Today the funeral of a great Pontiff was celebrated: Benedict XVI, the first Pope in the millennial history of the Catholic Church who wanted to renounce the mission of successor of Peter, before being summoned to the "house of the Father".
Benedict XVI and John Paul II: the defeated and the victor
Unlike John Paul II who decided to carry the cross even in suffering and disability, Pope Ratzinger spent the last nine years of his life in the unprecedented role of pope emeritus, in retreat, in prayer and in silence. But there was a substantial difference between the two Pontiffs - who were very united in life. The Polish Pope went down in history as a victor, as the Almighty's envoy to defeat the Empire of evil and restore freedom (even to profess the faith of the Fathers) to millions of people in Europe and in the world. Benedict XVI he comes out as a loser to whom respect and esteem are reserved; but his death did not raise the wave of emotion that accompanied the last trip of Pope Vojtyla all over the world.
Benedict XVI: the Pope guardian of the intransigent faith against relativism
Josef Ratzinger was a loser who, moreover, had thrown down his arms, without guaranteeing himself continuity in the leadership of the Church that was in line with the objectives of his Pontificate: defense of Christianity in Europe. Elevated to the throne of Peter, in choosing his name Cardinal Ratzinger had wanted to underline his vision of the Church which could not have survived separated from his roots in the Old Continent and its culture, including the Enlightenment.
San Benedetto is the patron saint of Europe and it fell to the Benedictines to save the classics of that Greek philosophical thought which, incorporated into the empiricism of the Roman Empire, was spread throughout the world. Ratzinger for many years guardian of the faith had understood that the effects of relativism, made up with modernity, would also involve the Church, if she had not remained anchored to those who were considered non-negotiable values.
I recall an important homily that the then Cardinal Ratzinger delivered at the opening of the consistory called to elect the successor of Pope John Paul II (Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontifice, in St. Peter's Basilica on 18 April 2005). Those considerations on the Catholic Church proved to be prophetic and forerunners of what was to happen over the course of a few years and which Ratzinger, having become Benedict XVI, was unable to oppose.
“How many fashions of thought….
''How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many fashions of thought... The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been agitated by these waves - thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, up to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so on. Every day – Ratzinger denounced – new sects are born and what Saint Paul says about the deceit of men, about the cunning that tends to lead them into error (cf. Eph 4:14) is fulfilled. Having a clear faith, according to the Creed of the Church, is often labeled as fundamentalism. While the relativism, that is, letting oneself be carried "here and there by any wind of doctrine", appears to be the only attitude up to today's times. It is being established (here is the central question of the decline, ed) a dictatorship of relativismor that does not recognize anything as definitive and that leaves "only one's own ego and its desires as the last measure".
Benedict XVI: ethics to guide behavior in daily life
It was and is just like that. Freed from temporal power, the authority of the Church is expressed by pointing an ethics to follow in the behaviors of daily life. On Mount Sinai the Lord wanted to give Moses the Tablets of the Law, in which they were engraved the rules of daily life. The Christ of the Christian tradition is not an abstract Idea: he is the Way, the Truth, the Life. The Church was losing Europe in terms of ethics and therefore of the main function that she was called to exercise. As Josef Ratzinger said in his homily: relativism appears to be the only attitude worthy of modern times.
Europe – the cradle of Judeo-Christian civilization – has discovered in the new golden calf of “rightism” another “immoral” ethic because it is aimed at demolishing, in the name of the “new rights”, every principle of natural law ( on which the doctrine of the Church is founded) to the point of consolidating the new doctrines in positive law, which is no longer limited to transferring the natural rights of persons into the juridical systems, but creates them leaving "as the last measure one's self and its desires ”.
This is the case of theories on gender identity, of same-sex marriages, of what IVG itself has become. Then what about the predominant “world view” in the Church? It has been noted several times that Pope Francis does not like to speak of Europe as not only a political but also a spiritual entity. It suffices to observe the route of Francis' apostolic visits and compare them with those of Benedict to realize that for the first Europe is marginal, while for the second it represented the main place of the Apostolate. And it is in the Church of the Old Continent where the "civil war" is under way which has repercussions in all the directions in which European states have taken Christianity - often imposed over the centuries. On the doctrinal level, the Vatican is unable to settle on new values or to defend those of tradition. Stay halfway. And he conceals his uncertainties by invoking the strengthening of pastoral action: as Francis said, priests are guardians of the flock and must have the same odor as the sheep entrusted to them. The late Cardinal Carlo Caffarra was the first to denounce this theory, when Pope Francis was still living his honeymoon with the faithful and world public opinion: ''A Church with little attention to doctrine - said Caffarra - is no longer pastoral , it's just more ignorant."
Benedict XVI in defense of Christian values in Europe
Today Christians are persecuted in many areas of the world, the very ones that Pope Francesco he prefers in his apostolate as Pontiff who - as he himself presented himself in his first speech - was taken by the end of the world. But in Europe - where the Church could make use of the rule of law and the possibility of influencing politics - Christians are left to themselves, their principles are banned by positive law in the name of an idea of freedom bordering on arbitrariness . You should re-read the Speech of Pope Benedict XVI in Regensburg – on September 12, 2006 – to grasp the close link between Western culture and Christianity. "The reciprocal interior rapprochement mentioned here, which took place between biblical faith and the questioning on the philosophical level of Greek thought, is a fact of decisive importance not only from the point of view of the history of religions, but also from that of the history universal – a fact that still obliges us today. Considering this meeting - said the Holy Father - it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origin and some of its important developments in the East, finally found its historically decisive imprint in Europe. We can also express it inversely: this meeting, to which the heritage of Rome is added later, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe”.
Pope Benedict argued that Christians must resign themselves to being a minority. But this condition did not constitute a limit in his thinking, if the community of believers had remained faithful to their values, arriving at faith through reason. When, for a phrase contained in the Regensburg speech, he was attacked, offended and threatened by the Islamic communities and by the authorities of theocratic countries, Benedict had to undergo criticism also from within the Church in the name, precisely, of a relativism for which faith it becomes a night in which all the cows are black and are all placed on the same level, even those with not born from free convictions but are imposed by law by the authority of the State. But the most serious insult to Pope Ratzinger came from an appeal signed by numerous professors of Sapienza to contest the invitation extended to him by the academic authorities to hold a lecture at that University. I hope that many of them in all these years have been ashamed of that signature extorted by a bigoted secularism: Josef Ratzinger was above all a professor, an outstanding colleague of a great university, the "vineyard of the Lord".
