Tag Archives: Fatherhood

When Jesus established the papacy,
the gospels report that he told St. Peter: “Amen I say to you: You
are Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church, and the gates
of hell shall not prevail against it.” These words are emblazoned
in Latin across the front of St. Peter’s Basilica. St. Peter’s
successors have incorporated his name to describe their work, the
Petrine ministry, and refer to themselves as Papa Petrus.
But the Petrine ministry is more than work. And being Papa
Petrus is not a job; it is a calling in which a man has been chosen
by the direct descendants of the 12 apostles as agents of God to be
the Vicar of Christ on Earth. One becomes ;the pope
not as one becomes the president, but as one becomes a Catholic
priest or the father of a child. The papacy, like ordination and
fatherhood, is a life-changing and irreversible imprint—and hence,
my sadness at the abdication of Benedict XVI. It shook my soul to
the core.
The present pope is cognizant of the burdens of office and the
needs of his enormous flock. The present pope is also a brilliant
theologian whose pre-papal and papal published works have
instructed the faithful and others in a manner and with a level of
confidence and erudition that surpass his modern predecessors.
Surely, no modern pope, not even the rock star who preceded him,
who opened the eyes of millions to the Catholic Church’s salvific
mission, has written as many books, monographs and essays with the
level of timeliness, encyclopedic knowledge, clarity and authority
as Benedict.
When Benedict was elected to the papacy in 2005, I wept with joy
that such a faithful custodian of the Church’s teachings and
traditions and such a worthy bridge to Christ in heaven had been
chosen by the cardinals. But it was not always so. Like many of us,
the youthful Benedict evolved with the passage of the generations.
Fifty years ago, as a young priest and scholar, he preferred
wearing civilian clothes in public to a Roman collar—truly a
statement in the mid-1960s—and he relished his role as an adviser
to the less orthodox members of the Catholic hierarchy at Vatican
II. He has said recently that at that time he was filled with hope,
enthusiasm and good will.
But his papacy has been spent attempting to return to the level
of Catholic orthodoxy that the somewhat misguided and largely
misunderstood teachings of Vatican II have been used to assault. At
some point in his career, the future pope recognized that Vatican
II made the Church worse, not better, and that the Catholic
teachings, traditions and liturgy that the world believed Vatican
II had watered down needed to be restored. He knew that his public
mission was to reverse the trivialization of the liturgy, the lax
clerical discipline, and the weakened sacramental safeguards from
which the Church has been suffering since Vatican II. And he knew
that Vatican II divided, rather than united, Christendom.
The Holy Spirit must have recognized all of this, as well, as He
sent us Pope John Paul II, the rock star, to blaze a path where no
pope had gone before—touching millions of youths with language they
understood—and then He sent us Pope Benedict XVI, the lion of
orthodoxy, to lay down the intellectual mechanisms for travels
along that path. The path is the bridge to heaven. The way to
travel upon it is personal sanctity. The first traveler is the Holy
Father.
But some, like Benedict, are called to more than just personal
sanctity. Benedict was called to carry a cross of personal
sacrifice, as well. That cross consists of the weight of the world
and the power with which to endure that weight. Jesus Himself
carried that weight and possessed that power. Surely, as the Son of
God, He could have stopped His executioners with the tiniest
exercise of His divine will, but He freely chose not to exercise
that will, no matter His personal gain. In a similar way, Benedict
has freely chosen to surrender his power and forgo his temporal
glory so one stronger than he can exercise it, no matter his
personal loss.
The essence of Jesus’ suffering was His decision to eschew the
exercise of power and submit to His Father’s will. The greatest
restraint in human history was His conscious decision to permit His
own crucifixion, knowing as He did that it would involve the
termination of His temporal ministry, extreme human torment and
certain human death. Even as His human body was suffering
egregiously and as He was approaching the hour of death, Our Lord
proclaimed that He would have preferred to live. Yet He submitted
to the will—the plan—of His Father. This most unique act in human
history represented both the affirmation of an informed conscience
and the free submission to divine will.
When Benedict decided that the mystical body of Christ needed
another bridge to heaven, he, too, gave up power and glory that he,
too, could easily have exercised and retained. He, too, searched
his conscience in a supreme effort to elevate submission to divine
will above personal preference.
This is the essence of Benedict’s gift to us: He used his very
existence on Earth near the end of his days to teach others to
reach and correspond to a personal relationship with God, driven by
conscience and consistent with Church teachings, via the sacraments
and personal sacrifice, no matter what the world thought.
Such a quiet, personal, Christ-like submission of the will is
not the essence of a rock star; it is the essence of a Rock. Human
salvation has been advanced immeasurably because the Church had
both popes at its helm—each to complement the other in ways we
could not have imagined. … Read More