Benedict XVI on Women and St. Augustine

(I apologize in advance.  I know this is too long and involved, but this is my first post, and I’m nervous.  I suppose this is the virtual equivalent of talking too fast.)

Being of almost pure Polish extraction (Poland being the birthplace of 7/8 of my great-grandparents), I grew up with a strong emotional attachment to John Paul the Great.   This was deepened over the past couple of years when I actually started reading his writings.    Even though I was born and raised in Germany, and the 1/8 of my blood that isn’t Polish is German, I’m still having trouble getting used to Benedict XVI. 

A few weeks ago, I participated in a wonderful, interdisciplinary St. Thomas summer seminar on “The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger --- Benedict XVI.”   Reading incredible books like Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity certainly deepened my appreciation for our new Pope. What I read and learned at this seminar raised for me two particular questions about the potential influence of Benedict on Catholic Legal Thought.

One of the things I loved most about JPII is what he has to say about women, some of which I explore in Sacrifice of Motherhood and Motherhood and the Mission .  I know that much of what he wrote was written either by or in collaboration with then-Cardinal Ratzinger, and I’ve been reading some of the earlier stuff by Ratzinger on women.  How could a working mom like me not love a guy who would write (from Mary: The Church at the Source):

In my opinion, the connection between the mystery of Christ and the mystery of Mary . . . is very important in our age of activism, in which the Western mentality has evolved to the extreme.  For in today’s intellectual climate, only the masculine principle counts.  And that means doing, achieving results, actively planning and producing the world oneself, refusing to wait for anything upon which one would thereby become dependent, relying rather, solely on one’s own abilities. It is, I believe, no coincidence, given our Western, masculine mentality, that we have increasingly separated Christ from his Mother, without grasping that Mary’s motherhood might have some significance for theology and faith.  This attitude characterizes our whole approach to the Church. We treat the Church almost like some technological device that we plan and make with enormous cleverness and expenditure of energy.  . . .

What we need, then, is to abandon this one-sided, Western activistic outlook, lest we degrade the Church to a product of our creation and design.  The Church is not a manufactured item;  she is, rather, the living seed of God that must be allowed to grow and ripen.  This is why the Church needs the Marian mystery;  this is why the Church herself is a Marian mystery.  There can be fruitfulness in the Church only when she has this character, when she becomes holy soil for the Word.  We . . .  must once more become waiting, inwardly recollected people who in the depth of prayer, longing, and faith give the Word room to grow.”

My first question is whether this Marian dimension of the Church finds much (or any) expression in Catholic Social Teaching or Catholic Legal Thought.  Or do we run the professional risk, as legal academics trying to change the world through our blogging, conferencing, and even old-fashioned paper articles, of “treating the Church almost like some technological device that we plan and make with enormous cleverness and expenditure of energy”?

My second question is about St. Augustine.  At the UST Summer Seminar, much was made of the fact that Benedict is very “Augustinian”, in contrast to JPII, who was apparently much more Thomistic. Indeed, Benedict certainly does seem to quote Augustine a lot in the things I’ve read so far.  As someone whose familiarity with Augustine consists of having read The City of God in college, and more recently reading Gary Will’s biography of Augustine, I was too timid to ask what that meant in the roomful of philosophers and theologians at the seminar.   Do any of you have any thoughts about this distinction between JPII and Benedict?    More importantly, though, is this distinction likely to make any practical difference with respect to any of the issues of interest to MOJ?

Lisa