April 24, 2005

As soon as the announcement of our new Pope Benedict XVI was made, people started to ask me if I knew him. The fact is that he has been to the United States a number of times and has participated in different theological dialogues when I met him and at one point I had an extended conversation with him. About two months ago I wrote him a thank you note and wished him the best and also told him the progress of our new community, which I knew he would be interested in.
I don’t feel bashful speaking about the new pope. You’ve heard a great deal about him from the papers and the television and I assure you that the negative comments will start coming in fairly fast, particularly from secular newspapers, which have an anti-religious bias like The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times, not to mention the Boston Globe. They will, as they have already, interview everyone they can find who is ideologically at odds with the former Cardinal Ratzinger and they will blow everything out of proportion.
People ask me what I think of his election. Obviously he is an excellent man and I know from his closest associates, a number of whom I taught in the seminary, that he is a deeply prayerful and spiritual man. I was able to tell that when I spoke to him and when I have read his books, which are often books of deep spirituality and prayer.
He is also a very modest man with a strong sense if his own inadequacy, despite the fact that he is intellectually brilliant. Being intellectually brilliant does not make a strong sense of inadequacy impossible. As a matter of fact it may add to that because intelligence helps you know yourself better and to see through the cloud of self-adulation that surrounds successful people in our society. Pope Benedict XVI will be unrattled and undeterred by the negative comments of the secular press or even of Catholics who should be more loyal to the Pope but who are not. I do feel sorry for those Catholics who thought that some kind of creation was coming. I don’t know where they got that idea. The vast majority of practicing Catholics who are people of faith were not looking for any great revolution. If they were people of faith, they would not have been. The fact is that Cardinal Ratzinger brought about a number of the changes that have taken place in the church in the last several decades. Most people don’t know it, but the first session of the Second Vatican Council was a failure. All that the delegates seemed to do was bring back a documentation that was copied out of old books. Cardinal Frings, Archbishop of Cologne, strongly spoke that in order to save the faith in Europe and in other educated places, new approaches and new initiatives to evangelization had to be taken. This very strong speech caused all of the documentation of the Council to be rewritten and put it on a totally new course. That speech was largely written by the theological expert of Cardinal Frings, Msgr. Joseph Ratzinger. If you don’t like the Second Vatican Council you could blame him.
Cardinal Ratzinger, like many people including myself, is very uncomfortable with some of the trends that came after the Council, which ended up in destroying large segments of religious life, undermining vocations, undermining Catholic theology and moral teaching. When people say that he’s a conservative, they’re saying that he wanted to restore those vital parts of the Catholic Christian life. I’m one hundred percent in agreement with him.
I hope that you will pray fervently for our new Pope in the days ahead. The day after his election our friars and sisters had a deeply prayerful Mass for him and for the guidance of the Holy Spirit upon him in these difficult times. He has taken for his patron St. Benedict, who is the patron of Europe. People wondered why he took that name. He also was born on the feast of my patron St. Benedict Joseph Labre April 16th.
God has chosen a faithful and hard working totally dedicated servant, who had every reason to expect that he could retire to a life of prayer and writing. Now he must become the shepherd of the flock. In my recent thank you note to Cardinal Ratzinger I mentioned a saying that the old German Capuchins used to have “we get too soon old and too late smart. I said Your Eminence if I may say so, only the first part is true of you.”

-Fr. Benedict Groeschel, CFR

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