the one that ended up in the article. (Luckily for her, no one remembers this whole article, because she has gone on to have a ‘church career.’)
Moral of the story and an early valuable lesson for me: Never pay any attention to what the mainstream media writes about the church. My other example is the NY Times headline sometime in the summer of 1995 – “Pope abolishes hell.” I thought, “Hmmm, I work for the church. Shouldn’t we have gotten a memo or something?” My investigation (“What in God’s name ARE they talking about????”) led me to John Paul’s wonderful Wednesday audiences on heaven, hell and purgatory. But no abolition.
Maureen
In line with what you said about him sometimes revising, do you know if he ever changed his condemnation of rock music:
Ratzinger’s 1985 address to the International Church Music Congress in Rome:
“Since rock music seeks release through liberation from the personality and its responsibility, it can be on the one hand precisely classified among the anarchic ideas of freedom which today predominate more openly in the West than in the East. But that is precisely why rock music is so completely antithetical to the Christian concept of redemption and freedom, indeed its exact opposite. Hence, music of this type must be excluded from the Church on principle, and not merely for aesthetic reasons, or because of restorative crankiness or historical inflexibility.”
…quoted in
http://popebenedictxvifanclub.com/faq.html
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Forget liturgy…if rock is so evil, he should now be seeking to remove it from all Catholic culture and all Catholic families as a matter of conscience. If it is evil as being in liturgy, it is evil as being in my car CD player.
Did he ever pull back on the severity of these comments?
I think his ‘85 comments to be less than rational and Aquinas is much better on things which interrupt reason…here is Aquinas on the sexual act which also suspends reason for the duration just as rock apparently does:
” By the marriage act man does not incur harm to his reason as to habit, but only as to act. Nor is it unfitting that a certain act which is generically better be sometimes interrupted for some less good act; for it is possible to do this without sin, as in the case of one who ceases from the act of contemplation in order meanwhile to devote himself to action.” Supplement to the ST Q49 art4 Reply to Objection 1
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But have you come across his revising this 1985 comment at all?
I’d like respectfully to disagree. I thought about the ‘man of mystery’ theme for a couple of days, and although it sounds risible at first sight, the journalist who said it has a point. I’ve read several biographies and overviews of Papa Ben, and looked at several others. It’s not just that they are all different, because all biographies and overviews of any thinker would differ from each other. But these ones of Papa Ben all highlight entirely different themes. It’s as if not even Catholic scholars can put their finger on it.
I was talking to an evangelical Protestant student this afternoon, and he *loves* Papa Ben. He read ‘Introduction to Christianity’ in a 2nd year course, and is writing his essay on him for my course. For him, the exciting point about Papa Ben is that he really is a Christian. We may as Catholics be patronising at his being surprised by this, but it may be precisely the theme which RCs don’t highlight, and which therefore leave him a mystery.
Bill —
If you read the whole thing, basically the Pope is saying that rock is not evil. He is saying that it rocks and it rolls, in a Dionysiac and crowd-capturing way intended to mimic the marital act, and is designed to do so by its beat, chord-pattern, and pacing.
In the Catholic Church, we don’t do that sort of thing in church. (If people want to do that as part of a religious ritual, there are a wide variety of pagan groups, and some of them won’t just mimic the marital act. Or you could just get married and enthusiastically practice it with your spouse, and get lots of graces without having to have an audience.)
I used to think rock had nothing to do with the marital act, but then I became a teenager. (I also became a linguist, and thus am able to tell you that the original meaning of “rock and roll” actually was a Southern slang term for sex. You still hear blues songs urging the partner to “let’s rock, baby, roll”, as well as 18th-19th century ballads in which “he rolled her in his arms all night” or “he rolled her against the wall”.) So I hope you’re not going to argue that’s not the basic theme of rock as a genre.
Certainly you can have a rock song about whatever you want, and certainly there are many good Christian rock songs. But they work better against a non-liturgical background, in which the setting is not so basic, powerful, and set apart from normal human life. Hymns and church music for the parts of the Mass are supposed to lift up our hearts, not get down on it. While we are commanded to “get down” and multiply, we generally don’t do that during Mass.
Of course, it should be said that rock as a genre by itself is considerably toned down from the thirties and forties, when rock and roll was still part of jazz/blues/big band. You get a lot of silly heavy breathing on “urban” and “rock” stations today, but it’s no comparison to some of those songs back in the day, especially done the way those musicians performed them. Enough to bring a blush to Paris Hilton’s cheek, I’m telling you. (This should be no surprise to anyone, since all those genres go back to Dixie and ragtime’s origins as entertainment in the front parlor of houses of ill repute.)
The Pope grew up in Germany, and I hear that post-war Germany had a lot of that kind of rock and roll. He also spent a lot of time at universities during the sixties and seventies. So his picture of rock music is probably pretty hardcore, not white chicks in poodle skirts or Kenny G.
People nowadays are so naive….