Category Archives: Pope Benedict XVI

“Blog!” says the pope . . .

Posted by on January 26, 2010 4 comments

The supreme pontiff seems to think that priests ought to be blogging more:

Responding adequately to this challenge amid today’s cultural shifts, to which young people are especially sensitive, necessarily involves using new communications technologies. The world of digital communication, with its almost limitless expressive capacity, makes us appreciate all the more Saint Paul’s exclamation: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (1 Cor 9:16) The increased availability of the new technologies demands greater responsibility on the part of those called to proclaim the Word, but it also requires them to become become more focused, efficient and compelling in their efforts. Priests stand at the threshold of a new era: as new technologies create deeper forms of relationship across greater distances, they are called to respond pastorally by putting the media ever more effectively at the service of the Word.

The spread of multimedia communications and its rich “menu of options” might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web, or to see it only as a space to be filled. Yet priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel, exercising their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different “voices” provided by the digital marketplace. Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.

Ratzinger the Revisionist

Posted by on October 27, 2009 15 comments

David Gibson has some interesting commentary on the unexpected way Ratzinger’s papacy is turning out, as seen most recently in the whole move to bring in the disaffected Anglicans:

Thus far, Benedict’s papacy has been one of constant movement and change, the sort of dynamic that liberal Catholics — or Protestants — are usually criticized for pursuing. In Benedict’s case, this liberalism serves a conservative agenda. But his activism should not be surprising: As a sharp critic of the reforms of Vatican II, Ratzinger has long pushed for what he calls a “reform of the reform” to correct what he considers the excesses or abuses of the time.

Of course a “reformed reform” doesn’t equal a return to the past, even if that were the goal. Indeed, Benedict’s reforms are rapidly creating something entirely new in Catholicism. For example, when the pope restored the old Latin Mass, he also restored the use of the old Good Friday prayer, which spoke of the “blindness” of the Jews and called for their conversion. That prayer was often a spur to anti-Jewish pogroms in the past, so its revival appalled Jewish leaders. After months of protests, the pope agreed to modify the language of the prayer; that change and other modifications made the “traditional” Mass more a hybrid than a restoration.

More important, with the latest accommodation to Anglicans, Benedict has signaled that the standards for what it means to be Catholic — such as the belief in the real presence of Christ in the Mass as celebrated by a validly ordained priest — are changing or, some might argue, falling. The Vatican is in effect saying that disagreements over gay priests and female bishops are the main issues dividing Catholics and Anglicans, rather than, say, the sacraments and the papacy and infallible dogmas on the Virgin Mary, to name just a few past points of contention.

That is revolutionary — and unexpected from a pope like Benedict. It could encourage the view, which he and other conservatives say they reject, that all Christians are pretty much the same when it comes to beliefs, and the differences are just arguments over details.

And that could be the final irony. For all the hue and cry over last week’s developments, Benedict’s innovations may have glossed too lightly over the really tough issues: namely, the theological differences that traditional Anglicans say have kept them from converting, as they could always do.

The Heresy of Novak

Posted by on July 7, 2009 32 comments

The brand new encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI is out and there are a smattering of responses about the blogosphere. Whatever we may want to say about the merits or liabilities of Benedict’s claims in the encyclical, no one could do worse than Michael Novak in his pathetic response over on the First Things blog:

What Benedict XVI has not spelled out yet is another forgotten lesson from St. Augustine: the ever-corrupting role of sin in the City of Man. Augustine points out how difficult it is even for the wisest and most detached humans to discover the truth among lies—and how even husbands and wives in the closest of human bonds misunderstand each other so often. The Father of Lies seems to own so much of the real world.

What are the most practical ways of defeating him? The Catholic tradition—even the wise Pope Benedict—still seems to put too much stress upon caritas, virtue, justice, and good intentions, and not nearly enough on methods for defeating human sin in all its devious and persistent forms.

So, according to Novak what we need is to stop trifling with all this stress on “caritas, virtue, justice, and good intentions” and starting looking for some new “methods for defeating human sin.” Not only is his whole thing about the “Father of lies” owning the “real world” straight up Manicheaism, Novak clearly just doesn’t think Jesus is worth bothering about in any significant sense whatsoever. Fuck charity, justice, and virtue, I need an effective method, dammit! In short, for Novak, Jesus simply doesn’t save.

What other method could there be for dealing with sin other than love, justice, and virtue we ask? I can only assume it must be some sort of coercive power. What else is there?

I mean seriously, this prick is saying that there’s far too much stress being given…to justice. WTF??

Novak has very openly declared his own apostasy. His god is Adam Smith and his religion is neocon capitalism. For goodness’ sake, he even acknowledges in his quote that it is outside of “the Catholic tradition”! Thanks for proclaiming your heterodoxy, Novak, old boy. At least now we don’t have to argue with you about it anymore.

Pope Benedict’s Easter Sermon

Posted by on April 19, 2009 Comments Off

Here’s a segment from the Pope’s Easter homily, preaced last Sunday:

“Let us celebrate the feast … with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth”. This exhortation from Saint Paul, which concludes the short reading that was proclaimed a few moments ago, resounds even more powerfully in the context of the Pauline Year. Dear brothers and sisters, let us accept the Apostle’s invitation;  let us open our spirit to Christ, who has died and is risen in order to renew us, in order to remove from our hearts the poison of sin and death, and to pour in the life-blood of the Holy Spirit: divine and eternal life. In the Easter Sequence, in what seems almost like a response to the Apostle’s words, we sang:  “Scimus Christum surrexisse a mortuis vere” – we know that Christ has truly risen from the dead. Yes, indeed! This is the fundamental core of our profession of faith;  this is the cry of victory that unites us all today. And if Jesus is risen, and is therefore alive, who will ever be able to separate us from him? Who will ever be able to deprive us of the love of him who has conquered hatred and overcome death?

The Easter proclamation spreads throughout the world with the joyful song of the Alleluia. Let us sing it with our lips, and let us sing it above all with our hearts and our lives, with a manner of life that is “unleavened”, that is to say, simple, humble, and fruitful in good works. “Surrexit Christus spes mea:  praecedet vos in Galileam” – Christ my hope is risen, and he goes before you into Galilee. The Risen One goes before us and he accompanies us along the paths of the world. He is our hope, He is the true peace of the world. Amen!

Pope Benedict at the Beginning of Holy Week

Posted by on April 10, 2009 1 comment

“Tomorrow we begin the Holy Triduum, the heart of the entire liturgical year: a time when we immerse ourselves in the central events of our Redemption. The Chrism Mass serves as a prelude to these three days, as priests renew their promises to the Bishop, who then blesses the holy oils and consecrates the chrism signifying the gift of the Holy Spirit. At the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, we recall the institution of the Eucharist, the supreme sign of Christ’s love for us. As we venerate his Cross on Good Friday, we contemplate the full meaning of his words: “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (Mk 14:24). Holy Saturday finds us waiting in silent hope for the Easter Vigil, when every church will break forth in a song of joy at the Lord’s Resurrection. The celebration of the Paschal mystery recalls the depth of Christ’s love: he did not wish to exercise his divinity as an exclusive possession, a means of domination, or a sign of distance between him and us. Rather, “he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Phil 2:7) by sharing fully in our human condition, even to the point of death: not a death imposed by blind chance or fate, but one freely chosen in obedience to the Father’s will for the salvation for all. May our fervent celebration of the Triduum draw us ever more deeply into Christ’s Paschal mystery!”

~ Pope Benedict XVI, GENERAL AUDIENCE, Wednesday, 8 April 2009

Ratzinger on Final Union

Posted by on March 9, 2008 3 comments

“I am convinced that the question of the final union of all Christians remains, indeed, unanswerable. One must not forget that this question also includes the question of the union between Israel and the church. At any rate, to me the notion that one could achieve unity through a “really general (ecumenical) council” is a hybrid idea. That would be tantamount to building another tower of Babel which would necessarily result in even greater confusion. Complete union of all Christians will hardly be possible in our time. However, that unity of the church which already exists indestructibly is a guarantee for us that this greater unity will happen in the future. The more one strives for this unity with all one’s might the more Christian one will be.”

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Luther and the Unity of the Churches: An Interview with Jospeh Cardinal Ratzinger“, Communio 11, no. 3 (1984): 226.

Pope Benedict on Martin Luther

Posted by on March 7, 2008 7 comments

As was pointed out in the comments on my last post (though I should give credit to my friend, Charlie Collier of Wipf & Stock for pointing it out to me first), it seems that there will indeed be upcoming interaction between the current Pope and Martin Luther.  According to a recent article in the Times Online, Pope Benedict will release his findings based on his study of Luther after discussing him in a seminar with 40 other theologians.  According the article, the Pope plans to release a positive assessment of Luther as a Reformer of the church, arguing that he did not intend to split the church, but only to purge it of corrupt practices, in some ways anticipating some of the reforms of Vatican II.

Some think that this move to positively evaluate Luther is something of a PR mop-up after the bad reactions to the statement released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith last summer which declared Protestant and Eastern Orthodox churches to be “not proper Churches.”  Regardless, I think more Catholic engagement with Luther is a good and important thing and the future of ecumenical theology may have a lot to do with such studies.  Ironically enough, it may very well be that Luther will be a decisive key in healing the very rift in the church that he helped create.  It is always the scribes of the kingdom who practice the hard art of bringing treasures new and old out of the storehouse of the church. 

Why we shouldn’t fear Pope Benedict XVI

Posted by on March 7, 2008 4 comments

A Bavarian bar-goer who can put away a German stein such as this one is alright by me.  Alas, if only Ratzinger could have appreciated Luther’s passionate love for beer, perhaps he could have appreciated some of the other aspects of his thought as well.  Regardless, I for one am glad to have a Pope that can legitimately down his pilsners while paying no heed to the nuns in the background.

A Reassertion of Catholic Ecumenical Primacy

Posted by on July 11, 2007 9 comments

A recent statement released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church reasserted a somewhat conseravtive interpretation of Vatican II’s decree on the Church and ecumenism (Lumen Gentium and Unitatis redintegratio respectively).  Essentially, the docment just released states the following five points:

  1.  Vatican II did not “change” Catholic ecclesiology, “rather it developed, deepened and more fully explained it.”
  2. The phrase “the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic church” means that while the church of Christ can conceiveably be present in other “churches” (Eastern Orthodoxy) and “ecclesial communities: (Protestants), they are not themselves churches in the proper sense.
  3. The reason that the church teaches that the church of Christ subsists in rather than simply is the Catholic church is because there are “numerous elements of sanctification and of truth” which are found outside her structure, but which “as gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, impel towards Catholic Unity”.
  4. The Catholic church calls the Eastern Orthodox churches “churches” because of the fact that they have apostolic succession, and specifically the priesthood and the Eucharist.  As such they are churches, but they are marred by not standing in communion with the office of Peter.
  5. Protestant churches are called “ecclesial communities” rather than churches because they lack apostolic succession, the priesthood, and the authentic Sacraments, thus existing in a state “deprived of a constitutive element of the Church”.

Although these statements aren’t really much of a change from the offical posture taken by the Catholic church since Vatican II, I still find it a bit ecumenically discouraging.  I would certainly admit that Protestant and Eastern Orthodox churches are marred and lack the “fullness of communion” without standing in communion with the Roman Catholic church.  However, the day I await is when the Catholic church is able to say that they are likewise marred for their lack of communion with Protestant and Orthodox Christians.  We all need each other and no Christian tradition should claim ecclesiastical perfection and fullness.  But that’s just one sectarian Protestant’s opinion, I guess.

Benedict XVI on the Word and Eucharist

Posted by on December 30, 2006 Comments Off

For man, the will of God is not a foreign force of exterior origin, but the actual orientation of his own being. Thus the revelation of God’s will is the revelation of what our own being truly wishes – it is a gift. So we should learn anew to be grateful that in the word of God the will of God and the meaning of our own existence have been communicated to us. God’s presence in the word and his presence in the Eucharist belong together, inseparable. The eucharistic Lord is himself the living Word. Only if we are living in the sphere of God’s Word can we properly comprehend and properly receive the gift of the Eucharist.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, God is Near us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 104-105.

Pope Benedict XVI on Hans Urs von Balthasar

Posted by on October 31, 2006 Comments Off


Message of Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) to the Participants in the International Conventionon the Occasion of the Centenary of the Birth of the Swiss Theologian Hans Urs von BalthasarPontifical Lateran University, Rome


Lords, Cardinals, venerable Brothers in the Episcopate and in the Priesthood, distinguished ladies and gentlemen:

It is with great pleasure that I join you spiritually in celebrating the centenary of the birth of Hans Urs von Balthasar. I had the joy of knowing and associating with this renowned Swiss theologian. I am convinced that his theological reflections preserve their freshness and profound relevance undiminished to this day and that they incite many others to penetrate ever further into the depths of the mystery of the faith, with such an authoritative guide leading them by the hand. On an occasion like this I could easily be tempted to dwell on personal memories, based on the sincere friendship between us and on the numerous projects that we undertook together, in response to the many challenges of those years. The founding of the review Communio, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, remains the most evident sign of our common commitment to theological research. Yet it is not memories that I intend to speak about, but rather the richness of von Balthasar’s theology.

He had made the mystery of the Incarnation the preferential object of his studies, and he saw in the Mysterium Paschale–as one of his works is significantly entitled–the most expressive form of this descent of God into human history. Indeed, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, the mystery of God’s Trinitarian love is revealed in its fullness. The reality of the faith finds here its unsurpassable beauty. In the drama of the Paschal
Mystery, God fully lives out his act of becoming man, but at the same time he makes man’s action meaningful and gives concrete form to the engagement of the Christian in the world. Von Balthasar saw in this the logic of revelation. God becomes man so that man might experience communion of life with God. In Christ is offered the ultimate truth, the definitive answer to the question that everyone asks himself about the meaning of life. Theological aesthetics, dramatics and logic make up the trilogy in which these concepts find ample room [for development] and principled application. I can testify that his life was a genuine search for truth, which he understood as a search for the true Life. He looked everywhere for signs of the presence of God and of his truth: in philosophy, in literature, in religions, always managing to break through the circuitous reasoning that often holds the mind a prisoner of itself, and opening it up to the horizons of the infinite.

Hans Urs von Balthasar was a theologian who placed his research at the service of the Church, because he was convinced that theology could be defined only in terms of ecclesiality. Theology, as he conceived of it, must be joined with spirituality; indeed, only in this way could it be profound and effective. Reflecting on precisely this aspect, he wrote: “Or did scientific theology only begin with Peter Lombard? Yet none dealt more adequately with matters of theology than Cyril of Jerusalem, Origen in his homilies, Gregory of Nazianzen and the Areopagite, the master whose works are so full of the spirit of awe and wonder. Who would be so bold as to say of any of the Fathers that his works are ‘full of unction’ in the modern sense? In those days, men were clear as to how theology should be written: it should reflect both the unity of faith and knowledge and an attitude of objectivity allied with one of reverence and awe. Theology was, when pursued by men of sanctity, a theology at prayer: which is why its fruitfulness for prayer, its power to foster prayer, is so undeniable” (The Word Made Flesh: Explorations in Theology vol. I, Ignatius Press 1989, pp. 207-208). These are words that prompt us to consider the true position of research in theology. The demand for scientific method is not sacrificed when theological research is carried on in a religious spirit of listening to the Word of God, when it is alive with the life of the Church and shares in the strength of her Magisterium. Spirituality does not attenuate the work of scholarship, but rather supplies theological study with the correct method so that it can arrive at a coherent interpretation.

This concept of theology led von Balthasar to a profound existential reading. Accordingly, one of the central themes that he liked to dwell on was demonstrating the necessity of conversion. The change of heart was a central point for him; indeed, only in this way does the mind free itself from the limits that prevent it from drawing near to the mystery, enabling the eyes to fix their gaze upon the face of Christ. In a word, he had grasped profoundly the fact that theology can develop only with prayer that recollects the presence of God and relies upon him in obedience. This is a road that is worth traveling to the very end. It allows us to avoid one-sided approaches that can only lead away from the goal, and it safeguards against following fashionable trends that fragment our interest in what is essential. The example that von Balthasar has given us is, rather, that of a true theologian who in contemplation had discovered a consistent course of action for living Christian witness in the world. We remember him on this important occasion as a man of faith, a priest who, in obedience and in a hidden life, never sought personal approval, but rather in the true Ignatian spirit always desired the greater glory of God.

With these sentiments, I encourage all of you to continue, with interest and enthusiasm, your study of the writings of von Balthasar and to find ways of applying them practically and effectively. I implore the Lord to send abundant gifts of understanding upon you and upon the work of the Convention, and as a token of the same I impart to all of you a
special Blessing.


Vatican City, October 6, 2005
POPE BENEDICT XVI

Link Here

The Inconceivable Credibility of God’s Love

Posted by on September 9, 2006 Comments Off

Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed. This is the achievement, the “work” of faith: to recognize this absolute prius, which nothing else can surpass; to believe that there is such a thing as love, absolute love, and that there is nothing higher or greater than it; to believe against all the evidence of experience, against every “rational” concept of God, which thinks of him in terms of impassibility or, at best, totally pure goodness, but not interms of this inconceivable and senseless act of love.

~Hans Urs von Balthsar, Love Alone is Credible, 101-102.

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