The right man

God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, by George Weigel (HarperCollins, 296 pp., $26.95)

The election of Pope Benedict XVI seemed both impossible and inevitable, and, after the white smoke had disappeared, the same observers who had assumed that age and controversy would block him would remark how logical the decision was. Some inhabitants of a universe parallel to reality stayed stupefied; the result silenced for dramatic seconds on network air one commentator who had broadcast that Ratzinger's chances were Mined by his homily before the Conclave. It may be that the future Pope had thought the same, for his denunciation of a "dictatorship of relativism" was like saying, "I don't want this, but if you insist, I want you to know what you'll be getting."

Pius XII was so emblematic of everything papal that he remained "The Pope" to many after the election of John XXIII, upon whose death it was generally thought that no one could outdo his act in history. This almost seemed the case during the hand-wringing melancholia of Pope Paul VI's reign. After John Paul II was gathered "to the Father's house," the refrain went up again, "There'll never be another." Within months, Benedict XVI was blessing the largest gathering of youth the world has seen, and a recent general audience broke all attendance records. Every Pope knows how fast the flax of popularity can burn, and also knows that if he were the only one to show up, there would be the Church.

George Weigel's Witness to Hope interpreted John Paul II to great numbers of readers worldwide. The first hundred pages of this book about Benedict are about John Paul. It did not take that long for Elijah to cast his mantle over Elisha, but in truth each is a code to the other. Weigel teases the historical muse by calling John Paul II "the Great" and one waits to hear how that will resonate in a few years. What Weigel calls "The Church that John Paul II Left Behind" in some ways was never finer and in other ways never more troubled. But Weigel becomes brilliantly concise when he shifts gears, the change in syntax matching the change in papal personalities.

As the new Pope's age did not thwart him (Ratzinger was in fact little more than a year older than John XXIII had been at his election) and may in fact have been in his favor, so did his outspokenness gain the votes of cardinals who, like Chesterton, did not want a Church that moves with the world but a Church that will move the world. And here Weigel takes on the new Pope's challenging persona; some of what follows in the next two-thirds of the book may be received as the most provocative things he has published.

What Weigel calls John Paul's "least impressive social encyclical," the 1987 Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, was the camel put together by a committee, the result of "a tortuous process of consultation between the papal apartment, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and other curial offices." It was symptomatic of a bureaucracy immensely inflated in the pontificate of Paul VI, and that John Paul II did not trim, as his mind was on other things. The big picture must come first, for without vision the people perish, but God is also in the details. Benedict XVI has a mind for both. He has the advantage of having seen the Vatican for a long time from the inside. By refusing Ratzinger's repeated requests for retirement, John Paul II may have recognized an intellect even sharper than his own. In some of the writings of John Paul, a form critic would detect the influence of Ratzinger's sudden bursts of clarity.

As a young theologian at Vatican II he enthused for "ressourcement," the return to a patristic sense of the sources of Christianity that he hoped would box the compass for an "aggiornamento" to make Christ understood by a generation shaken by seismic anthropological shocks. Ratzinger had a girl for discernment that many of his academic colleagues did not. They were like Left Bank intellectuals who say, "That may be good in practice but how is it in theory?" Most of them who are not dead are now pouting in universities and renovated convent parlors, wondering why a world that has passed them by has not caught up with them. Some of them began a journal, Concilium, that labored in the belief that Vatican 11 was a new Pentecost more interesting than the first. (They simply misread Thomas More on the etymology of "Utopia.") When Ratzinger saw through their half-baked Kantianism, concluding that they had detached "aggiornamento" from "ressourcement," he helped launch an alternative to Concilium called Communio, which today is published in a dozen different languages, and attracts the best minds.

This ended Ratzinger's friendship with such as Hans Kung and Karl Rahner, although one of his first papal acts was to invite Kung to visit, with no illusions about doctrinal accord. As chaos in the universities reached a kindling point in 1968, his move to a more serene academic environment in Regensburg was to find a solid place for an Archimedean lever to move the world. There may be no German expression equivalent to "steel magnolia," but there was no softness in the aesthetic integrity of Ratzinger--which must have caused him much suffering as he witnessed the moral ugliness and liturgical vulgarity of recent years.