I went out for breakfast this morning before anyone else awoke -- my favorite Saturday activity, now that MJ's old enough to be left behind for a few hours -- and took with me the new encyclical, finishing it over a pile of fried yuca, steak and eggs at the local Cuban diner.
I haven't read anyone else's comments on it yet, and here's mine.
First, it's not long -- I read half before bed and half over breakfast. Nor is it challenging for anyone who's used to reading theology; much less challenging than Cardinal Ratzinger's academic work.
B16 begins with a discourse about the nature of Christian hope and how it intersects with faith. He talks about the "certainty of hope," which sounded paradoxical to me at first (isn't hope something that concerns the thing you might experience, not the thing you will experience?), but I think I get it now: through faith we have a certainty of something that will satisfy our every desire, but its nature so completely unknowable to us now that it has to reside in the realm of the desired-thing, the not-yet-realized thing, and so it is something we have hope for and not satisfaction in. So the faith and the hope are one. (Forgive me for my clumsy paraphrasing. There's a reason -- okay, several -- that I don't write the encyclicals. Go read it yourself.)
The real meat of the encyclical is paragraphs 32-48, in which Benedict describes three "settings" for learning and practicing the virtue of hope. As I read the first, on prayer, and the second, on suffering, I was nodding and going "Oh yes," and "That's a nice way of putting it," and other mild expressions of agreement. The third section, though, blew me away. If you only have time to read part of the encyclical, paragraphs 41-48 are the place to go: "Judgment as a setting for learning and practising hope."
Another paradox: the Last Judgment as a means of inspiring hope? As Mark said when I told him the topic, "That's, um, odd." Most of the time, the image of the Last Judgment has been used to inspire fear. Benedict prefers to say that it inspires "responsibility." Intriguing!
In those few paragraphs (only 4,159 words in length) he lays out an astonishingly concise exposition on the meaning of "images of God;" on the Christian view of history; on the tension between freely granted grace and justice for evildoers; on purgatory; on praying for the beloved dead; and on the nature of good and evil in the human person. If you include paragraphs 49-50 in that astonishingly concise exposition, you also get an incisive reflection on the role of Mary in all this. So paragraphs 41 through 50 are terrific preparation for explaining some of the trickier bits of Catholic theology. I really couldn't believe how much he packed in. And it's all really fresh and new, at least to me.
Anyway, you shouldn't be listening to me... read it yourself. Form your own take on it -- and then, as I'm doing now, see what others are saying: Amy Welborn, Disputations, John Allen. Surely more is forthcoming...
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