The deaths of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell have been great losses to those who remain faithful to traditional Catholic beliefs. The closest I ever got to meeting Pope Benedict was in January 1988, when he visited Cambridge as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to deliver the Fisher Lecture at the Catholic Chaplaincy. Monsignor Alfred Gilbey helped to arrange the invitation.
Fisher House was packed. Ratzinger’s talk was called “Consumer materialism and Christian hope”. He quoted CS Lewis, talked about the AIDS epidemic and warned the student gathering about the dangers of drugs: “The result of despairing of a world which is experienced as a prison built of facts in which man cannot long endure.” He ended his speech with the line: “Morality is not man’s prison; it is rather the divine in him.”
In 2005, when he was pope, Benedict did not forget his Cambridge visit. He donated £2,000 to the Cambridge chaplaincy when it was fundraising for a new chapel. By way of a telling example of the holy kindness referred to in this issue’s main leader, this money came out of his own pocket.
I had the privilege of meeting Cardinal Pell last year, when he gave the Herald the opportunity to run exclusive extracts from his prison diaries. He had a commanding and charismatic presence. It was his first time back in the United Kingdom – where he took a DPhil at Oxford and has many friends – since his release from prison in Melbourne.
He told me how he had visited the chapel at Wardour Castle in Wiltshire to celebrate Mass, staying with a Knight of Justice of the Order of Malta, and had been taken around the Wallace Collection by a member of the Waugh family (he enjoyed The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold in prison, along with reading St Thomas More and watching the Ashes test series). One reason that he had so relished his week in the UK was that he admitted to being a strong supporter of Brexit: “I am very pleased to be back in a liberated London.”
He also celebrated Mass for the Oxford members of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. The Ordinariate was founded by his friend Pope Benedict XVI and he told me that he was “very sympathetic towards it”. To anyone hostile to the idea that Anglican clergymen with families can become Catholic priests, he mischievously quoted Mao Zedong: “Let a thousand flowers bloom.”
Cardinal Pell also gave the annual Newman Lecture at Oxford, which he began by quoting Matthew Arnold’s melancholic poem of 1867, “Dover Beach”, on the theme of declining faith. The concept of a “darkling” and hollow world was not one with which he cared to be identified, let alone endorse or even understand. He simply didn’t believe in the idea of a universe stripped back to mere Dawkins-like logical determinism – a material world without the providence of God or divine truth. He told me that he chose the “Sea of Faith” as a metaphor for how the secular world was simply wrong.
I personally hope that Cardinal Pell’s cause for canonisation may be opened soon. His lack of bitterness about being wrongly incarcerated was truly saint-like, and his prison diaries make clear that he repeatedly returned to the ideas of forgiveness being at the heart of Christian life. In prison, he prayed for those who convicted him, as well as his fellow prisoners: “Not just forgiveness… But God’s providence, that God is in charge, that God is good, is interested in us… that suffering can be redemptive. We believe that we are redeemed by Christ’s suffering and death on the Cross. The major point of difference between us and those without religion is our attitude to suffering.”
A long-term Catholic Herald reader – and a contributor, too – he told me that he didn’t “invent” any new teachings. “I follow the doctrines of the Church and try very hard not to push the more difficult ones away.” His mission was simply to be true to what the Catholic Church stands for. Which is another way of saying that he wasn’t afraid to speak out in defence of true Catholic values and doctrine. Surely a saint for our times.
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