One year later

NEW YORK TIMES READERS:

Welcome!

This your perpipatetic blogger's old blog. Before the new blog. Which is now here.

Back to business:

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That day a year ago is impossible to forget. It was thrilling and mystifying. Why were we all so fascinated, even the secular media? I was watching one of the nets and an anchor said, "I'm getting chills" - it's sobering, really, to think about it - that the election of a Pope could produce so much interest in what we thought was such a cynical world.

What was it? The drama was hard to miss, and impossible not to be affected by. A vote, totally in secret, with no exit polls and not a hint of what was happening, by a small group gathered in a chapel in which they Creation and Fall arches above them and the Last Judgment looms above them - as our tour guide in the Sistine Chapel told us, when Michelangelo painted the Last Judgment, no one thought anyone except clerics - the highest clerics in the Church- would ever see it. It was intended for them: Listen to the Lord. Put your own interests aside. There is a great deal at stake here.

And face it: we're talking about the longest-lasting institution in the world, aren't we? Governments, movements, cultures and even empires have come and gone, but the Church has remained, with Peter and his successors at the heart of it, symbolizing unity and continuity.

The drama. The history. The question of who could follow John Paul?

Then came the smoke, and the uncertainty as to its color. Long, long minutes of confusion, and then finally we knew. How did we know? Because of the bells, rung to confirm the vote. Habemus Papam.

Then, most thrilling to me were the people. Streaming into St. Peter's in response to the bells, just as Christians had ordered their lives according to the bells for centuries. They rushed from all over Rome, in this scene that evoked ancient times: they came, not to listen to a radio or watch a film or check the internet - but to glue their eyes to a balcony and see who came out.

And do you remember the announcement? Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez - the "Cardinale - Ratzinger!" with a lovely, memorable, rolling of that "r."

(Want to relive it? Here's a CNN page with video and audio from that day)

More photos of the day here, from the very excellent site devoted to the history of St. Peter's Basilica

And after a year...what?

I'm actually reluctant to offer an "assessment" of Pope Benedict's first year because it strikes me as awfully presumptuous. Who the heck am I?

So that's not what this is. It's an appreciation.

I will admit to you - no surprise to readers of this blog - that I do love Pope Benedict. I knew next to nothing about Cardinal Ratzinger, only a few of his writings and the assurance that he was unfairly maligned by his enemies and critics.  But in the year since, I have become - odd for me - devoted.

I worry about this sometimes, my feelings echoed in a comment made by someone here a week or so ago. The reader commented that she worried about herself. Was she becoming a "papalotrist?" Was she too attached to Benedict ? Because she couldn't help herself - she was intrigued by practically everything he said.

No, I really don't worry. That was a joke. Sort of.  But like that commentor, I am thoroughly engaged by Benedict's teaching. It is clear, rich and, most importantly and amazingly to me - speaks with precision to the moment at hand. Every moment is a teachable moment for Benedict, and he gets it all - the yearnings and hurts that human beings in the 21st century are enduring, the context in which we live, and the answers Jesus Christ offers.

In a way, he is the teacher I've been waiting for. He's the teacher I can attempt, faintly, to model myself after.

There are enormous problems in our Church and in our world. Some of us wish there would simply be some concerted head-knocking to take care of it all. But Benedict knows history, and he also knows what is at the heart of our problems: we have turned from Christ. Even in our Church, our fundamental problem is that too many of us have argued ourself out of serious, commmitted belief in Jesus Christ, modulating and contextualizing it to the point of emptiness. Too many of us have put ourselves at the center of this enterprise rather than Christ. Too many of us have simply sold out to whatever culture that surrounds us, letting it be our Lord, not Jesus Christ.

 

I have no great statements about his impact on the Curia or the bishops' conferences or liturgical life or diplomacy. What I have heard over and over this year is a wise father gently, surely re-grounding us in Scripture and the witness there, as well as in the voices and art and holiness of Christians through the ages, articulating what we know is true about the strains, temptations and deserts in our lives, weaving it all together and in rather startling simplicity, pointing us to Jesus.