Got nothing done this weekend. I don’t know why ever imagine that I will. So I’m going to hold fast to no blogging til Tuesday (barring big news, of course)…but if you like..

You can wish the Pope a happy birthday, via the Vatican website

and…pray for his intentions for the month of April:

Call to Holiness.  That guided by the Holy Spirit, each Christian may respond enthusiastically and faithfully to the universal call to holiness. (G)

Vocations.  That the number of priestly and religious vocations may grow to meet the needs in North American and countries of the Pacific Ocean. (M)

Okay, here are a couple of birthday/anniversary pieces, both from the English Catholic press, but both by Americans:

George Weigel in the Catholic Herald:

With the dust settled after the Regensburg lecture, perhaps we can see that Pope Benedict, in cooperation with men like Senator Pera, has for some time now been trying to give the world a precious gift: a vocabulary through which a serious, global discussion of both the crisis of technological civilisation in the West and the crisis posed by jihadist ideology and its lethal expressions around the world can be engaged by believers and non-believers alike – the vocabulary of “rationality” and “irrationality”. If Europe begins to recover its faith in reason, then at least some in Europe may, in time, rediscover the reasonableness of faith; and in any event, a renewed faith in reason would provide an antidote to the spiritual boredom from which Europe is dying – and thus open the prospect of a new birth of freedom in Europe, and throughout the West. 

Benedict XVI has been trying to remind the world that societies and cultures are only as great as their spiritual aspirations. It is not an act of ingratitude toward the achievements of the Enlightenment to suggest that the soul-withering secularism – the exclusivist humanism – that has grown out of one stream of Enlightenment thought threatens the future of the West, precisely because it prevents us from giving an account, to ourselves and our children and grandchildren, of the noble political ends embodied in the Western democratic tradition. As Marcello Pera put it in Without Roots: “Absolute [worldliness], supposing there is such a thing, is an absolute vacuum in which neither the happy majority nor the creative minorities can exist.”

I dislike the role of Jeremiah, as I am sure Pope Benedict does. But it is neither cynicism nor despair to note that two possible Dark Ages loom on the horizon of the 22nd century: there is the Dark Age of a technologically manufactured and morally stunted humanity, created by the unwise deployment of the new, Promethean knowledge given us by genetics; and there is the Dark Age in which an anti-humanistic theism fills the vacuum created by atheistic humanism and extinguishes the Western experiment in freedom whose deepest roots run to the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages. Neither is inevitable; both can and must be resisted, with all the tools of wit and wisdom at our disposal. We are fortunate to have, in Pope Benedict XVI, such a wise guide through the thickets before us.

John Allen in the Tablet:

Benedict’s commitment to collegiality has been visible in ways large and small. He has repeatedly spoken out about the crisis of Africa, for example, including a strong condemnation of the way Africa has been "plundered and sacked" in his new book, Jesus of Nazareth, and a plea for humanitarian concern with Africa in his Easter homily. That focus does not come out of the blue. In the General Congregation meetings in April 2005 leading up to the conclave, the African cardinals made a plea for the next pope, whomever it might be, to put Africa at the centre of his pastoral concern. Benedict obviously wants to honour that request. His collegiality can also be measured by what hasn’t happened, including the delayed release of a motu proprio authorising wider celebration of the Tridentine Mass. If it were entirely a matter of the Pope’s personal instincts, the document would have come out long ago, but in light of reservations voiced by several bishops, Benedict has opted to go slow.

Perhaps the best expression of Benedict’s emerging persona came in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, released at Christmas 2005. The Pope treats human erotic love in deeply approving terms, deliberately avoiding anathemas. In general, most observers regard the Pope’s writings and public addresses to date as impressive. Some have been tempted to style Benedict as "a pope of words", in contrast to his predecessor, John Paul II, as a "pope of images".

Oh…and for more rounding up…go to Christopher Blosser’s Benedict Blog. He’s got it all!