Benedict XVI is no longer Pope. It has been for me a
real bereavement. I loved, I can’t say the man, which is reductive, so let’s
say the person. Persona, in Latin,
meant originally the mask a man wears in society, the face by which he shows
who he is. Now he was the Pope, that was his person.
What is to be a Pope? Pope is the bishop of Rome, as
successor of Saint Peter, and Peter was the man invested by Jesus, according to
the Gospels, to herd his sheep, the rock on which his ecclesia, the converging of all the people recognizing themselves
in him, was to be built.
And again, who was He? Who was Jesus (the) Christ? The
king par excellence, the anointed one
(as it was the case with the Old Testament kings), through whom it shines forth
the glory of the Lord, real ultimate authority from whom all things come and on
whom all things rest.
Moreover, what does a king do? The answer is simple,
he represents the people. And don’t take this to mean that there is a people
already existing, and afterwards there is a king representing it. No, the
people exists only through him who represents all those belonging to it. This
makes the king a sacrificial figure.
To live as people we have to recognize each other as
men, i.e., conversely, reciprocally to represent each other in our common
humanity. A man, though, cannot represent another in what in he has, his
properties, which can differ (starting from being male and female, and
consequently sons and daughters of a man and a woman converging in marital
alliance), but only by giving, which means by stripping himself of the
properties he has. Sure, we identify each other by what we give. So, only he
who gives all can represent everybody. But to give all means to give one’s life:
in a giving exchange, though, in which life is renewed, being given back. This
is what the king does: effectively to represent with his person the reciprocal
life giving and receiving people are involved in.
I know I have been very short: these lines summarize in
fact the common sense of all kind of evidence, historical and ethnographical,
of human affairs, collected by some of the best cultural anthropologists and theologians.
Everywhere giving takes the ceremonial form of gift, in which the things given expressly
stand for the ones who give. And everywhere we find gifts turning decisively
into something like sacrifice, i.e. into rituals in which the person feigns a
dying and a coming out from death renewed. Even now days there are (in spite of
all denials and psychological reductions) actions of which we must say that by
them an older self dies and a new one is born. Such are the actions performed
by kings. But what is performed elsewhere as a ritual action, becomes full
reality with Jesus Christ.
Here is the universal meaning of the Cross, symbol of
a passage in which life is taken and given, of which every Christian is called
to share through the sacraments. Anointed with chrisma, he becomes himself a “Christ”. But, for Catholics, the
anointment finds a special representations in the person of bishops, and, among
bishops, in the bishop of Rome.
Back then to Benedict’s renuntiatio. What was it its meaning? We were all stricken by it,
we who love him, and those who don’t love him. Some, mostly among these, have
seen in it a kind of surrender to the intrigue of the Curia, and/or to the
aggression on the Church by a totalitarian liberal (I prefer to say, instead of
the banal “secular”) world. It would be like saying that Jesus Christ didn’t
deliver himself voluntarily to his enemies, thus challenging them, but more or
less cowardly gave in to them not opposing any resistance. This, however, if
anything, is not the story the Gospels tell.
Losing strength – the strength necessary to govern the
Church – was the reason given by Benedict for his renuntiatio. He choose with it to live his papal, Christian persona to the very end. In a different
way, but meaning the same as his predecessor. With the Parkinson undermining
him, John Paul II, asked whether he meant to retire, replied in turn with a
question: «Can one descend from the Cross?». Obviously not. Aware that some
might have taken in this sense his renuntiatio,
Benedict, in one of his last public words, said: «I am not descending from the
Cross.». Retiring in clausura, disappearing
from the eyes of the world, he showed himself in that very passage symbolized
by the Cross, where through death shines forth life.
These long overdue lines of comment on Benedict’s renuntiatio are meant, at the eve of the
conclave, as a prayer, to see come out of it a new Pope as saintly as he. Equally
endowed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom and understanding, counsel
and strength, knowledge, fear of the Lord and justice.
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