The empire strikes back
Edition: 1 - All-round Country
Section: Features, pg। 013
Attempting to hold back the tide of atheist literature and popular fiction, the Pope has launched a tome about Jesus, and it's set to be a bestseller, writes Jill Rowbotham.
WHEN The Da Vinci Code opened in cinemas across the world a year ago and became a box office hit, Pope Benedict XVI, then a year into his reign, remained silent on the theme that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had produced a line of descendants whom the Catholic Church and its subsidiary, Opus Dei, had long conspired to conceal.
The Pope was in fact working on a blockbuster of his own and last week his version of Jesus' story, Jesus of Nazareth, went on sale in the world's largest English language market, North America.
German, Polish and Italian versions of his book have already rung up sales of one million since their release last month.
When his new work hit the bookshops, the 80-year-old leader of the world's one billion Catholics, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was on a tour of Latin America.
Last week Newsweek published an excerpt from the new book about Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist, saying: ``Benedict's portrait may contribute little to our historical understanding of Jesus, but what he does give is a window into his own, passionate and uncompromising faith, a faith that faces constant challenge in the world of ideas.''
Newsweek points out that Benedict, an elderly German theologian once labelled God's rottweiler, has been notoriously disapproving of unauthorised views of Jesus, even suspending an American priest for writing a book about Jesus that did not give sufficient credence to the resurrection.
``But for orthodox Christian believers, Benedict's book is a gift, a series of homilies on the New Testament by a masterful scriptural exegete,'' Newsweek says.
In Australia, religious scholar Francis Moloney has greeted the Pope's book enthusiastically. ``What's exciting to a person in my trade is here we have not just a historical report of what may or may not have happened, he's interested in what it means and what it means for him is that the baptism points to the cross, which links
it to Christian baptism.''
Moloney, who heads the Salesian order of John Bosco in Australia and the Pacific, is also an author. His latest book, The Gospel According to Judas, co-written with Jeffrey Archer, was released before Easter to widespread publicity.
He is interested to see what the Pope's books -- this is the first of two volumes -- will make of some of Christianity's abiding knotty problems: that Jesus was fully God and fully man, and part of a trinity with God the father and the holy spirit. ``It will be much more nuanced than most mainstream believers who would have it that Jesus of Nazareth walked around Palestine saying he was the second person of the divine trinity.''
Paul Collins, a former priest and now a commentator on the Catholic Church, declares the Newsweek excerpt ``vintage Ratzinger'', a reference to the Pope's long academic career in Germany before he was seconded to the Vatican.
``It's a theological interpretation of Jesus' life, not a conventional look at the Gospels in the sense that it is a verse by verse commentary,'' Collins says. ``In many ways he looks for the deeper symbolic meaning in the text and that in some ways is new, not in the church's traditions but in terms of modern scholarship of Jesus.''
In the baptism scene, Collins says Ratzinger struggles with the theology of Jesus being both divine and human. Although contemporary theological study emphasises Jesus as sharing in the human condition, the papal view is emphatic about Jesus' access to God and his reflection of the will of God.
Moloney and Collins zero in on the Pope's reassertion of the divinity of Jesus and reject that it was written in response to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, saying it has been in production for decades -- Moloney claims up to 30 years, Collins estimates up to 20 -- and with a number of chapters completed before Ratzinger became
Pope.
They have differing theories about a passage picked up by the media in the earlier translations released last month, which refers to ``the worst books, which destroy the figure of Jesus and dismantle faith'' and the interpretation of the Bible going down ``mistaken paths''.
Moloney speculates that the books the Pope refers to would not be popular fiction such as Brown's. ``The holy father would be concerned about much more dangerous books, serious scholarly books, particularly those coming out of the Jesus Seminar, that reduce Jesus to a mere 1st century wandering charismatic prophet.''
The Jesus Seminar is a group of modern scholars concerned with establishing what is historically reliable about the Gospels and Jesus. Its The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? by founder Robert W. Funk was published in 1997. Benedict XVI believes it gets the balance between Jesus' humanity and divinity wrong. There also has been a slew of anti-religion writers gaining a lot of media attention, among them Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion (also showing as a two-part series on ABC television); Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great; American writer Sam Harris, with Letter to a Christian Nation; and, most recently, France's Michel Onfray, with The Atheist Manifesto.
Collins detects papal concern about another modern theological movement. ``He's obviously still quite critical of the way in which certain interpretations of scripture would work, for example liberation theology,'' he says. Liberation theology argues it is the church's responsibility to support human rights activism and to agitateor social change.
One of the movement's champions, San Salvador's archbishop Oscar Romero, was shot dead in 1980 after a sermon urging soldiers to stop carrying out the government's repressive orders. The movement has been a strong influence in Latin America in recent decades, angering the Vatican.
John Paul II aggressively opposed it -- Collins says he regarded it as a ``deviant exegesis [interpretation] of scripture'' -- and so did then cardinal Ratzinger. Moloney says: ``Cardinal Ratzinger was very opposed to it in the early days because he felt it was linked to a Marxist theology.''
There was clear evidence of that during the Pope's five-day visit to Brazil. The world's ``most Catholic'' country with 125 million followers was targeted to try to stop the significant outflow of faithful to Pentecostalism. The Pope is not the only church leader with this problem: the denominations that come under this category are experiencing satisfying rates of growth across several countries, including Australia, where they are represented by congregations such as Sydney's Hillsong and the Christian City Churches. Pentecostals tend to have a demonstrative style of worship, with an emphasis on music, and a conservative attitude to the Bible.
While in Brazil, the Pope attacked ``ethical relativism'', reiterated the church's opposition to contraception, abortion and divorce, and slammed rampant capitalism.
The Brazil visit is the biggest stir BenedictXVI has made since his famous speech in September at the University of Regensburg in Germany. He caused an uproar by quoting from a dialogue between Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and ``an educated Persian'' that probably took place at the turn of the 14th century: ``Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.''
Eruptions of Muslim protest greeted these remarks and there was forensic examination of their meaning and context, but it was clear that intentionally or not, the pontiff profoundly offended some sections of that community. Collins attributes the impolitic remark to a changing of the guard in the Vatican: the trip fell between the departure of Cardinal Angelo Sodano as secretary of state and the arrival of his replacement, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. He points out it was taken out of context, the response to it was an overreaction and that the Pope made up for it with his trip to Turkey in December, when pictures of him in Istanbul's Blue Mosque were published across the world.
Like any world statesman the Pope juggles a range of issues: reconciliation with Anglican and Orthodox Christians, relations with Islam and relations with China, sexual abuse by clergy, pressure for concessions on condoms and celibacy, and dealing with AIDS.
While he has been trying to shore up relations and numbers in South America, bemusement has been building about when he will announce that Catholics are allowed once more to say the ancient Tridentine Mass in Latin, as opposed to saying the modern mass in Latin. The Second Vatican Council did away with the right to the former as part of the 1960s reforms that modernised the church. Collins says the old Latin mass's return has been ``predicted more often than Dame Nellie Melba's retirement'', noting it is an indication the Pope sometimes has difficulty making up his mind.
The feeling in Rome, says Collins, is that the Pope is getting more people to his public audiences than John Paul II, and that the composition of the crowd is fewer tourists and more followers.
``I certainly think the Pope has softened and he thinks it is his responsibility to be more universal, a reconciler of the community, but nonetheless he has not in any way compromised on a lot of the themes that were typical of him before his elevation.''
Australians will be able to make their own assessment in July next year, when the pontiff is due to make his first visit here to conduct the closing mass for World Youth Day in Sydney.
Copyright 2007 / The Australian
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Source: Australian, The, MAY 25, 2007 Item: 200705251013009640
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