Pope Benedict on Creation

William Carroll is talking about aspects of the Pope’s vigil homily on Catholic Thing. It seemed to address one or two of the points raised in the expanding It’s not religion thread.

At the Easter Vigil, the journey along the paths of sacred Scripture begins with the account of creation. This is the liturgy’s way of telling us that the creation story is itself a prophecy. It is not information about the external processes by which the cosmos and man himself came into being. The Fathers of the Church were well aware of this. They did not interpret the story as an account of the process of the origins of things, but rather as a pointer towards the essential, towards the true beginning and end of our being. . . .

The Church Fathers and others in the history of the Church tried to find some concordance between the opening chapter of Genesis, the so-called “six days of creation,” and what the sciences tells us about the world. But theologians like Thomas Aquinas remind us that what is essential to the faith in Genesis is the “fact of creation,” not the “manner or mode of the formation of the world.” The Bible ought not to be read as a science textbook. Galileo liked to quote the words of Cardinal Baronius: the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

Read and enjoy!

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Pope Benedict – a pilgrim among pilgrims

There’s an interesting comment from Amy Welborn about Pope Benedict. She says there is something to annoy everyone in the book Light of the World, and that people will have trouble reconciling what they see as opposing statements. But this, Welborn claims, is because we insist on looking at the Pope through our own filters.

Here’s the full article – but I especially wanted to share with you her final point:

Pope Benedict with Senior Constable Gary Hill during his WYD trip to Australia.

Now what confuses and even angers some Catholics is that along with this high sense of church is the acceptance of the reality — very clear throughout this interview — that human beings interact with the church at different levels of commitment. Some go to Mass every day, and others once a year. Some are saints, while others are barely hanging on. There certainly have been through history various ways to articulate God’s call to humanity, some more forceful and dire, but that is not Pope Benedict’s language. The way he has always expressed it is that it’s not the church’s role to force an individual to come closer, but rather to constantly invite. Not to impose, but to “propose” — one of Pope Benedict’s favorite turns of phrase.

So in essence, he’s saying some will agree, some won’t. But what of “everyone else?” Contrary to popular impressions and maybe even the hopes of some Catholics, Pope Benedict doesn’t see it as his job to issue blanket condemnations of that “everyone else.” “We are sinners,” he says. “We should try to do as much good as we can and to support and put up with each other.”

That doesn’t sound like “God’s Rottweiler,” a nickname Benedict earned as a cardinal. Nor does it sound like the words of a man too often condemned as intolerant, rigid and stuck in past centuries. In short, Pope Benedict is saying: It’s not my job to either change the teaching or declare you eternally condemned for your failures in living it. That’s God’s job. And I’m not God.

This pleases hardly anyone, of course. It doesn’t fit with our favored ideologies or our scripts of what it means to be liberal or conservative or even religious. But to an 83-year-old man convinced of the gift of God’s love and truth and who says to his interviewer that when he prays, he really does no more than come as a “simple beggar before God,” it does.

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Light of the world

Catholicism Pure and Simple has posted some exerpts from the new book of interviews with the Pope, which – despite the impression given by the fuss around the internet in the last few days – talks about a broad range of topics.

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