Pope Benedict XVI Blog

Pope Benedict XVI stamps pontificate with his own style

A hat tip to Spirit Daily and Menafn.com:

Analysis: New pope's style takes shape
UPI - Sunday, July 17, 2005

By ROLAND FLAMINI, Chief International Correspondent

WASHINGTON, July 17 (UPI) -- When Pope Benedict XVI left Rome for his two-week vacation in a chalet in the Aosta Valley in the Italian Alps last week he took with him a piano and three suitcases of books. This was a significant change from his more athletic predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who spent his holidays in the same location, but packed a knapsack and hiking boots.

Pope Benedict may have been chosen to provide continuity for the core beliefs of John Paul, but in his first three months in office he has shaped a style that is all his own. He has enjoyed no honeymoon from dissident theologians. Father Thomas Reese, the U.S. Jesuit whose dismissal from the editorship of the Jesuit journal America magazine was said to have been at the command of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger shortly before the latter's election, has attacked the new pope as the irreconcilable enemy of modernity.

But despite his reserve the intellectual pope "is captivating the crowds," reports Vatican expert Sandro Magister. "The same masses of the faithful that applauded the gestures or striking phrases of Pope (John Paul II), while almost completely missing what it was that he was talking about, are doing the opposite with the new pope," Magister says. "They follow Ratzinger's homilies word for word, from beginning to end."

On vacation, Vatican sources say, the pope will be working on his first encyclical, writing it by hand as he does his homilies and sermons, in German in a miniscule script.

Settling into the Vatican with him is his small German staff. His long time personal assistant Ingrid Stampa, is supervising the work of arranging the papal apartments throughout the summer while the pope is away first in the Italian Alps and then at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence in the Alban Hills outside Rome. His private secretary, who like him is a Bavarian, Father Georg Gaenswein, 48, comes from Freiburg and joined the pope two years ago. Four women - Carmela, Loredana, Emanuela, and Cristina -- from the Catholic organization Communion and Liberation, who have taken nuns' vows but do not wear a religious habit will perform the domestic duties in the pope's household.

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posted by Dr. Denice Hanley, DPM, M.Div. @ 3:19 PM