{"id":3122,"date":"2006-04-14T09:43:16","date_gmt":"2006-04-14T09:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/on-benedict.html"},"modified":"2006-04-14T09:43:16","modified_gmt":"2006-04-14T09:43:16","slug":"on-benedict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/on-benedict.html","title":{"rendered":"On Benedict"},"content":{"rendered":"

First, from Hans Kueng – scroll down a bit<\/a><\/p>\n

The man’s ego is evident and unintentionally humorous. He has an impressive sense of his own importance and the attention that must be paid to his opinions. So with that in mind – <\/p>\n

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Benedict must choose between an eventual retreat to the pre-modern, pre-Reformation world of the Middle Ages, or a forward-looking long view which will take the Church into the post-modern universe that the rest of the world entered for quite some time. <\/p>\n

The Pope may decide on retreat, but I don\u2019t believe he will. He may decide to stand firm right where the Church is now, but to be limited merely to celebrating the Papacy instead of helping the Church in its present needs would be tantamount to taking a step backwards. <\/p>\n

Or he may decide to go forward \u2013 and this is what I and countless other persons within and outside the Catholic Church wish that he would do. The Pope knows that the situation of the Church is serious. John Paul II failed to convert many persons to his rigorous viewpoints, especially in matters of sexual morality, despite all his speeches and his travels. Such viewpoints have been rejected by a crushing majority of Catholics and national parliaments, even in his native Poland. All his encyclicals and his catechism, his decrees and his disciplinary sacntions, all the pressures from the Vatican, plain or hidden, on those who opposed him, resulted in practically nothing. <\/p>\n

Maybe Benedict perceives that the campaign to re-evangelize Europe revived fears of spiritual imperialism from Rome and contributed to the rejection of even a mention of God and Christianity in the preamble to the European Constitution. The oceanic Masses by the previous Pope, though they were very well-organized and effective as media events, failed to hide the fact that things are not going well for the Church. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And…Charles Curran! All your favorites!<\/a><\/p>\n

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Yet I have been pleasantly surprised by the first year of Pope Benedict\u2019s papacy. He has recognised his role as a centre of unity and has not seen the Church primarily as a small remnant in opposition to the world. Church pundits have often pointed out that the most important document from a new pope is the first encyclical. On 25 January, Benedict released his first encyclical: Deus Caritas Est<\/em>. My fears were that the first encyclical would be on truth: we the Church have the truth and we must struggle against the relativism and subjectivism in the world around us. Many of Cardinal Ratzinger\u2019s earlier statements and homilies before his election took this approach. But the first encyclical is a reflection on what Pope Benedict calls \u201cthe heart of the Christian faith\u201d \u2013 love. He is speaking here as the centre of unity in the Church, confirming his sisters and brothers in their faith in the power of love. There is nothing divisive about this encyclical. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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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\/3122","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=3122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}