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On Deck
Edward Pentin 7/22/2009 12:00:00 AM
When Pope Benedict XVI broke his wrist in the middle of the night last week, the world was reminded rather suddenly of his age (82), his potential frailty, and the possibility that, some time in the not too distant future, the Roman Catholic Church could be looking once again to choose a new Successor of Peter.
Is the Economic Crisis a Sin?
7/10/2009 12:00:00 AM
One issue on which President Obama and Pope Benedict XVI agree is that people of faith are supposed to stand for economic justice. This idea is as old as the biblical command to "let justice roll down like a river, and righteousness an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:24).
The President and the Pope
George Weigel 7/8/2009 12:00:00 AM
When he meets Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican on July 10, President Barack Obama will find himself in conversation with a man who is, at heart, a teacher. Which raises the question: what lessons might Professor Ratzinger be interested in proposing to President Obama?
How to Sell a Better Pope
Lisa Miller 5/14/2009 12:00:00 AM
I say this with respect: Pope Benedict XVI has a public-relations problem. You need only remember the 2000 visit of John Paul II to Jerusalem—which earned wall-to-wall cable coverage and produced the unforgettable image of the frail pope praying by the Western Wall—to know it's true. Pope Benedict, by contrast, visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial last week and in so doing turned what should have been a moment of transcendent grief into a small international brouhaha because he did not refer to his own German past and appeared to some in the Israeli press to be insensitive to the fates of 6 million Jews. Otherwise, Benedict's Holy Land visit was largely ignored by the U.S. media. Benedict makes international news only when he does something thoughtless (like "reconciling" with a Holocaust-denying bish-op) or when he fumbles in public, as he did on the plane to Cameroon in March when he awkwardly noted that AIDS "cannot be overcome by the distribution of prophylactics; on the contrary, they increase it." This remark, though in keeping with his theology, reverberated in the media echo chamber for a week—overshadowing other stops that might have served him better, such as meeting with representatives of Cameroon's Muslim community and a mass for as many as a million people in Angola. Benedict will never be John Paul, but why don't he and his people do a better job—to be perfectly crass about it—marketing their message?
VIEWPOINT
Parsing the Pontiff
George Weigel 5/6/2009 12:00:00 AM
No matter how much the Vatican rightly insists that the primary purpose of Benedict XVI's journeys outside Rome is to "strengthen the brethren"—as Christ instructed Peter to do—papal travel is inevitably political travel. Especially when that travel is to the Holy Land.
RELIGION
The Pope’s Denial Problem
Christopher Hitchens 1/31/2009 12:00:00 AM
Ever since Pope John XXIII made history by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, there have been believing Roman Catholics who regarded the whole thing as having been a ghastly mistake. The best known of these outside the church was probably Evelyn Waugh, who went to his death, after Easter service in 1966, convinced that Christendom had been betrayed by the capitulation of the Holy See to the fashionable heresies of modernism. The best known inside the church was the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a highly traditional French cleric who took his differences with Rome into open schism and was excommunicated, along with the four men he dared to "ordain" as bishops, in the year of our lord 1970. The most notorious (which I choose to distinguish from being merely well-known) of the extremist Catholic dissenters are the Father-Son team—if I may annex such profane imagery—of Hutton Gibson and his son Mel, whose highly lurid version of the sacrifice of Jesus was brought to the multiplex as "The Passion of the Christ."