The TLS blog

The German Shepherd bows out

Pope Benedict XVI © Tony Gentile/Reuters

 

BY RUPERT SHORTT

 

To many, the news was seismic. No pope has resigned since the fifteenth century. Perhaps, though, the portents of Benedict XVI’s abdication were there all along. Two years ago he told a German interviewer, Peter Seewald, that a pope could step down if he were too physically or mentally frail to do his job. Even John Paul II, renowned for the doggedness with which he pursued his ministry in the face of chronic ill health, is said to have entrusted his private secretary with a resignation letter to be published if he reached a certain level of incapacity.

But John Paul’s mental condition see-sawed. His toughness won the admiration of many; overall, though, the effect on the Church was very mixed. The barque of Peter was steered this way and that by competing Vatican officials, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger among them. The contrast between sclerosis at the top, and the vibrant grassroots of the Church in Latin America, Africa and Asia, looked stark.

The unapologetic Francis Spufford

By RUPERT SHORTT

Richard Dawkins’s bestseller The God Delusion (2006) has prompted many pro-religion counterblasts, though none has enjoyed a comparable profile, still less the high priest of atheism’s vast sales figures. Perhaps the situation will change with the publication of Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic, a book written with as much vim and joie de guerre as the works it excoriates.

Spufford, who teaches writing at Goldsmiths College London, knows a thing or two about an arresting opening. “My daughter has just turned six,” he tells us. “Some time over the next year or so, she will discover that her parents are weird. We’re weird because we go to church. This means that as she gets older there’ll be voices telling her what it means, getting louder and louder until by the time she’s a teenager they’ll be shouting right in her ear. It means that we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities. That we fetishise pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we’re too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. . . That we’re savagely judgemental.” You get the picture.

Worth a new Mass?

By RUPERT SHORTT

 

How should seminal texts from the remote past be translated or otherwise recast in a contemporary idiom? When it comes to liturgy, the matter is of much more than academic interest. British readers, especially, will be familiar with the ferocity of quarrels between Prayer Book traditionalists and modernizers in the Anglican Church. Now, though, the rumblings are coming from English-speaking Catholics, whose own services have been changed by the new translation of the Missal introduced earlier this month.