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Predicting future under Benedict

By Tony Staley
Compass Editor

Papal emphases Fr. Donald Senior said he believes Pope Benedict will follow these four emphases based on a homily he gave April 20, the day after his election: • Implementing the spirit and content of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council; • Renewing appreciation of the Eucharist; • Continuing the quest for Christian unity within Catholicism and among all Christian denominations; • Carrying out the church's responsibility to the world through interfaith dialogue, including Judaism and Islam, and outreach to young people.

DE PERE -- Expect improved ecumenical relations between the Catholic Church and other Christian and non-Christian denominations, predicted a Scripture scholar who knows Pope Benedict XVI.

Furthermore, Pope Benedict will prove to be a pastoral leader, rather than the tough enforcer he was under Pope John Paul II, said Passionist Fr. Donald Senior.

Fr. Senior, president of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and the author of several books, has known the pope since 2001. He made his predictions Oct. 11 in a Killeen Chair lecture at St. Norbert College.

Fr. Senior prefaced his remarks by saying that he's not an authority on the Vatican or a close friend of the pope. Rather, he based his comments on his experiences as a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, which then Card. Joseph Ratzinger oversaw, and from reading the pope's books and statements.

They first met when then Card. Ratzinger presided at the opening Mass of a Pontifical Biblical Commission meeting.

Card. Ratzinger attended all sessions, meals, liturgies and coffee breaks, Fr. Senior said. He listened intently, seldom intervened and never controlled the discussion. At the end of each week's sessions, he summarized them extemporaneously - in flawless Latin - possibly the only person in the Vatican who could do that, Fr. Senior said.

Pope Benedict is an "extraordinary theologian ... lucid, compelling and erudite," Fr. Senior said. He described the pope as a low key, devout, gracious, humble, deferential person with excellent English skills and a good sense of humor, who is interested in others in a nonthreatening way. He also values Scripture, uses it in his talks and wants the church to recover its roots in Scripture, Fr. Senior said.

The cardinals chose Card. Ratzinger, Fr. Senior said, because in the days after Pope John Paul's death they came to believe that he was what the church needed - a leader with a deep and genuine spirituality, who knew English and other languages, and could deal with world leaders.

As pope, Benedict has shown his willingness to allow people to ask hard questions, Fr. Senior said. He cited as examples the October Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist, a wide-ranging conversation with priests last summer and an interview with a prominent Italian journalist.

Some topics discussed at the synod would not have been allowed under Pope John Paul II, Fr. Senior said. The exchange with the priests last summer included questions about divorced and remarried Catholics, mandatory celibacy for priests, condoms and AIDS. In none of these instances did Benedict move to stop the discussion or order that the questioner be removed. Rather, "he dealt with them in a pastoral way and admitted the ambiguities," Fr. Senior said. "He likes to dialogue with people of unlike minds."

But Pope Benedict's willingness to discuss seemingly anything does not mean that anything goes, he said. But he responds not by being confrontational or condemning, but by being positive and encouraging, Fr. Senior said.

For example, at World Youth Day, Pope Benedict didn't rail against sexual immorality, drugs or materialism. Rather, he concentrated on the Eucharist as an act of love and its victory over hatred and death, Fr. Senior said.

The pope often speaks nostalgically about his small town roots in Bavaria, where everyone was Catholic and took part in the Triduum and Corpus Christi processions. Fr. Senior sees the pope as working to recover and call forth from Catholics that sense of devotion and deep piety.

Pope Benedict "will be calling us to a more evangelical and a deeply holy church, ready if necessary to take a stand against the prevailing wisdom of the world, proclaiming the truth and living the counter-cultural life of the Gospel that runs at times against the grain of the world's assumed values," Fr. Senior said.

The pope, he said, has repeatedly spoken of the need for "spiritual wisdom derived from the Gospel and Christian witness," as opposed to the "dictatorship of relativism."

The pope was clearly shaped by his theological training and liturgical experience and his exposure as a youth to the brutality and lies of Nazism, its distortion of the truth and the complicity of mainline churches, Fr. Senior said.

In the 1960s, then Fr. Ratzinger saw relativism rise among students in the free speech movement, the sexual and social revolutions and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.

To him, these showed the church's need to affirm enduring truths and to be suspicious of secularism and certain theological trends, Fr. Senior said.

The pope is skeptical about "the over institutionalization of the church," Fr. Senior said. "The church, he fears, has often been tempted to imitate the structures and organizational complexity of modern corporations and expends a lot of energy and resources in doing so. He wonders out loud in his writings if what is needed is not more bureaucracy but more communities of genuine holiness where Christians are trying to live the Gospel in the midst of the world."

Hence his support for Focolari, the Neocatechumenate and other "experiments in vitality," Fr. Senior said. It is also why Pope Benedict has said there are too many canonizations and that not enough lay men and women living the Gospel are being canonized, Fr. Senior said.

Fr. Senior said he expects Pope Benedict to draw on his 21 years in the Vatican - where he remained an outsider because he had not been there all his life - to reform the Curia, the bureaucracy at the center of the Roman Catholic Church.

"Many bishops believe the curia has become too insular; that it does not have enough theological and pastoral expertise; that it doesn't listen very well to the concerns of local bishops around the world; that it has become actually too cumbersome and somewhat divided, speaking in contradictory ways at times," Fr. Senior said.

Reform could include eliminating some offices, Fr. Senior said, quoting the pope's comment that some "could disappear tomorrow and no one would notice."

In answer to a question from the audience, Fr. Senior said he does not think the pope will ordain women, particularly given the statements of Pope John Paul II on the subject. However, he said he wouldn't be surprised if the pope moves toward married priests.

And it's possible that he will allow some intercommunion because he believes we cannot continue as we have. The pope, Fr. Senior said, believes its important for Christians to know their histories and why we divided and then we must move beyond that to unity.