Benedictums
It has been reported that the first thing the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger did after breaking the seals on the Papal apartment that had been shuttered since the death of his predecessor was move in his library, tens of thousands of volumes. There's no doubt about it, the pope chosen in the shortest conclave in recorded Church history is an intellectual, a genius, perhaps one of the foremost religious minds since the post-war righteousness of Niebuhr and Tillich. At least that's what CNN would have us believe.
In the days following the pope's naming, every godless wonk of the Semitic media would offer this quite German dialectic: John Paul was the people's pope, a kindly loving soul; Benedict's more of a mind, a right real thinking man with little social skills. Which of course sent all of maybe 10 people in search of his many, many books, published in English by the small Ignatius Press, based amid the hippie wasteland of Boulder, Colorado, and previously known for their wonderful hymnals and ordinaries.
Reading the pope-most famously the author of Dominus Iesus, a document from 2000 declaring eternal salvation an exclusively Catholic estate-one encounters the most dangerous type of mandarin: not the Judeo-Christian intellectual who embraces exegesis as art, interpretation as subtlety and discourse for its own sake, but the type who embraces argument as dogma, knowledge as directive, and history as heresy to be reacted against, manipulated in the interest of the preservation of power.
"That is the love of contradiction, the temptation to mistrust," the pope writes against interpretation, "all this is present in mankind because of an impulse toward destruction."
Or this late-model, scared-shitless reaction to our, um, postmodern world: "The present-day crisis [in values, God, everything!] is due to the fact that the connecting link between the objective and subjective realms have disappeared."
Such people have historically been known as either rationalists or Heidegger, or run national security agencies; such a person-and a former Grand Inquisitor at that-now heads the Catholic Church at a unique time in its history. With today's "crisis of philosophy and theology," with Europe threatened by anarchists, queers and Godless central bankers, and America beset by Mammon and Babel, Benedict must seek raptureless salvation for the few over the many (he writes extensively on "the infinite precedence of the individual over the universal"). Ultimately, it seems, our pope seeks eternal life just for himself, and maybe his books.