"Benedict's Wager"

John Allen's Word From Rome is a retrospective on B16's first year. It's well worth R-ing TWT, but here are two points I especially like. Why, some "conservatives" want to know, has Benedict not cracked the whip more? It's because Benedict knows the secularized world fears the Church's dictates are an effort to assert power and control them.

Benedict understands that one can't break through such perceptions with finger-wagging and condemnation, which reinforce the prejudice rather than challenging it. The church must first seem a credible witness to love.
The effort of this first year has to some extent been to put the church's teaching in a new context. That was the thrust of Deus Caritas Est, his first encyclical,which surprised many people with its endorsement of eros, or human erotic love, and its overall positive tone. Writing without anathema or interdict, Benedict argued that no one is more committed to human love than the Christian, but that the church wants people to love so deeply and so eternally that it pushes them to a deeper kind of love, a lasting love, expressed in caritas.

To put Benedict's point in street language, it boils down to this: You may not like what we have to say, but at least give us credit for our motives. We're not talking about truth because we want to chain you down, but because we want to set you free. It's not a matter of love and joy versus a fussy, legalistic church. It's a question of two different visions of what real love is all about -- Baywatch, so to speak,versus the gospel. We too want happy, healthy, liberated people, we just have a different idea of how to get there.

Allen calls this "Benedict's Wager" --that the Church can re-cast itself and people of good will will be convinced. I especially like Allen's little aside at the end of this discussion:

As a footnote, for all the talk about Benedict as an Augustinian pessimist, he actually seems to believe there are still people out there who can be persuaded by unadorned argument -- if you think about it, a rather optimistic stance.

Jumping to the second point of interest, B16's view of Islam, the only point on which he represents a break with JPG rather than continuity (arguably). Allen's view is that B16 is much more of a hawk, and that the murder of Fr. Santoro in Turkey deeply affected most Vatican personnel, who see it as a sign of rising persecution of Christians in Muslim countries:

In his March 23 session with cardinals, much conversation turned on Islam, and there was general agreement with Benedict's policy of a more muscular challenge on what Catholics call "reciprocity." In essence, it means that if Muslim immigrants can claim the benefit of religious liberty in the West, then Christian minorities ought to get the same treatment in majority Muslim nations.

Jumping a bit. . .

John Paul, who met with Muslims more than 60 times over the course of his papacy, and who during a 2001 trip to Damascus became the first pope to enter a mosque, believed in reaching out to Islamic moderates and avoiding confrontational talk. Benedict XVI clearly wants good relations with Islam, and chose to meet with a group of Muslim leaders during his August trip to Cologne, Germany. Yet he will not purse that relationship at the expense of what he considers to be the truth. No doubt, Benedict intends this tougher line as a stimulus to Islamic leaders to take seriously the challenge of expressing their faith in a multi-cultural, pluralistic world.