2 Cardinals with Pittsburgh roots say document scandal to be addressed – Tribune
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By Betsy Hiel
Published: Tuesday, March 5, 2013, 9:51 p.m.
Updated 17 minutes ago
ROME – Two American cardinals with Pittsburgh roots said Roman Catholic officials will closely examine the church’s troubles before choosing a pope.
Cardinals Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston and Sean O’Malley of Boston stepped from a College of Cardinals’ meeting on Tuesday to talk with reporters about church operations, including a scandal that embarrassed the resigned Pope Benedict XVI.
Terrence Tilley, Fordham University’s theology department chairman and a professor of Catholic theology, described their remarks as “unusual.â€�
“They are sending a message,� he said.
DiNardo, 62, grew up in Castle Shannon, graduated from Duquesne University’s St. Paul’s Seminary, and was a priest at St. Pius X in Brookline and Madonna del Castello in Swissvale.
 O’Malley, 68, grew up in the South Hills, attended elementary schools in Pittsburgh and ae_SNbSSt. Fidelis Seminary in Herman, Butler County.
Both addressed problems involving the Curia, the centuries-old Vatican bureaucracy beset by scandal. DiNardo said the Curia’s work must be examined “attentively.â€�
“There is certainly a lot of reflection going on throughout the Catholic world about the governance of the church and how to improve it,â€� O’Malley said.
In the most recent scandal – dubbed “Vati-leaksâ€� by the Italian press – Pope Benedict’s butler was arrested for leaking stolen documents that allegedly detailed financial corruption and criminal activity inside the Curia.
Benedict reportedly directed three cardinals to investigate and to give their findings to the next pontiff.
“The ‘Vati-leaks’ grabbed the headlines for a long time,â€� O’Malley said. “But I don’t know how important those issues are for the work of the conclave.â€�
He said he was confident that cardinals will share “the information that is really germane� as they select a pope.
Fordham’s Tilley believes the two cardinals “are sending a message that this opacity is a detriment, not an asset, to the Vatican bureaucracy.â€�
“I think it is very clear that we need a pope who will clean up the mess, which most of us suspect is a part of the cause of Benedict’s resignation,â€� he said.
Unlike the two Americans, he said, cardinals have been reluctant to deal with the media.
“Given that the pope is not deceased but resigned, given the level of discomfort with the Curia and other scandals, and given the inept use of the media over the past pontificate, I am not surprised that the cardinals are briefing the media rather than avoiding them,� he said.
Both cardinals said they are unlikely candidates for the papacy.
“That’s an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ story, going down the rabbit hole,â€� joked DiNardo.
Both said they could not divulge what cardinals discussed, but they explained the process.
Not all of the 115 cardinals who will vote in the conclave have arrived. No date for the conclave has been set.
DiNardo said the cardinals are addressing each other in formal speeches and informally over coffee. He said the mood has been “serene� since the meetings began Monday.
Tilley said strong candidates for pope may emerge in those informal discussions.
“It is always possible that the king-makers are already at work,� he said, and an unexpected late-afternoon session “suggests that the people who want to get down to business have won a small battle.�
DiNardo said the pre-conclave meetings, known as general congregations, “help the cardinals to understand a little bit about the dimensions of what is going on in the church worldwide and locally.
“We want to make sure there is plenty of time to discuss, but we also want to get the voting under way so we can get back to Holy Week at our dioceses.�
O’Malley said the cardinals “want to have enough time so that when we get to the conclave itself, it is a time of decision. The general congregations are a time of discernment.
“This is the most important decision that some of us will ever make.�
Betsy Hiel is the Tribune-Review’s foreign correspondent. Email her at bhiel@tribweb.com.
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2 Cardinals with Pittsburgh roots say document scandal to be addressed – Tribune
Betsy Hiel
Middle East correspondent
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Justin Merriman
Photographer
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Subscribe to RSS headline updates from:
Contact Us |
Video
RSS |
Mobile
By Betsy Hiel
Published: Tuesday, March 5, 2013, 9:51 p.m.
Updated 17 minutes ago
ROME – Two American cardinals with Pittsburgh roots said Roman Catholic officials will closely examine the church’s troubles before choosing a pope.
Cardinals Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston and Sean O’Malley of Boston stepped from a College of Cardinals’ meeting on Tuesday to talk with reporters about church operations, including a scandal that embarrassed the resigned Pope Benedict XVI.
Terrence Tilley, Fordham University’s theology department chairman and a professor of Catholic theology, described their remarks as “unusual.â€�
“They are sending a message,� he said.
DiNardo, 62, grew up in Castle Shannon, graduated from Duquesne University’s St. Paul’s Seminary, and was a priest at St. Pius X in Brookline and Madonna del Castello in Swissvale.
 O’Malley, 68, grew up in the South Hills, attended elementary schools in Pittsburgh and ae_SNbSSt. Fidelis Seminary in Herman, Butler County.
Both addressed problems involving the Curia, the centuries-old Vatican bureaucracy beset by scandal. DiNardo said the Curia’s work must be examined “attentively.â€�
“There is certainly a lot of reflection going on throughout the Catholic world about the governance of the church and how to improve it,â€� O’Malley said.
In the most recent scandal – dubbed “Vati-leaksâ€� by the Italian press – Pope Benedict’s butler was arrested for leaking stolen documents that allegedly detailed financial corruption and criminal activity inside the Curia.
Benedict reportedly directed three cardinals to investigate and to give their findings to the next pontiff.
“The ‘Vati-leaks’ grabbed the headlines for a long time,â€� O’Malley said. “But I don’t know how important those issues are for the work of the conclave.â€�
He said he was confident that cardinals will share “the information that is really germane� as they select a pope.
Fordham’s Tilley believes the two cardinals “are sending a message that this opacity is a detriment, not an asset, to the Vatican bureaucracy.â€�
“I think it is very clear that we need a pope who will clean up the mess, which most of us suspect is a part of the cause of Benedict’s resignation,â€� he said.
Unlike the two Americans, he said, cardinals have been reluctant to deal with the media.
“Given that the pope is not deceased but resigned, given the level of discomfort with the Curia and other scandals, and given the inept use of the media over the past pontificate, I am not surprised that the cardinals are briefing the media rather than avoiding them,� he said.
Both cardinals said they are unlikely candidates for the papacy.
“That’s an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ story, going down the rabbit hole,â€� joked DiNardo.
Both said they could not divulge what cardinals discussed, but they explained the process.
Not all of the 115 cardinals who will vote in the conclave have arrived. No date for the conclave has been set.
DiNardo said the cardinals are addressing each other in formal speeches and informally over coffee. He said the mood has been “serene� since the meetings began Monday.
Tilley said strong candidates for pope may emerge in those informal discussions.
“It is always possible that the king-makers are already at work,� he said, and an unexpected late-afternoon session “suggests that the people who want to get down to business have won a small battle.�
DiNardo said the pre-conclave meetings, known as general congregations, “help the cardinals to understand a little bit about the dimensions of what is going on in the church worldwide and locally.
“We want to make sure there is plenty of time to discuss, but we also want to get the voting under way so we can get back to Holy Week at our dioceses.�
O’Malley said the cardinals “want to have enough time so that when we get to the conclave itself, it is a time of decision. The general congregations are a time of discernment.
“This is the most important decision that some of us will ever make.�
Betsy Hiel is the Tribune-Review’s foreign correspondent. Email her at bhiel@tribweb.com.
You must be signed in to add comments
To comment, click the Sign in or sign up at the very top of this page.
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2 Cardinals with Pittsburgh roots say document scandal to be addressed – Tribune
Betsy Hiel
Middle East correspondent
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Justin Merriman
Photographer
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Subscribe to RSS headline updates from:
Contact Us |
Video
RSS |
Mobile
By Betsy Hiel
Published: Tuesday, March 5, 2013, 9:51 p.m.
Updated 17 minutes ago
ROME – Two American cardinals with Pittsburgh roots said Roman Catholic officials will closely examine the church’s troubles before choosing a pope.
Cardinals Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston and Sean O’Malley of Boston stepped from a College of Cardinals’ meeting on Tuesday to talk with reporters about church operations, including a scandal that embarrassed the resigned Pope Benedict XVI.
Terrence Tilley, Fordham University’s theology department chairman and a professor of Catholic theology, described their remarks as “unusual.â€�
“They are sending a message,� he said.
DiNardo, 62, grew up in Castle Shannon, graduated from Duquesne University’s St. Paul’s Seminary, and was a priest at St. Pius X in Brookline and Madonna del Castello in Swissvale.
 O’Malley, 68, grew up in the South Hills, attended elementary schools in Pittsburgh and ae_SNbSSt. Fidelis Seminary in Herman, Butler County.
Both addressed problems involving the Curia, the centuries-old Vatican bureaucracy beset by scandal. DiNardo said the Curia’s work must be examined “attentively.â€�
“There is certainly a lot of reflection going on throughout the Catholic world about the governance of the church and how to improve it,â€� O’Malley said.
In the most recent scandal – dubbed “Vati-leaksâ€� by the Italian press – Pope Benedict’s butler was arrested for leaking stolen documents that allegedly detailed financial corruption and criminal activity inside the Curia.
Benedict reportedly directed three cardinals to investigate and to give their findings to the next pontiff.
“The ‘Vati-leaks’ grabbed the headlines for a long time,â€� O’Malley said. “But I don’t know how important those issues are for the work of the conclave.â€�
He said he was confident that cardinals will share “the information that is really germane� as they select a pope.
Fordham’s Tilley believes the two cardinals “are sending a message that this opacity is a detriment, not an asset, to the Vatican bureaucracy.â€�
“I think it is very clear that we need a pope who will clean up the mess, which most of us suspect is a part of the cause of Benedict’s resignation,â€� he said.
Unlike the two Americans, he said, cardinals have been reluctant to deal with the media.
“Given that the pope is not deceased but resigned, given the level of discomfort with the Curia and other scandals, and given the inept use of the media over the past pontificate, I am not surprised that the cardinals are briefing the media rather than avoiding them,� he said.
Both cardinals said they are unlikely candidates for the papacy.
“That’s an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ story, going down the rabbit hole,â€� joked DiNardo.
Both said they could not divulge what cardinals discussed, but they explained the process.
Not all of the 115 cardinals who will vote in the conclave have arrived. No date for the conclave has been set.
DiNardo said the cardinals are addressing each other in formal speeches and informally over coffee. He said the mood has been “serene� since the meetings began Monday.
Tilley said strong candidates for pope may emerge in those informal discussions.
“It is always possible that the king-makers are already at work,� he said, and an unexpected late-afternoon session “suggests that the people who want to get down to business have won a small battle.�
DiNardo said the pre-conclave meetings, known as general congregations, “help the cardinals to understand a little bit about the dimensions of what is going on in the church worldwide and locally.
“We want to make sure there is plenty of time to discuss, but we also want to get the voting under way so we can get back to Holy Week at our dioceses.�
O’Malley said the cardinals “want to have enough time so that when we get to the conclave itself, it is a time of decision. The general congregations are a time of discernment.
“This is the most important decision that some of us will ever make.�
Betsy Hiel is the Tribune-Review’s foreign correspondent. Email her at bhiel@tribweb.com.
You must be signed in to add comments
To comment, click the Sign in or sign up at the very top of this page.
There are currently no comments for this story.
Steve Scauzillo: Catholics must ask: Should I stay or should I go?
On Thursday, Pope Benedict XVI took off his mitre for good.
It marks the first resignation of a pope in 600 years. The historical oddity reminds me of growing up at St. Raphael’s Catholic Church in East Meadow, N.Y. The timing of his resignation — shortly after Cardinal Roger Mahony was relieved of his public duties after we learned about numerous incidents of priests sexually abusing children under Mahony’s watch — prompts me to ask a question to all Catholics: What makes you stay?
For each and every parishioner, this is a personal decision. So while I won’t tell anyone what to do, I will, however, tell you my journey with the Catholic Church and the No. 1 lesson I’ve learned: Always ask questions.
No, I was never molested.
I made my First Communion and my Confirmation all the while taking Catechism classes. I attended St. Raphael’s school from first to third grade. Going to Mass was mandatory in my family — just as was dinner on Sundays at 1 p.m.
I can remember bringing home the Baltimore Catechism and memorizing the Ten Commandments. For instance, for “You Shall Not Steal,” it depicted two pre-teens at a store counter. One whispered to the other: “Let’s steal this candy bar while the clerk’s not looking.” The other responded: “No. That is a sin.”
A friend told me the church gave me a moral foundation.
But being in the Catholic Church during the late ’60s and early ’70s caused me to question things. I asked a priest during Catechism his opinion of the play “Jesus Christ, Superstar.” He read me the riot act for even asking the question. At my best friend’s house, a few parish priests sat imbibing Christmas spirits. My friend asked that same priest what book of the Bible he should read. “You shouldn’t read the Bible. Only priests can read the Holy Scriptures,” he said.
Though I wasn’t believing any of this stuff, that priest’s answers left me perturbed.
My mom challenged the church’s ban on contraception after she and my dad had two children in a year and a half. When the priest told her birth control is banned by the pope, she defied the church just like many American Catholics. Planned, I came along nearly six years later.
East Meadow loved the Rev. John Mott, known warmly as Father Mott. He served at St. Raphael’s from 1956-1969, then suddenly was transferred to another parish. My mom went to visit him there, and he confessed to having an affair with a woman.
The church never said anything about Father Mott. Then, in 1995, four women sued him and the church, alleging he had molested them while they were on the cheerleading squad. Two civil suits were filed and dismissed, according to USA Today. He told the media “he was a good priest” and passed away shortly thereafter in 1999.
According to the web site BishopAccountability.org, the church said he was fit to continue, even continue working with children after passing psychological tests.
Not all priests are bad. I very much respect Father Greg Boyle of East L.A.’s Homeboy Industries.
But I left the Catholic Church for a non-denominational one where there is no pope and where infallibility is a myth. Where pastors can marry and face adult issues in the same way as their parishioners.
I left the church to get closer to God. Maybe that’s the question you should be asking: What church or house of worship brings you closer to God? That’s the one you should join.
steve.scauzillo@sgvn.com
626-544-0843
An ancient religion caught between fascination and frustration
Posted: Tuesday, March 5, 2013 6:00 am
PhillyBurbs.com
With the end of Pope Benedict’s reign, Catholicism is at a crossroads. It is a deeply polarized religion. Its values and culture predate capitalism. Today, many Catholic Americans are globalized and often torn between a spiritual vision of the world and their acceptance of secularized society. Nevertheless in both First and Third World countries, there remains substantial interest in the progress of the Catholic Church and its leaders.
The excitement surrounding the conclave that has followed Pope Benedict XVI’s retirement suggests that it is the distance between modern American life and Catholic religious culture and leadership that continues to both fascinate and frustrate many Catholic and non-Catholic Americans.
The roots of Christianity lie in cultures that depended on local networks and personal charity rather than communities supported by centralized government-funded assistance programs. Through the first 1,900 years of Catholic history, infant mortality rates were high, making unreliable contraception methods less problematic. Public homosexuality was extremely rare and widely demonized. War, famine and disease epidemics were realistic concerns to people who had little education or role in government and sought front-line protection through prayer.
This type of society still exists in many parts of the world, notably South America and Africa, which are home to 27.87 percent and 12.57 percent of the world’s Catholics, respectively. In South America, large populations live amid desperate poverty and continued violence, but they remain overwhelmingly active Catholics. Catholics are a small minority (15 percent in 2010) in Africa, a continent plagued by famine and HIV/AIDS, but it has seen steady growth in both converts and the priesthood.
While Catholic theology reflects thousand-year-old teachings that many Americans find outmoded, our fascination with the traditions of Catholicism grows out of our distance from its point of origin and trajectory of development – first Roman Judea and then medieval Europe. This American fascination is fed by the popularity of neo-Gothic church architecture and Renaissance art (Michelangelo in particular) that reminds us of Christians’ shared European past.
The preservation of centuries-old liturgies and rituals and the periodic use of Latin allow Catholics to connect with their spiritual and cultural roots. Yet this desire for cultural preservation often sits in opposition to the modernization of Catholic theology and frustrates people seeking a compromise between traditional doctrine and a modern lifestyle.
The current discussion among the 74 million American Catholics about the next pope’s identity reflects a tension between our current lives and our collective past as well as a tension between Catholic needs in First and Third World countries. Not surprisingly, Americans want different things from the next pope than do Catholics living in a Brazilian slum or dying of AIDS in Africa.
If the next pope wants to bridge the disconnect between these dramatically different lifestyles, he will have to find a way to deliver traditional Catholic succor while easing frustration over doctrine and maintaining the trappings of Catholic culture. Surely this is a divine challenge if ever there was one.
Jennifer Mara DeSilva is a history professor at Ball State University.
© 2013 phillyburbs.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Benedict’s politics defied categories
Pope Benedict XVI interacted with world politics in ways that defied typical ideological categories. The caricature of him as a conservative reactionary does not bear scrutiny, at least not as Americans understand conservatism. Benedict stands in a long line of popes whose teachings challenge both the political left and right, but in the past eight years, conservatives have found more challenge and less solace from Rome.
On the economy, Benedict staked out positions that were far more radical than what passes for progressive politics in the U.S. For example, in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, the pope defended the rights of workers in the most explicit terms: “Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers, partly because Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labor unions. Hence traditional networks of solidarity have more and more obstacles to overcome. The repeated calls issued within the Church’s social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum, for the promotion of workers’ associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honored today even more than in the past, as a prompt and far-sighted response to the urgent need for new forms of cooperation at the international level, as well as the local level.” This warm embrace of organized labor is not on the agenda of today’s Republican Party to be sure.
Benedict also challenged modern capitalism for the gross inequalities it produces both within and among nations. In his recent World Day of Peace message, he listed five threats to world peace, and he started with “unregulated financial capitalism.” The others: terrorism, international crime, fanaticism and fundamentalism. You do not need to conduct a poll to imagine how many Republicans would respond if President Barack Obama lumped together “unregulated financial capitalism” with terrorism and international crime.
The effects of capitalism were not the only problems he discerned. In Caritas in Veritate he noted the ways capitalism fails at its core and in its ethical demands. The market requires competition, not solidarity. It lionizes self-assertion, not self-surrender, and it values thrift and frugality, not gratuitousness and generosity. The market’s heroes are self-made men. But, as Benedict taught, Christians are called to follow Jesus, whose entire life was an act of solidarity, who never asserted himself but always self-surrendered to the will of the Father, whose grace is never thrifty or frugal but gratuitous, always a bit surprising, never stingy. Most obviously, Jesus was not a “self-made man.” Benedict, like previous popes, did not propose a specific economic system, but his critique of modern capitalism, root and branch, was stinging. Why did this never garner much in the way of headlines?
On another political issue, global climate change, Benedict has been something of an innovator, developing Catholic moral theology to embrace a clear concern for the environment. In 2010, in an interview with Peter Seewald, Benedict said that as pope, he recognized “an inner obligation to struggle for the preservation of the environment and to oppose the destruction of creation.” He applied traditional moral ideas about stewardship to contemporary environmental concerns, and has called for drastic international action to avert further damage to the climate. Additionally, and always keen to the power of symbols, the Vatican became one of the first carbon-neutral states in the world as the Holy See installed solar panels on various buildings within the small territory it holds on the bank of the Tiber.
Benedict has also been a tireless advocate for peace, especially in the Mideast where political instability often results in specific threats to those few, but ancient, Christian communities that remain in Muslim lands. He has engaged in dialogue with the Muslim world, and encouraged it to stand against any fanaticism within its ranks, but he also has urged Israelis to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians. Benedict has called for all the countries of the world to spend less on armaments and more on development, following a long line of papal teachings stretching back to Pope John XXIII’s groundbreaking Pacem in Terris. In April, at The Catholic University of America in Washington, a conference on the 50th anniversary of Pacem in Terris will include an examination of the ways Benedict has brought that seminal teaching into the 21st century.
Catholic neocons in the U.S., understandably, ignored or downplayed the pope’s writings on these subjects. And because many Americans seem content to assume that religion has more to say about sexual mores than about economic ones, it was Benedict’s re-statements of Catholic teaching on contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage that always garnered the headlines. On these issues, Benedict was never going to budge, either in his assessment of the moral issues themselves, nor in his belief that government needs to actively promote traditional values, especially concern for the family. He seemed unimpressed by those who invoked a pluralistic society, or changing mores, or any other rationale for what they deemed progress. For him, deviation from the truth as he understood it could not be seen as progress at all.
Here is, perhaps, the most challenging and unique contribution Benedict made to the world of politics, not only to Catholic theology, but to the broader cultural dialogue in the West. He never stopped asking what could bolster freedom if it were ever unhinged from the truth. In his major speeches at Westminster Hall in London and at the German Parliament, the Bundestag in Berlin, the pope posed the question to Western democracies whether a formal ethics of rights was sufficient to guarantee a humane society. Benedict, perhaps the most learned public figure of his day, could pose a question of such depth. No one has really devised an adequate answer.
This seemingly obscure question of the ethical foundations of law and government may be somewhat abstract, but it manifests itself in the most contentious issues of the day. Here in the U.S., the debate over the Department of Health and Human Services’ contraception mandate is, in part, a discussion about the role of churches in civil society. During the recent debate in the British House of Commons about same-sex marriage, both sides acknowledged that “Parliament is sovereign,” but Benedict challenges the idea of state sovereignty. It was John Stuart Mill who said, “Parliament can do anything except turn a man into a woman,” and the critics of same-sex marriage argued, essentially, that the proposal should be rejected precisely because it sought to contravene an authority even higher than Parliament, nature itself. Benedict would not have voted for same-sex marriage if he were a British MP.
Benedict’s legacy in the political realm, then, is not as traditional as it might seem. In America, Catholics may focus on the conservative sexual ethics he defended and sought to see defended in law, but in the developing world, where the church is growing, his appeals on behalf of the poor rang both louder and truer to the Gospel. There, the experience of poverty allows Catholics to experience the Gospel in a way that has become difficult for affluent Catholics in the West, as good news for the poor. His teachings on the environment, his deep suspicion of modern capitalism, and his foundational concern with the ethical and human basis for law, all these serve to point his successor in a direction that does not easily fit into U.S. political terms. Politicians may see Benedict as confounding, frustrated that his commitment to social justice and equally strong commitment to traditional sexual and gender roles was inconsistent. Benedict, if given the chance, might ask if the inconsistency is in him, or in us.
[Michael Sean Winters writes about religion and politics on his Distinctly Catholic blog on the NCR website, at NCRonline.org/blogs/distinctly- catholic.]
‘Benedict, most gentle of men’
‘Benedict, most gentle of men’
By RICHARDSON DHALAI Monday, March 4 2013
AS the Roman Catholic Church settles into a period “Sede vacante” (Latin for the seat being vacant), Archbishop of Port-of-Spain Joseph Harris has described Pope Benedict XVI as “the most gentle of men”.
On Saturday night in San Fernando, he urged believers to pray for God’s guidance in the election of a new pontiff.
Harris, together with the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Nicola Girasoli, were the chief celebrants at Our Lady of Perpetual Help RC Church, Harris Promenade.
The special mass was held to give thanks for the pontificate of Benedict XVI and to seek God’s guidance for the cardinals who will proceed into Conclave for the election of the new Pope. Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation took effect on February 28, after he announced publicly in Rome on February 11, that he was stepping down as pope.
Benedict XVI takes on the title of Pope Emeritus of the Catholic Church and is expected to move into the newly-renovated Mater Ecclesiae monastery for his retirement.
Addressing the congregation, Harris recalled several personal experiences he had with the retired Pope, saying that in 2005, a number of priests and bishops were wary of the election of then Cardinal Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, who had developed a formidable reputation while serving as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
According to online report posted by Wilkipidia, Ratzinger was listed as having defended and reaffirmed the Catholic doctrine, especially in the field of teaching on topics such as birth control, homosexuality and inter-religious dialogue.
Harris recalled that when he had journeyed to Rome last year to receive the pallium (an ecclesiastical vestment in the Roman Catholic Church), the Pope had asked him which region he was representing. Harris said Benedict XVI’s eyes seemed to have glowed, when he answered, “Trinidad.”
The Pope asked for the people of this country to pray for him, Harris said. Harris said the Pope’s reaction was similar when, in a private audience, he introduced his brother to the Pope. “His eyes had once again lit up,” Harris said. “Pope Benedict is the most gentle of men, full of love in his heart.”
The Archbishop urged the congregation to pray that the Holy Spirit would lead the Conclave of Cardinals to choose a person in the “ways of true and authentic discipleship.”
In his homily, Archbishop Girasoli, who is the representative from Rome based in Trinidad, said he too was surprised when the Pope’s resignation was announced.
“When the Pope announced his resignation, we were all surprised because this was something unexpected in the history of the Catholic Church. But it was the supreme gesture of love by Pope Benedict. He is recognised because of his strength, but he could not continue in the ministry thrust upon him,” Girasoli said.
“Our Pope has given us a great example of which to follow. We all know the Church is not ours, we know the Church belongs to God and the Pope knew very well that we are all servants of the Church,” he added.
Girasoli urged the congregation to pray continuously for the Conclave for when the time comes for the retreat to elect a new pope.
See page 26A
Must Do’s: What we like this week
Saturday, Mar 2, 2013 3:00 PM UTC
David Duchovny loses a nuclear sub, Rebecca Hall fills the “Downton” void, and Betty Friedan ignites a movement
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From PBS’s “Makers”: Some leaders of the women’s movement pass a torch that was carried by foot from New York to Houston, Tex., for the November 1977 National Women’s Convention. (Credit: PBS/AP/Greg Smith)
BOOKS
Laura Miller dug into Candida Moss’ scholarly work on Christianity’s obsession with martyrdom, titled “The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom.” She writes:
“Moss is thorough, strives for clarity and is genuinely fired up in her concern for the influence of the myth of martyrdom on Western societies. ‘The idea of the persecuted church is almost entirely the invention of the 4th century and later,’ she writes. This was, significantly, a period during which the church had become ‘politically secure,’ thanks to Constantine. Yet, instead of providing a truthful account of Christianity’s early years, the scholars and clerics of the fourth century cranked out tales of horrific, systemic violence. These stories were subtly (and not so subtly) used as propaganda against heretical ideas or sects. They also made appealingly gruesome entertainment for believers who were, personally, fairly safe; Moss likens this to contemporary suburbanites reveling in a horror film.”
Kyle Minor is our Listener columnist this week, the final week of Pope Benedict XVI’s term, and what better time to consider Garry Wills’ “Why Priests?: A Failed Tradition”:
“If you’re expecting a polemic, you might get a quiet one, but you won’t get much in the way of bombast or grandstanding. Wills is a scholar, and his opposition is rooted in a position firmly inside the church. The book is dedicated to the memory of a priest, Henri de Lubac, S.J., and it begins with a long appreciation of the priests Wills has known and loved in a professional lifetime of reading and writing about religion, which itself began in a Jesuit seminary, where Wills studied for five years in hopes of becoming a priest … There are two kinds of readers or listeners who might spend some time with ‘Why Priests?’ — those who know quite a lot about Roman Catholicism and those who don’t — and Wills takes great care to be respectful of the intelligence of both. To the already knowledgeable reader, he offers an analysis that doesn’t shy away from the historical arcana upon which the rituals and practices of the church turn, and to the less-informed reader, he offers a clear, thorough and concise explanation of the vocabulary of Catholic theology and practice, which turns out to be an aid to the knowledgeable reader as well, because in his attempt to be clear, he ties each explanation to its special history, and shows how many of the ideas and practices that contemporary Catholics take for granted survive in forms very different from what they might have been in the time and place in which they originated.”
MOVIES
Andrew O’Hehir indulges one of his favorite genres — the submarine thriller — in his Pick of the Week, titled “Phantom,” which stars David Duchovny and Ed Harris as Russians, in a story based on a real, mostly forgotten historical event:
“Even given its overly familiar story about a Soviet sub going rogue at a moment of heightened Cold War tension, writer-director Todd Robinson’s ‘Phantom’ has a pulpy B-movie intensity and economy to match its cast of quality character actors … The story of “’Phantom’ is no more than an intriguing possibility, with all the inherent drama, terror and claustrophobia of the submarine genre baked into it. I’ll admit I’m a fan of the sub movie, which for understandable reasons isn’t everybody’s thing: No women, confined spaces, challenging and often cheesy special effects … The basic plot … is one that recurs in numerous military thrillers set during the Cold War: Will the crazy people bring us to Armageddon before the sane people can head them off? Viewed from one angle there’s no drama to this question 40-odd years later, but from another it remains unanswered. In this classy, taut white-knuckler – largely shot inside a real-life decommissioned Soviet sub – Robinson asks us to consider more than the hypothetical possibility that the world nearly ended in 1968. He reminds us that we have no idea how many other near-misses may have happened in the behind-the-scenes history of the modern age and also, more troubling still, that long after the Cold War has faded into memory we continue to have difficulty telling the crazy people from the sane ones.”
TELEVISION
Willa Paskin had high hopes for HBO’s miniseries “Parade’s End,” based on the four-book series by Ford Madox Ford, and adapted for the screen by Tom Stoppard:
“Having just thrown up my hands at ‘Downton’ and all its manipulations and stupidity, ‘Parade’s End’ would seem to be a welcome antidote: a complicated, intellectual, yet gossipy period piece. But watching ‘Parade’s End’ is — presumably as intended — a very near experience to reading ‘Parade’s End’ — there are beautiful moments, images, and lines, but there is an overwhelmingly opaque, foggy quality, a sense of having to peer in very attentively to comprehend what is going on. That can be an enjoyable feeling in a book: you put it down, you pick it up, newly clear-eyed and focused each time. But in enforced hour-long sittings, ‘Parade’s End’ washes over you, unexamined, too much. There is a beautiful scene in the first episode when Tietjens and Valentine get lost in a heavy fog, and her face suddenly emerges beneath his — in an instant, he sees her clear. If nearly anything else in ‘Parade’s End’ were so crystalline, it would be much more pleasurable.”
Irin Carmon watched “Makers,” the PBS doc about the feminist revolution:
“The story begins where most everyone would expect it to, with ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ the ennui of white, educated suburban women, Betty Friedan launching it all. (Even as her homophobia and other severe limitations are called out, you have to feel for the deceased Friedan when the camera slowly pans from her, sitting exhaustedly at the edge of the table, to introduce a cigarette-laced, effortlessly charismatic Gloria Steinem at the other end of the table.) But it doesn’t stop there: Black women — particularly Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton — give voice to the general inapplicability of the problems of the suburban, single-earner households to the longtime realities of their lives. Lesbians talk of being openly shut out of the movement for fear they would hurt its image. Phyllis Schlafly, a woman identified as a “homemaker/writer,” and Fox News commentator Monica Crowley rep for right-wing women and their hostility to the f-word … Watching the documentary, it suddenly seems starkly clear that the most profound unresolved conflict of women’s progress is not all of the competing struggles of identity, although they obviously matter, but an ambivalence about traditional female roles and activities. That ambivalence lies at the heart of unresolved questions about motherhood, the pleasures or pains of domesticity and fashion, sexuality and “objectification,” the persistence of “pink ghetto” jobs held by women — whether they’re being rejected, embraced or reclaimed. (Interestingly, the often-bitter battles over pornography and other forms of paid sex work, for example, are hardly mentioned, unless you count Madonna and the picketing of the Miss America pageant.) And too often, this ambivalence is dispatched with a pat assertion that feminism is about women making choices, so all choices are good. It’s beyond the documentary’s provenance to solve these disputes, but it provides plenty of fodder to examine them.”
Kera Bolonik is the arts editor of Salon. Follow her on Twitter @KeraBolonik
More Kera Bolonik.
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Pope Benedict Pledges Obedience To Next Pontiff In Final Address To Cardinals
VATICAN CITY, Feb 28 (Reuters) – Pope Benedict, addressing cardinals on his final day in office, called on Thursday for the Roman Catholic Church to unite behind his successor and pledged his own “unconditional” obedience to the next pontiff.
“I will continue to be close to you in prayer, especially in the next few days…as you elect the new pope to whom I today declare my unconditional reverence and obedience,” he said.
“In these past eight years we have lived with faith beautiful moments of radiant light in the path of the Church as well as moments when some clouds darkened the sky,” he told cardinals gathered to bid him farewell, including most of those who will enter a conclave to choose his successor.
“We tried to serve Christ and his Church,” he said.
Benedict’s papacy was dogged by sex abuse scandals, leaks of his private papers and reports of infighting among his closest aides, crises that are thought to have contributed to his decision to be the first pontiff in six centuries to resign.
The pope spoke to the cardinals about nine hours before he officially steps down, leaving the papacy vacant until the new head of the Roman Catholic Church is chosen by the cardinals, a decision expected by the middle of March. (Reporting By Philip Pullella; editing by Barry Moody)
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