c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The best way to understand Pope Benedict XVI is to compare his succeeding the larger-than-life John Paul II to Harry Truman’s following the equally giant-sized Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The year-end news roundups stressed the void left in the media universe by the death of John Paul. Pundits alternated between puzzlement at and pity for Benedict, a 78-year-old German scholar better known for summoning theologians to zero-hour examinations in the shadowed recesses of the Holy Office than greeting crowds in the flooding light of St. Peter’s Square.

Analysts continue to shake his nine-month-old papacy as a child does an unopened present for clues about what is inside. What they miss is that Benedict has already done something in plain sight as dramatic and far reaching as any of John Paul’s actions.

In a quiet, simple, yet unhidden way, the new pope has validated the work of Vatican II, the landmark council (1962-65) that modernized the Catholic Church. His carefully chosen name symbolically separates him from his predecessor. It also identifies him with the World War I Benedict who ended the witch hunt era against Catholic scholars set off by Pope Pius X’s condemnation, as ill-fitted as it was ill-defined, of what was called “modernism.”

Benedict is described as “shy” in comparison to the self-dramatizing John Paul. He is not bashful as much as he is unself-conscious on the world stage. By his natural underplaying, he has drained the theatricality out of the public papacy. He has thereby gracefully ended in the 21st century the imperial papal style.

It reminds one of how banners fell after Garibaldi’s 19th century rising in Italy ended the church-as-worldly-kingdom by stripping away the papal states, installing a king in a former papal palace in Rome, and leaving the pope, as it was then said, a “prisoner of the Vatican.”

The then Pope Pius IX reacted by pressuring Vatican Council I (1870-1871) to proclaim the pope infallible when speaking ex cathedra, that is, from the throne, with its echo of worldly power, on matters of faith and morals. Pius IX got so much attention from other heads of state that England’s prime minister, worried at its effects on the loyalty of English Catholics to the crown, promptly wrote a book of distinctions and rebuttal on the subject.

Vatican I was interrupted by the arrival of Garibaldi’s red-shirted troops in Rome and its work was not concluded until Pope John XXIII convened Vatican II almost a century later. The paper on the nature of the church and whether the pope, by virtue of his infallibility, is an absolute monarch controlling all authority within it was taken up again.

People noticed the changed in the Mass to their own language, as opposed to Latin, but Vatican II’s greatest achievement was to finish Vatican I by restoring the balance between the pope and the bishops of the world. The council fathers reinstated the ancient practice of collegiality that recognizes that bishops, including the pope, derive their authority from their being ordained bishops rather than as a delegation from the primal store of papal authority. This means bishops are not passive messengers but full collaborators in the work of the church.

Pope Benedict XVI’s unaffected and non-histrionic manner represents a healthy move back to a more human and modest papacy after the screen-filling yet still remote personality of John Paul II. John Paul overpowered and overshadowed the world’s bishops and, although he championed democracy’s victory over communism in Europe, he did not encourage it in the church. This extraordinary man served the world that he viewed as a stage for his undeniably imperial presence.

Benedict XVI comes across as himself and if he lacks an actor’s gifts, he is also free of an actor’s needs. He has already diminished the dramatic and enlarged the pastoral possibilities of the papal office in the 21st century.

As president, Franklin D. Roosevelt was as dominant and histrionic as John Paul II was as pope. Commentators doubted that FDR’s successor could step out of his shadow, but the down-to-earth Harry Truman proved that an ordinary man could be a great leader and saved the post-war world. Pope Benedict XVI may well be to John Paul II what Truman was to FDR, a loyal successor who by being himself also changes the world.

MO/PH END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.) Editors: To obtain a photo of Eugene Kennedy, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.