On Benedict XVI’s papal coat of arms appears a beast of burden
(a bear with a pack-saddle), a symbol of the reluctance and
dutifulness with which Benedict served in the Vatican. In fact, he
had once asked Pope John Paul II if he could leave Rome and return
to Germany. But the pope asked him to stay and continue to serve as
the Church’s head of doctrine.
After John Paul II’s death, Benedict emerged as the
indispensable man, without the least bit of angling for that role.
He didn’t seek the papacy; it simply fell upon him. He had hoped
the college of cardinals would select someone else. But his acute
intellect, grasp of the Church’s crisis, and closeness to John Paul
II made him the obvious choice.
Given this background, his resignation appears more
understandable. He entered the papacy humbly and now leaves it
humbly. His resignation is a great loss for the Church and the
world. He represented the unity of reason and faith at a moment
when the world was fast losing both. Between the West’s culture of
abortion and the East’s culture of jihad, he stood as the
civilizational center for life.
The media verdicts so far on his supposedly inconsequential and
failed pontificate have been useless, reflecting nothing more than
the progressive prejudices of reporters and pundits. Long after
their spiteful articles have yellowed, his encyclicals will be
read.
The truth is that they didn’t like him from the start, treating
the elevation of a believing Catholic to the papacy as somehow
“controversial.” Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the
New York Times, once blurted out that “the struggle within
the church is interesting as part of a larger struggle within the
human race, between the forces of tolerance and absolutism.” That
is the only prism through which the media ever saw Benedict: he
fell on the wrong side of the progressive “struggle” and so became
a target for endless media bias.
All the coming coverage of the papal election, sure to be
absurdly ill-informed and tedious, will turn on that same standard.
Candidates who appear sympathetic to the “forces of tolerance” will
receive glowing coverage for weeks while the Church is lectured
about the need to “modernize” and avoid a “contentious” pope.
Modern liberals simply can’t rest until the Church elects a liberal
pope. Hijacking the Church for their own ideological purposes has
long been their goal. They dream of a pope giving his imprimatur to
the sexual revolution and socialism. Then at last the “forces of
absolutism” will have been defeated!
By absolutism, the Kellers ultimately mean God. That’s the
absolute authority they seek to overthrow. They numbered Benedict
among their historical enemies for refusing to join them in
removing God from religion. He wouldn’t swallow the secularist
acids they dish up as “dialogue” and so he had to be dismissed.
But historians decades from now will take his pontificate
seriously. It stands as an important step toward the restoration of
order and orthodoxy within the Church after many years of scandal
and foolishness. While plenty of dysfunction is still on display,
Benedict did what he could to curb it. Contrary to the media’s
spinning, he inherited these crises; he didn’t create them.
Indeed, the moments in his pontificate that the media has worked
hardest to try and trivialize and discredit will hold up the best:
his battles with the “dictatorship of relativism,” his promotion of
wider use of the traditional Latin Mass, his reinstitution of the
ban on the ordination of homosexuals to the priesthood, his
historic overture to disaffected Anglicans, his voluminous stream
of speeches and writings that aimed at repairing the catechetical
collapse within the Church; his insistence on the “non-negotiable”
character of the natural moral law in shaping politics and
culture.
He threw out an anchor to stop the doctrinal and disciplinary
drift within the Church, which future generations will appreciate
even if this one doesn’t. The pressure on modern popes, both from
outside and inside the Church, to pander to the permissive society
is enormous. He resisted that pressure, understanding that if the
Church mirrors the morality and philosophy of the world she becomes
just one more force for evil and delusion in it.
He was a reluctant pope but a conscientious one, whose legacy,
like that of his namesake, will be to have scattered seeds of
recovery along the dark fields of Europe and the world.
Photo: UPI
