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BOOK
Review
The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle
with the Modern World
Reviewed by Catherine McKeen, VOTF NY
On Seeing and Being Seen by Pope Benedict XVI
There are many ways to see a pope. While living in Rome,
you might glimpse in a piazza an influential Vatican
prefect and future pope who murmurs a mild “buongiorno” as
he passes. As a reporter you might travel with the epic
Pope John Paul II, or wait with patient crowds in St.
Peter’s Square as a conclave of cardinals locked
inside the Sistine Chapel chooses his successor.
You might work for Vatican Radio at the center of the
church’s global communications network. As a journalist,
you might conduct interviews with church insiders and
research the writings, biography, style, clerical career,
and theology of Joseph Ratzinger, today’s Pope
Benedict XVI.
David Gibson has done all of the above. His book The
Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with
the Modern World is the result. And it’s a first-rate
book, told on the one hand from the perspective of those
who see popes like John Paul and Benedict solely in their
public roles, and on the other, from those who get an
inside view of church structures and personalities at
the Roman heart of the universal church.
Given such different ways of seeing, Gibson enlivens
his account with details of the Vatican’s theatrical
landscape, its vestments, headgear, shoes, the drama
of a new pope’s appearance on a balcony, and the
sublime majesty of Catholic liturgy. Within that culture
and landscape, Gibson situates Pope Benedict’s
personal history and his twenty-five years at the Vatican
as John Paul’s defender of orthodoxy before becoming
pope himself.
Voice of the Faithful Catholics would do well to spend
time with Gibson’s Pope Benedict XVI, especially
to understand his Augustinian theology; his interpretation
of the Second Vatican Council; his powerful role as prefect
of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith; his
resistance to change; his understanding of church structures;
and – perhaps most importantly – his pastoral
insularity from the lives of contemporary men and women.
At one point Gibson is struck by Ratzinger’s way
of seeing, “an image of such affecting loneliness
that one’s heart goes out to a man who would see
himself so alienated from the world.”
By two specific measures, Voice Catholics should not
be too optimistic about what kinds of church reforms
might be accomplished during Benedict’s papacy:
his treatment of “dissent” while CDF prefect
and his reification of existing church structures, making
them not amenable to change.
On the dissent issue, Gibson documents the CDF’s
years-long scrutiny of Fr. Tom Reese and America magazine
that led to the departure of Reese from the Jesuit journal
of opinion within days of Cardinal Ratzinger’s
elevation as pope. Under Reese’s editorial leadership,
the magazine provided a forum for a variety of controversial
church issues. Church leaders as well as lay Catholics
joined in spirited discussion and debate in the magazine
pages. “But that was the problem,” Gibson
writes. “Ratzinger did not want such discussion
within the church.”
At its inception Voice of the Faithful certainly believed
that the sexual abuse scandal and the secrecy and dishonesty
of the church’s official response called for some
kind of adequate reform of church culture and practice.
So it is less than encouraging to read that: “In
light of his nature, it seems unlikely that Benedict
will offer much in the way of penitential reflection
on his record as prefect of the CDF or in the still-pressing
matter of acknowledging the church’s errors in
the clergy sexual abuse scandal.”
At its inception Voice leaders called for “structural” change
as one of its goals, later developing that concept to
mean a more open church with ways for laypeople to exercise
their rightful participation in the church decision-making
that affects their lives and finances.
Gibson argues that Pope Benedict sees church structures
not as something that human beings can reform but as
something willed by God and therefore inviolable. “More
challenging for proponents of reform,” he writes, “is
Benedict’s extension of the church’s divine
structure to include not just the hierarchy but the hierarchs
themselves…By divinizing the structures of authority
in the church so completely, Benedict effectively inoculates
the bearers of that authority – the bishops – from
personal accountability, except of course to God.”
David Gibson’s book should be widely read and
discussed among Voice of the Faithful Catholics. Then,
as antidote, we should read again Jesuit James Martin’s “Saints
That Weren’t” opinion piece in the New
York Times. There we find ourselves placed in the company
of Mother Theodore Guerin, recently canonized by Pope
Benedict, and other saints who were at odds during their
lives with bishops or even with the Vatican: Joan of
Arc, Thomas Aquinas, Ignatius Loyola, Mother Mary MacKillop.
We need their company.
The weekend edition (Nov. 25) of the Wall Street
Journal published an excellent
consideration of Pope Benedict. Subscribers can access
the article “A
Tumultuous World Tests a Rigid Pope."
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