Today’s Gospel recalls how ‘Andrew took his brother Simon to Jesus. Jesus looked hard at him and said, ‘You are Simon son of John; you are to be called Cephas’ – meaning Rock’. We read elsewhere in the Gospels how Our Lord renames Simon: Peter - literally ‘rock man’ - founding his Church on the ‘rock’ of Peter’s faith in Christ’s divinity. To this day the Christian world takes note of the successor of St Peter, first Bishop of Rome, seeing him as a referee helping safe play continue down the centuries. This is why the death of a former Pope is being marked at the altar this evening.
Pope Benedict XVI, whose funeral is tomorrow, was an exceptional Bishop of Rome and one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century. Some Bishops, priests and Popes are more pastors and some more teachers. Benedict, like his friend Archbishop Rowan Williams, came to office from being a theology professor. That friendship, one of many he had with Anglicans, came to the fore when he visited the United Kingdom in 2010 to canonise John Henry Newman.
Unlike his successor Pope Francis, more pastor than teacher, Benedict has gained an unfair reputation as over dogmatic churchman. This is despite his being instrumental with other theologians of the revolutionary empowerment of the laity at the 1962-5 Second Vatican Council. Picking up on failure to address clerical abuse under the reign of Pope St John Paul II, Pope Benedict acted only to be blamed himself for the abuse crisis, one reason he resigned and handed over to Pope Francis.
I speak as one widely read in his writings. Only last week I was reading his book on the biblical texts related to Christ’s birth. His writings, so rooted in scripture, transcend the Catholic-Evangelical divide in the Church. Benedict’s passion was to help rise above Christian divisions to commend to the next generation the reality of the risen Lord. In this he used captivating images such as his commending to people, young and old, what he calls ‘Jesus’ Hour’, attendance at Sunday Mass, through which the Lord manifests himself to us transformatively in word and sacrament week by week, day by day, down through the centuries.
As Anglicans who value our Church’s place in the stream of Christian believing through the centuries we should be grateful for steps he took in 2012, seen as provocative by some, to establish an Anglican Ordinariate which has become a sort of bridge between our Communions under the patronage of Blessed John Henry Newman. Though both the action of and the secession of many from the Anglican Church over female ordination in recent years is controversial Pope Benedict’s action remains an affirmation of the intrinsic catholic credentials of historic Anglicanism which would warm Newman’s heart.
When we compare how global media treat Pope Benedict’s reputation compared to informed church circles it is evident how very little the reputation has to do with the man. It is our reputation before God, each one of us, that will count when at last we stand before him. A holy and gentle soul Benedict’s last recorded words were ‘Lord, I love you’. He knew God’s love and laboured to bring others into its orbit. As St John puts it so beautifully in the passage we read yesterday at Mass ‘Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, by letting us be called God’s children; and that is what we are… what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is, that when it is revealed we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is’. So be it for us - and for Pope Benedict, blessed in name and in life.
No comments:
Post a Comment