Category: Benedict XVI

Of course a lot of people have been wondering where the Tridentine Mass liberalization motu proprio is and why it hasn’t come out.

We know with a high degree of confidence that the documents was drafted–in fact, that it’s been through several drafts–and that B16 has been favorably disposed to issuing it (or it wouldn’t have been drafted in the first place).

But where is it?

Some have speculated that it was delayed by the negative reaction of the French episcopate–or other episcopates–and that this negative reaction may derail it altogether.

Maybe.

Although maybe B16 is just letting the bishops have their say before he does what he planned to do all along.

Myself, I have a different speculation about why it hasn’t come out. The desire for greater consultation with the bishops may be part of it, but I suspect that there is a different factor that has been delaying the motu proprio: the delay of the apostolic exhortation.

The Holy See sequences the release of major documents so that each one can make an impact in the press and then be absorbed by the public (or at least the relevant sections of the public). They don’t want the impact of major documents diluted by having them step on each other.

You could see a bit of that happening last week when–although the big news was the release of the apostolic exhortation–the headlines in many places were stolen by attention to a document of much lesser importance: the warning about some books by an individual theologian.

The latter–because it involved controversy–got more press in some circles, though it was much less important in and of itself.

Now you can imagine what would happen if they released the motu proprio before or (as some suggested) at the same time as the apostolic exhortation. Since the motu proprio will be controversial, the press surrounding it would totally overwhelm the apostolic exhortation.

The smart things for B16 to do–and he is a very smart man–would be to issue the apostolic exhortation first, to lead with the document that clearly shows he is in harmony with the liturgical renewal that followed the Second Vatican Council (even if it needs some course corrections) and then issue the motu proprio liberalizing the celebration of the Tridentine Mass.

The inordinate delays with the apostolic exhortation (which B16 complained about himself, albeit politely) thus strikes me as a likely reason for the delay in the release of the motu proprio.

Or that’s my theory.

CNS has a nice piece on what B16 will be doing in the coming year.

GET THE STORY.

Incidentally, the story had a bit of Vatican lore that I wasn’t previously aware of:

The "ad limina" visits [that bishops make to see the pope] have undergone a quiet revolution in recent years, and it’s evident in the pope’s 2007 schedule. Canon law says the visits, by heads of dioceses to report on the status of their dioceses, should take place every five years, but that interval is now anywhere from six to nine years; many of the bishops coming in 2007 made their last visits eight years ago.

There are several reasons for the change. One is the simple fact that the number of the world’s bishops has approximately doubled over the last 50 years. Another is that when Pope John Paul II was ill during the last years of his pontificate, he was unable to keep up the pace of "ad limina" meetings, and a backlog developed.

Today, even with a healthy pope, it’s doubtful the Vatican can get back to the five-year schedule, one Vatican source said. The pope would have to meet with 540 bishops a year; last year, he met with 360.

Interesting!

So. What are your hopes for what B16 will do in 2007?

Catholic News Agency is reporting:

Sources close to the Vatican have told Catholic News Agency that the Motu Propio by which Pope Benedict XVI would allow for the universal use of the Missal of St. Pius V may be published after Christmas, while the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist could come in mid-January 2007.

MORE . . .

The Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, according to the same sources, has already been finished by Pope Benedict XVI and is being translated into the different languages in which it will be presented.

The document, which sources say will be issued after January 15, reaffirms the Church’s commitment to a celibate priesthood, encourages the use of Latin in liturgical celebrations, and even requests that seminarians learn the language as part of their formation.

It will also promote the recovery of Gregorian chant and sacred polyphonic music as a replacement to modern music, which would result in a gradual elimination of musical instruments that are “inappropriate” for the solemnity and reverence of the Eucharistic celebration.

GET THE STORY.

A while back ago, SDG did a post in which he quoted Pre-16 on Christmas in which the predestined-to-be-pontiff took something other than the usual dour, scolding tone that priests and preachers are expected to take toward the way that Christmas is celebrated.

To be sure, he did say that "The hectic commercialism is repugnant to us, and rightly so," but he went on to say, "And yet, underneath it all, does it not originate in the notion of giving and thus the inner urgency of love, with its compulsion to share, to give of oneself to the other? And does not the notion of giving transport us directly into the core of the mystery that is Christmas?"

He went on to reflect more concretely on the custom of giving Christmas presents, saying:

In the offertory prayer of the Christmas Vigil liturgy, we ask God for the grace to receive with joy his everlasting gifts that come to us in the celebration of Christ’s birth. Thus the concept of gift-giving is squarely anchored in this liturgy of the Church and, at the same time, we are made aware of the primal mode of all giving at Christmas: that God, on this holy night, desired to make himself into a gift to mankind, that he turned himself over to us.

The one genuine Christmas gift to mankind, to history, to each one of us, is none other than Jesus Christ himself. Even those who do not believe him to be God incarnate will have to admit that he has enriched and gifted the inner existence of generations upon generations.

This year Post-Pre-16, which is to say, B16 himself, took up this theme again in an address to college students , telling them:

"Christmas gifts remind us of the most perfect gift that the Son of God gave us of himself in the Incarnation,” Pope Benedict told the youth.  “Christmas is the day in which God has given himself to human persons and this gift is made perfect, so to speak, in the Eucharist." (SOURCE.)

I don’t have the full text of his address, but I hope it appears on the web soon, because I’d like to read more about what he has to say on this subject.

In former days, I myself expected pastors to take the scolding attitude toward the commercialization of Christmas, not that this ever stopped me from giving Christmas presents to others.

To this day any talk that suggests a horizontalization of Christmas–that good will among men is the "real meaning" of Christmas–turns my stomach, and I am no fan of the endless holiday movies and TV shows that make this point, including remakes of Charles Dickens’ secular fairy-tale A Christmas Carol.

The real meaning of Christmas is Christ, and to convey the idea that it is anything else, whether commercialistic or sentimentalistic is to confuse the epiphenomena for the Phenomenon that occasions them.

Yet I find myself agreeing with B16, too.

It’s natural to give gifts as part of a celebration. When the Jewish people were saved from Haman’s plot against them in the book of Esther, they exchanged presents of food with each other (9:22). There’s a certain naturalness to that, particularly in an age when food was not as cheap and easily available as it is today. But even apart from the biblical precedent, the exchange of gifts as a sign of joy is a human universal.

There is a familiar pattern that shows up across cultures whenever something is being celebrated. The details may vary, and not every element may be present in each celebration or in each culture, but in the main, whenever humans celebrate something you’re going to find a familiar cluster: eating, drinking, singing, dancing, gift-giving, and decorating. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Christmas or Purim or Eid al-Fitr or Diwali or Chinese New Year. There’s going to be a substantial presence of what we might call the human "celebration pattern" present.

Why does the pattern exist?

I haven’t reflected on the matter until recently, but it seems to me that there are likely to be at least two main reasons:

1) Humans are tangible creatures and we need to externalize our feelings through physical actions. Vulcans might be able to commemorate an event of joy just by meditating on it (assuming they weren’t wrong-headedly repressing their joy), but not humans. We’ve got ants in our pants, and we need to do something.

2) This blends into the second reason, which is that we need to externalize joy not just to express it but to promote it as well. All of the things in the human celebration pattern promote joy–they (when done well) make us happy, and so it’s natural to use them to promote joy over the thing we are celebrating. If you will, they are the occasion of natural happiness that, in religious contexts, becomes supernaturalized by pointing us to something beyond themselves.

Let’s look at gratitude for a moment. Suppose that you had come down with a horrible disease that was going to kill you or otherwise ruin your life. Then a doctor shows up and tells you that there’s a cure, and he gives it to you. In the moments of joy and relief that follow, you would not need any elements of the human celebration pattern to get you to feel joy and gratitude. You’d just feel it. Immediately. Hugely. Without any assistance.

But what about ten years later? The feelings wouldn’t be the same at that point, and while they’d still be there, latent, it would require more effort to bring them to the surface.

Something similar happens in religious contexts.

If you were one of the Israelites who came through the Red Sea, you wouldn’t have needed special celebrations to evoke feelings of awe and joy and thanksgiving to God. But 3500 years later? It’s a different story.

In the same way, if we were there at the manger on the night of the first Christmas–in Bethlehem–knowing the significance of the night, we wouldn’t need special assistance in evoking feelings of awe and joy and thanksgiving. But 2000 years later, it’s a different story.

Because of the distance that exists between us and the events we are celebrating, and given the way the human psyche works–at least in its fallen form–we need assistance to help evoke the feelings that we recognize are appropriate for the event we are celebrating. And so we employ elements of the human celebration pattern to help raise us to the level where–at least in a fallen, partial, incomplete way that doesn’t compare to what we would feel if we could go back and be in Bethlehem on that first Christmas–we feel some of what is appropriate.

We use the epiphenomena (the external elements of celebration) to help us appreciate the Phenomenon that occasions them.

That’s just the way humans work.

And so the celebration pattern not only allows us to express joy but to create joy as well.

The danger, in a religious setting, is that we will let the party become an end for its own sake. Parties are fine, and you don’t need a special occasion for them. My square dance club has one every month (that is, a special "Party Night," in addition to its weekly dances). But if you are having a party imbued with religious meaning, that meaning needs to be kept in sight.

This is something that we have to work at at times. It’s easy–when we are children–to focus exclusively on presents–or other elements of the celebration pattern (e.g., decorating Easter eggs, Halloween costumes, Halloween candy)–and we need our parents to help us keep a spiritual perspective in view.

But it is not wrong to use elements of celebration to evoke religious feeling. God knows how we’re made, and he expects us to do this, receiving and blessing the pattern. One of the purposes toward which the tithe was put in the Old Testament was to throw a party in thanksgiving for what God had given you. This was a matter of divine command at the time, and it shows the divine reception of external, joyful celebrations oriented toward the spiritual.

If we then ask: How much celebration is appropriate on a particular occasion, the answer will depend in part on what it is we are celebrating. If it’s the feast day of St. Paul well, as awesome as St. Paul is, that ain’t nothing compared to the birth of the Messiah. The joy occasioned by the latter should far outstrip the former–and St. Paul would say so himself. (Indeed, he would be positively insistent on the matter.)

The birth of God in human form–together with the rising of God from the dead for our salvation–should occasion the greatest joy and the greatest celebrations. One can argue that our culture doesn’t have the respective proportions between Christmas and Easter right, or that it allows other holidays to compete with them that shouldn’t, but at least among Christians they are recognized as the two most important religious holidays.

If we leave off comparing one holiday to another, though, and just ask ourselves "How much celebration is warranted for the birth of God in human form?" it seems to me that there is no intrinsic maximum to how much joy or how much celebration we should have. This is an event of such transcendant importance that the answer to how much joy you should feel or how big a celebration you should have, the answer is "As much as you can."

God doesn’t want you to exceed your means in these matters. He doesn’t want you to get so joyful that you become blind to your surroundings and rush out into the street shouting praises and get hit by a bus. Neither does he want you to ruin your family finances buying Christmas presents that you can’t afford. But within your means, it’s warranted to throw Christ a tremendous birthday party.

What counts as a tremendous birthday party depends on the means of the family and the culture throwing it. On the principle of the widow’s mite, a family or a culture that has very modest means will throw an externally modest party that is just as tremendous in God’s eyes as a family or culture with larger means which throws an externally larger party.

The key is not the size of the party but that it seeks to reflect the joy that is due the Event, within the means we have available, and that the party not lose sight of the purpose for which it is being celebrated.

I thus find my own reaction to the contemporary celebration of Christmas taking a somewhat different shape than it used to. It’s not the size of the party that our culture throws or all the economic activity that Christmas generates. My concern is more directed to orienting the celebration toward Christ rather than complaining about the excesses of the celebration (though there are certainly those in individual cases).

Which is why I was very pleased Friday night at my square dance club when our new caller confessed himself unashamed to wish people Merry Christmas. This not only drew immediate applause from the dancers but occasioned extensive Merry Christmassing for the rest of the evening.

I don’t know how religious everyone at the event is (it’s not a specifically Christian square dance club), but it helped keep Christ in Christmas–not to say keep Christmas in Christmas–and that made me happy.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

A press release from Doubleday:

DOUBLEDAY ACQUIRES POPE BENEDICT XVI’S

FIRST BOOK AS HOLY FATHER

December 12, 2006, New York, NY—Pope Benedict XVI’s first book as the Holy Father has been acquired by Doubleday, it was announced today by Bill Barry, Vice President and Publisher of the company’s religious publishing division. Entitled JESUS OF NAZARETH: From His Baptism to His Transfiguration, the book, which will be written for the general reader, will be published in Spring 2007. Barry acquired world English, first serial, audio and exclusive Spanish language rights in North America from the Italian publisher Rizzoli, which licensed international rights to the book at the behest of Libreria Editrice Vaticana (LEV), the publishing arm of the Vatican.

“Having previously published works by Popes John XXIII and John Paul II,” said Barry, “we are especially honored by the Holy Father’s confidence in Doubleday in entrusting to us the English language publication of his book. His scores of books written as the theologian Joseph Ratzinger demonstrate His Holiness’s erudition, but the appeal of this work will be in the personal passion he means to share about the intimate friendship with Jesus as the central figure of Christianity. It is truly a gift for all believers and sure to be an instant spiritual classic.”

JESUS OF NAZARETH represents the culmination of Pope Benedict’s lifelong quest to defend historical Christianity in the modern world. It is, he writes in the book’s preface, the result of a “long interior journey,” and “an expression of [his] personal search for the face of the Lord.” He began work on the project in the summer of 2003 and because, as he explains, “I don’t know how much time and how much strength I will still be given, I have decided to publish the first 10 chapters [from Baptism to Transfiguration] as volume one.” In the book, Pope Benedict paints a vivid portrait of Jesus as depicted in the Gospels and asserts that “only if something extraordinary happened, if the figure and words of Jesus radically exceeded all the hopes and expectations of his age, can his crucifixion and his effectiveness be explained.”

The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group is a division of Random House Inc., whose parent company is Bertelsmann AG.

###

No word if Ignatius will also be publishing an edition.

Catholic World News reports:

At a December 12 meeting, the Ecclesia Dei commission discussed a papal document that will broaden access to the traditional Latin Mass, Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez confirmed after the Tuesday-morning session. The Chilean cardinal said that he expects Pope Benedict XVI (bio – news) to release the document in the near future.

Cardinal Medina Estevez, the former prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, is a member of the Ecclesia Dei Commission, which was set up in 1988 to supervise Vatican relations with traditionalist Catholics. He confirmed that the group’s December 12 meeting was dedicated entirely to a discussion of a papal initiative that will allow more liberal use of the Tridentine rite.

The cardinal told the Roman news agency I Media that the results of today’s discussions would be presented to the Holy Father by Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos (bio – news), the chairman of the Ecclesia Dei commission. He suggested that the Pope might then schedule publication of the document. Cardinal Medina Estevez indicated that he did not anticipate further discussion of the matter by the Ecclesia Dei commission.

Vatican insiders expect that the papal document, widely expected to take the form of a motu proprio, will give priests permission to use the Tridentine rite– the liturgical form used throughout the Roman Catholic Church prior to Vatican II– without requiring the explicit permission of the local bishop.

CHT: Roman Catholic Blog.

MORE . . .

Rorate Caeli, quoting Il Giornale, reports:

Benedict XVI intends to extend the indult of his predecessor, in fact withdrawing from the bishops discretionary power on the matter: the Missal of Saint Pius V is no longer abolished, and even if the ordinary Roman Rite is that originated from the post-conciliar liturgical reform, the old one — used by centuries in the Church — can subsist as an "extraordinary rite".

The bishops, therefore, will not be able to deny the ancient mass anymore, but only regulate its eventual celebration, together with the parish priests, harmonising it with the need of the community. The corrections included would have reduced from 50 to 30 the minimal number of faithful who ask for the celebration according to the old rite. As for the readmission of the Lefebvrists, once the rite of Saint Pius V is liberalized, the deal should be easier.

GET THE STORY.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

B16’s visit to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Constantinople, New Rome, Augusta Antonina, Byzantium (oh, heck, SEE HERE) raised a lot of eyebrows. More specifically, the fact that the pope prayed in the mosque did.

I was surprised when press reports emerged–initially reports that were unclear as to whether he’d actually prayed or just meditated quietly for a moment. Given Pre-16’s disapproval of the interreligious meetings at Assisi and his authorship of Dominus Iesus, it wasn’t something that I predicted.

But it wasn’t something that I thought totally out of character for him. He has articulated principles in the past that would allow him to do something like this, and I could see him saying to himself, "Like Jews and Christians, Muslims do worship God, and in view of the grave world crisis we are presently in and my own obligation as the Vicar of Christ not to inflame it, I should go as far as I possibly can to settle the situation down."

This was a way that was possible given the principles he has articulated before, and so he did it.

Not everyone, though, is familiar with what Pre-16 wrote on this subject, and I was glad to see that John Allen provied a nice column on how to view the event in light of what B16 said before he was B16–as well as the fact that the pope felt is was possible for him to do this without loading it up with theological explanations and qualifiers that would have killed the effect.

Why did he feel that he could handle the matter in that way?

ONLY NIXON COULD GO TO CHINA.

I was delighted yesterday when word hit the Catholic wires that His Awesomeness B16 has appointed Dr. John Haas to the Pontifical Academy of Life.

Dr. Haas is (among other things) head of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, which is an orthodox Catholic organization devoted to bioethics. They’re very sharp and very faithful to the Magisterium, and at Catholic Answers we regularly point people their way.

Dr. Haas is a stand-up guy who has made time to discuss bioethical questions with me on the phone, and I was delighted to see his work being honored with this new appointment.

Congrats!

HERE’S AN ARTICLE BY DR. JOHN HAAS.

ABOUT THE PONTIFICAL ACADEMY OF LIFE.

Here’s some video from the Mass that Pope Benedict celebrated at Mary’s House in Ephesus (the Vatican guidebook for the trip notes that there is no archaeological evidence for Mary having lived there, but it is a traditional site of Marian veneration, including for Muslims).

The video covers the presentation of the gifts, and the song being sung at this point is reportedly Nearer, My God, To Thee, though my German isn’t good enough to tell (the tune sounds right, though).

I’m interested in this Mass because of the peaceful, open-air setting and the fact that there were apparently only three hundred or so people there due to the remote area and the low population of Christians in Turkey, making this a far more intimate papal celebration of the Mass than ususally occurs on an apostolic voyage.

I would have loved to be there.

HERE’S JOHN ALLEN’S ACCOUNT OF THE EVENT.

AND HERE’S THE JOINT DECLARATION B16 SIGNED WITH PATRIARCH BARTHOLOMEW THE NEXT DAY IN ISTANBULCONSTANTINOPLE.

AND JOHN ALLEN’S ACCOUNT OF ONE OF THEIR MEETINGS.

For those wanting to check the latest on what’s happening with Pope Benedict in Turkey, Christopher over at Against the Grain has a running roundup, including his upcoming schedule day-by-day.

HERE’S THE LINK.