As I started writing this, I suddenly thought of a possible title, namely: The Ratzinger Razzmatazz but simultaneously felt it would be an uncalled for barbarity — even if Pope Benedict is the pope, his critics, pre-eminently Hans Kung, say he is. Disrespectful, incidentally, to the religion of everyone on my mother’s side, my father’s side, my stepfather’s side.
I suddenly understood the vague feeling about Pope Benedict that I’ve had for quite some time. Not so much a feeling as an impression. Namely, that he is not only a man of great intellect but one who possesses a real ardour for the splendor of the church (to use the phrase of Father Henri de Lubac, who held such a high estimate of him)of yore.
Nonetheless here’s to do a Hans Kung at a conservative remark picked from the global forest: ‘Nowhere in The Tablet on the abdication of Pope Benedict do the contributors show any appreciation of the fact that for faithful and loyal Catholics the pope is first and foremost the ‘successor to St. Peter’. This focus of Catholic devotion isn’t an invention of the past 200 years but has been a central element of the Catholic Church since the beginning.’
By a Deacon Nick Donnelly.
Our take:
We dispute the phrase ‘since the beginning.’
It seems Elaine Pagels towards the 1980s had ‘explod(ed) the myth of the early church as a unified movement.’ That is, the church was far from being a hierarchy as the RCC lovingly holds itself to be.
OK ‘not an invention of the past 200 years, but neither ‘since the beginning.’ For there was an earlier period or phase that was – yes, that’s the word — egalitarian.
But even in its 20th-century heyday, it appears that the church was, arguably, in a sense, egalitarian.
I mean that’s how it struck me when in my ignorance I found out that even the pope has a father confessor. I read that the legendary theologian, Romano Guardini, was the father confessor of Pope Pius XII. Imagine. the pope himself. Father, forgive me for I have sinned.
Even now I am assailed by fear that I am still ignorant and did not really understand what I read! Am I? Didn’t I? ‘
Or did Father Guardini really hear the pope’s confession? And if he did — on a regular, routine basis at that — what could be more egalitarian?
And back to Lubac.
By way of a blog’s updating. ‘Benedict XVI, Hans Kung and Catholicism’s Future’ by a Samuel Gregg.
‘Books written by two Catholic theologians recently rocketed up Germany’s best-seller list.
‘One of the theologians is Benedict XVI. The other is the well-known scholar Fr. Hans Kung. His text, Can the Church Still Be Saved?, was published the same week as volume two of Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth.
‘In his Vatican II diaries, de Lubac entered pithy observations about those he encountered. Ratzinger is portrayed as one whose powerful intellect is matched by his “peacefulness” and “affability.” Kung, by contrast, is denoted as possessing a “juvenile audacity” and speaking in “incendiary, superficial, and polemical” terms.’
I guess every reader knew at once where Dr. Gregg was coming from.
But the parallel and agonistictrajectories that have been Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Kung, wow.
‘Benedict and Kung have led curiously parallel lives. Both are native German-speakers. They are almost the same age. For a time, both taught at the same university. During the Second Vatican Council, they served as theological advisors with reputations as reformers.’
As we say, stranger than fiction, right?