Ten Things Pope Benedict XVI Wants You to Know.
Vatican
inside observer John L. Allen, Jr., drawing from
the writings and speeches of the Holy Father, shares
the ten most important things that Pope Benedict
XVI wants all Catholics to know.
1. God Is Love
STRIP EVERYTHING else
away, and the core of the Christian message is
that God is love. The ultimate reality in the universe,
the one which created it and sustains it, is love.
In faith, we call that personal love God. Since
that's the point upon which everything else in
Christianity pivots, it's no surprise that Pope
Benedict chose to title his very first encyclical,
the most important form of papal teaching, Deus
Caritas Est-precisely, "God Is Love."
The heart of the encyclical's
argument is that eros, or human sexual love, is
a beautiful reflection of God's passionate love
for humanity. Yet eros, he says, is not an end
in itself. Rather, it calls us out of ourselves,
toward something even higher. Eros must be transformed
through "a path of ascent, renunciation, purification
and healing" into
agape, meaning the complete gift of oneself for another.
Agape, in turn, flows into service of one's neighbor,
especially the poor and vulnerable, which is the
basis for all Catholic charitable work. In order
for this purification to happen, we have to exercise
our reason about the right way to put our love into
action. Thus, Benedict says, a final element of the
Christian concept of love is logos referring not
only to "words" in
the sense of human thought, but also to the Word,
the Son of God, made flesh in Jesus Christ.
Against any abstract
or purely philosophical concept of God, Deus
Caritas Est reminds us that the Christian God is not just
a force or a concept, but a lover. "God
is the absolute and ultimate source of all being;
but this universal principle of creation-the Logos,
primordial reason-is at the same time a lover with
all the passion of a true love," Benedict writes.
The late Italian Vatican writer Orazio Petrosillo
said that with Deus Caritas Est, Joseph Ratzinger,
once known as Grande Inquisitore, or "the Grand
Inquisitor," revealed himself as If Innamorato,
or "the Great Lover."
Benedict is well aware
that critics over the centuries, such as Friedrich
Nietzsche, have complained that Christianity "ruined" eros
by making human beings ashamed of their sexuality,
by treating sex as something to be controlled and
feared. Instead, Benedict argues, Christianity
liberates eros by pointing the way toward its true
fulfillment.
The pope chose to write on this theme, at this time,
in part out of concern for all the violence and hatred
in today's world justified
in the name of a loving God. Too often, Benedict
believes, people mistake passion for love, as if
all we need is the heart, not the head. In reality,
the pope insists, feeling is just the beginning of
love, not the end. At bottom, love is the recognition
that we are the sons and daughters of God's love
for all humanity, which calls us to love of our neighbor-all
our neighbors, everywhere in the world.
Benedict's understanding
of love is closer to that of Dostoevsky in The
Brothers Karamazov, who wrote, "Love
in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared
to love in dreams." Real love comes at a price.
That's the kind of love we see in Jesus, and that's
the kind of love that Benedict describes in Deus
Caritas Est.
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2. Jesus Is Lord
BENEDICT XVI has always
been a prodigious writer, and in May 2007 he released
the first book of his papacy: "Jesus
of Nazareth",
a 400-page work that's projected as the first volume
of a longer study. In essence, Benedict wants to
assure his readers that the gospels are reliable
witnesses to Jesus. They teach us that the Jesus
of history and the Christ of faith are one and
the same figure: the Living Son of God, made flesh.
Placing Christ at the center is Benedict's modus
operandi, and proper ("Christology," meaning
teaching about Christ), is the dominant doctrinal
concern of his papacy.
Benedict wrote the book
in part because during the last century, a number
of popular reinterpretations of Jesus were floated
by Bible scholars and theologians, usually in an
effort to make Jesus more "relevant." But
the pope believes that starting with desired social
outcomes and then drawing conclusions about Jesus
puts the cart before the horse. There can be no humane
social order or lasting moral progress, he says,
apart from a right relationship with God, and it
is Jesus Christ who reveals God's face to us. If
we really want to promote justice and tolerance,
Benedict says, we have to start with Christ. Preaching
Christ is not a distraction, he believes, from
building a better world-it is building a better
world.
Over the course of the book,
Benedict critiques a number of popular modern images
of Jesus: Jesus as a preacher of liberal morality,
Jesus as a social revolutionary, Jesus as an inspired
prophet or sage on the level of other founders of
religious movements. The pope is well aware that
these interpretations usually arise from noble motives,
which he also shares-to affirm the primacy of human
beings over the law, to combat poverty and injustice,
and to express tolerance for other religions. But
out of impatience to achieve desired social outcomes,
Benedict argues, revisionist images of Jesus subvert
the only basis for real humanism, which is belief
in God, and in an objective truth that comes from
God and stands above the human will to power.
Reflecting on Christ's temptations in the desert,
Benedict makes this argument:
Whenever God is considered
a secondary concern, which can temporarily or stably
be set aside in the name of more important things,
then it is precisely those things presumed to be
more important which fail. It's not just the negative
result of Marxism which makes the point. The aid
given by the West to developing countries, based
purely on technical-material principles, which
has not only left God to the side but has also
distanced people from God with the pride of its
presumed superior wisdom, has made the Third World
into the "Third World" in the modern
sense ....Believing it could transform stones into
bread, it has instead given stones in place of
bread. What's at stake is the primacy of God. It's
a matter of recognizing God as a reality, a reality
without which nothing else can be good. History
cannot be governed with merely material structures,
prescinding from God. If the heart of the human
person isn't good, then nothing else can be good.
And goodness of heart can come only from He who
is Himself goodness, who is the Good.
Reminding the world that,
in Jesus of Nazareth, we see the definitive revelation
of the meaning and ultimate destiny of human life,
is a cornerstone of Benedict's papacy.
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3. Truth and Freedom Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
IF ONE WERE LOOKING
for a single word to sum up Benedict XVI's message
to the men and women of his time, it might well
be "truth." His motto
as a bishop is Cooperatores veritatis: "coworkers
of the truth."The day before the conclave opened
that elected him to the papacy in April 2005, then-Joseph
Cardinal Ratzinger memorably defined the chief challenge
facing the Catholic Church as a "dictatorship
of relativism." By that, he meant the way in
which denial of objective truth-of truths independent
of time and culture, binding everywhere and for everyone
- has become conventional wisdom.
It's worth quoting the heart of that homily:
How many winds of doctrine
have we known in these recent decades, how many
ideological currents, how many modes of thought.
..The small ship of thought of many Christians
has often been agitated by these waves-tossed from
one extreme to the other; from Marxism to liberalism,
from collectivism to radical individualism; from
atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism
to syncretism and so on....To have a clear faith,
according to the Creed of the Church, is often
styled as fundamentalism. Meanwhile relativism,
meaning allowing oneself to be carried away "here
and there by any wind of doctrine," appears
as the only attitude suited to modern times. What's
being constructed is a dictatorship of relativism,
which recognizes nothing as definitive, and that
regards one's self and one's own desires as the
final measure.
Benedict realizes that
many people unconsciously endorse this "dictatorship
of relativism" because
they want to be free, meaning that they don't want
to live on the basis of someone else's truths. But
Benedict , believes that such a desire reflects a
flawed understanding of what freedom entails. Freedom,
he believes, is not the absence of restraint on our
behavior, but rather the capacity to become the kind
of person God calls us to be. That doesn't mean doing
whatever we want; it means doing what we should.
Put it this way: An
alcoholic might imagine himself "free" as
long as he's able to drink as much as he likes, but
we know he won't really be "free" until
he breaks the chains of his addiction. It's the same
with all of us, Benedict believes. Real freedom does
not mean freedom to exploit the poor, to hate one's
neighbor, or to sacrifice unborn life; it means the
freedom to realize our highest potential as sons
and daughters of God. God wants us to be free, but
this freedom has content-it means ordering our lives
in accord with God's design. Truth and freedom are
thus not opposed, but interdependent. Truth, for
Benedict XVI, is the doorway through which one must
walk in order to be "free" in the fullest
sense of the word.
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4. Faith and Reason Need One Another
ON SEPTEMBER 12,2006,
Benedict XVI gave a lecture at the University of
Regensburg in Germany, where he once taught theology.
That lecture became a "shot
heard 'round the world" because of controversies
surrounding a quotation from a dialogue between a
fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor and a Persian
scholar, in which the emperor said negative things
about Muhammad, the founder of Islam. The ensuing
firestorm was unfortunate, in part because few people
read the whole lecture-which was not about Islam
at all, but the relationship between reason and faith.
The title, in fact, was "Faith, Reason and the
University."
Benedict XVI summed up the
testimony of the Bible and the early Christian church
in the following fashion:
God is Logos, creative
reason itself. Thus, "not
to act in accordance with reason is contrary to
God's nature."
Christianity presupposes the
rationality of God, and on the basis of that conviction,
Christianity itself must be reasonable. Shutting
down the exercise of human reason, turning Christianity
into a form of religious fundamentalism, would be
inconsistent with the rational character of God himself.
More broadly, Benedict said, faith and reason desperately
need one another.
In the first place, Benedict
argues, faith and reason belong together because
reason presumes faith. How do scientists know that
there's an underlying logic to the universe? Why
do they assume that nature will work tomorrow the
way it did yesterday? Why do they believe the human
mind is capable of penetrating nature's secrets?
In the end, they take all this on faith-a stance
grounded in the Judeo Christian tradition, whether
today's scientists acknowledge it or not.
On another level, much dysfunction
in contemporary culture, Benedict believes, can be
explained by attempts to separate reason and faith.
Reason without faith, he believes, becomes skepticism,
cynicism, and ultimately nihilism, leading to despair.
Faith without reason, on the other hand, becomes
fundamentalism, extremism, and sometimes violence.
We see this today in radical currents within Islam,
which justify terrorism and hatred in the name of
God. Benedict is well aware, however, that in a different
key, the same temptation to irrationality courses
through every religion, which makes it all the more
important that faith and reason remain on speaking
terms.
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5. The Eucharist Is the Heart of the Christian Life
WHEN POPE BENEDICT XVI went
to Cologne, Germany, for World Youth Day in August
2005, many Germans expected the pope to take them
to task on a variety of fronts-from declining Mass
attendance and internal dissent within the Church,
to a general unwillingness to grant religion a role
in public life. Instead, Benedict offered a message
that was at the same time more gentle and yet more
radical. In his concluding homily, he chose to meditate
on the Eucharist, Christ's gift of himself under
the forms of bread and wine at Mass.
The pope offered a memorable
metaphor to describe its impact. He told the one
million young people who had gathered to hear him:
To use an image well known
to us today, [consecrating the Eucharist] is like
inducing nuclear fission in the very heart of being
the victory of love over hatred, the victory of love
over death, Only this intimate explosion of good
conquering evil can then trigger off the series of
transformations that little by little will change
the world. All other changes remain superficial and
cannot save. For this reason we speak of redemption:
what had to happen at the most intimate level has
indeed happened, and we can enter into its dynamic.
Jesus can distribute his Body, because he truly gives
himself.
That imagery came from Joseph Ratzinger's lifetime
of prayer and devotion centered on the Eucharist.
In March 2007, Benedict
XVI released a document called an "apostolic
exhortation," officially
drawing conclusions from the Synod of Bishops on
the Eucharist that took place in the Vatican in October
2005. It's titled Sacramentum Caritatis (Sacrament
of Charity) and it offers Benedict's most developed
reflections on the Eucharist.
The Church's faith is essentiality
a Eucharistic faith, and it is especially nourished
at the table of the Eucharist....For this reason,
the Sacrament of the Altar is always at the heart
of the Church's life...The more lively the eucharistic
faith of the People of God, the deeper is its sharing
in ecclesial life in steadfast commitment to the
mission entrusted by Christ to his disciples.
That last line is important,
because as Benedict goes on to argue in Sacramentum
Caritatis, the faith expressed in the Eucharist comes
with a mission. On a personal level, it impels us
to live our lives in accordance with what we profess
during the Mass; we must become, as Saint Augustine
once famously suggested, what we consume, meaning
to model ourselves on Christ. On a social level,
it means efforts to build a world in which the self-giving
love of Christ, which is made new each time the Eucharist
is celebrated, is the cornerstone upon which society
is constructed, as opposed to ideology, profit, or
the blind will to power.
Taken seriously, Benedict
argues, the Eucharist can change the world-indeed,
it's the only thing that can.
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6. Christianity Is a Positive Message
ONE OF THE MOST striking aspects
of Benedict XVI's papacy has been how determined
he is to phrase his message in a positive key. To
take one example, when the Holy Father visited Spain
in July 2006, many expected a dramatic showdown with
the Socialist government of Prime Minister Luis Rodriguez
Zapatero, whose left-wing government has done battle
with the Church on a variety of fronts: gay marriage,
abortion, divorce, euthanasia, and public funding
for Catholic schools. Many Catholics expected fire
and brimstone from the pope. Instead, he was doggedly
positive, concentrating on the Christian fundamentals,
never directly engaging any of the issues that have
divided Church and state.
Later, some German TV reporters
asked Benedict what had happened. It's worth listening
to his reply in full:
Christianity, Catholicism,
isn't a collection of prohibitions: it's a positive
option. It's very important that we look at it
again because this idea has almost completely disappeared
today. We've heard so much about what is not allowed
that now it's time to say: we have a positive idea
to offer, that man and woman are made for each
other, that the scale of sexuality, eros, agape,
indicates the level of love and it's in this way
that marriage develops, first of all, as a joyful
and blessing-filled counter between a man and a
woman, and then the family, that guarantees continuity
among generations and through which generations
are reconciled to each other and even cultures
can meet. So, firstly it's important to stress
what we want. Secondly, we can also see why we
don't want something. I believe we need to see
and reflect on the fact that it's not a Catholic
invention that man and woman are made for each
other, so that humanity can go on living: all cultures
know this. As far as abortion is concerned, it's
part of the fifth, not the sixth, commandment:
'Thou shalt not kill!' We have to presume this
is obvious and always stress that the human person
begins in the mother's womb and remains a human
person until his or her last breath. The human
person must always
be respected as a human person. But all this is
clearer if you say it first in a positive way.
Benedict's desire is
to lead contemporary Catholics back to the fundamentals
of our faith, to remind us of that deep "yes" that
lies beneath our specific "no's" on hot-button
cultural debates.
During his May 2007 trip to Brazil, Benedict XVI
put the same point a different way when he said:
The Church does not
engage in proselytism. Instead, she grows by "attraction":
just as Christ "draws
all to himself" by the power of his love,
culminating in the sacrifice of the Cross, so the
Church fulfills her mission to the extent that,
in union with Christ, she accomplishes everyone
of her works in spiritual and practical imitation
of the love of her Lord.
In other words, the
pope wants Christians to let the "good news" of
their faith shine through their own lives, so that
its inner beauty can again become clear in a world
accustomed to thinking of Christianity as little
more than a fussy legal system. That doesn't make
the law less important or valid, but Benedict realizes
that one doesn't stir hearts with law, but with
love.
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7. The Church Forms Consciences but Stays Out of
Politics
OVER THE COURSE of his
career as a theologian and a Church official, Benedict
XVI has resisted any attempt to turn Christianity
into a political party. That doesn't mean, however,
that faith lacks consequences for politics. Benedict
wrote in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est,
that "Justice is both the
aim and the intrinsic criterion of all politics." According
to the moral vision of Benedict XVI, a Christian
must work toward a just social order, which among
other things implies a special concern for the poor.
In an address to the
bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean on May
13, 2007, Benedict endorsed what exponents of liberation
theology have called the "preferential option
for the poor," saying
it is "implicit in the Christological faith
in the God who became poor for us." And he has
not shrunk from drawing the consequences of this
option.
Benedict has repeatedly
spoken out in defense of the poor, often in language
with very concrete political implications. For
example, in December 2006, he wrote to German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, at the time the president of the
G8 group of nations, demanding "the
rapid, total and unconditional cancellation" of
the external debt of poor countries. The pope described
debt relief as a "grave and unconditional moral
responsibility, founded on the unity of the human
race, and on the common dignity and shared destiny
of rich and poor alike."
Benedict has shown a special
pastoral concern for the struggles of Africa. In
June 2005 he announced his intention to call a synod
of bishops from Africa to discuss the crises facing
the continent. In November 2006, when a new bond
measure was launched by the World Bank to raise four
billion dollars over ten years for the immunization
of children in impoverished nations against preventable
diseases, the very first bond was purchased by Pope
Benedict XVI.
For Benedict XVI, fidelity
to Church teaching and Tradition is not opposed to
social concern; to conceive of things that way, he
believes, would be to pit faith against works, a
position Roman Catholicism rejected during the Protestant
Reformation more than five hundred years ago.
At the same time, Benedict
is clear that the role of the Church is to hold up
moral values, not to provide a specific political
blueprint for translating those values into political
choices.
"If the church
were to start transforming herself into a directly
political subject, she would do less, not more,
for the poor and for justice,"
the pope said during his trip to Brazil,
"because she would
lose her independence and her moral authority,
identifying herself with a single political path
and with debatable partisan positions."
"The church is
the advocate of justice and of the poor, precisely
because she does not identify with politicians
nor with partisan interests,"
Benedict continued.
"Only by remaining
independent can she teach the great criteria and
inalienable values, guide consciences and offer
a life choice that goes beyond the political sphere."
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8.The
Importance of Catholic Identity
IN A MARCH 20, 2007,
address to Italian businesspeople, Tarcisio Cardinal
Bertone, the Vatican's Secretary of State and a
longtime intimate of Pope Benedict XVI, said that
the "overall goal" of Benedict's
papacy is to defend authentic Christian identity
in a world marked by religious relativism.
This thrust toward a
stronger sense of identity forms one of the megatrends
in contemporary Catholicism. In every area of the
life of the Church-from liturgy to religious orders,
from Catholic schools and hospitals to seminary
instruction-the question of the day is, "How
do we know it's Catholic, and how do we make sure
it stays Catholic?"
A consummate student
of Western culture, Benedict knows that since the
Peace of Westphalia in 1648, religion has suffered
a progressive exile from public life, especially
in Europe. In the West today, religion is often
seen as a purely private matter, and religious
people feel pressure to either downplay or abandon
those aspects of their faith that don't "fit" with
the values of enlightened modern culture. Over time,
Benedict worries, in too many areas the Catholic
Church has gradually assimilated to this ethos, absorbing
its world view like secondhand smoke. The result
is that some Catholics, and some Catholic institutions,
are shaped more by the values of secular modernity
than the tradition of the Church.
The time has come, Benedict
believes, to recover a strong sense of what makes
Catholics different. His decisions in July 2007 to
broaden permission for use of the pre Vatican II
Mass, and to reassert that the Catholic Church alone
is the true church willed by Christ, both express
this conviction.
Benedict XVI comes out
of the Communion school in Catholic theology, associated
above all with the great twentieth-century Swiss
theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Its key figures
accent the need for the Church to speak its own
language, premised on the conviction that Christianity
is itself a culture, often at odds with the prevailing
world view of modernity. Restoring a sense of Catholic
distinctiveness-a Catholic version of what sociologists
call the "politics
of identity" has in some ways been Joseph Ratzinger's
life's work.
In that light, Pope Benedict
is less immediately concerned with numbers, such
as Mass attendance or turnout at papal events, than
with fostering a deep sense of Catholic distinctiveness,
however few those who embrace such a spirit may be.
As early as The Ratzinger
Report in 1984, he put things this way: "Today
more than ever, the Christian must be aware that
he belongs to a minority and that he is in opposition
to everything that appears good, obvious, and logical
to the 'spirit of the world,' as the New Testament
calls it. Among the most urgent tasks facing Christians
is that of regaining the capacity of non-conformism,
Le., the capacity to oppose many developments of
the surrounding culture."
That doesn't mean, of
course, that Benedict wants Christians to cut themselves
off from the world, retreating into a Catholic
ghetto. Rather, he wants them to be in the world
but not of it - to find, as he once memorably put
it, "that none-too-easy
balance between a proper incarnation in history,
and the indispensable tension toward eternity."
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9. Christ and the Church Are Inseparable
IN MARCH 2006, Benedict
XVI announced that he would devote his catechesis
during his regular Wednesday General Audiences
that spring to the "profound,
inseparable, and mysterious continuity" between
Jesus and the Church. Any attempt to say "yes" to
Jesus but "no" to the Church, Benedict
insisted, ultimately falls apart, because Jesus'
message was intended precisely "to gather and
to save" a people, which is the Church.
The Wednesday catechesis
is the most important regular opportunity a pope
has to get his message across, and for a teaching
pope such as Benedict XVI, the choice of theme
is revealing in terms of his priorities. Benedict
is well aware that for many contemporary men and
women, Jesus of Nazareth remains a fascinating
figure, but they often struggle with aspects of
institutional religion. The natural temptation,
therefore, is to opt for Jesus without the "intermediary" of
the Church.
In the end, however, one cannot
truly love Jesus or follow his teachings, Benedict
insists, without taking one's place in the family
of faith that Jesus called into being. Being part
of that family comes with no guarantees of perfect
contentment; like any family, the Church has its
ups and downs, its moments of disappointment and
heartache. If that's true of a human family, how
much more it is of a global Church of more than one
billion people, carrying the weight of two thousand
years of history! But just as one does not walk away
from a family when things get rough, similarly a
disciple of Jesus does not walk away from his or
her Church.
Describing as "baseless" any "individualistic
interpretation of the proclamation about the Kingdom
made by Christ," Benedict said that the "obvious
intent" of Jesus "was to unite the community
of the covenant" into "the Twelve," symbolized
and by the twelve apostles.
"By their very existence,
the Twelve called from diverse origins-become an
appeal to all Israel to convert, and to allow itself
to be gathered into the new covenant, a full and
perfect fulfillment of the old one," the pope
said. "By entrusting
the Twelve with the task of celebrating his memory
in the Supper before his Passion, Jesus showed
that he wanted to transfer to the whole community,
in the person of his leaders, the mandate of being
a sign and instrument of eschatological oneness
throughout history, started in him. In this light,
one understands how the Resurrected One conferred
upon them, with the effusion of the Spirit, the
power to forgive sins (cf. John 20:23). The Twelve
Apostles are thus the most evident sign of the
will of Jesus regarding the existence and mission
of His Church, the guarantee that between Christ
and the Church, there is no contraposition."
In response to the cry
of "Yes to Jesus, No
to the Church," Benedict XVI responds, "Yes
to Jesus means Yes to the Church."
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10. The Virtue of Patience
SAINT AUGUSTINE once
wrote that "the deeds
of the Word are, for us, words too." He meant
that we learn as much from what Jesus did as from
what Jesus said.
In a similar vein, popes
teach the world through their actions, their personalities,
and their "styles," in addition to their
explicit speech. For example, perhaps one of the
most eloquent moments of John Paul II's papacy
came near the end on Easter Sunday 2005, when despite
his obvious agony, he spent twelve long minutes
at the window of his apartment, struggling to speak
to the faithful gathered below in Saint Peter's Square
and to the millions watching around the world. The
way John Paul poured himself out in service that
day spoke volumes about his self-sacrifice, even
though he never managed to utter a single word.
Probably without being conscious
of it, Pope Benedict XVI is teaching the world something
through his own behavior. He is exceedingly humble
and gentle, which stands in stark contrast to the
bluster and braggadocio often associated with global
titans in the worlds of politics, finance, and culture.
He is living proof that one does not have to be an
exhibitionist to lead and to inspire.
Perhaps more important,
he's teaching a microwave world that expects instant
results to slow down a bit, to catch its breath,
and to look before it leaps. Upon Benedict's election,
there were fevered expectations of swift and dramatic
action in many quarters. Some expected a root-and-branch
reform of the Roman Curia, the Catholic Church's
central organ of government. Others anticipated
a sweeping crackdown on dissident theologians and
liberal activists within the Church. this day,
many pundits and commentators are still waiting
for the "real" Benedict to emerge
from beneath his patient, gentle what they don't
seem to appreciate is that what they regard as a
facade is, in fact, the real pope.
Benedict is a man of deep
faith, which means he realizes that, ultimately,
the vicissitudes of the Church and of the world are
in God's hands, not his. There's a serenity about
him, a lack of what the Germans call angst, rooted
in his belief that the final act of the story in
which all of us are involved has already been written,
and it ends well. Thus he does not feel the need
to lurch from one initiative to the next or to resolve
all the Church's problems in a Single bound. He understands
better than most the complexities of those problems,
both intellectually and pastorally, and he also grasps
the importance of thinking carefully before taking
steps that may have unforeseen consequences.
In an impatient world,
Benedict XVI is a very patient man. To paraphrase
Saint Augustine, occasionally his very lack of
deeds is an important "word" for
the harried women and men of his time.
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About the Author
JOHN L. ALLEN, JR., is the
senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter
and senior Vatican analyst for CNN. He's also the
author of The Rise of Benedict XVI (Doubleday, 2005)
and the forthcoming book, MegaTrends in Catholicism:
Ten Forces Turning the Catholic Church Upside Down
(Doubleday, 2008).
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