Editorial

It is already a year since the name of Joseph Ratzinger changed to Benedict XVI. It is also 950 years since the last German Pope, Victor II (1055 - 1057), an appointee of Henry III and a reformer, it needs to be added, was elected to the papacy. Pope Benedict, whose towering intellect is universally acknowledged, will have read up the short but purposeful reign of his fellow countryman.

There is little doubt that he intends to emulate him in matters of reform even if he does so in a world that is vastly different today to what it was more than nine centuries ago and, yet, given the nature of man, politics and power, basically the same. Pope Benedict is on record as saying that Vatican Council II was a council whose time was yet to come. This must sound like an extraordinary statement to those who thought we had finished with Vatican II, that we were living in post-conciliar times.

"My sole concern," he told the cardinals in the first homily he delivered as Pope at the end of Mass in the Sistine Chapel, "is to proclaim the living presence of Christ to the whole world". This must embrace, as the dean of research at Heythrop College has pointed out in his introduction to the life and thought of Benedict XVI Fellow Worker For The Truth, an emphasis on liturgy, which "will be an important focus of Benedict's papacy".

Liturgy is, in a deep sense, all about Christ because it is all about scripture and scripture has Christ at its centre. Christ and liturgy and the truths they proclaim, then, will form the main thrust of his papacy. From both proceeds his commitment to promote the cause of ecumenism for which theological dialogue, not just dialogue for its own sake, would be necessary. As would be "the investigation of the historical reasons for the decisions made in the past", an investigation that was "indispensable".

None of this will prevent him from speaking as one who is in the world, a world he recognises as being in danger of being derailed unless leaders everywhere, of whatever belief, acknowledged the razor-sharp perils that beset our planet.

In his Easter address he spoke of a world living through "uncertainty and anxiety". Pope Benedict picked on the oppressed for a special mention; "Israel's right to exist" (which did not prevent the Iranian President from referring to Israel as "a rotten, dried tree" that would be annihilated by "one storm"); assistance to the Palestinian people "to build their future, moving towards the constitution of a state that is truly their own" (a suicide bomber detonating himself in a fast-food restaurant in Tel-Aviv was not a move in that direction) and "an honourable solution through serious and honest negotiations" to the nuclear stand-off in Iran (the hardest nut of all?).

There are those who have remarked, mistakenly, that Pope Benedict does not have the charisma of Pope John Paul. The observation requires comment. There are many types of charisma. Pope Benedict's happens to be different from the one we witnessed in his predecessor, which is why he has correctly not tried to imitate Pope John's ways. He would be his own Pope, displaying, if that is the correct word to use about a manifestly humble man, his own special charisma, a man who described himself to the crowd at St Peter's when his election was announced, as a "humble worker in the Lord's vineyard".

God grant him a papacy longer by far than the one Pope Victor II enjoyed.