Defender Of The Faith
The Vatican's longtime enforcer promises a kinder, gentler pontificate. Can he deliver?
A problem, a solution, or a big question? Around the world, theologians, commentators, and men and women on the street batted those possibilities back and forth. But even some of Benedict's biggest critics, including his longtime adversary in theology, Hans Kung, said that, as disappointing as the election was, Benedict should be given a chance to make his intentions known. Sister Joan Chittister, a writer and commentator from Erie, Pa., had spoken strongly for reforms in the church at a conference organized by the international lay Catholic movement We Are Church in Rome the week before the conclave. She had hoped the cardinals would choose someone who saw less of a contradiction between orthodox faith and a realism that permits women to be deacons or accepts the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS. Yet after the election, she voiced cautious optimism that "people on different parts of the spectrum of the church" would still be able to have an open discussion.
God's Rottweiler? Speaking to the cardinals who had elected him the day before after only four rounds of voting--and by a vote that went well over the two-thirds majority to something around 100, according to Marco Politi of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica --the new pope seemed to be responding to some of the concerns that were being raised around the world. After dedicating himself to the task of bringing the "light of Christ to shine before the men and women of today," he pledged to address himself "to everyone, even to those who follow other religions or who are simply seeking an answer to the fundamental questions of life."
Was this, then, "God's Rottweiler," the man who at the opening mass of the conclave had denounced "the dictatorship of relativism" and seemed to call for a circling of the wagons of faith to protect true believers from a host of modern "isms" and "new sects" that draw people into error? Was Benedict XVI the same man whom people thought they knew as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the uncompromising defender of orthodoxy, or was he already becoming a more open and receptive pastor of the world's largest Christian church, extending a hand not only to the faithful but to others seeking meaning and truth in their lives?
While many fretted over questions like that, those who claimed to know the new pope well suggested that there were always deeper qualities of mind, character, and belief connecting these seemingly different faces of the man. Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, speaking at a press conference the day after the election, urged people to resist rushing to labels. "He has so many qualities," Mahony said, "so many dimensions."
It remains unclear, though, whether those deeper qualities add up to the kind of person who can take the legacy of John Paul II further into the 21st century, and particularly whether Benedict can build on the enormous reserves of goodwill and affection that people had come to feel for a pontiff who was both a strict teacher and a vigorous advocate of spiritual solidarity among all people. How, furthermore, will the new pope face the challenges confronting the church after the 26-year reign of John Paul II? The increasing secularism of Europe and the industrial world in general is, for instance, something for which Benedict, as cardinal, proposed a rather uncompromising solution: Don't dilute the doctrine or teaching; hold firm to orthodoxy even if it means that the num-ber of believers dwindles further. "Perhaps the time has come to say farewell to the idea of traditionally Catholic cultures," he said in a book-length interview with German journalist Peter Seewald. "Maybe we are facing a new and different kind of epoch in the church's history, where Christianity will again be characterized more by the mustard seed, where it will exist in small, seemingly insignificant groups that nonetheless live an intensive struggle against evil and bring the good into the world--that let God in." Reformists in the church, unsurprisingly, see that approach as giving up too easily by shutting down the conversation and debate with the modern, secular world.
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