Benedict the Communicator

John Allen's current column has a fascinating analysis of "the paradox of a pope who is a master communicator, but who nonetheless needs to work on his communications skills."  Allen writes that:

On the one hand, Benedict is an exceptionally lucid communicator.  He's a gifted logician, so his conclusions flow naturally from his premises.  Moreover, he's able to synthesize complex ideas in easy-to-understand formula, so you don't need a degree int heology to get his point.  Yet Benedict can also be remarkably tone-deaf to how his pronouncements may sound to people who don't share his intellectual and cultural premises. 

Allen suggests an explanation that seems to me to get at the heart of what makes what we are trying to do with "Catholic legal theory" so difficult:

Benedict is close to the communion school in Catholic theology, whose key figures accent the need for the church to speak its own language. It's an "insider's" discourse, premised on the conviction that Christianity is itself a culture, often at odds with the prevailing worldview of modernity. All this is part of Benedict's project of defending Catholic identity against pressures to assimilate in a relativistic, secularized world.

Benedict also has tremendous interior freedom, meaning he doesn't conduct focus groups before deciding what to say. Certainly no one wants Benedict shackled to a platitudinous form of political rhetoric, designed principally to avoid offense.

Yet a pope is, inevitably, Catholicism's chief ambassador to the outside world, including people not predisposed to give the church the benefit of the doubt. That implies a special responsibility to weigh one's words carefully, not just for their inner logic, but also for their potential cultural and political repercussions. It's not enough to insist that the world take the church on its own terms -- one has to meet it halfway.

Part of what I think many of us are trying to do is figure out the vocabulary and arguments of that "insider's" discourse, to determine for ourselves how it ought to be applied to legal issues -- to be, for our Church, where it "does its thinking" about the law.  But part of what we are also all trying to do is be Catholicism's "ambassadors to the outside world, including people not predisposed to give the church the benefit of the doubt."   How far do we go in meeting the world halfway in that effort, without compromising the "project of defending Catholic identity against pressures to assimilate in a relativistic, secularized world"?  It's tricky, isn't it?