Benedict Year One

Allen also observes that Benedict is fully aware of the fact that many people have a hard time taking the Church seriously on matters of truth and freedom. “[T]he tendency,” he writes, “is to see all that talk [about truth] as a rhetorical smokescreen for maintaining power over people's lives.”

Ah, but who is responsible for this image of the authoritarian Church seeking to control people with burdensome teachings? It seems at least to me possible to make the opposite case: that the Church has gone out of her way not to make people feel uncomfotable. In the last several decades we have seen at least in America a strong desire on the part of teachers in the Church to be accepted in the intellectual elite circles and academia, and largely this has been done by steering clear of issues that Allen characterizes as "tough sells" like homosexuality, the family, abortion, stem-cell research and euthanasia.

And what have we to show for it? Has this peripheralizing lead to greater acceptance of the Church on the part of the intellectual elites, the academic in crowd? Has it decreased anti-Catholic sentiments? One need only visit the Internet Movie Database to find the answer. The DaVinci Code is the first big movie event of the summer. Here in the popular media is where we find the image of the brutal authoritarian Church. In spite of the best efforts of some church leaders to be accepted in that forum, the DaVinci Code is only an example of the continuing image of the Church as a corrupt authority figure. And none of it, at least in DVC, stands up before historical, theological or journalistic scrutiny.

What is Benedict's approach to this? And why will his approach work? Because whereas some (like Ian Fisher at the New York Times) have tried to increase the Church's acceptance in the world by portraying the Church as permissive and noncommittal to her own teachings, Benedict reframes the discussion altogether. He recognizes that the debate is already lost as soon as one accepts the premise that the Church is not dedicated to the truth, and that her teachings do not equate to love and are not conducive to freedom and cannot lead to happiness. These are the premises on which the image of the power-hungry Church is based. (And the agenda behind The DaVinci Code and similar works, I would argue, is merely to advance those premises.)

Therefore Benedict returns to the first things. The basics. Freedom. Truth. Love. He invites us to stop and really think about them. This is why I think Allen's analysis of Benedict's first encyclical Deus Caritas Est is right on the money. As he writes it:

We’re not talking about truth because we want to chain you down, but because we want to set you free. It’s not a matter of love and joy versus a fussy, legalistic church. It’s a question of two different visions of what real love is all about – “Baywatch,” so to speak, versus the gospel. We too want happy, healthy, liberated people; we just have a different idea of how to get there.

“Different,” indeed. It is different in that it is the right way to achieve happiness, health and freedom. The catalogue of vices in the dictatorship of relativism are marked by the promises they make—promises of happiness, of personal fulfillment, indeed of love and freedom. The modern relativist culture seems least concerned, not surprisingly, with the human appetite for truth. What is truth, after all? According to modern times, it’s just whatever you make it, at least superficially. This is the first premise of the dictatorship of relativism, namely, that freedom is the ability to define Truth for oneself, which is really the assertion that no common understanding of truth is desirable or even possible.

But as Benedict pointed out when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger (on page 80 of his book The Nature and Mission of Theology): “In the long run, the renunciation of truth has no power to liberate. On the contrary, its final result is uniformity.”

That was his message during his service as prefect, and it continues to be his message today: that all the promises of sin ultimately are broken, and that all the difficulties of life in Christ prove to be but a prelude to the discovery of all the desires of the heart of man, namely: truth, freedom, and love.

This is a rather different image than the secretive, sexually repressed dungeon that the popular media would have us picture whenever we think of the Catholic Church. Quite the contrary, one could say that Benedict's whole message is “pro-life” in the sense that it is a call to the “fullness of life” (John 10:11). The approach accepts that the modern mind is pursuing real goods: happiness, health, liberty. It simply offers a better vision of those goods and a better path to find them. And that path may seem counterintuitive to the modern mind, but only because the modern mind is not timeless and does not think towards eternity.

As Allen points out, it is impossible to measure the legacy of any leader much less a pope after only a year’s time. But I suspect that we will see more of this new approach: of showing the faithful and the searching and the questioning how the Good News of Jesus Christ is not only unopposed to our fulfillment, but is the beginning and end of everything we are really looking for in life. For Benedict is above all a teacher, and he is teaching the world how to think timelessly.