Benedict XVI: from guard dog to pastor

Catholic New Times, March 8, 2005

For the new Benedict, humans are much too weak to create meaning. Only God, revealed in the church, especially the vertical church and the Magisterium, contains the full mystery. Revelation is from God, transcendent and never from below, fallen humanity. The breaking point for him is Vatican II. Though Ratzinger accepted Vatican II, his understanding of the divine was transcendent, with grace being ahistorical. It was here that he was powerfully challenged by the Uruguyan Jesuit, Juan Luis Segundo and the liberation theologians, including Oscar Romero.

With Vatican II's turn to the world, incarnational theology suggested that God works through universal justice movements and the humanization of the world. God's grace and salvation are indeed universal, meaning the church must in humility discern the authentic signs and walk with other pilgrims for justice as agents of the reign of God. Romero, for example, was never supported by the Opus Dei bishops whose blinkered theology refused to see God anywhere but in the Holy Roman Catholic Church. The Holy Spirit of God's justice was empowering those who were dying not for an abstract idea but a more humane world. The early (1962) Ratzinger at one time admitted this when he said: "The meaning of prophecy is the protest against the self-righteousness of the institutions. God throughout history has not been on the side of the institutions but on that of the suffering and the persecuted."

In the late 1960s, the timid and genteel Josef Ratzinger was further traumatized by the student revolts. They were further proof that authority must be deepened. A church immersed in God's non-violent liberation project became anathema to him. The apolitical otherworldliness of God must be safeguarded by God's hierarchical church. For Ratzinger, the church must "gradually purify itself of anthropological, sociological or simply horizontal accents." This appears almost docetic, barely human and hardly engaged in life's struggles.

We wish the present pope well, but at this point it is difficult to see how a pope of such little pastoral experience and with a theology so rarified that it barely touches the earth, can move a church in the direction it so desperately needs. The weak bishops, appointed under JP II, more wedded to the institution than the reign of God, have little ability to inspire. The one great hope is the growing maturity of adult Christians living close to humanity and the earth, who know that they are church. This church soon will need a pastor, a mystic in action, who feels in his bones what it is like to bury millions of African AIDS victims, who rages that people in a small nation 30 kilometers from the U.S. shore have a life expectancy of 49 years, while the most "Christian" country a boat ride away spends a billion dollars a day on armaments.

Bona fortuna Papa.