{"id":5846,"date":"2006-09-15T10:45:53","date_gmt":"2006-09-15T10:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/all-things-catholic.html"},"modified":"2006-09-15T10:45:53","modified_gmt":"2006-09-15T10:45:53","slug":"all-things-catholic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/all-things-catholic.html","title":{"rendered":"All Things Catholic"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Allen’s new column is up:<\/a><\/p>\n

He didn’t go to Bavaria, but offers observations and notes:<\/p>\n

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As we have seen during his other public voyages, this is Benedict the pastor at work. For the most part, he avoids theological speculation or hard-hitting political commentary, striving instead to speak to the immediate spiritual needs of ordinary people. <\/p>\n

I wrote in Poland that when Benedict travels he has an intended audience in mind, and it certainly isn’t the press corps. The Italian daily Corriere della Sera<\/em> tried to profile it statistically on Tuesday, using the results of a recent poll on religious practice in Italy. (In general terms, the findings have parallels pretty much everywhere in the West). <\/p>\n

The survey found that more than 90 percent of Italians describe themselves as "Catholic," while just 25 percent go to Mass on a weekly basis. Twenty percent never go at all, and the remainder are clumped somewhere in the middle. <\/p>\n

These "in-betweeners" still think of themselves as Catholic, still recognize the church as a moral and spiritual point of reference, but to varying degrees have drifted away from regular practice of the faith. They have a Catholic background, according to the poll, but are moving in the direction of progressive secularization.<\/p>\n

That broad middle — people not instinctively hostile to the church, but not wild about it either — represents, according to Corriere<\/em>, Benedict’s "potential market." His strategy seems to be to speak in positive tones about the Christian message, avoiding giving headline writers on occasion to fashion banners along the lines of, "Pope condemns x." He’s also offering a "back to basics" message, focusing on Scripture, the Church fathers, the devotional life and the sacraments, proposing that they offer the best way to satisfy post-modernity’s need for meaning.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A bit more on various points, and then some excerpts from a talk Allen gave earlier this week at John Carroll in Cleveland, in which he introduces his discussion of Benedict by looking at Shaw and Chesterton:<\/p>\n

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By the way, I am not comparing Benedict and Chesterton on a personal level. Chesterton was irascible and curmudgeonly; Benedict, on the other hand, is unfailingly gracious, polite, and kind. As a personality type, he’s closer to Emily Post. Yet Benedict breathes the same air of Christian enlightenment as Chesterton. His approach to modernity is neither the craven assimilation that Jacques Maritain described as "kneeling before the world," nor the defensiveness of a "Taliban Catholicism" that knows only how to excoriate and condemn.<\/p>\n

Facing disagreement and differing cultural visions, Benedict is not afraid — and because he’s not afraid, he’s not defensive, and he’s not in a hurry.<\/p>\n

Such a spirit is largely alien to our fractured and hair-trigger era, and so Benedict has been something of a paradox- this avatar of Catholic traditionalism espousing a positive message, willing to engage in reasoned reflection with people who don’t think like him. For 18 months, people have been speculating about when the "real pope" will emerge from beneath this serene, gracious fa\u00e7ade. Ladies and gentleman, I suggest to you tonight that the fa\u00e7ade is<\/em> the real pope. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Allen’s new column is up: He didn’t go to Bavaria, but offers observations and notes: As we have seen during his other public voyages, this is Benedict the pastor at work. 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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\/5846","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=5846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}