What Does The Prayer Really Say?
W D T P R S

RealClearPolitics has an interesting piece by E.J. Dionne which I share with you along with my usual emphases and comments.

April 18, 2008
The Pontiff’s Counterculture
By E. J. Dionne

WASHINGTON —The most jarring word that Pope Benedict XVI is using during his visit to the United States is "countercultural." The American sense of that term is shaped by the 1960s: free love, drugs, hippies, rock music and rebellion. Needless to say, that’s not what Benedict is preaching.  [I find it interesting how Papa Ratzinger has always been willing and oh so very able to appropriate concepts and terms of very inimical positions and convert them to his own uses.  For example, he did so with a certain dimension of Liberation Theology as a starting point for a liturgical theology.  Brilliant.]

That word is the key to understanding how Benedict’s message runs crosswise to conventional liberalism and conservatism. Benedict came to the United States as a quiet but forceful critic of "an increasingly secular and materialistic culture," as he put it during Thursday’s Mass. Almost any American who paid attention to his sermon had to be uncomfortable because all of us are shaped by the very forces he was criticizing.  [How frank!]

Benedict directly challenged an assumption so many Americans make about religion: that it is a matter of private devotion with few public implications.  [Well said!]

Not true, said the pope. "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted," he told the country’s Catholic bishops on Wednesday. "Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel." [Ergo, the bishops must shore up their subjects, their public political subjects. And this reminder came in a televised meeting, not behind closed doors.]

That is a demanding and unsettling standard for the right and the left alike. Benedict asked a pointed question: "Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?"

This is the thinking of a communitarian counseling against radical individualism. "In a society which values personal freedom and autonomy," he said, "it is easy to lose sight of our dependence on others as well as the responsibilities that we bear towards them. ... We were created as social beings who find fulfillment only in love—for God and for our neighbor." It is this attitude that Benedict described as "countercultural."

There will be much pious talk among Catholics (I speak from the inside) about how marvelous Benedict’s words were, how warm and gentle he proved to be. Parodies [pious talk and parodies] that paint him as a heartless enforcer are, of course, false. He seemed determined to confess the church’s great sin in the sexual abuse scandal, and he asked again and again for forgiveness. He took the extra step Thursday of meeting with a group of victims of abuse.

It was a good and necessary act of penance.

Yet there is a radicalism underlying Benedict’s view (he spoke on Thursday of "a disturbing breakdown in the very foundations of society") rooted in a rather different spirit from the one animating the church at the time of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

John saw it as imperative for the church to discern "the signs of the times" and was critical of excessive gloom about modernity. "Distrustful souls," John wrote in 1961, "see only darkness burdening the face of the earth."

Benedict is certainly not without hope. Indeed, his November encyclical on hope—to which he has made frequent references this week—is a moving and intellectually powerful argument on behalf of an often forgotten virtue. Yet Benedict is more inclined than John was to see the church as beleaguered. [He is in this, perhaps, a bit more Augustinian in his perspective.] He is less eager to seek "the signs of the times" than to worry about Christians who "are easily tempted to conform themselves to the spirit of this age," as he put it this week.

For this reason, I suspect that American Catholics of all political hues will find themselves struggling with his message. For myself, I admire Benedict’s distinctly Catholic critique of radical individualism in both the moral and economic spheres, and his insistence that the Christian message cannot be divorced from the social and political realm.

Yet I do not see the "spirit of this age" as being quite so threatening to faith or human flourishing as Benedict seems to think. As the pope has acknowledged in the past, Catholicism has been enriched by its encounter with enlightenment thought. The church should not now close itself off to what our age has to teach about the equality of men and women or the virtues of more democratic structures in its internal life.  [I don’t believe that this is so.  I don’t think Benedict wants to close off to the world or modern thought.  I think he is taking it head on and shaping it.  He is making his contribution, a contribution entirely formed in the very root of all ages, yesterday, today and tomorrow.]

Perhaps it is the task of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church to bring discomfort to a people so thoroughly shaped by modernity, as we Americans are. If so, Benedict is succeeding.

postchat@aol.com

Dionne’s comments about the way Benedict has provoked bishops to do their duty also with their politician subjects draws my mind back to the image of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) kissing the Holy Father’s ring on Papa’s first day in the USA. 

I cannot begrudge her the desire to do so or the opportunity seized.  Catholics, good - not so good, will desire to do this, I think.  It is in our Catholic DNA.  Many non-Catholics do this on sincere impuse.  It is the right thing to do, not only for the office, but especially for the estimable men who have held that office. 

But the fact remains that many of our Catholic pols betray a weak inner core in their Catholic identity.  Papa Ratzinger has a long term vision, his "Marshall Plan" as I call it, to revitalize Catholic identity. 

This must be accomplished brick by brick.

Ring kiss by ring kiss.

There is a useful article at Slate.  Nota bene: this was from before the Pope’s visit.  I wonder how it stands up in the wake of the Pope time in the USA.

My emphases and comments.

"God’s Rottweiler" Becomes the Church’s "Beloved German Shepherd"
How Pope Benedict has disappointed the right.   [I’m not disappointed.  I think I would be considered by many to be part of "the right", though I really think I am fairly close to the true center.]
By Michael Sean Winters
Posted  Friday, April 11, 2008, at 5:15 PM ET  [Before the papal visit.]
 
For more on the pope’s visit, read "On Faith," a blog on religion produced by the Washington Post and Newsweek.  Religion professor Donna Freitas makes three wishes for the Catholic church.  On Faith’s Sally Quinn interviews clergy-abuse victim Barbara Blaine. Anthony Stevens-Arroyo discusses the pope as a defender of faith. And "Campus Catholic" Elizabeth Tenety writes on faith, hope, and love.
 
When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI on April 19, 2005, Catholic conservatives in America were licking their chops. "The ‘progressive’ project is over," Catholic neocon George Weigel triumphantly announced. William Donohue, the eccentric, right-wing president of the Catholic League, said of Catholic liberals, "We expect that the weeping and gnashing of teeth will begin soon."  [Ehem… it did!  It is still going on.]
 
Three years later, as American Catholics prepare for the pope’s visit next week, [This dates this piece.] those same conservatives in the United States have been disappointed. They had hoped Benedict would confront liberal tendencies in the church. Some, like Weigel, sought to purge the presbyterate of gays whom they blamed for the sex-abuse scandal. [And probably rightly.] They wanted the ecclesiastical equivalent of court-packing, with the pope appointing only conservatives to major posts. But Benedict has defied them [Puhleeze] in his appointments, in his views on capitalism and the war in Iraq, and even in his approach to other faiths. "No one would call Benedict the darling of the left, but he has been moderate, pastoral, tolerant, nuanced," says Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, a theologian and U.S. leader of the Catholic group Communione e Liberazione. 
 
Conservative distress began almost immediately after Pope Benedict took over, when in May 2005 he named San Francisco Archbishop William Levada to fill his old job as the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a position that amounts to being the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog. Levada had been suspect to conservatives since 1996, when he worked out a compromise on same-sex partner benefits with San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Under Levada’s proposal, employees at Catholic institutions could designate anyone with whom they were legally domiciled as their beneficiary: an aunt, a cousin, a same-sex partner. The proposal avoided the culture war that some Catholic conservatives were hoping for. In a controversial article in February 2006, Father Richard John Neuhaus cited the Levada appointment as one of the reasons for "a palpable uneasiness" among "those who greatly admired Cardinal Ratzinger and were elated by his election as pope."  [I don’t think people really get why Card. Levada is in that position.  Consider: Papa Ratzinger sort of revolutionized the role of Prefect of the Congregation: he workedit out with JP2 that he could remain a working theologian. The role of the Prefect of CDF is not so much to be a theologian yourself, but rather to make sure, along with the Secretary, that the work of the Congregation is getting done!  So, since there were many cases concerning priests coming from the USA, there was a backlog, someone needed to get the work moving.  Also, no one could lie to Card. Levada: he know what the real situation was in the USA.  Also, Papa Ratzinger knew him to a certain extent.  Moreover, Card. Levada has put his signature on some documents that have had the lefties tearing their hair.]
 
The next year, when Benedict had to appoint a new archbishop for Washington, D.C.—his first major stateside appointment—neocons hoped he would redeem [NB the skewed language] himself. They championed three archbishops who had publicly urged denying communion to pro-choice politicians during the 2004 election: Charles Chaput of Denver, Raymond Burke of St. Louis, and John Myers of Newark, N.J. Instead, Benedict chose Pittsburgh Bishop Donald Wuerl, a moderate who has opposed turning the communion rail into a political battle station. Benedict further disappointed conservatives hellbent on denying communion to pro-choice politicians when he named as cardinal Boston Archbishop Sean O’Malley, who refused to order Sen. John Kerry out of church. Benedict’s choices shouldn’t have surprised anyone, though. According to one American present during a spring 2004 Vatican meeting with U.S. bishops, then-Cardinal Ratzinger laughed [The write