SPAIN
National Catholic Reporter
by Michael Sean Winters | Mar. 7, 2013
A reader, Oswald Sobrino, generously took me up on my request that someone translate the essay I linked to yesterday by Mario Vargas Llosa on Pope Benedict. My views of the now Pope-Emeritus are less sullen than the great poet’s, but I think he captures the essence of Benedict in a way few Catholics have, and why Benedict’s writings pose a challenge not just to Catholics but to the entire culture of the West. Thank you Mr. Sobrino for so generously translating the article and sending it on so I can publish it here.
“ The Man Who Disturbs”
by Mario Vargas Llosa
I do not know why the abdication of Benedict XVI has been such a surprise; although exceptional, it was not unforeseen. It was enough to look at him, fragile and as if lost in the midst of those crowds in which he was obligated to submerge himself, making superhuman efforts in order to play the protagonist in those spectacles obviously foreign to his temperament and calling. So different from his predecessor, John Paul II, who navigated like a fish in the water among the masses of believers and onlookers that the Pope attracts in all his appearances, Benedict XVI would appear completely alien to those extroverted events that today make up the required duties of a pontiff. In this way, we can understand better his reluctance to accept the chair of St. Peter that was imposed on him eight years ago and to which, as we know now, he never aspired. The only ones who abandon absolute power with the ease with which he has just done it are those rarities who, instead of coveting power, disdain power.
He was not a charismatic man nor a man of the stage, as Karol Wojtyla, the Polish Pope. He was a man of the library and of the lecture hall, of reflection and study, surely one of the most intelligent and cultured popes that the Catholic Church has had in all her history. In an age when ideas and reasons matter much less than images and gestures, Joseph Ratzinger was already an anachronism, since he belonged to what is an especially conspicuous species on the way to extinction: the intellectual. He thought with depth and originality, based on his enormous theological, philosophical, historical, and literary knowledge, gained in the many classical and modern languages that he had mastered, among them Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
Although his books were always conceived within the bounds of Christian orthodoxy—but with a very broad horizon, his books and encyclicals often went beyond the strictly dogmatic and contained novel and bold insights concerning moral, cultural, and existential problems of our time that non-believing readers could read fruitfully and often—this has happened to me—with some discomfort. His three volumes dedicated to Jesus of Nazareth, his small autobiography and his three encyclicals—especially the second one, Spe Salvi, of 2007, devoted to the twofold nature of a science that can extraordinarily enrich human life but can also destroy and degrade it—contain a dialectical vigor and an expositive elegance that stand out sharply among conventional and redundant texts, written by the convinced, that the Vatican has customarily produced, for a long time now.
To Benedict XVI has fallen one of the most difficult periods that Christianity has ever faced in its more than two thousand year history. The secularization of society advances with great speed, especially in the West., the citadel of the Church until relatively recently. This process has been aggravated by the great scandals of pedophilia in which hundreds of Catholic priests have been enmeshed and whom part of the hierarchy protected or tried to ignore, scandals which continue to be exposed everywhere, just as the accusations of money laundering and of corruption that affect the Vatican bank.
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