RU 20/2007 - VATICAN

- VATICAN: Benedict XVI is our Holy Father since 2 years. Let's try to draw a preliminary balance. With John-Paul II we had a charismatic pope, a disaster for the Church (tremendous reduction of the religious practice in the Church, just by going through our different RU dispatches since June 1997 one gets a terrible account of it). Now we have an intellectual pope. After the first results, it's just another plague for the Church. Maybe we didn't deserve a better one, if we look at our increasing egoism? It's sufficient to remember the following miserable issues, so ambiguous that it was necessary each time to move back, to make complicate distinctions, to correct and to alleviate: the speech of Regensburg, the position of the Vatican facing the European Union at the time of the pope's visit to Turkey, the prayer of Benedict XVI in the mosque of Istanbul, the Motu Proprio always announced and never published, and many others...

First of all, what's an intellectual ? While schematizing a bit, one can say that it's the opposite of an intelligent one. The intellectual, as soon as he pronounced a sentence or a thesis, already doubts about what he said while creating hundred objections and even contradictions. He saw too much, read too much, thought too much, discussed too much. He believes to master the whole, while dissecting thousands of details. If he is honest, he comes back permanently on what he preached a short time before. But in order not to appear mad, he doesn't admit his previous mistakes, he doesn't even dare to analyze their falseness, no, he 'integrates' them into an always more complex hyper-system, with a special terminology which becomes gradually incomprehensible for others. But he doesn't have confidence in this system even himself. In short, he says all and the opposite of it, nearly in the same sentence, and everyone can find in his incomprehensible and ambiguous words what is best fitting to him. In the worst case, if you don't understand what he says, it's you the bad thinker, and not him. With all these unavowed, attenuated, transformed, sometimes repented mistakes, he considers himself as terribly intelligent, what is a nonsense in itself.

On the other hand, there where the intellectual dissects, analyzes, schematizes, clones, copies, tinkers, while using exclusively his cerebral capacities, the intelligent one, on the other side, operates while integrating his heart, his faith, his hope, his love, in short his entire human being. Very often intellectuals - a paradox! - don't know anything about intelligence, what makes that their faith shrinks, their hope vanishes and their love dries up. How many people living with 'intellectuals' as family members or collaborators or friends - even some very famous ones - made this terrifying experience! These ' intellos' are a kind of dwarfs of the heart, under-developed in the faith and the hope, they are almost like living deaths! St Thomas of Aquinas entered one day with a friend into a chapel. The friend whispered in his ear: "Thomas, admit that you have a more sublime faith than that old woman crouched down there before the altar?" And St Thomas answered to him: "Dear friend, you can burn all my books, if only you can procure me the faith of that old woman!" The friend was stunned. It was maybe the first time in his life that he saw the rare thing: an intelligent intellectual.

Let's hope that this is the case also of our Holy Father Benedict XVI, in spite of all his gropings, imprecisions, contradictions, hesitations and high flights of one day. Nothing than that ridiculous issue of the Motu Proprio (concerning the necessary universal reestablishment of the rite St Pius V in the occidental Church), announced a thousand times, and a thousand times rediscussed, modified, attenuated, delayed, proves abundantly that our Holy Father in his hesitations and complexities like aprisoner in his own intellect. He surely suffers from it. He is even afraid. For sure, the natural courage is not missing to him - the mere fact to have gone to Turkey proves it -, but the SUPERNATURAL courage? The only one needed to direct the Church of O.L. Jesus Christ? Facing the enemies of the Church, outside and inside, IT'S NECESSARY to FIGHT with Christ's force. Let's pray so that, during the remaining years of his pontificate, our pope may get rid of his intellectualism and embrace the whole faith, without compromises nor hesitations, received from the Church, the only Light for a world which gets lost while running behind a thousand wrong sky lights. Let's pray for Benedict XVI, and for his successor who is already living: "My God, we need a very big Saint!", and our Father who is in Heaven will give him to us. - (ru)