{"id":3018,"date":"2006-04-17T14:21:32","date_gmt":"2006-04-17T14:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/do-you-want-pope-articles.html"},"modified":"2006-04-17T14:21:32","modified_gmt":"2006-04-17T14:21:32","slug":"do-you-want-pope-articles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/do-you-want-pope-articles.html","title":{"rendered":"Do you want Pope articles?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best place to go for links to articles about Pope Benedict is here, the "Papa Ratzinger Forum" where not only English-language articles are posted, but translations of other pieces, as well.<\/a><\/p>\n

Notable over the weekend were those emanating from the Brits – sniping, snide and mostly missing the point. It’s one thing to disagree with Benedict – go read the Traditionalist forums, or on the other hand, the Huffington Post – to get a taste of that – but what these fellows do – Peter Stanford at the Observer<\/a> and Cornwell’s in the Times UK<\/a> is to basically warn that surely the Rottweiler has not lost his bite, it’s soon to evince itself, and to spend many hundreds of words attempting to squeeze Benedict into their preconceptions and ideological expectations. It is simply beyond them to understand how a Pope, firmly and thorougly committed to Christ, could look at the world as it is and want his first and foundational message to be "God is love."<\/p>\n

Their loss.<\/p>\n

Oddly enough, both stories refer to him as the "IPod Pope" in the headlines. Good job.<\/p>\n

One of the more interesting articles linked in the forum is, amazingly enough, from the Italian Vanity Fair.<\/em> A taste:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

At a time when, alas!, preaching seems to have been reduced to an obsessive repetition of moral norms, ranging from commonplaces about solidarity to instructions on how to behave in bed, Joseph Ratzinger, in those 5 speeches, managed to shake us up, reminding us that Christianity is not an ethic but the celebration of an event: that God be came man, died for us and rose again, and that even for us, life does not end here. All the rest \u2013 including moral behavior \u2013 are a consequence of that fact, not premises<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

If you can, go back and reread those speeches and you will see how Ratzinger, I repeat this, keeps showing us, above all, the beauty of Christianity<\/strong>. Even his first encyclical, Deus caritas est<\/strong>, follows that orientation: God is not a policeman, God is love<\/strong>. \u201cHe who does not love does not know God, because God is love.\u201d <\/p>\n

Anything but a stick-rapping moralist, Ratzinger even exalts all the dignity of erotic love, but he also makes it clear that eros without agape (the love in which one gives oneself to the other) risks being nothing but self-love, pure satisfaction of one\u2019s own desires. <\/p>\n

Why do I like Benedict XVI\u2019s manner of speaking? Because he is not dogmatic. Rather, he rationalizes moral indications. He doesn\u2019t simply say: do this! He explains, he talks to the modern mind, which is rational by training<\/strong>. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The best place to go for links to articles about Pope Benedict is here, the "Papa Ratzinger Forum" where not only English-language articles are posted, but translations of other pieces, as well. Notable over the weekend were those emanating from the Brits – sniping, snide and mostly missing the point. It’s one thing to disagree…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nDo you want Pope articles? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/do-you-want-pope-articles.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Do you want Pope articles? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The best place to go for links to articles about Pope Benedict is here, the "Papa Ratzinger Forum" where not only English-language articles are posted, but translations of other pieces, as well. Notable over the weekend were those emanating from the Brits – sniping, snide and mostly missing the point. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}