bracketing or ignoring anything from the truth of our present situation, but living the faith fully here and now in the utterly sober light of day, appropriating it completely, and stripping away from it anything that only seems to belong to the faith, but in truth is mere convention,” he said. “In order to accom- plish her true task adequately, the Church must constantly renew the effort to detach herself from the ‘worldliness’ of the world.” He said the Church usually had to be forced to do so by “secularising trends”, such as the appropriation of goods or elimination of its privilege. This “contributed significantly to her purification and inner reform”. The Pope left reform-minded German Catholics to grapple with the meaning of those words and his refusal to address their calls for married priests, sacramental ministry for women, Communion for the divorced and remarried, and affirmation of committed gay relationships. There was further disappoint- ment for them, and for the country’s Protestants who had hoped for an “ecumenical gift”, such as loosening restrictions on inter- Communion, especially for spouses in mixed marriage. “Here I would say that this reflects a political misreading of the faith and ecumenism,” the Pope told a prayer service in the church in Erfurt where Martin Luther was ordained a priest before breaking from Rome in the sixteenth century. He made it clear that faith could not be worked out intellectually or negotiated. The editor of L’Osservatore Romano, Gian
Maria Vian, said Benedict XVI had “pulled off” one of the “most intense and important visits of his pontificate”. He had been “able to make himself understood and touch the hearts of a great many people”. But Vian blasted important sectors of the media, which he said had not been “up to the task” of understanding and reporting the real meaning of the Pope’s four days back home in Germany.
A
ctually, it was not really a visit “back home” at all, in the geographical or the emotional sense. Joseph Ratzinger spent all but 10 of his
first 54 years in Bavaria, nestled in Germany’s south-east corner next to Austria. Between 1959 and 1969 he taught theology in Bonn, Münster and Tübingen, but he was back in Bavaria – first as a professor at Regensburg and then as Archbishop of Munich – when Pope John Paul II named him Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981. Next February marks the thirtieth anniversary of his departure from Bavaria to take up residence in Rome. A number of commentators and Catholics who followed the visit to Germany suggested that Benedict’s three decades in an office in Rome had put him further out of touch with the Church in their country. Many of them saw the visit as the Pope’s last best chance to show that he has heard their concerns for church reform and renewal. As one of the German papers observed: “The Pope has gone, the problems remain.” Unless Benedict decides to fix them back in the Vatican.
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