As some sort of tradition, Pope Benedict XVI. has made it a custom that he gives interviews before he undertakes a major travel abroad. So he invited four German journalists in the forefront of his visit to Bavaria, his (and also my) homeland in the beginning of September. If you want to see the entire interview (it’s in German language), make sure you have the Real-Player installed, then click HERE:
I don’t hesitate to confess at any occasion that my admiration for this man is unlimited. Our by far brightest living German is sitting in Rome on the Holy See. Once you start reading the books he has written during his entire life, you will realize that deep conviction of his Christian faith in combination with a razorsharp intellectual mind. If you are a believer or not, one cannot deny the unparalled purity of his thought. What I mean with “purity” extends to two dimensions: one, the unblurred clarity of his mental agility to support an argument from the thesis to its conclusion as well as two, the unshaken principles of virtue of this humble and unassuming personality. People who had seen him speaking always came back stunned that Benedict and previously also the theologist Prof. Joseph Ratzinger speaks freely as if it is written. And that’s what you get to see in this interview: His answers are visibly spontaneous, but he follows them through with an amazing sharpness and refined structure of his words.
What I liked most from what he said is that he wants to refresh the faith in our single-sidedly enlightened western socities by propelling a positive message, to say what the church stays for instead of reconfirming the false perception that it stands for a “collection of prohibitions”. Furthermore, he is right to make the the point that the “clash of civilizations” which we are facing at the moment in the Middle East or in its most perverted form of the (thwarted) terrorist attacks, can hardly be met just by the excessive rational secularism into which we westerners seem to project the highest stage of personal freedom. By contrast, if we want to engage in a cross-cultural dialogue, Christianity is not a party in an “us against them”-conflict, but can rather function as a bridge in which other cultures will recognize the respect towards some higher being under which we submit our own demeanor. I could tell from many occasions when I got asked in India what my religion was: Whan I replied “Catholic”, all perfect, especially because Hinduism is a strongly open, tolerant and, say, “inclusive” religion. When I conducted the counter test and said “nothing”, “atheist” or “agnostic”, I could see total disbelief, even the attitude that I was missing out on something very important in my life.
There was just one passage which I did not like: I would like to stress up-front that religion is much more than the annoying debate of condoms vs. non-condoms. Yet, the Pope’s conclusion that just technical education and the recommendation of contraceptives in Africa have only lead to war and AIDS-epidemics, is factually flawed. He has a point, though, that education should not just pertain to skills and engineering, but should also extend to the formation of moral standards. Certainly Africa as the forgotten continent has certainly a long way to go for both of these objectives, yet ignoring the success of decreased infection-rates and AIDS-deads where sexual eduaction had been undertaken with rigour, is close to cynical.
Nevertheless, Benedict’s interview is a masterpiece and underscores his justified weight as a great religious and secular leader of the 21st century.
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