To understand the personal baggage that Pope Benedict XVI brought to the Holy Land this week, it is worth looking at his most accessible book, “Jesus of Nazareth”, published two years ago. With a mixture of intense piety and arcane scholarship, he reflects on the Jewish origins of Christianity’s dogmas and rites in a way that shows deep interest in the religion of ancient Israel–yet total conviction that the older faith’s true meaning is to be found only in Christ. Both in its rigour and in its devotion, the pope’s writing reflects the enclosed places in which he has spent most of his 82 years. First, the formal atmosphere of German academia, where charisma is a dirty word; and then the upper echelons of the Vatican, a world whose ethos, reasoning and vocabulary are utterly remote from the lives of most lay Catholics, let alone everyone else.
No surprise, then, that he lacked the street sense to send the right signals on a trip to the front line: the Middle Eastern confrontation zone of the three monotheistic faiths, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, a region that tests the skills of the savviest statesman. In the event, he deeply upset his Israeli hosts, and to a much milder extent his Palestinian ones too, both mainly through sins of omission.
What a heathenish article; the implicit critique is that Pope Benedict does not himself embrace the religious outlook of “Nathan the Wise,” nor comprehend that the only important role for religion today is to act as a “spiritual” echo-chamber for the aspirations and concerns of the Western elite.
If that is what they want, they have the perfect instantiation of such hopes in the Presiding Flaminica of the Episcopal Church.
The smug superiority of this article is a profound contrast to the gentle soul who currently occupies the Chair of St. Peter.
“Arcane scholarship?” Time will remember Joseph Ratzinger for a brilliant theologian when this writer is long forgotten.
Ditto to the previous commenter. I can’t say often enough: those who criticize this Holy Father just haven’t read enough of Joseph Ratzinger. There are tens of thousands of pages, just get through a couple of hundred and you’ll change your mind. I promise.
The Economist says, “With a mixture of intense piety and arcane scholarship, he reflects on the Jewish origins of Christianity’s dogmas and rites in a way that shows deep interest in the religion of ancient Israel–yet total conviction that the older faith’s true meaning is to be found only in Christ.” And what, in the author’s view, is different about this view from that of other believing Christians? The risen Lord opened the Scriptures to the disciples, showing them their meaning.
RE: “And what, in the author’s view, is different about this view from that of other believing Christians?”
Katherine nailed it.
Heh — this article bespeaks the fond fantasies of a man who desperately wants to see the conservative fail. And Ratzinger is a conservative who is a threat to the progressive Roman Catholics who took Vatican II and ran with it, along with the progressives everywhere who cheered them on.
I’m cheering for Ratzinger.
About 17 hours ago I posted a comment on this thread; mine was (or would have been) the first one. It did not concern WO; ir was not “off-topic,” and yet it hasn’t appeared. Every comment that I have posted on T19 over the past fortnight has experienced similar prolonged delays before appearing — why is this?