Indeed, his resignation has probably united Catholics in approval like no other action he undertook as pope. His admirers see it as an act of great humility and confidence in God; even many of his detractors agree, emphasizing its intelligence in a world in which many live to 100 despite ever-declining faculties.
We can be grateful for his eight-year pontificate, for his willingness to serve the Church he loves in such a public and demanding role until his body gave out. A shy university professor who would have preferred a retirement to read and write instead got a boatload of frequent flier miles, a Twitter account, and an unimaginable volume of scrutiny and criticism.
We can be grateful that he is leaving, that someone with other gifts and less historical baggage will sit in the Chair of Peter and perhaps remedy some of the results of Benedict's shortcomings. Even his admirers, including some cardinals, publicly say that he has not proven a gifted administrator, and those he chose to "make the trains run on time" have not done so. When he asked in his resignation message for pardon for his "faults," these may have been at the top of his mind.
We can be grateful that, while we will not have his presence, his writings will endure. His greatest gift was as a teacher of the faith, most especially in the rare combination of clarity, profundity, and learning with which he wrote, and those writings will remain with us. Although he often delivered astoundingly brilliant off-the-cuff remarks or replies to questions, hearing him read his prepared remarks still sometimes felt like attending an academic lecture, better to be dissected at home than heard. Well, we now have all of our lives to dissect, or rather, to meditate on his words. I do not doubt that, like his favored theologian Augustine, this pope's writings will still have immediacy long after other more "relevant" speakers have faded into obscurity, because he grasped all of our doubts and fears without succumbing to them.
But none of this really gets to the heart of Pope Benedict's pontificate, or this day. The pope's own final messages were filled with gratitude--to the "ordinary people" who "write as brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, with the sense of very affectionate family ties", to the cardinals, the diocese of Rome, other priests and bishops, to those he met on his travels, even to his dysfunctional Roman Curia, and ultimately to the whole world. But above all, the pope expressed his gratitude to God, more specifically, to Jesus Christ.
When, almost eight years ago, on April 19th, [2005], I agreed to take on the Petrine ministry, I held steadfast in this certainty, which has always accompanied me. In that moment, as I have already stated several times, the words that resounded in my heart were: “Lord, what do you ask of me? It a great weight that You place on my shoulders, but, if You ask me, at your word I will throw out the nets, sure that you will guide me” – and the Lord really has guided me. He has been close to me: daily could I feel His presence. [These years] have been a stretch of the Church’s pilgrim way, which has seen moments joy and light, but also difficult moments. I have felt like St. Peter with the Apostles in the boat on the Sea of Galilee: the Lord has given us many days of sunshine and gentle breeze, days in which the catch has been abundant; [then] there have been times when the seas were rough and the wind against us, as in the whole history of the Church it has ever been - and the Lord seemed to sleep. Nevertheless, I always knew that the Lord is in the barque, that the barque of the Church is not mine, not ours, but His - and He shall not let her sink. It is He, who steers her: to be sure, he does so also through men of His choosing, for He desired that it be so. This was and is a certainty that nothing can tarnish. It is for this reason, that today my heart is filled with gratitude to God, for never did He leave me or the Church without His consolation, His light, His love.
We can grateful for Pope Benedict's resignation because it reflects his certainty that Jesus Christ is the center of everything, and therefore we can entrust whatever we cannot ourselves accomplish to Him, if indeed we judge that Jesus Christ is the center of everything. The heart of Benedict's papacy, and his lack of pop culture popularity, is that he brought Jesus Christ to the forefront. He wrote about love. He wrote about hope. He wrote books about Jesus. Not because he didn't share the pain of the suffering in the world. Not because he wasn't up to the intellectual challenge of modern culture. But because he was convinced that Jesus Christ gives love, gives hope--convinced from experience. And most of us are, at best, ambivalent about whether we want Him in the center, even of our own hearts, let alone of how we think or act or live together.
When I say "us", it's not a rhetorical gesture--I mean me. The ambivalence is mine. I was, once upon a time, a theology student, and Josef Ratzinger, one of the theological giants of the 20th century, was very influential on me. I am sorry to see him go because we have so very, very few public leaders who actually say what they mean and mean what they say, who aren't molded at every step and in every utterance by public relations and power calculations--and that includes the ones that actually want to do good! You may think he is too tradition-bound or too rigid (even I do in some small ways--he doesn't get rock and roll, for instance), but he is genuinely a humble, loving, honest person. If he was, to you, too hard on "dissident" theologians in his role as doctrinal "enforcer," it was out of a jealous protection of the centrality of Christ--and not as an idea, but as our salvation.
It's very striking to me that the secular journalist who interviewed then-Cardinal Ratzinger, Peter Seewald, returned to faith as a result. A slightly different witness is John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the "liberal" National Catholic Reporter, who had written a book slamming then-Cardinal Ratzinger but came to acknowledge him as a "Christian gentleman" and to see him as pope in a different light. When Pope Benedict visited England, he was understandably villifed both for the sexual abuse scandal and for upholding offensive traditional moral teachings, but his own goodness shone through. I know that some people can't see any of this because of the sex abuse scandal. I'm not in a position to say if he's "done enough," but there's good reason to think both that he personally cares and that he has pushed the Church in the right direction. But in general, when people could see through the media's distorted picture, and through the uncritical adulation of his most fervent supporters, they found an exceptional man, a man of God.
So it made me laugh when a family member of mine asked, at the beginning of his papacy, "I heard the next pope will be the anti-Christ. Will he?" He may be many things, but not that. And the image of the Grand Inquisitor, who refused to allow Jesus to come in the present, is an odd one for a man who hardly seems to talk about anything except Jesus present now, as an encounter, not just an idea, not just a set of teachings or doctrines, as the source of joy, hope, love, faith.
But we often want our focus to be on action, on "the kingdom," on making the world better. I want to be an environmentalist, which I hardly am now. Would I be if I left the Church? Is all this time looking for Christ's presence, and the satisfaction it brings, holding me back? And yet, there's Pope Benedict. While American "orthodox" Catholicism seems to be filtering scientific findings through a Republican-like filter, so that creationism might be okay and environmental concern is a "liberal myth," the Pope was encouraging a Vatican conference on theology and evolution and repeatedly expressing concern about the destruction of the natural world, leading some to (a little optimistically) call him "the green Pope." The heir to a tradition of intentional poverty, he had no need to defend a system built to maximize wealth. Hopefully those speeches will be more and more read in the coming years, and start to sink in.
Still, Benedict always insisted--only God is God. Nothing else can be worshiped, not money, not power, not respect, not even the good earth. And that divine limit carries with it absolute respect for human life, among other things that are anathema to mainstream environmentalists.
I want an easier path--to fit comfortably into some political milieu, to just get to be red or blue or green. But the fact that I admire Benedict for his integrity against all public opinion probably means I don't really want that after all. I probably want a silence that purifies my thoughts and pulls me out of the never-ending stream of hyperlinks in which I live, and the nihilism that they thinly veil. I probably want to be wounded by beauty, and to seek true Beauty, and justice and truth and happiness.
In his final public audience, the pope said,
I also receive many letters from ordinary people who write to me simply from their heart and let me feel their affection, which is born of our being together in Christ Jesus, in the Church. These people do not write me as one might write, for example, to a prince or a great figure one does not know.
I understand why, because after years of reading him, I know he is not a great figure who I do not know; he has revealed himself to me, to us, in his attempt to pass on what he loves, this faith, this hope, this love. He has assured us, me and my wife and our whole ecclesial family who are trying to be faithful to Christ and His Church, that although we may shrink in numbers and in respect among the good people of our culture, we never have to become the villains the world takes us to be. You may hate the stances Benedict upholds, but he doesn't hate you.
And so we're left, for the moment, without a pope, but not without a Father or mother or brothers or sisters or children or land or houses. The former pope again:
Here, one can touch what the Church is – not an organization, not an association for religious or humanitarian purposes, but a living body, a community of brothers and sisters in the Body of Jesus Christ, who unites us all. To experience the Church in this way and almost be able to touch with one’s hands the power of His truth and His love, is a source of joy, in a time in which many speak of its decline.
I am grateful, then, today. Not for an end, but for another new beginning--to see if I can again almost touch this power, and allow it to make me a servant of love.
