Uncertain Times

The questions that arise about Benedict are usually from those who never knew him, and they reflect that they still don’t. No surprise that this one is from the New York Times.

WITH little fanfare, Benedict XVI will tomorrow mark the second anniversary of his formal installation as pope, a threshold at which his immediate predecessors had established themselves in the public mind.

Let’s don’t forget that one of them was John Paul I, who was in the Chair of Peter for just about a month. 

Yet he remains an enigma to many who thought they knew him well, and something of a blank slate to a world curious to see what this new pontiff would be like.

Polls show Benedict — formerly known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — in the middle of the pack among respected world leaders, and a survey last year in Germany had the Dalai Lama and even the losing World Cup coach Jürgen Klinsmann outpacing the first German pope as “a role model and admirable person.” It wasn’t that Benedict wasn’t liked as much as he wasn’t known, or understood.

Much of this puzzlement can be chalked up to the blessing of low expectations.

I believe President Bush called that the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Not only was Benedict following the supersized pontificate of John Paul II, but as John Paul’s doctrinal “bad cop” in Rome for more than two decades, he had diligently cemented his reputation as a conservative hardliner while continuing his own career as a polemical theologian who wrote dozens of books and engaged in frequent debates. All that made Cardinal Ratzinger the most prominent and controversial head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in memory.

Those terms always baffled me. Did they, conversely, expect him to be ‘a liberal soft peddler’?, or ‘a doctrinal pushover’?

Yet the new pope was too astute to fall into that trap. For one thing, Benedict understood that being pope would demand a pastoral touch instead of a combative edge. As he told dinner companions last fall: “It was easy to know the doctrine. It’s much harder to help a billion people live it.”

That simple statement reflects the keen insight Benedict had into both himself, and the pastoral task at hand.

Above all, in his pronouncements and writings, he carefully accentuated the positive. His first encyclical was titled “God Is Love,” and charity has become the recurring byword of his apparently irenic pontificate. “Christianity, Catholicism, isn’t a collection of prohibitions: it’s a positive option,” as Benedict said last year.

Teaching the world how that is so, Benedict is revealing a brilliant simplicity and clarity. Some people of the Times haven’t caught on to that yet.