Defender Of The Faith
The Vatican's longtime enforcer promises a kinder, gentler pontificate. Can he deliver?
And what about the developing world, where the church is far from being a mustard seed and where more than half of the world's Catholics live? The challenges there abound, from the AIDS crisis in Africa to the growing influence of Protestant evangelicals in such former Catholic bastions as Brazil. Many wonder whether this intensely cerebral pope will be able to offer anything but orthodox pronouncements about the need for sexual abstinence. Will he, for example, do anything to address the discontent that many Brazilian women feel about their second-class status within their society and, many feel, within the church? If not, many critics predict, there will be even greater migrations into the rapidly growing Protestant evangelical sects.
The new pope, in his opening statement to the cardinals, made it abundantly clear that he will continue his predecessor's fight to bring economic justice to the developing world--including, specifically, some relief from its crushing debt load. The concern, though, is whether the new pope will have the charisma and energy that the previous one brought to the task. The 78-year-old pope, alluding to the short tenure of another Pope Benedict, Benedict XV, who worked to prevent World War I, told the cardinals on the day of his election: "I, too, hope in this short reign to be a man of peace."
The issue of church governance also looms large. Benedict says he is committed to the Vatican II ideal of stronger collegiality, but is this master of curial politics going to increase the power of the church's central bureaucracy or to restrain it to allow more decision making to return to bishops in their dioceses and to the national bishops' conferences? There are also growing numbers of lay Catholic movements demanding a more central role in the running of the church at the local level. Will they be collectively ignored--or even selectively ignored, if the agendas of some are seen as too liberal or reformist?
Fall of man. All of these matters will appear more urgent precisely because the new pope has less proven personal magnetism to work with. Brazilian women may have been angry with the church, but many stayed in it because they loved John Pope II. He conveyed concern and real love. He also seemed to embody optimism and hope. This pope, by contrast--shy and gentle in his personal demeanor--seems to be largely preoccupied by the struggle against moral depravity and evil, the struggle with humankind's fallen nature. "The Christian faith holds that the creation has been damaged," Ratzinger told Seewald in another extended interview. "Human existence is no longer what was produced at the hands of the Creator. It was burdened with another element that produces, besides the innate tendency toward God, the opposite tendency away from God." This is orthodox Christianity's standard view of the problem for which Christ's sacrificial death is the only solution, if the believer will accept the grace bestowed by that sacrifice. But the emphasis on the fallen nature of all humankind comes from St. Augustine, the theologian Ratzinger is most deeply drawn to. In part this may be due to a natural affinity, in part to his own experience of history, particularly the experience of growing up in Hitler's Germany--and his own reflections on the cultural conditions that enabled the rise and success of such a monstrous ideology. The answer he came to was that, in addition to economic factors, it was the excesses of individualism and freedom that led to the nihilism of pre-Nazi Weimar German culture, a condition that made the racialist utopian solution of National Socialism look so attractive to so many people. "He will still take an Augustinian, pessimistic view of the world," says Cardinal Avery Dulles, a theologian at Fordham University who was too old to be among the electors in this conclave. Still, he cautioned, "maybe we will see another side of him, though, someone who will try to win with honey rather than with threats."
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