Official CDF clarification "Regarding certain interpretations of 'Light of the World' "

Following the publication of the interview-book Light of the World by Benedict XVI, a number of erroneous interpretations have emerged which have caused confusion concerning the position of the Catholic Church regarding certain questions of sexual morality. The thought of the Pope has been repeatedly manipulated for ends and interests which are entirely foreign to the meaning of his words – a meaning which is evident to anyone who reads the entire chapters in which human sexuality is treated. The intention of the Holy Father is clear: to rediscover the beauty of the divine gift of human sexuality and, in this way, to avoid the cheapening of sexuality which is common today.

Read more at the Vatican website...

George Neumayr on "The mischievous debate over condoms"

George Neumayr writes in an editorial for Catholic World Report:

During his 2007 visit to the US, [Pope Benedict] sounded this warning again, lamenting as “particularly disturbing…the reduction of the precious and delicate area of education in sexuality to management of ‘risk,’ bereft of any reference to the beauty of conjugal love.”

And then, most recently in the interview-book Light of the World, he repeated that condom use is not a “moral solution.”

Yet the Catholic left claims confidently that the Church’s position on condom use has “changed.” Dissenters continue to point to the passage from Light of the World in which Benedict offers a narrow and nuanced observation about an intention behind (but not the act of) condom use and speculates that the flicker of consideration for another person’s safety contained within that intention might in some cases grow into a greater sense of morality: “[The Church] of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality.”

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A Select English Language Bibliography for Understanding the Benedict XVI/Condom Debate

Joe Trabbic has assembled a useful list that gives background to the debate about condom use, and the Pope's comments in Light of the World:

This is a very select (i.e., incomplete) bibliography, arranged in chronological order, to help those interested in understanding the Benedict XVI/condom debate, which, despite the note issued yesterday by the Holy Office, may still (for better or worse) have life left in it.

Not all the entries deal directly with the condom debate itself. Some provide the theoretical context, not always made explicit, in which much of the debate has been carried out. And not all the contributions are of equal quality.

I have also constructed the bibliography in such a way that readers will get a sense of some of the debate's historical development. The Pope's remarks in Light of the World only brought into a broader public view a debate that has been going on for a number of years among Catholic moral philosophers and theologians.

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Jay Richards: The Pope and Climate Change

Jay Richards blogs at The American Enterprise Institute:

As part of my holiday reading, I’ve been working my way through the delightful new book on Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World. The book is the result of a six-hour interview with the Pope by journalist Peter Seewald. Although it’s divided into topical chapters, the chapters consist of questions from Seewald and answers from the Pope.

The benefit of this format is that it gives readers the sense that they are listening in on an intelligent, personal conversation with Pope Benedict. You feel like you know him better for having read the book. I heartily recommend it for that reason.

The disadvantage of a Q and A format is that the Pope must answer questions framed by someone else. Even before the book was released, the media (led by the New York Times) misreported that, in the book, the Pope had changed the Church’s position on contraception. But the limits of the interview format are especially obvious on the subject of climate change and environmental stewardship. Without too much trouble, the New York Times could (mis)report that Pope Benedict fully agrees with left-wing environmentalists.

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Fr. Fessio on Light of the World: Faith and Reason, Islam, and the Liturgy

Fr. Fessio on Light of the World: The future of the Church and theology

Fr. Fessio on Light of the World: Pope Benedict and the abuse scandal

Fr. Fessio on Light of the World: Pope Benedict and Ignatius Press

The Pope and prayer

Benedictine monk Fr. Hugh at Douai Abbey reflects on Pope Benedict's comments about prayer in Light of the World:

I have just begun reading the recently-released book of the interview Pope Benedict gave to Peter Seewald during the summer, entitled Light of the World. Not too far into the interview Seewald asks the Pope how he prays.

In light of the fact that the Pope is, and has been for decades, a first-rank theologian, I was half expecting a weighty and perhaps even complex approach to prayer. Instead he is as direct and to the point as it is possible to be, and reveals a beautifully simple and authentic prayer life. To the person familiar with his writings both as theologian and as Pope it becomes clear that the spirituality of his theology is distilled to its essence in his prayer, which is situated right in the heart of the Church as the communion of saints, and its rich and profound traditions, focused on the Lord with whom he relates as “by old acquaintance”.

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"Papal infallibility—or, the prisoner of the Vatican"

Phil Lawler reviews Light of the World at CatholicCulture.org:

Reading Light of the World, the book-length interview in which Pope Benedict XVI reveals so much about himself, one is frequently reminded of the title that Pope Gregory the Great preferred: The Roman Pontiff is the servus servorum Dei: the servant of the servants of God. 

Secular commentators look upon the Pope as an absolute despot, who could change Church teachings if he wished, with just a stroke of his pen. Not so.

The Pope has considerable authority, to be sure. But he cannot use that authority to enforce his own preferences; he can only teach what the universal Church teaches—what the Church has always taught.

When a gently smiling Joseph Ratzinger walked out onto the loggia of St. Peter’s basilica on that fateful day in April 2005, to be introduced to the world at Benedict XVI, servus servorum Dei, he was accepting a task that allowed him less freedom than he had previously enjoyed, not more. Light of the World drives home that truth, in ways both big and small.

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Fr. Fessio on Light of the World: Pope Benedict as a teacher and more

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the term "People of God" and...

... the real meaning and purpose of "hierarchy", from Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, an Interview with Peter Seewald (Ignatius Press, 1997):

We Are the People of God

The term "people of God" is understood today as the idea of an autonomy vis-à-vis the official Church. The motto is "we are the people", and what the people says has to be done. On the other hand, there is also the expression "vox populi, vox Dei". How do you understand this term?

If we are theologians and believers, we listen first to what the Bible says. In other words, we ourselves can't invent the major concepts: "Who is God?" "What is the Church?" "grace", and so forth. The gift of faith consists precisely in the fact that there is a prior given. The term "people of God" is a biblical one. The biblical use is thus also normative for how we might use it. It is first and essentially an Old Testament term; the term "people" comes long before the era of nations and is connected more with the clan, with the family.

Above all it is a relational term. More recent exegesis has made this very clear. Israel is not the people of God when it acts simply as a political nation. It becomes the people of God by turning to God. It is the people of God only in relation, in turning to God, and in Israel turning to God consists in submission to the Torah. In this sense, the idea of "people of God" in the Old Testament includes, first, the election of Israel by God, who chooses it for no merit of its own, despite the fact that it is not a great or significant people but one of the smallest of the peoples, who chooses it out of love and thus bestows his love upon it. Second, it includes the acceptance of this love, and concretely this means submission to the Torah. Only in this submission, which places Israel in relation to God, is it the people of God.

In the New Testament, the concept "people of God" (with perhaps one or two exceptions) refers only to Israel, that is, to the people of the Old Covenant. It is not a concept that applies directly to the Church. However, the Church is understood as the continuation of Israel, although Christians don't descend directly from Abraham and thus actually don't belong to this people. They enter into it, says the New Testament, by their descent from Christ and thereby also become children of Abraham. Thus, whoever belongs to Christ belongs to the people of God. One could say that the term "Torah" is replaced by the person of Christ, and, in this sense, the "people of God" category, though not applied directly to the new people, is tied to communion with Christ and to living like Christ and with Christ, or, as Saint Paul says, "hav[ing] the mind of Christ" (Phil 2:5). Paul goes on to describe the "mind of Christ" with the words: "He became obedient unto death on the cross." Only when we understand the term "people of God" in its biblical usage do we use it in a Christian way. Everything else is an extra-Christian construction that misses the real core and is, in my opinion, also a product of arrogance. Which of us can say that we are the people of God, while the others perhaps are not.

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Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the Dogma of Infallibility and the Truth of the Gospel

From Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, an Interview with Peter Seewald (Ignatius Press, 1997):

Referring to criticism of the Church, you once spoke of a classical "canon of issues": women's ordination, contraception, celibacy, the remarriage of divorced persons. This list is from 1984. The "Petition of the People of the Church" of 1995 in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland shows that this canon of issues hasn't changed one iota. The discussion seems to be going wearyingly in circles. Perhaps a few clarifications would help get beyond this impasse. It seems to me that many don't know exactly what they're talking about when they speak of the papacy and priesthood, that they actually don't know the meaning of these terms.

I would stress again that all of these are certainly genuine issues, but I also believe that we go astray when we raise them to the standard questions and make them the only concerns of Christianity. There is a very simple reflection that argues against this (which, by the way, Johann Baptist Metz has mentioned in an article on the "Petition of the People of the Church"). These issues are resolved in Lutheran Christianity. On these points it has taken the other path, and it is quite plain that it hasn't thereby solved the problem of being a Christian in today's world and that the problem of Christianity, the effort of being a Christian, remains just as dramatic as before. Metz, if I recall correctly, asks why we ought to make ourselves a clone of Protestant Christianity. It is actually a good thing, he says, that the experiment was made. For it shows that being Christian today does not stand or fall on these questions. That the resolution of these matters doesn't make the gospel more attractive or being Christian any easier. It does not even achieve the agreement that will better hold the Church together. I believe we should finally be clear on this point, that the Church is not suffering on account of these questions.

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The Salt Lake Tribune on George Wiegel and Two Popes

The Salt Lake Tribune has an in-depth article about George Wiegel, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI.

Five years into the papacy of Benedict XVI, biographer George Weigel is struck by the continuity of mission between Benedict and his predecessor, John Paul II, both of whom pursued activist papacies engaging an often-skeptical general culture.

Both popes are products of early 20th-century European Catholic culture, John Paul in Poland and Benedict in Germany. Both were deeply influenced by World War II and its aftermath, and both were partly shaped by Vatican II in the 1960s.

Both popes preach “the centrality of discipleship,” both seek to spread the gospel — Benedict, especially, in Western Europe — and both believe in outreach to the young, Weigel said during a stop here to lecture on his newest book, The End and the Beginning.

Weigel, John Paul’s biographer in 1999’s Witness to Hope, also wrote the forward to Light of the World, a new book-length interview on a range of topics Benedict conducted with German journalist Peter Seewald.

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Bishop Thomas Tobin on Light of the World, condoms

From News Channel 10 in Providence:

Tobin said the pope's comments were misunderstood.

"It's a very highly nuanced, a very refined theological position, but one that is very difficult to explain in the public sector. It doesn't translate well easily into headlines," Tobin said.

Tobin said that the pope's comments are not a reflection of a change in the church's stance against condom use, but that the comments reflect moral awareness.

"It's still wrong. It's still evil. But if a person uses condoms to prevent the spread of disease, at least there is some kind of humanity there, some kind of decency, that the pope referred to as the first step toward moralization," Tobin said.

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R.R. Reno: "The Pontificate Of Continuity"

At First Things, R.R. Reno reviews Light of the World:

I’ve never met Benedict XVI, but I feel as though I have. Or at least I think I have a pretty good sense of how his mind works: clear, to the point, and earthy. OK, maybe not D. H. Lawrence earthy, but for a German university professor very direct, concrete, and capable of a memorable turn of phrase.

These qualities are very much in evidence in an extended interview of Benedict by Peter Seewald, recently published under the title Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times. Seewald is a sympathetic interlocutor, and this new book is his third published interview with Benedict, with the previous two taking place when the present pope was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for Doctrine and the Faith. The topics vary, but one theme is clear throughout. This papacy wants to italicize and underline and put into bold one word: continuity.

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Love and the Law

Father Raymond J. de Souza writes:

To follow the law is to be under a burden, to be compelled, to be constrained. To love, on the other hand, is to embrace the capacity to choose, to be creative, to be liberated.

In his recent book, Light of the World, Pope Benedict considers that way of thinking as having wrought catastrophic damage in the life of the Church. The opposition of love to law, as if the former required an abandonment of the latter, is an error widespread in society too, with similarly deleterious consequences. The context for the Holy Father's comments was the sexual abuse scandals.

"The archbishop of Dublin told me … that ecclesiastical penal law functioned until the late 1950s; admittedly, it was not perfect – there is much to criticize about it – but nevertheless it was applied," Benedict said. "After the mid-'60s, however, it was simply not applied any more. The prevailing mentality was that the Church must not be a Church of laws but, rather, a Church of love; she must not punish. Thus the awareness that punishment can be an act of love ceased to exist. This led to an odd darkening of the mind, even in very good people."

Even those with a rudimentary knowledge of canon law were aware that severe penalties existed for clergy who were guilty of sexual misconduct of all sorts. Yet the punitive sanctions of the law were not applied. It is true that today there are stricter laws and more severe punishments, but what has principally changed is that the Church's law in such cases is being more vigourously enforced.

 Read the whole piece at the Catholic Education Resource Center.

Bloomberg News reviews Light of the World

Catherine Hickley reviews Light of the World for Bloomberg News:

Even as a lapsed Protestant, I was engrossed by the book’s rare insights into a leader who usually appears impossibly aloof -- an elderly, white-robed patriarch viewed from afar, waving to crowds and speaking Latin. (He wears the cassock even at home, he says. No sweaters for him.)

Often seen as a dry academic steeped in dogma, Benedict is better known for the things he did before, rather than after, his election as supreme pontiff in 2005. In his 24 years as John Paul II’s doctrinal enforcer, he helped oust priests who diverged from orthodoxy and asserted the superiority of the Roman Catholic Church over other Christian religions. His hard- line stances on homosexuality, women priests and birth control won him enemies, both within the church and without.

Though there’s plenty here to make non-believers balk, his clarity on complex issues is compelling. If nothing else, the book succeeds as a public-relations vehicle for a pope who has had his share of PR disasters. 

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Sydney Morning Herald on Light of the World

Gerard Henderson reviews Light of the World for the Sydney Morning Herald:

The Vatican, apparently like God, works in strange ways.

A series of official meetings at the Holy See last week served as a reminder that, in its governance function, the Catholic Church is very bureaucratic. Yet Pope Benedict has just done what few government or religious leaders would do. He gave six interviews of one hour's duration each to the German journalist and author Peter Seewald.

The product of this conversation is contained in Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times (Ignatius Press), which has just been published. In the Western world, which is increasingly subsumed with sex and celebrity, media attention has focused on the Pope's answers to two questions about HIV/AIDS in Africa and the church forbidding condoms.

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William Oddie on the secular media and condoms

At the Catholic Herald UK, William Oddie analyzes the impact some Catholic commenters had on the secular media's reaction to the condom issue.

Francis Philips got it dead right in her last blog; the pope’s gripping, highly readable and indispensable book The Light of the World (and if you haven’t read it yet you really should) is about a great deal more than just sex.

The extraordinary distortion by the secular Press of his passing remarks about condoms is now generally seen for what it was: a sign of the fact that papers have to have splash headlines; that’s the way they’re designed: hence the Sunday Telegraph’s declaration of a “historic U-turn by [the] Catholic church”. So the secular response is understandable: journalists need stories; it’s not so much that they don’t care about the truth, but that they really aren’t necessarily equipped, in a story about the Church, to recognise it when it’s staring them in the face.

But parallel to this kind of understandable secular distortion, there was a jumping on this particular bandwagon by some Catholics who really didn’t have that kind of excuse. Perhaps the most informative example of the “historic U-turn by Catholic Church” syndrome among Catholic journalists was the Today programme’s “Thought for the Day” on the morning after the Sunday Telegraph splash headline, uttered from on high by Clifford Longley, the BBC’s token “authoritative” Catholic and the elder statesman of the Tabletistas.

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