By Pope Benedict XVI and Peter Seewald
Reviewed by Hugh Ryan
Pope Benedict XVI’s latest book, an interview with German journalist Peter Seewald, opens with a touching description of what the 78-year-old Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger expected from the Papal Conclave of April 2005. He expected finally to have some peace and quiet.
The humble obedience and direct prayerfulness with which he accepted a dramatically different outcome reveal a man readers will want to get to know better.
This raises the question: Who is the book for?
It is for Catholics, of course, and especially for those whose attitudes to their Faith, the Church and the Pope are too heavily influenced by the secular media who are almost always wrong in their facts and their interpretation about Church controversies.
It is also for non-Catholics of any religious belief or none who would like to have a reliable insight into the Catholic Church which is the 2,000-year old foundation stone of Christianity and the biggest organisation in the world, although entirely lacking in military or economic power.
It is not a book of religious instruction, although Benedict’s faith shines clearly through. A glance at the summary of the Pope’s engagements from 2005-2010 (pages 200-217) will convince any potential reader that this really is an interesting man and his book worth reading. His visitors include most of the world’s political and religious leaders, on a scale that is almost certainly unique in the world.
A third group who would profit from the book are journalists and those who teach journalism in universities. Without requiring any sort of religious or spiritual agreement from the secular media, this book would reveal how consistently they have misunderstood and misinterpreted the Pope’s words and actions in the controversies of recent years. Since the purpose of journalism is to get things right, such enlightenment would help journalists and their readers, viewers and listeners.
Throughout the book, Pope Benedict deals with all the controversies of his time, and in the process gives delightful insights into his character and his faith.
He deals with the sexual abuse of minors with the blunt directness and heartfelt sorrow he has shown on visits to places like the US and Ireland. But he deals only with the work the Church needs to undertake to eradicate the problem from the Church, without making any comparisons with the rest of society.
He accepts Peter Seewald’s point that most of the abuse within the Church occurred 25 to 40 years ago, but only to seek its meaning in the virtual collapse of moral theology within the Church and society at that time, and to show the need for conversion and purification.
The Pope does not seek mitigation of the Church’s problem in the far greater sexual abuse problems in society and does not mention them even when Seewald raises some figures.
For instance, on 1 November last year, Perth’s morning newspaper ran a double-column story with photo headed “Clerical abuse victims march on the Vatican”. A US leader of the group was reported as saying: “Society has failed to address the problem of sexual abuse by priests, but we can’t let this go unresolved.”
There was no mention of the fact – and no marches on Washington or New York – when a few months earlier the US Government released a report showing that in 2008 there were 69,100 cases of sexual abuse of minors in the USA. Parents and other direct and extended family members were responsible for 55.5 per cent of cases and mothers’ unmarried boyfriends another 8.8 per cent. The rest of the abusers were spread across society, with priests of all kinds accounting for 0.03 per cent.
The Pope also speaks beautifully about his prayer life: “I see very well that almost everything I have to do, I cannot do myself. I place myself in the Lord’s hands and say to Him: “You do it if you want it!”
Later, he says, he notices “there is help there, something is being done that is not my own doing”.
He also speaks of his prayer with Mary and with his friends Augustine, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, and then with the whole Communion of Saints.
“Strengthened by them, I then talk with the dear Lord also, begging for the most part, but also in thanksgiving – or quite simply being joyful.”
Later, when speaking of his Papal journeys, he says: “I am carrying out the task entrusted to me, in the awareness that this is being done for Another and that this Other is standing by me.”
He deals easily with the question of infallibility in a way that anyone can understand, regardless of whether they want to accept it.
Benedict’s summaries of ecumenical and interfaith progress with Orthodoxy, China, Protestants and Islam (including the famous Regensburg address) are illuminating, but are neither pessimistic nor presumptuous of early success. With regard to the division created by the Government in China between the two groups of Catholics, he says, “there is much hope that we can definitively overcome the separation. This is a goal that is particularly dear to me and that I bring before the Lord daily in prayer.”
The relevant section of the Regensburg address is included in the Appendix, and the Pope describes the positive outcomes from this speech which was so widely and ignorantly condemned at the time.
He points out that both Christianity and Islam defend major religious values – faith in God and obedience to God – and that Islam is lived in very different ways depending on its various historical traditions and current relationships of power. Bishops from many parts of sub-Saharan Africa told him there had been a long tradition of good co-existence and it was a matter of ancient custom for them to celebrate one another’s holidays.
“The important thing is to remain in close contact with all currents in Islam that are open to, and capable of, dialogue, so as to give a change of mentality a chance to happen even where Islamism still couples a claim to truth with violence,” he concluded.
Expressing the basis for Ecumenism, Benedict says the world needs a well-founded, spiritually based, rationally bolstered capacity for witness to the one God who speaks to us in Christ … and it is of the greatest importance that we provide it together at this time when the peoples of the earth are in crisis.
The Pope speaks in a variety of ways about the many aspects of this crisis of humanity, but most of it comes back to the prevalence of atheism, relativism and the large-scale rejection of a natural moral law in the Western world and the erroneous behaviour that flows from them.
“Today,” he said, “it is still a major task of the Church to unite faith and reason. For, after all, reason was given to us by God. It is what distinguishes man.”
The problem in the modern world is that reason is expected to lead the individual to what he wants, whereas sound reason leads to what is true.
Faith is the conviction that we are required to live by truth, and at a deeper level Faith is revealed truth.
This conflict about the purpose and value of reason is repeatedly displayed in Australia and the rest of the Western world.
A few years ago when embryonic stemcells were supposed to save the world, the then Federal Minister for Health declared belief in the sacredness of human life, but added that if there was any benefit to be gained from killing human embryos, that would be the thing to do. Sadly, our Parliaments agreed.
Similarly, we pay baby bonuses to encourage women to have babies and we pay doctors to kill babies in the womb if anyone wants them to.
Speaking for the entire world, the United Nations defines killing babies in the womb as “reproductive health”.
That’s Western reason?
Reason should say it is nonsense to drug healthy women every day, but we pay the medical profession to prescribe the pill, even though doctors know that if a woman not taking this drug turned up with her body functioning as though she were, they would have a serious clinical condition to attend to.
The Western world lived through the 20th century and the unprecedented cruelty and slaughter launched on its own people and others by atheistic philosophies and dictatorships, but today in Australia and elsewhere atheism is being presented as the only reasonable way of thinking and living.
However, Pope Benedict explains: “Truth points out those constant values that have made mankind great. That is why the humility to recognise the truth and to accept it as a standard has to be relearned and practised again.”
Benedict examines a wide variety of earthly problems such as the environment and the economy and places them in this context of truth, God and the common good.
In relation to the GFC, the subsidisation of banks by governments, and the huge interest bills being paid by governments to banks to cover their GFC borrowings, the Pope says, “it is plain that we are living in untruth”.
He also speaks of the “serpent of drug trafficking” and the “destruction that sex tourism wreaks on our young people” and attributes both to the “arrogance and false freedom of the Western world” and its search for “eternal joy” when “the eternity man needs can come only from God”.
“The important thing today is to see that God exists, that God matters to us, and that He answers us. And, conversely, that if He is omitted everything else might be as clever as can be – yet man then loses his dignity and his authentic humanity and, thus, the essential thing breaks down. That is why, as a new emphasis, we have to give priority to the question about God.”
Late in the book, Peter Seewald introduces the apparitions of Mary the Mother of God to three children at Fatima and the great miracle that was performed there on 13 October 1917
The Pope adds that throughout history God had never ceased to use Mary as a light to lead us to Himself. At Fatima, she appeared to three children and spoke to them of the essentials: faith, hope, love and penance.
For those who don’t know the story, the apparitions occurred monthly from May to October and quickly became widely known by the Catholic faithful and the very angry officialdom. In July, August and September, Mary promised the children that on 13 October she would perform a miracle that everyone could see and know that the children were telling the truth.
Between 70 and 90 thousand people turned up, including the editor of Portugal’s biggest daily newspaper called O Seculo in harmony with the virulently secular and anti-religious spirit of the Government and establishment.
In a front page editorial, he condemned interest in the event and promised to attend himself and expose the ridiculous hoax.
He and the rest of the huge crowd, including people who were more than 20 miles away, witnessed a spectacular display of multi-coloured light issuing from a wildly gyrating sun which at one point dislodged itself from its place and charged towards the earth.
At the end of the 10-12 minute display, people suddenly realised they had been staring directly at the sun for that period of time without any ill-effects, and also realised that despite heavy rain through the night and morning their clothes and the water-logged ground they stood on were dry. To his eternal credit, the editor of O Seculo published the story in detail, for which he was roundly criticised by many of his prominent secular friends, not because they thought he could deny it, but because he really should not have given it any publicity!
This attitude of denial and pretence that the spiritual world does not exist is still rampant in our society, but as Benedict says, Mary and her message at Fatima are still alive in the world and essential to it because the solution to the world’s problems can only come from the transformation of the heart – through faith, hope, love and penance.
There are many other aspects of the human condition dealt with in this book, all of them interestingly.
The language is clear, without the burdens that so often accompany matters theological and philosophical.
The ideas are accessible to people with or without religious background.
The star of the book is undoubtedly Benedict, but Peter Seewald deserves our admiration and gratitude for his lucid questions and interesting background information.
It occurred to this reviewer about 2000 words ago that the best review of this book would be: Read it, re-read it, and then read it again. You will never regret it and always remember it.
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– Hugh Ryan is the former communications manager for Archbishop Barry Hickey