Seeking God's face

CHERISHED ideas die hard. True, the favored image of the erstwhile Cardinal Ratzinger as a brutal Grand Inquisitor has not survived the first year of the pontificate of Benedict XVI--but a residual miasma of mainstream suspicion prevents the appropriate amount of attention from being paid to some of the new Pope's remarkable pronouncements. Fortunately, the indispensable Catholic publisher Ignatius has now made available in book form a series of the important speeches delivered by Pope Benedict in Germany last summer. In God's Revolution: World Youth Day and Other Cologne Talks (108 pp., $14.95), we have some of this Pope's central messages.

Benedict's ministry is radically Christocentric. Welcoming pilgrims to the World Youth Day celebrations, he insisted that only Christ "gives the fullness of life to humanity.... Christ takes from you nothing that is beautiful and great, but brings everything to perfection for the glory of God, the happiness of men and women, and the salvation of the world." Yet he proclaims Christ in a spirit not of triumphalism, but of the love that is at the heart of the Christian faith. This focus on love would become even sharper in the encyclical Deus Caritas Est, published a few months afterward, but it was certainly in evidence in the Germany visit. Benedict told an audience of seminarians that their vocation might be compared to "falling in love"--and "love knows no 'why'; it is a free gift to which one responds with the gift of self."

This has important consequences for the way Christianity is practiced and proclaimed. In a sermon on the journey of the Magi, Benedict pointed out that these searchers for a King "had to change their ideas about power, about God and about man ... Now they were able to see that God's power is not like that of the powerful of this world. God's ways are not as we imagine them or as we might wish them to be. God does not enter into competition with earthly powers in this world. He does not marshal his divisions alongside other divisions.... He contrasts the noisy and ostentatious power of this world with the defenseless power of love ... [that] ushers in the Kingdom of God."

These comments capture well the spirit of the Pope's addresses to Jewish, Muslim, and non-Catholic Christian audiences in Cologne. To the Muslims, he made a timely confession, and appeal: "How many pages of history record battles and wars that have been waged, with both sides invoking the Name of God, as if fighting and killing the enemy could be pleasing to Him. The recollection of these sad events should fill us with shame, for we know only too well what atrocities have been committed in the name of religion." This admission of the sins of Christendom past, which Benedict issued many months before the recent "cartoon intifada," gave him an Archimedean point from which to encourage the Muslim world to respect religious liberty: an ideal certainly implicit within both Christianity and Islam, but which Christendom had, in practice, to be taught by the secularists of the Enlightenment, and Islamdom has (by and large) yet to learn.

Perhaps most noteworthy were the Pope's comments at an ecumenical meeting. In Germany--the birthplace of the Reformation--he offered a dramatic context for the understanding of Christian divisions. Too often, ecumenical discussions get bogged down in issues of ecclesiology. Ecclesiology is, formally, the study of the Church; but it often degenerates into the study of bureaucracy, of who's-in-charge--in short, of Lenin's "who whom." In a remarkable address, partially ad-libbed, Pope Benedict declared his impatience with this approach: "It is said that ... the elaboration of ecclesiological issues and the questions concerning ministry are the main obstacles still to be overcome. Ultimately, this is true, but I must also say that I dislike this terminology, which from a certain point of view delimits the problem since it seems that we must now debate about institutions instead of the Word of God, as though we had to place our institutions in the center and fight for them. I think that in this way the ecclesiological issue ... [is] not dealt with correctly.

"The real question," Benedict continued, "is the presence of the Word in the world." The proclamation of this Word demands a commitment to Christian unity, but the Pope stresses that "this unity does not mean what could be called an ecumenism of return: that is, to deny and to reject one's own faith history. Absolutely not!"

This is the approach of an apostle who meets the world in the spirit of Christ--that is to say, with a challenge grounded in love and true human respect. God's Revolution is a small book, but the ideas it presents are large.

* The trial of Saddam Hussein may have farcical aspects, but what it is accomplishing is deadly serious: It is compiling--for history--a record of eyewitness testimony of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Saddam's sadistic regime. And eyewitnesses are essential to mankind's process of memory; they humanize what can too easily be deadened into statistical dust.