Here’s another one:  Catholic Outsider from Alejandro Bermudez, editor of Catholic News Agency. It’s a young little blog, but it’s pretty interesting, with a couple of recent posts on Benedict’s style of interacting, including a primer on who gets to meet with the Pope these days. Answer: hardly anyone.

(Michael met up with an old friend on his trip last week, a priest who’d just returned from a few-months sabbatical in Rome, the kind of stay during which in the past, the priests would have probably had the chance to meet the Pope. Nope!)

(And to be honest, I find this totally understandable. The Pope is almost 79 years old and he knows it. Can you imagine being elected Pope when you’re 79? Can you even conceive of it? This is a man who knows his gifts, seems to be intent on honestly discerning how God can best use him in the time he has, and knows how to reserve his energy. I think it also shows, to the haters of various types, how this Pope understand the office – as being, essentially, not about him, but about Christ, and that indeed, the business of the Church, while it finds an important unifying anchor in the Papacy, is broadly based. I like it.)

Anyway, I happened upon this blog while I was seeing what Magister had said in his blog recently (as if I can understand it), and came upon his latest entry, which refers to the Catholic Outsider in the context of a few comments about the long article about the death of John Paul and the election of Benedict in the most recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

Paul Elie is a writer whom I admire – his The LIfe You Save May Be Your Own – a study of O’Connor, Percy, Merton and Dorothy Day in the context and in relationship to one another – was really excellent and has had a profound, continuing impact on me as I consider the purpose and nature of my own work.

But this article, while, of course, well-written, doesn’t strike a chord with me. Perhaps it is because I’ve read both Allen and Weigel’s books on the same period, as well as a million articles. I probably should go back and re-read it, putting myself in the place of the average Atlantic reader who hasn’t been immersed in this material for almost a year.

For there is not much new here in terms of basic news, but what is worth commenting on here is the interpretation. The short version is that Elie attributes quite a bit more, for lack of a better word, angling for the papacy on Ratzinger’s part than any other observer I’ve read so far. Here is how he puts it:

The events of the twelve months from the onset of John Paul’s last illness up to the present—a year of two popes—complete a process that has been under way since the turn of the millennium. John Paul’s poor health prompted Ratzinger, always confident of the soundness of his own approach, to speak and act more boldly than ever. John Paul’s physical weakness made Ratzinger (seven years younger) seem spry and vigorous beneath his head of white hair; John Paul’s thick, clotted speech made Ratzinger’s gentle enunciations seem the voice of clarity. John Paul’s struggle to carry on despite his ailments precluded the notion that Ratzinger’s own limitations—advanced age, a divisive public image, an attraction to thoughts more than to thinkers—were drawbacks in any important sense.

Did Ratzinger want to be pope? Certainly—provided that this was what God and the other cardinals wanted of him. More and more, it seemed, he was wanted. Beginning in 2000 circumstances at the Vatican seemed to call Ratzinger to the papacy—to "convert" him or turn him around to the office, as he would put it. He saw the papacy diminished by the pope’s illness, and the Church weakened by scandals. He was clearly "head and shoulders above the rest of the cardinals," one of his aides told me, "and he knew it"; he at once recognized his mastery of the mechanisms of Vatican power and trusted himself to use them properly. He did not—dared not—wait for John Paul to die; the Church was going off course again. So he prayed for guidance and then stepped in.

And here, really, is the essence of the interpretation, following Elie’s discussion of his (mostly anonymous) sources:

My interlocutors told me how Ratzinger deliberately took charge as John Paul faltered, and described what Ratzinger hadn’t liked about John Paul’s approach to the papacy. They provided the commentary that made it possible to form a clear picture of the conclave

The piece is long and detailed, and not online, of course. I’ll take issue with one point, and then let three Vaticanisti make some corrections.

I am interested in Elie’s insistence on implying that Ratzinger’s assumption of certain roles (for example, engaging in substantive meetings with bishops on ad limina visits when John Paul was unable to do more than just greet them) or wrangling with an issue in a different way that John Paul seemed prone to do (Dominus Iesus, for example, interepreted by Elie and others as a way to balance out, not just the religious relativism and indifferentism rampant even within Catholicism, but to certain symbolic gestures by John Paul II himself) – that all of this amounts to indicating a desire for the papal office, or, more generally, a desire to run the church. Which is, of course, why Ratzinger kept trying to resign and return to Germany – a point which Elie mentions but ignores the significance of.

I think what is missing in this piece is an understanding of how serious Christians understand service and discipleship. No one argues that ego can always get injected into the mix, or that motives, even of good people, are always pure and unmixed. But Elie, while not ascribing outright deviousness to Ratzinger, does indeed imply that he was angling for the job of running the Church his own way. But even based on his own evidence, one can come to a very different conclusion, based, as I said, on a different understanding of what should motivate Christians, and, indeed, does motivate many of them: to discern the call of the Spirit to do what is necessary. So if John Paul was unable to engage substantively with visiting bishops, and if ad limina visits are supposed to serve a certain purpose which and if the Pope cannot engage or make use of the information that might come out of those meetings…why should everything come to a halt? Someone needs to step in and hear those concerns and make sure that the process works the best it can under the circumstances. And if, during those meetings, Ratzinger was, indeed, interested and attentive (which is what I’ve heard , and what Elie reports) – why does that imply that he’s interested because he’s trying to curry favor or make a good impression in order to serve his own interests – for that is the implication of this article. Why can’t it be that Ratzinger truly was concerned and interested? One of the things that has struck me about this Pope since I started reading and paying attention to him, is not just how intellectually deep and adept he is, but of how understanding he is of the human condition, and not just abstractly, but as it is lived in 2006. That "desert" imagery in his homily at his inaugrual Mass sealed the deal for me on that score, and nothing I’ve heard since has disappointed me.

I could go on with more examples, but I think you get my point. If I’m working in a parish in which the pastor, for example, is alienating people right and left, and if I try, within the limits of my role, to ameliorate that situation, am I angling for the pastor’s job? If I perceive that the other religion teacher tends to emphasize, let us say, the more affective aspects of religious faith, so I therefore decide to utilize my own gifts and emphasize the more cognitive aspects, does that mean I’m trying to take her job? Not really. It means that in this matter of ministering in the Body of Christ, there is this constant shifting dynamic of what is done and by whom. If Cardinal Ratzinger discerned that certain points of faith needed to be emphasized by his Congregation…so?

Now for some other critiques:

Rocco corrects Elie on a point of Anglican attire – Elie makes some hay out of his understanding that at the opening of the door at St.-Paul-Outside-the-Walls during the Holy Year in 2000, and to inaugurate the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Anglican Archbishop Carey was vested in his full episcopal vesture, implying equivalence between Anglican and Roman Catholic orders. Not so, says Rocco:

First off, as the picture above can testify, Carey was vested in the choir dress of the Church of England — cassock, rochet and stole — not a cope, mitre or crozier in sight on George Cantuar. The Vatican people would have sooner cloaked the Door in macrame’, dyed-green mac-and-cheese and multicolor Christmas lights than let an Anglican parade around in a patriarchal basilica wearing pontificals…

Secondly, and back to the start of this post, the Catholic Outsider has not one, but three posts on what he says are the inaccuracies in the article, giving the greatest space to the theory that there was a movement centered behind Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires.

To think that Cardinal Bergoglio “would  have considerable appeal among the progressives, who have long sought a pope  from Latin America,” is pure naïveté or wishful thinking. Most provably, it is just the conclusion of an outsider. For most of the cardinals, if not all, Bergoglio’s record as tough theologian and doctrinal enforcer is very well known.

In short: the hypothesis that Argentinean Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio running closely second to Cardinal Ratzinger at the beginning of the Conclave is, at best, a legend.

A legend Cardinal Bergoglio debunked personally when I asked him about it in Rome last October.
“Pavadas!,” he responded, using the typically Argentinean expression for “foolish.”

Most likely, Elie wrote his article long before it was published, so did not have time to follow the complete saga of such version of the conclave. In Vatican circles,  that story is completely passé.

Finally, another person, who’s very in-the-know, echoed, in a note to me, Elie’s complete misunderstanding of Bergoglio, saying that he is, if anything more "conservative" than Benedict, as well as critiquing Elie’s presentation of the Vatican as a closed place dense with secrets. "It’s a sieve" he says, echoing what anyone who’s read John Allen’s All the Pope’s Men has picked up. The trick is to discern the wheat from the chaff.

So, enough inside baseball. The broadest point you might take from this post is reflecting on the difference between the way the Church sees the roles we play and the decisions we make in the institution and the way the world sees it.

The way the Church sees it ideally, I should say. Power can play a huge role in the lives of people working in the Church. I’ve seen it, and require no instruction on the point. My point is that, even admittedly from waaaaaay outside, it seems incorrect to intepret Ratzinger’s actions, even implictly, as expression of some inner sense that he himself should be Pope, and thus ignoring the perspective that says, "If I’m in this place…what does God want me to do now?"