Reporting on Benedict and Francis from Bavaria

Pray Tell
April 4, 2013

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung from Munich – most likely a newspaper Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI reads daily – Matthias Drobinski is noting the contrast between Pope Francis and his predecessor.

“The Opposite of Benedict’s Program” reports on the “sensation” of the short speech Jorge Mario Bergoglio made at the cardinals’ meetings before the conclave, made public with his permission. Dobrinski sees it as the “program of the new pope,” like the 2005 homily of Joseph Ratzinger at the Mass before the 2005 conclave.

Efforts are underway to put Bergoglio in the light of continuity with Ratzinger, Drobinski says. Both are against relativism and for the truth of the Gospel. Bergoglio warn of a “worldly” church, which fits with Benedict’s desire for “desecularizing” the church.

But note the contrasts:

In 2005 Joseph Ratzinger described the church as a little ship threatened by the high waves of the “dictatorship of relativism.” What can a ship crew do in a storm? Shorten the sails, close the hatches, raise the ship sides, close oneself off from the danger from the outside. In 2005 Joseph Ratzinger preached hermeticism, securing of what one has, preservation of the entrusted treasure in a secure place. This is – to put a fine point on it – what his successor castigates as an “egocentric church” which “seeks Jesus within.”

The image of a church that goes to the borders of the world and human existence is not compatible with the image of a ship in a hostile storm. A church that goes to the borders risks something. It risks losing its own security. And the treasure of Catholic tradition, in view of the cries of the present day, appears as something beautiful but secondary.

To go to the periphery: the notion derives from Latin American liberation theology, whose proponents left their rectories in the 70s to live with the poor. For many in the curia – but by no means for all – this is a battle cry: to be a liberation theologian and thus naturally a Marxist is a curse. It is a battle cry just like the demonstrative renunciation of insignia, trappings, and formalities of papal existence, the renunciation of forms that have long since broken free from their content, that have become self-referential and narcissistic.

The cardinals have voted for this battle cry – with full knowledge of the inflammatory speech of the cardinal from Buenos Aires, Argentina. With a two-thirds majority, they are fed up with the royal court carrying one of the curia, the sacralization of form over existential content, a church leadership scandalously concerned with itself, with a pope at the peak who is, to be sure, a man of integrity and well-educated, but increasingly out of his depth.

They voted for a change that they had not yet wanted in 2005. These cardinals will now have to support their Pope Francis over against the mentality of adamancy, of closed hatches. For those powers are very strong in the Catholic Church.

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