Monday, February 05, 2007

The Christ of Benedict XVI

The Pope is about to publish a book about Jesus. In so doing, he will share his deepest convictions about Jesus Christ
- by Dr. Robert Moynihan

The greatest drama of this pontificate -- greater than the drama of relations with secular humanism or Islam, greater even than the drama of the scandals in the Church -- is the drama occurring within Pope Benedict himself.

It is the drama of a man whose entire formation as a thinker and theologian led him to regard free theological inquiry as the highest intellectual activity of the believing Christian, but whose destiny was to become the Successor of Peter, and as such, the possessor of the Church's binding teaching authority, the Magisterium (the authority to "bind and to loose," to approve and to condemn doctrine and heresies, to teach, ex cathedra, infallibly). And that is why Benedict's decision to publish a book about Jesus later this spring, but not to give the teaching in the book any magisterial authority whatsoever, is so dramatic.

It is dramatic because it is the decision to withhold magisterial authority from the book that is itself magisterial.

And this decision has profound consequences, both for the exercise of the papal office within the Roman Catholic Church, and for relations with non-Catholics, particularly the Orthodox. For this reason, it is one of the most important decisions of the pontificate thus far, and perhaps a defining one. . .

More here from Inside the Vatican

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