Seeking God's face.

CHERISHED ideas die hard. True, the favored image of the erstwhile Cardinal Ratzinger as a brutal Grand Inquisitor has not survived the first year of the pontificate of Benedict XVI--but a residual miasma of mainstream suspicion prevents the appropriate amount of attention from being paid to some of the new Pope's remarkable pronouncements. Fortunately, the indispensable Catholic publisher Ignatius has now made available in book form a series of the important speeches delivered by Pope Benedict in Germany last summer. In God's Revolution: World Youth Day and Other Cologne Talks (108 pp., $14.95), we have some of this Pope's central messages.

Benedict's ministry is radically Christocentric. Welcoming pilgrims to the World Youth Day celebrations, he insisted that only Christ "gives the fullness of life to humanity.... Christ takes from you nothing that is beautiful and great, but brings everything to perfection for the glory of God, the happiness of men and women, and the salvation of the world." Yet he proclaims Christ in a spirit not of triumphalism, but of the love that is at the heart of the Christian faith. This focus on love would become even sharper in the encyclical Deus Caritas Est, published a few months afterward, but it was certainly in evidence in the Germany visit. Benedict told an audience of seminarians that their vocation might be compared to "falling in love"--and "love knows no 'why'; it is a free gift to which one responds with the gift of self."

This has important consequences for the way Christianity is practiced and proclaimed. In a sermon on the journey of the Magi, Benedict pointed out that these searchers for a King "had to change their ideas about power, about God and about man ... Now they were able to see that God's power is not like that of the powerful of this world. God's ways are not as we imagine them or as we might wish them to be. God does not enter into competition with earthly powers in this world. He does not marshal his divisions alongside other divisions.... He contrasts the noisy and ostentatious power of this world with the defenseless power of love ... [that] ushers in the Kingdom of God."

These comments capture well the spirit of the Pope's addresses to Jewish, Muslim, and non-Catholic Christian audiences in Cologne. To the Muslims, he made a timely confession, and appeal: "How many pages of history record battles and wars that have been waged, with both sides invoking the Name of God, as if fighting and killing the enemy could be pleasing to Him. The recollection of these sad events should fill us with shame, for we know only too well what atrocities have been committed in the name of religion." This admission of the sins of Christendom past, which Benedict issued many months before the recent "cartoon intifada," gave him an Archimedean point from which to encourage the Muslim world to respect religious liberty: an ideal certainly implicit within both Christianity and Islam, but which Christendom had, in practice, to be taught by the secularists of the Enlightenment, and Islamdom has (by and large) yet to learn.

Perhaps most noteworthy were the Pope's comments at an ecumenical meeting. In Germany--the birthplace of the Reformation--he offered a dramatic context for the understanding of Christian divisions. Too often, ecumenical discussions get bogged down in issues of ecclesiology. Ecclesiology is, formally, the study of the Church; but it often degenerates into the study of bureaucracy, of who's-in-charge--in short, of Lenin's "who whom." In a remarkable address, partially ad-libbed, Pope Benedict declared his impatience with this approach: "It is said that ... the elaboration of ecclesiological issues and the questions concerning ministry are the main obstacles still to be overcome. Ultimately, this is true, but I must also say that I dislike this terminology, which from a certain point of view delimits the problem since it seems that we must now debate about institutions instead of the Word of God, as though we had to place our institutions in the center and fight for them. I think that in this way the ecclesiological issue ... [is] not dealt with correctly.

"The real question," Benedict continued, "is the presence of the Word in the world." The proclamation of this Word demands a commitment to Christian unity, but the Pope stresses that "this unity does not mean what could be called an ecumenism of return: that is, to deny and to reject one's own faith history. Absolutely not!"

This is the approach of an apostle who meets the world in the spirit of Christ--that is to say, with a challenge grounded in love and true human respect. God's Revolution is a small book, but the ideas it presents are large.

* The trial of Saddam Hussein may have farcical aspects, but what it is accomplishing is deadly serious: It is compiling--for history--a record of eyewitness testimony of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Saddam's sadistic regime. And eyewitnesses are essential to mankind's process of memory; they humanize what can too easily be deadened into statistical dust.

The power of witness could not be any clearer than in the massive new anthology From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States (ISI, 750 pp., $35). Edited by Paul Hollander, himself one of the best chroniclers of Communism's bloody record, the book is a stark and moving tombstone for an evil system of global reach--and a severe indictment of the Left-terror regimes (e.g., China, North Korea, and Cuba) that still exist.

* A new book from Fr. Richard John Neuhaus is always cause for celebration, and Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (Basic, 260 pp., $25) doesn't disappoint. He is not just a fine theologian but a thoroughly engaging writer, with an eye for the charming anecdote. Here's an example:</p> <pre> In my parish there is an elderly woman who really does believe in the Holy Quaternity, although she doesn't put it that way. She was much taken with, and mistaken about, a homily in which I explained why we call Mary the Mother

of God. I obviously did not explain it very well, for this dear woman thanked me for confirming what she has always believed: There is no point in praying to the son when you can go directly to the mother. I no longer try very hard to correct her. God will no doubt sort out her prayers. </pre> <p>There is in this little story some truly profound wisdom: Discussions about religion sometimes give the appearance of theological IQ tests, in which the speaker's eternal destiny hinges upon the proper exegesis of certain intellectual formulas. Some of my fellow Protestants, for example, take the solid theological concept of "justification by faith" and turn it into an anti-Catholic shibboleth: Surely Catholics don't believe in justification by faith, if they force themselves to follow so many man-made rules? But, as Anglican theologian N. T. Wright has pointed out, "one is not justified by faith by believing in justification by faith." The woman in Fr. Neuhaus's anecdote is a case in point: Her theology is muddled, and would get a low grade if presented in a seminary term paper--but through her incoherences of mind we can discern an innocence of heart, a genuinely humble faith.

Neuhaus's generosity of spirit should not, of course, be mistaken for doctrinal latitudinarianism. He is forceful in his defense of the Catholic magisterium, and some of the most moving passages in the book describe how he came to his belief that in Catholicism he had found the fullness--the "splendor"--of truth.

There is rich theological meat in this volume, but the casual reader should not be discouraged by that fact. Many of the book's frequent pleasures are incidental, in the stories and witticisms with which Neuhaus peppers his text. (E.g.: "Father George Rutler, a noted pastor in Manhattan and a former Episcopalian, is regularly asked whether he misses anything since he became a Catholic. He just as regularly answers: 'Oh yes. I do so miss the liturgy in English.'")

Neuhaus even takes a moment to praise one of my favorite works of popular theology, one that has been almost completely forgotten. The Church's Year of Grace is a five-volume work, published in 1953 and long out of print, by Dr. Pius Parsch; designed as a commentary on the pre-Vatican II Catholic liturgical books, it is an eloquent source of reflections on the Christian Year. Neuhaus calls it "a winsome and deep exploration of the sanctifying of time through the Church's calendar." The world in which that book was written has passed--Neuhaus calls the set "a period piece, a curiosity, a guide to what used to be," a judgment in which he is undoubtedly correct--yet it remains fascinating and highly readable, and deserves to be back in print.

To read Neuhaus is both to meet old friends and to be continually surprised. Even a solecism can prove ben trovato: When he refers to people "passing through this veil [sic] of tears," this is surely a typo for the traditional phrase "vale [i.e., valley] of tears," from the Catholic Salve Regina prayer. But: Isn't it equally accurate, theologically, to see the tears as a translucent "veil" behind which the Resurrection looms? In another of his anecdotes, Neuhaus has poked fun at a Protestant clergyman who declared that "there's nothing downbeat about the cross at Crystal Cathedral"; but Neuhaus has inadvertently discovered the sense in which the minister was correct.

* George Washington's reticence about public professions of religion has allowed historians to construct a portrait of the Founder as a deist, a skeptic, and even a modern secularist avant la lettre. But could this conventional picture be the latter-day equivalent of Parson Weems's pious fable about the cherry tree? In Washington's God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country (Basic, 282 pp., $26), AEI scholar Michael Novak and his daughter, Jana Novak, lay out all the evidence--and, in doing so, construct a powerful case for the proposition that Washington was a believing Christian.

The book is persuasive chiefly because of its attention to nuance; the authors are careful to avoid claiming too much. "[Washington's] concept of God," they write, "was far more Biblical than deist. Yet it seems more Hebrew than Christian. His official words seem closer to the One God of the Hebrew Prophets and the psalmist than to the Father, Son, and Paraclete of, say, [John 14]." In referring to God, Washington often used the word "Providence"--which to most Americans today connotes something rather more abstract than a personal God who acts in history. But to Washington, Providence was not a bloodless concept of impersonal fate: It was the God who had liberated the Israelites from Egypt, and whom Washington called upon to guide his new nation. The Novaks quote some letters Washington wrote to bereaved family members and associates, and point out that he counseled submission (in their words) "not only to the will of Providence, but to [its] wisdom and goodness" as well: characteristics of a Person, not a mere force.

The authors summarize ably Washington's thought on Providence:</p>

<pre> History is open to human initiative, imagination, and action.... [Yet] Providence is sovereign over all things, of nature and of history, of the external world, and of the realm of consciousness, reflection, and choice.... Americans should act according to God's law in order not to turn away his favor, and in that sense to "merit" the blessings they ask, on the basis of his generous, freely granted, and undeserved promises. We do not, strictly, merit these blessings, but it would be hypocritical to ask them of God while we willfully  violate his law. </pre> <p>Washington's emphasis on God's sovereignty in human affairs is not surprising; the theologian who influenced colonial America more than any other was John Calvin, whose name remains to this day synonymous with predestination. In his commentary on Psalm 23, Calvin saw in David's phrase "The Lord is my shepherd" an excellent metaphor for Providence: "This [metaphor] is no mean token of [God's] tender love toward us.... [We] only attribute to God the office of a shepherd with due and rightful honor when we are persuaded that his Providence alone is sufficient to supply all our necessities." Is this humble dependence upon God not equally apparent in the words of the general who captured Boston in 1776? George Washington spoke of his achievement there as that of a mere "instrument in the late signal interposition of Providence." It will be objected that he may have been speaking conventionally. But, as the Novaks' fine book makes clear, there is no good reason to assume Washington was as cynical as such habitual insincerity would have required--and substantially more reason to believe that Washington had internalized much of the Christianity of his society.

* Calvin's commentary on Psalm 23 is included in John Calvin: Steward of God's Covenant: Selected Writings (Vintage, 417 pp., $13.95), a manageable new anthology edited by John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne. Conventional wisdom is assured of two things about the doctrine of predestination: a) it refers to a cruel act by a capricious and unworthy God and b) it was invented in the 16th century by John Calvin. On both counts, conventional wisdom is unjust; in this anthology, the reader will get a fuller picture of the Geneva Reformer's thought. Calvin's predestination was the intellectual progenitor of, and indeed closely akin to, George Washington's Providence: the solicitousness for His creatures of a personal yet holy and inscrutable God. And Calvin believed in this kind of God not because such a conclusion appeared plausible, as a result of human syllogizing, but chiefly because it seemed to account best for the data in the Bible.

The issue of how God's absolute sovereignty can coexist with empirical evidences of human choice is still a central one for theology; Calvin remains one of the most brilliant, and valuable, thinkers to have wrestled with it.