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February
6, 2006
VOL.
44, NO. 3Oakland,
CA
COMMENTARY
A Pope focused on changing his Church, not the world
Benedict XVI’s emerging legacy is ending the imperial papacy
State budget challenges option for the poor
Americans fear increase in poverty
A Pope focused on changing his Church, not the world
By Stacy
Meichtry
Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY
-- On any given week, the oval contours of St. Peter’s Square swell
with tens of thousands of banner-waving pilgrims, gathered to hear Pope
Benedict XVI preach in a monotone, high-tenor voice.
The German pontiff does not have the commanding presence of his Polish
predecessor, John Paul II, but his message of conservative values and
fundamental truths resonates on the cobblestones.
Benedict has decisively brought the papacy back to Rome after decades
of globe-trotting under John Paul. The shift is aimed at building a spiritual
and political base of true believers by focusing on the internal life
of Catholicism.
In other words, after nine months on the job it’s apparent Benedict
is not out to change the world. He’s out to change his Church.
Whether addressing the issue of gays in the priesthood or meditating on
the difference between love and lust in his first encyclical, released
Jan. 25, Benedict has made Church governance his priority.
“The 26 years of (John Paul) was a rich and complex stew, but they
created various tensions and problems,” said Father Cosimo Semeraro,
secretary of the Vatican Committee on Historical Science. “Now is
the time to get selective and deal with issues that touch the core of
Christian identity.”
Benedict’s effort to follow John Paul’s global legacy with
a period of Catholic purification is apparent in many of the administrative
changes he has recently made. For example, he has:
• Appointed American Archbishop William Levada, a prelate noted
for his front-line experience in the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal,
to succeed him at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
• Clamped down on the Franciscan friars for conducting unorthodox
prayer sessions and massive anti-war protests at the site of St. Francis
of Assisi’s tomb.
• Issued a controversial “Instruction” barring those
with “deep-seated” homosexual tendencies from entering the
priesthood.
But Benedict’s respect of Church tradition and history is not just
reflected in his management. You can literally see it as an expression
of style and personality.
He does not set trends, as John Paul did, but resurrects them, donning
crimson mantles and Santa-like headgear in a throwback to the popes of
medieval and Renaissance times.
“He is the successor of John Paul II, but he is his own man,”
Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington said during a recent visit
to Rome. “He’s not going to try to imitate his predecessor.”
In his recent encyclical, Benedict chose to set the tone of his papacy
with a meditation on love -- Christianity’s most basic virtue.
“Purification and growth in maturity are called for,” the
pope wrote without mentioning any of the condemnations on contraception
and homosexuality he authored as John Paul’s right-hand man and
defender of Vatican doctrine.
“Love is indeed `ecstasy.’ Not in the sense of a moment of
intoxication, but rather as a journey,” he wrote. Erotic love, he
said, “needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide
not just fleeting pleasure but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of
our existence.”
According to Alberto Melloni, a church historian at the University of
Modena, Benedict’s love letter will disappoint cardinal electors
who thought they were getting a gun-slinging Clint Eastwood when they
elected a doctrinal prefect as pope.
“He’s not saying `Make my day!’ to anyone,” Melloni
said. A call for purity, Melloni said, does not necessarily involve a
purge. Instead Benedict is “like a decanter,” Melloni said.
“You pour in John Paul’s teachings and let them settle.”
Melloni believes the encyclical’s soft touch could alter debate
within the Church from a tone of conflict to one of introspection. Unlike
John Paul’s first encyclical, Benedict’s “Deus Caritas
Est” (God Is Love) does not offer a controversial treatise on the
state of the world and role of the Church within it.
John Paul’s “Redeemer of Man” foreshadowed his outward
challenge to Soviet communism and modern culture; Benedict’s love
letter represents an inward look at the Church’s founding principle.
In a rare interview with Polish radio in October, Benedict said he aimed
to explain and clarify the doctrines he helped develop under John Paul
rather than multiply them.
“My personal mission is not to issue many new documents, but to
ensure that (John Paul’s) documents are assimilated,” he said.
While Benedict has firmly defended Church teaching on sexuality, there
have been signs that the man famously dubbed “God’s Rottweiler”
by the media may be softening in his approach.
For example, Benedict has:
• Met with his longtime archrival, the dissident theologian Hans
Kung.
• Taken the unconventional step of allowing open discussion during
an October synod of bishops.
• Repeatedly called for unity among Christian churches.
And then there is his presence in the square. The cardinal portrayed as
rigid and fearsome has transformed into a pope who delights the faithful,
his people, his Church.
(Stacy Meichtry is the Vatican reporter for Religion News Service.)
Benedict XVI’s emerging legacy is ending the imperial papacy
The best way
to understand Pope Benedict XVI is to compare his succeeding the larger-than-life
John Paul II to Harry Truman’s following the equally giant-sized
Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The year-end news roundups stressed the void left in the media universe
by the death of John Paul. Pundits alternated between puzzlement at and
pity for Benedict, a 78-year-old German scholar better known for summoning
theologians to zero-hour examinations in the shadowed recesses of the
Holy Office than greeting crowds in the flooding light of St. Peter’s
Square.
Analysts continue to shake his nine-month-old papacy as a child does an
unopened present for clues about what is inside. What they miss is that
Benedict has already done something in plain sight as dramatic and far
reaching as any of John Paul’s actions.
In a quiet, simple, yet unhidden way, the new pope has validated the work
of Vatican II, the landmark council (1962-65) that modernized the Catholic
Church. His carefully chosen name symbolically separates him from his
predecessor.
It also identifies him with the World War I Benedict who ended the witch
hunt era
against Catholic scholars set off by Pope Pius X’s condemnation,
as ill-fitted as it was ill-defined, of what was called “modernism.”
Benedict is described as “shy” in comparison to the self-dramatizing
John Paul. He is not bashful as much as he is unself-conscious on the
world stage. By his natural underplaying, he has drained the theatricality
out of the public papacy. He has thereby gracefully ended in the 21st
century the imperial papal style.
It reminds one of how banners fell after Garibaldi’s 19th century
rising in Italy ended the church-as-worldly-kingdom by stripping away
the papal states, installing a king in a former papal palace in Rome,
and leaving the pope, as it was then said, a “prisoner of the Vatican.”
The then Pope Pius IX reacted by pressuring Vatican Council I (1870-1871)
to proclaim the pope infallible when speaking ex cathedra, that is, from
the throne, with its echo of worldly power, on matters of faith and morals.
Pius IX got so much attention from other heads of state that England’s
prime minister, worried at its effects on the loyalty of English Catholics
to the crown, promptly wrote a book of distinctions and rebuttal on the
subject.
Vatican I was interrupted by the arrival of Garibaldi’s red-shirted
troops in Rome and its work was not concluded until Pope John XXIII convened
Vatican II almost a century later. The paper on the nature of the Church
and whether the pope, by virtue of his infallibility, is an absolute monarch
controlling all authority within it was taken up again.
People noticed the change in the Mass to their own language, as opposed
to Latin, but Vatican II’s greatest achievement was to finish Vatican
I by restoring the balance between the pope and the bishops of the world.
The council fathers reinstated the ancient practice of collegiality that
recognizes that bishops, including the pope, derive their authority from
their being ordained bishops rather than as a delegation from the primal
store of papal authority.
This means bishops are not passive messengers but full collaborators in
the work of the Church.
Pope Benedict XVI’s unaffected and non-histrionic manner represents
a healthy move back to a more human and modest papacy after the screen-filling
yet still remote personality of John Paul II. John Paul overpowered and
overshadowed the world’s bishops and, although he championed democracy’s
victory over communism in Europe, he did not encourage it in the Church.
This extraordinary man served the world that he viewed as a stage for
his undeniably imperial presence.
Benedict XVI comes across as himself and if he lacks an actor’s
gifts, he is also free of an actor’s needs. He has already diminished
the dramatic and enlarged the pastoral possibilities of the papal office
in the 21st century.
As president, Franklin D. Roosevelt was as dominant and histrionic as
John Paul II was as pope. Commentators doubted that FDR’s successor
could step out of his shadow, but the down-to-earth Harry Truman proved
that an ordinary man could be a great leader and saved the post-war world.
Pope Benedict XVI may well be to John Paul II what Truman was to FDR,
a loyal successor who by being himself also changes the world.
(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic
Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago
and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,”
published by St. Martin’s Press.)
State budget challenges option for the poor
Food or heat?
Medicine or rent? These are choices the poor must make whenever they pay
the bills. And this year’s proposed California budget will not make
those choices any easier.
Budgets include more ethical and moral decisions than virtually any other
governmental action. Through them, elected officials make thousands of
decisions on our behalf.
Catholic social teaching urges us to evaluate financial choices –
personal or governmental – by how they impact the vulnerable members
of society. A preferential option for the poor asks us to favor actions
that help the people who need help the most.
So how does the proposed 2006 California budget of $98 billion measure
against that criterion?
Not well. In fact, assistance programs are the only areas slated for major
cuts. Two of the tougher reductions: assistance for child care expenses
to help welfare recipients who start new jobs and cost-of-living-adjustments
for the blind, disabled and elderly.
Our welfare system is designed to move people into work. That’s
why the state subsidizes child care for people who go to work, school
or job-training class. During a three-month period last year, $114 million
allocated for this purpose was not used, so the governor has cut the program
by that amount this year.
A three-month slowdown is hardly enough to make such a drastic change
– it’s a mere glitch in statistical terms.
Worse yet, the budget also fails to provide cost of living adjustment
(COLA) for the blind, disabled and elderly. Even though funds are available
for COLAs from the Feds, the governor will not accept that money because
it would mean the state has to match it.
Larger deficits in the past have meant even worse cuts to social programs.
But at a time when a recovering economy means greater revenue than expected,
why continue to make cuts to programs that help those who already have
so little?
The poor must continue choosing between food, medicine, heat and other
basic needs. As so often is the case, they are lost in endless policy
debates and political posturing that rewards more powerful groups.
Overshadowing much of the conversation this year, the budget includes
provisions for the governor’s Strategic Growth Plan, a series of
massive renovation and construction plans for transportation, education,
public safety and other systems.
The effort is reminiscent of California’s post-WW II growth boom.
The governor is calling for $222 billion in bonds over 10 years, but compromise
with Democrats and election year horse-trading may change that.
While I am concerned about the pork-barrel potential of such a plan, preparing
for the future is a good and necessary government function. My final decision
on the plan’s merits will depend on how all Californians fare –
rich and poor alike.
For example, the governor does not include any funds for affordable housing
– a conspicuous hole for those concerned about the poor. Alternative
proposals in the legislature address this oversight and housing may yet
be included.
There are some hopeful notes in the 2006 budget, too: a proposal to raise
the minimum wage and funding to help legal immigrants complete the citizenship
process.
In hopes of undermining a Democratic push to both increase the minimum
wage and to index it so that it keeps pace with rising costs, the governor
proposes a modest increase from $6.75 to $7.75 per hour.
Most minimum wage earners are adults, disproportionately Latino, and employed
in the leisure and hospitality industry. The research shows that moderate
increases in the minimum wage do not translate into job loss as many believe.
Amid a turbulent and often vicious debate on how to compassionately reform
our immigration system, the budget includes $1.5 million for the Naturalization
Service Program.
Catholic Charities and the California Catholic Conference have pushed
for years to fund this program, which has been reduced or omitted from
recent budgets. Inclusion in the governor’s first draft is welcome.
As for the future, the budget does pay down on state debt, but it still
has about a $6 billion operating deficit and projects three more years
of the same.
So many programs are on autopilot – about 80 percent of the budget
– that neither the governor nor the legislature can significantly
alter the structural deficit. To do so would require a fresh and painful
look at the tax structure in California. It’s also why the budget
must make so many cuts in human services programs – it’s one
of the few areas not off limits.
Politicians, unfortunately, don’t appear likely to touch the hot
button tax issue now or anytime in the foreseeable future. After all,
it’s someone else’s food or rent decision?
(Steve Pehanich is the executive director of Catholic Charities of
California. Contact him at spehanich@cacatholic.org.)
Americans fear increase in poverty
WASHINGTON
-- Nearly two-thirds of Americans - 65 percent -- fear that poverty will
increase in the United States in 2006 while seven in 10 (71 percent) believe
there are more poor people today than a year ago and 63 percent worry
that they could themselves become poor, according to the latest Poverty
Pulse survey by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
The poll also found that nearly all Americans, 97 percent, think that
it is important to decrease or eliminate poverty in the U.S. and that
more than half - 56 percent - had donated money to organizations that
assist the poor.
Nearly half - 46 percent reported giving money for disaster relief and
about a quarter - 26 percent - said they themselves had volunteered.
But the Poverty Pulse survey found Americans divided on assigning “the
greatest responsibility” for responding to the needs of poor people
and addressing poverty overall: 31 percent said the responsibility lies
with the federal government, while 29 percent said it is the task of “everyone-the
general public.”
Another 17 percent assigned the task to the poor themselves and 2 percent
held churches responsible.
However, 90 percent of the public said that it is important for the federal
government to ensure that all poor people have health coverage.
And 91 percent believe that health care should be guaranteed to all children.
