Pope Benedict Roundup!

News

• Pope Benedict XVI will have a full schedule following his visit to the United Kingdom, says Rome Reports. His Fall calendar looks to be one of the busiest of his pontificate. On the agenda: closing the Italian Meeting of Families in Palermo, Siciliy; meeting Church Leaders at the Synod of Bishops and its Special Assembly for the Middle East; canonizing six new saints and a pastoral visit to Spain.

• 09/03/10: The Archbishop of Santiago, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz, brought 33 rosaries blessed by Pope Benedict XVI to the miners trapped 700 metres underground in San Jose, Chile (Rome Reports). See also: "Surviving the Darkness": How 33 trapped Chilean miners can beat the danger of living without sunlight (Newsweek). On September 17th, the New York Times reported an important milestone in the effort to rescue 33 trapped miners, reaching the caverns where the men are trapped with a bore hole that will now be widened so they can be pulled to safety.

• 09/03/10: Pope Benedict XVI has released his message for the next World Youth Day to be held in Madrid 2011 (Rome Reports):

  In warm and personal way, the Pope has invited young people around the world to turn out for the celebrations which will be held in the Spanish capital next summer. Recalling his own youth, Benedict XVI reflected on his time as a university student and the challenges of responding affirmatively to his vocation to the priesthood.

  Full Text of Pope Benedict's message for World Youth Day 2011.

• 09/01/10: Pope Benedict XVI has given a series of interviews to a German journalist that will form the basis of a new book to be published later this year (Catholic Herald) | Video:

  The Vatican said this week that the Holy Father and fellow Bavarian Peter Seewald spoke several times over the course of the final week in July at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, just outside Rome. It will be the third time their conversations have been published. Mr Seewald interviewed then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger for his 1996 book Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium, a transcript of interviews on the state of the Church from Cardinal Ratzinger’s perspective as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. [Also, 2002's God and the World: A Conversation With Peter Seewald -- Christopher

  The Vatican spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi, said the new book would be published before the end of the year by the Vatican’s publishing house in German and Italian. ...

  Mr Seewald has written three other books about the Pope, The German Pope – From Joseph Ratzinger to Benedict XVI, Benedict XVI: An Intimate Portrait and Benedict XVI: Life and Mission.

• 08/24/10: Zenit covers an interview with Pope Benedict's personal physician, Doctor Patrizio Polisca. Originally published in L'Osservatore Romano, Polisca recalled his prior service to Pope John Paul II as well:

  "I cannot think of my life without the responsibility to the Pope and to the Church. I live it, rather, as a joy that I share with my family." A job that enables him to realize his dream: "to practice the medical profession and have the possibility to do so in a dimension that is always mine: the Christian, to the utmost of its earthly expression."

Commentary

• "Mainstream US media asleep on the job?" asks the Pertinacious Papist (September 24, 2010):

  A friend of mine, a retired Hollywood actor, who rightfully prides himself on keeping up with the news, wrote me recently and included a newspaper clipping on the Pope's recent trip to Great Britain. The newspaper article featured a large photo of crowds of placard-bearing anti-Catholic demonstrators and was substantially devoted to only one subject: the Pope's meeting with sex-abuse victims and the outrage of Britons over the sex scandal. If one's news sources were limited to the mainstream print media and TV networks in the US, this is likely all he would know about the Pope's journey to Britain, if he knew about it at all.

  Likewise, Deacon Greg Kandra notes, One of the biggest surprises of Pope Benedict's historic trip to the United Kingdom may be how few people realize that it was, in fact, historic."

• "It is a bad sign when the head of a Catholic college’s theology department ends an interview by calling Pope Benedict an Austrian." David Mills, First Things on Religion News Service's interview with Mark J. Massa, SJ.
• I lived next door to the Pope - Gerald O'Collins SJ (The Guardian September 18, 2010):

  It was summer 1968 and I'd just finished my PhD at Cambridge. I wanted a few months somewhere different and hit on Tübingen, a lovely, medieval city in southern Germany. I was researching and writing at the university before taking a post in the US.

  I found a room on the outskirts of town and moved straight in. The landlady wasted no time in telling me about the hotshot on the block, my next-door neighbour Professor Joseph Ratzinger. ...

• "Why They Are Attacking Me." Autobiography of a Pontificate Ever since he was elected, Joseph Ratzinger has been the target of a crescendo of assaults, from inside and outside of the Church. Is an "invisible hand" moving them? Here's how the pope sees and explains it. (Sandro Magister)

• Responding to the vicious critics of the papal visit to the UK, the blogger of Heresy Corner offers "ten reasons to love the Pope":

  ... the Heresiarch will not be joining in the frenzy of pope-baiting. As Brendan O'Neill astutely points out, "the great irony of this allegedly rationalist protest against the pope is that it is indulging in precisely the kind of demonology that the Catholic Church once excelled at."

• Space Alien Followers vs. Pope Benedict (No, Seriously) (Above The Law September 13, 2010):

  A prophet, who now goes by the name “Rael,” once encountered space aliens who told him the secret of life. Later, his followers, “the Raelians,” set up an advocacy group to expose pedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church. But the group’s work was frustrated when Pope Benedict XVI (a.k.a. Joe Ratzinger) covered up the crimes of Catholic priests, in an effort to discredit the Raelians and suppress their message. ...

• Mark Dowd, author of the BBC documentary Trials of the Pope, on "How I changed my mind about the Pope" (Catholic Herald September 10th, 2010):

  . . . those who complain of the betrayal of Vatican II and have this pontificate down as unreservedly restorationist and insular have some explaining to do. How is it that such a man commands the respect of a towering figure and atheist intellectual such as Jürgen Habermas, so much so that they are prepared to engage in a dialogue in public? How is it that such a man devotes his first encyclical to a profound discussion of human love and ponders on the potential for Eros and Agape to be a bridge between the human and the divine? Furthermore, how is it that this pope has taken every opportunity to emphasise that care from the environment is not some woolly-minded aspect of New Ageism, but an integral part of his theological outlook?

• Tracey Rowland, Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, on Benedict XVI and the banality of sacro-pop (Religion and Ethics ABC.net.au September 6, 2010).

• How the Pope Brought God to Drug Addicts: Interview on Brazil's "Farms of Hope" When Benedict XVI visited Brazil in 2008, one of his stops was at a center for recovering drug addicts. A young patient later recounted what the experience meant for him: Not even my family wants to see me, he explained, but the Pope comes to see me and others like me. (Zenit September 6, 2010).

• Pope Benedict XVI: Theologian of the Bible, by Fr. Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J. This talk was the 15th Annual Peter Richard Kenrick Lecture, delivered at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, on March 18, 2010. (Homiletic and Pastoral Review)