This week in his "Word from Rome" column, John Allen reflects on the papal stylings of Benedict:

Benedict XVI, in the language of the guild, is largely a pope for the inside pages.

In Poland, I found myself wondering if this "less is more" style could have ecclesiological consequences — if Benedict’s way of exercising the papacy, quite apart from any explicit teaching, could change the way we think about the pope.

To explore that question, I turned to Richard R. Gaillardetz, who holds the Margaret and Thomas Murray and James J. Bacik Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. Gaillardetz has written widely on ecclesiological topics, and is a popular speaker on these subjects.

Gaillardetz might be best-known to long time blog readers as the author of a widely-commented on article in America magazine critiquing the "New Apologetics" which was critiqued, in turn by, among others Karl Keating. In a Word from Rome a year ago, Allen summarizes a talk Gaillardetz offered at the LA Religious Ed Congress and talk summarized as well in the LA Lay Catholic Misson (summaries from two different perspectives, to be fair!)

He opines on problematic overreaches of papal authority:

Yet Gaillardetz argued that what he termed the "interventionist practice on the part of the curia" continues apace. He offered three examples:

• The November document on gay seminarians
• A letter from Cardinal Francis Arinze, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, cracking down on liturgical practices in Chiapas in southern Mexico
• Another letter from Arinze to Bishop William Skylstad, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, warning that liturgical translations not in accord with Roman rules cannot be approved

"I think this still adds up to a fairly aggressive exercise of papal authority," Gaillardetz said.

Gaillardetz also expressed reservations about the recent decision by Benedict XVI to drop the title "Patriarch of the West," which, he said, if anything amounts to a more sweeping assertion of papal authority over the entire church, East as well as West.

The problem with this perspective is that the criterea for "proper" exercise of papal authority isn’t laid out, so most of us could match Gaillardetz’s measly little list with a much longer list of ways in which Catholic institutions and clerics are going off on their merry own ways without a peep from the overreachers in the Curia. (And for the record, Arinze’s intervention in Chiapas wasn’t about "liturgy" as much as it was about the imbalance in that area between permanent deacons and priests – there was a sense that the bishop was encouraging the former at the expense of the latter).

The exercise of papal authority is complex and has certainly shifted dramatically in uncounted ways over the centuries. And who knows what the future will hold? What I’m missing from folks on Gaillardetz, however, at least in their more popular pronouncements (and perhaps, to be fair, not so in their books) is any real sense of what an alternative to this supposed overreaching authority structure would look like – the Church’s teaching should more powerfully reflect the sensus fidelii? Which one? In what country? Western consumerist Catholics? The majority of Catholics who support capital punishment? The parishioners of St. Agnes? Of St. Joan of Arc? University theologians?

Nor am I seeing an acknowledgment of a simple reality: the deeply ironic (and perhaps frustrating to some) contemporary Catholic scene in which the great energy in Catholic evangelization, catechesis and just…work in the world…is being carried about lay people, not clerics. And most of these lay people don’t agree with Gaillardetz’ ecclesiastical vision.

Also from Allen, some further reflectsion on Benedict at Auschwitz:

Some compared the visit unfavorably with John Paul II’s June 7, 1979, trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, widely remembered as an important turning point in Jewish-Christian relations.

The irony is that John Paul in 1979 said more or less the same things that got Benedict in trouble in 2006.

In his homily that day, John Paul did not acknowledge any generalized Christian involvement in the slaughter of Jews, nor did he say anything about the role of his fellow Poles; he did not refer to modern anti-Semitism; and he too invoked Edith Stein.

If anything, Benedict went farther in accommodating Jewish sensitivities, because rather than celebrating a Catholic Mass as John Paul did in 1979, Benedict opted for an inter-faith ceremony with significant Jewish participation. In so doing, he avoided triggering Jewish concerns about attempts to "Christianize" the Holocaust.

So why the praise for John Paul in 1979 from the Jewish world, and the mixed reviews for Benedict in 2006?

He offers a partial answer in this column, and promises more in an article to be published next week.