What Orwell saw...

David Scott has an insightful article at Godspy on Benedict XVI as the Pope of hope.

"In an unsigned review printed in the New English Weekly in 1932, George Orwell remarked: “Very few people, apart from Catholics themselves, seem to have grasped that the Church is to be taken seriously.”

This is probably more true today than it was seventy-five years ago. And it is probably true too, unfortunately, with regards to Pope Benedict XVI.

Nearly three years into his papacy, Benedict has emerged as the wisest leader on the world stage today, one who has thought deeply about what ails us in these troubled times and has offered compelling answers for what we should do about it. But very few people, even among Catholics, seem to have grasped this or taken him seriously.

It may be that people aren’t paying much attention because of his age—he’s almost 81 now—and because he arrived on the scene only after a long apprenticeship in the Vatican and the long twilight of his beloved predecessor, John Paul II. But this is no caretaker Pope biding time until a more youthful helmsman can be found for St. Peter’s barque.

Commentary and media coverage, even to a large extent that found in the Catholic press, tends to focus on Benedict’s “positions” on whatever is the hot-button issue of the day—abortion, gay “marriage,” the war on terror, the Latin Mass, ex-communicating Catholic politicians, and the like.

But looking through this kind of reductionist lens, we’re bound to miss that aspect of Benedict that might have struck Orwell, though he himself was no fan at all of the Church or any organized religion.

What Orwell was honest enough to recognize about Catholicism is true about Benedict as well. Like the Church he leads, Benedict has a comprehensive, integrated vision of life and society that ranges from human psychology and spirituality to justice and peace within and among nations.

What he has offered the world in his few hundred speeches, homilies, and other statements over the last couple years represents the late work of a remarkable 60-year career as a theologian, pastor, and public intellectual.

You don’t find in Benedict any of the defensive, self-justifying chest-thumping and controversy-mongering that passes for so much of contemporary apologetics in this country.

Benedict gives account for the hope that is in him with the serene self-possession of one of the early martyrs. Jesus Christ is real, he tells us, and the Church’s claims are true. It is not only reasonable for us to believe these things; even more, these are truths worth dying for—and changing our lives to live for.

In Benedict we always catch an echo of the confidence of the early Church, of people like St. Ignatius of Antioch, who once wrote: “Christianity is not the result of persuading people. Rather it is something truly great.” (Ignatius wrote those words, incidentally, while behind bars waiting to be fed to the Roman lions.)"

For the complete article click here.