With Peter

The papacy of Benedict is an amazing moral witness to the world and a focused body of work reminding it of its true nature, and this article from Catholic Thing, captures what Benedict is doing.

An excerpt.

“…What is Benedict up to? Of course, the best any outside, or inside, observer can offer is an opinion or even a hunch.

“…Benedict is probing the world. We have never really seen anything like it, a pope who really does think in what Hegel would call “world historical” terms.

“Thus far, Benedict has visited Germany, Austria, Turkey, Brazil, the United States, Spain, Australia, Paris, and numerous Italian cities. On a regular basis, he meets leading political, ecclesiastical, and intellectual leaders from all over the world. He meets ordinary people, again, from everywhere. He has written two encyclicals, a book, numberless addresses and homilies. By now, he has looked over most religious orders and dioceses. He already knew about the curia. He had a good bead on the theologians, being one of them….

“The key to Benedict is that God is Caritas, Logos, but not Pura Voluntas. Benedict thought his way through the Old and New Testament, mastering the vast scholarship on the subject. His book, Jesus of Nazareth, tells us that we need not agree with him. But it has one basic conclusion, one that is confirmed, not undermined by scholarship; namely, that Jesus was indeed the Word made flesh.

“The fact is that Christ was Who He said He was. This fact means that the world is different; it cannot help but being so if this Logos is a fact. It is not a myth. This concreteness is why Benedict insists on the relationship of Jerusalem and Athens, which was already inaugurated in the Old Testament and confirmed when Paul was called to Macedonia. Christianity thus addresses philosophy, not myth.”