What Kind of Pope Will He Be?

(2 of 2)

Day 41 Deflating An Image
In his first extra-roman excursion, to the Adriatic port of Bari on May 29, Benedict seemed uncomfortable with the chants of "Be-ne-det-to!" by young Catholics eager to pick up the old "Gio-van-ni Paolo!" tradition. (In subsequent weeks, he even shushed them.) "John Paul built a rapport based on [such] enthusiasm," says another Rome-based Cardinal. "This Holy Father tends to diminish the importance of enthusiasm." While preaching, John Paul would wave, gesticulate and repeatedly make the sign of the Cross. Benedict's pulpit style is austere by contrast. During his Bari homily, which lauded observation of the Sabbath as an antidote to modern life's "unbridled consumerism" and "secularism closed to transcendence," Benedict allowed himself only a small circling gesture of his cupped hands. He displayed the Host with a simple up-and-down movement rather than the slow- motion drama that is in Eucharistic vogue.

The Vatican official and former Benedict colleague calls this part of Benedict's attempt to "simplify the papacy" and "deflate" the Pope's image in favor of his ideas. He expresses those ideas simply so that the author's style does not obscure the primacy of Christ. Observes Cardinal Kasper: "John Paul would make longer, maybe more poetic discourses. Benedict is more precise. He is a theologian." An explainer of symbols, not the symbol itself.

Day 56 Battlefield Europe
Much has been made of how "gentle" the new Pope is. And his comportment and rhetoric have been relatively mild. (While discussing aids prevention with African bishops, for instance, rather than restating John Paul's opposition to condoms, he simply called abstinence the only "fail-safe" way to prevent hiv.) But those who missed the "Panzer Kardinal" were rewarded in the weeks before an unusual political triumph on June 13. It was clear that Benedict regarded Europe as the epicenter of the secular relativism he scorned, but it was less clear what he might do about it. When an Italian referendum threatened to end restrictions on in-vitro fertilization, the Pope joined the fray, telling Italian bishops fighting it, "I am close to you with my words and my prayers." When the referendum failed, Italian television called the church the winner. Three weeks later, Spain legalized gay marriage over Catholic objections and Benedict's (indirect) criticism. But the Italian vote galvanized prelates who had suffered decades of defeat on divorce and abortion and suggested that if Benedict picks his political fights wisely, he may be rewarded.

Day 80 A Player On Islam?
The deadly July 7 bombings in London exposed the Pope's desire to be heard on the topic of Islam. Within hours of the carnage, the Italian newswire ANSA reported that he intended to call the attack "anti-Christian." It seemed a harsh and narrow attribution, and indeed his actual statement replaced the term with "barbaric." Yet Vatican Secretary of State Angelo Sodano subsequently muddied the waters by saying that "anti-Christian" had been intended to suggest that the attacks were inconsistent with Christian values rather than aimed at Christian targets. That in turn led to a careful clarification by Benedict that the bombings represented "not a clash of civilizations, but only a small group of fanatics." Asked whether Islam is a religion of peace, he mused, "I wouldn't want to label it with big general words. Certainly there are also elements that can favor peace and other elements. We must try to find the best elements to help." The response's nuance may not endear him to Muslim groups, but his notion of the Catholic Church "helping" moderate Islam was a telling excursion beyond typical interfaith vocabulary into the language of realpolitik. What sort of help Benedict might offer remains to be seen.

Day 98 Speaking Out At Last
July 25 may be remembered as the day the Pope finally opened up. Officially, reporters were barred from the 12th century cathedral in Introd, down the hill from Les Combes, while he had a few words with local priests as his vacation ended. But a day later, he passed the proceedings to L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, and they were riveting. In a rat-a-tat-tat strafe of global Christianity, he asserted that traditional Protestantism is in "profound crisis," that evangelicalism owes its popularity to a "certainty" that he said derives from its willingness to settle for a "minimum of faith," and that although Catholicism "isn't in such bad shape," the West is "a world that is tired of its own culture ... that has arrived at a time in which there's no more evidence of the need for God, much less Christ, and in which it seems that man alone can make himself."

Benedict also challenged a phenomenon in which John Paul often reveled — the explosion of priestly vocations in the developing world, which the new Pope said sometimes owed less to faith than to seminarians' quest for material gain and "social promotion" in their villages. If the global south is the church's future, he apparently plans to vet it. Most concretely, he dashed the hopes of those who begged him to let Catholics who have divorced and remarried without getting an annulment take Communion. Yet he did so with some delicacy, acknowledging their suffering and saying they should feel they still belong to the church.

Did his talk break new ground? Perhaps not doctrinally, but it demonstrated qualities that the Vatican has missed at least since the latter years of John Paul's illness: a subtle, questing intelligence; a willingness to understand issues in their complexity even when he does not change his mind; a certain humility and a spirit of practical engagement that seem eager to take on the world of the church and the church in the world.

A few days earlier, when the Pope seemed to be playing his cards close to his chest, his spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls assured reporters who had made the pilgrimage to Les Combes not to worry. "We'll have a lot of work to do," he said. "There will be a lot to analyze." Indeed, there already is.

1. Why McCain Picked Palin
2. McCain's Prickly TIME Interview
3. The Palin Pick: Bold or Disastrous?
4. McCain's Surprise Pick: Sarah Palin
5. Klein: Obama's Speech 'Very Tough'
6. Obama's Risky Stadium Gig
7. Exclusive Poll: Obama's Swing Leads
8. Is McCain Overplaying the POW Card?
9. What Bush Taught McCain
10. Clinton Builds a Bridge to Obama