With Good Reason Benedict at Ground Zero

Apr 22, 2008

Benedict's sojourn among us last week was composed of countless "moments."

There were, first and foremost, all those personal "moments":  "He looked right at me!"  "He smiled at me!" "He grabbed me by the hand!"

There were the moments of ecumenism.

There was that moment of fraternity with his brother bishops which did not lack candor and admonishment-albeit highly measured-for how some bishops had failed to be the shepherds they should have been in the handling of sexual abuse by priests.  And then the moment Benedict met with some of the victims of that abuse.

There were plenty of light moments as well.  About all he had to do was light up with that shy grin of his to send electricity through his audience. There was also that particularly warm moment when he greeted physically disabled young people at St. Joseph's seminary in Yonkers.

And then, of course, there was the moment at Ground Zero-a moment on which I now want to reflect in greater depth.

"My visit this morning to Ground Zero" Pope Benedict told 3000 well wishers present to see him off at JFK airport on Sunday night, "will remain firmly etched in my memory, as I continue to pray for those who died and for all who suffer in consequence of the tragedy that occurred there in 2001."

We can only hope that Benedict's uninterrupted moments of silent prayer before a small reflecting pool built for the occasion has brought the family members of those who perished on September 11th closer to closure-a word we were hearing a lot on Sunday.  One thinks especially of the families of approximately 1100 victims of the attack who never recovered so much as a fragment of the bodies of their lost loved ones.  Benedict blessed them and he blessed the ground-the hallowed ground-in which those bodies, as one family member of those 1100 put it, are simply understood to rest.

Theologian and commentator George Weigel wrote last week in Newsweek magazine about another kind of "moment" Benedict may have already had-not necessarily during this apostolic journey to the US, but perhaps already somewhere in his three-year-old papacy. 

Weigel was recalling the June 1979 visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland. Wrote Weigel:
Cold-war historians now recognize June 2-10, 1979, as a moment on which the history of our times pivoted. By igniting a revolution of conscience that gave birth to the Solidarity movement, John Paul II accelerated the pace of events that eventually led to the demise of European communism and a radically redrawn map in Eastern Europe. There were other actors and forces at work, to be sure; but that John Paul played a central role in the communist crackup, no serious student of the period doubts today.

Weigel's salient point, however, is that few people were able to discern the significance of that trip at the time.  There were certainly many reasons for this, but a deeper reason, suggests Weigel, might lie "in the filters through which many people read history today."  He notes that, according to one such filter, religious and moral conviction is irrelevant to shaping the flow of history. Nearly thirty years since that historic trip, history itself has demonstrated the stark inadequacy of such a filter.
Whether or not Benedict's own "June 1979 moment" has already come, only time will tell.  I don't expect his presence at Ground Zero will necessarily play itself out as that moment, but then again, who knows?  In addition to the peace and-we can only hope-further healing it brought to the families of the victims, how can we fail to grasp other significant aspects of this event?

In the person of Benedict, faith and reason met at Ground Zero on Sunday-the faith of the leader of one billion Catholics in the world, and the reason of one of contemporary history's most educated men. Benedict has been unflinching in his contention that faith without reason (religious fanaticism) and reason without faith (secularism) are dangerous paths for humanity. Might this event occasion an even more intense dialogue between Islamic and Christian intellectuals on the place of religion in public life, its ability to shape culture, and our common need to respect religious freedom?  Might Benedict's presence at Ground Zero give renewed vigor to those agents of culture who are striving to disabuse Americans of our own brand of secularism which relegates religion-at best-to the realm of the personally therapeutic and quirky, if not seeing it as something inherently divisive and even dangerous. We can only hope-precisely what Benedict would have us do.

The iconic image of the 81-year-old Pope lost in prayer before a reflecting pool at Ground Zero was, in the end, a poignant reminder that we live in a time, we might say a season, of great consequence for humanity.  Time and again, almighty God-faithful to his creatures to the very end-has raised up men and women to lead us through remarkable seasons of the Church and of human history. 

Isn't this why, come to think of it, Robert Bolton's play A Man for All Seasons-the story of just one such individual, Sir Thomas More-has garnered such a timeless appropriateness and meaning? We have good reason to believe that Benedict is a man for our season, and that his moment has now come. 

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