Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret

Farewell to a modest and wonderful Pope

 

From Saturday's Daily Telegraph

"You must be awfully shocked by the Pope’s resignation,” people have been saying to me all week. It’s true – I was. For five minutes. But then I thought: how typical of Benedict XVI, the most modest, unsentimental and forward-looking of recent popes. And also, in my opinion, the best.
If that sounds like an odd verdict, perhaps you’ve been watching too much BBC. Auntie has a little circle of Catholic commentators, dogmatic liberals who hark back to the glorious days of the Second Vatican Council. Many are elderly, and hoarse from moaning 24/7 about Benedict “turning back the clock”. Alas, unlike the Holy Father, they have no intention of retiring to a life of serene contemplation. There they are, sitting by the phone, bus passes at the ready, waiting for the invitation to join Ed Stourton or some Lefty religious correspondent in clucking at the Vatican’s failure to see the light over women priests, gay marriage etc.
These Tabletistas (so called because they write for a “with-it” quasi-Catholic rag called The Tablet) have been tying themselves in knots trying to argue that Benedict was simultaneously a caretaker pope, an enforcer and a fire-and-brimstone conservative. Their thesis doesn’t work because he was none of those things.
First, that was no caretaker who visited Britain in 2010. Benedict XVI’s address in Westminster Hall was historically important as much for its content as its setting. No Archbishop of Canterbury has ever articulated so crisply the relationship between Britain’s parliamentary tradition and the role of Christianity, which sets out “objective norms governing right action”.
Also, Benedict tackled the huge task of restoring beauty to worship. But this is where we come up against the enforcer problem – that is, he isn’t one. The former Cardinal Ratzinger had to enforce things, in his job monitoring doctrinal orthodoxy, but as Pope Benedict he shied away from arm-twisting. This has allowed bishops, including those in England and Wales, to ignore any of his innovations that don’t take their fancy. Fortunately, young Catholics are so sick of the cod folk-wailing of “worship leaders” that Benedict’s restoration of beauty is being implemented quietly, from the ground up.
Benedict has not altered any teaching that the Church regards as God’s will, but his urge to conserve the faith reflects a gentle search for authenticity rather than tub-thumping intransigence. How many times, compared with John Paul II, has he railed angrily against sexual immorality? Hardly ever. Instead, he has talked urgently about the most poisonous threat facing young people everywhere: drug abuse, that unfailing killer of spirituality.
It is this practical wisdom that lies behind Benedict’s departure. He was at John Paul II’s side when the late pontiff’s body and mind fell apart on the job, and he thought: I will not let this happen to the Church again. He is leaving office in frail health but with his mental faculties intact.
On Thursday he delivered an unscripted, intellectually dazzling analysis of recent Catholic history to the clergy of Rome. He ended by expressing the belief that a properly reformed Church is emerging now that various trendy experiments have failed. If so, it is partly thanks to him – the first Pope in 600 years with the modesty to step aside for a stronger man.
Benedict is deeply loved and must be aware that he is breaking hearts by abdicating. But he is willing to do so, because he understands the papacy as intimately as any pope in history and has a rather wonderful message to impart: “This isn’t all about me, you know.”