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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 24, 2005
Mozart
The new Pope, Benedict XVI, is somewhat controversial. And in just the right way, so far as I can see. The faithful are drawn to him; the faithless appear to be repelled. This makes him a magnetic personality.A good friend of mine, who is a battle-axe traditionalist Catholic, and who was if possible even happier than I with the election of Benedict XVI, put the case plainly. We, who happen to know something about the personal history and writings of the former Cardinal Ratzinger, know him as a gentle, holy man. He has great courage, and can be counted upon to uphold the doctrines of the Catholic Church; to stonewall when a stone wall is necessary. But my friend fears he may be unable to sustain his image in the fever-swamps of the Left, as another Torquemada. Pope Benedict's reputation as a "disciplinarian" has not been fully earned. As Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (successors to the Holy Office of the Inquisition), he only ever excommunicated one crazy priest in Sri Lanka -- who persistently preached that Mary wasn't a virgin, and that Christ wasn't divine. And then let that gentleman back in, when he recanted. If one's standard for discipline is the Spanish Inquisition, one can't help being a little disappointed. Such openly heretical theologians as the Swiss, Hans Kung, or the Belgian, Edward Schillebeeckx, were denied the right to claim the authority of the Catholic Church for their teachings. They were hardly denied the right to teach, or even denied communion. We look to the legacies of Stalin and Pol Pot, and must declare our new Supreme Pontiff a pussycat. How, then, can we reasonably hope, that he will drive the legions of openly apostate Catholics out of the Church? Especially when we look at so many despairing "progressives" who keep saying they have had the last straw, that this is it, that now they are leaving. People like the American homosexualist blogger, Andrew Sullivan, who has been announcing his departure from the Catholic Church almost continuously for 18 months, and was announcing it again last week. For these people never finally seem to go. As my "trad" friend put it: "They're running around yelling how the sky is falling. We gotta keep 'em out long enough to get the locks changed." While I have much sympathy with this view, and thus for trying to build up Benedict XVI as "our new Torquemada", I don't think it will be necessary to build a new Catholic consensus upon "surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope". Rather, let the Pope be Pope, and let every other person find his own way, by the light of grace. Of all the many remarks made by the former Cardinal Ratzinger which I have read or re-read in the last few days, I am most arrested by this one: "The Catholicism of the Bavaria in which I grew up was joyful, colourful, human. I miss a sense of purism. This must be because, since my childhood, I have breathed the air of the Baroque." This was followed by another, that theologians who "do not love art, poetry, music, nature ... can be dangerous." And with the information that, as a pianist, the new Pope favours Mozart. This is all of a piece with what any reader will find in his fine book, The Spirit of the Liturgy; or in the three long interview-books for which he was subject. He shows that doctrine and liturgy do not come down to words, alone. They must be shown, made exemplary. And there is a chastity, for instance in Mozart, that is lost in the heaviness and ugliness of most of the church as it is today. Pope Benedict's elder, the late Hans Urs von Balthasar, was another of my heroes. His seven volumes, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, is worth dusting off now. It was written against "dead faith", a kind of faith without hope and love. This is what afflicts many contemporary believers. We cannot afford the grimness that is setting into our lives and works, the reduction of our religion to mere propaganda. We have to re-open ourselves to -- "art, poetry, music, nature". And this is not irrelevant to the cause of evangelism. We must come to the world as bearers of light. We must express the life-wish in a culture of death; and that is a job well suited to Mozart. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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