God, protect Benedict from his friends

The refrain of the past week has been that we must wait and see what the impact of Pope Benedict XVI will be on the Church and on the culture of political liberalism. But what about the impact of the Church on Benedict XVI's pontificate? If the past week is anything to go by, he will need to pray to God to protect him from his friends while he takes on the "tyranny of relativism".

For while the international and local media have been parading the former Cardinal's opinions on subjects like homosexuality, the married priesthood and rock music, I have not come across a single Catholic teacher, whether largely sympathetic or critical of these opinions, who placed these opinions-turned-sound bites back into their original arguments. As a result, what has emerged is a distorted portrait of Joseph Ratzinger.

In some cases, the distortion is severe. The cliché about Cardinal Ratzinger is that he has a package-deal notion of the faith - all or nothing. But in an interview, given when he was Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, he explicitly rejected the idea that faith is the acceptance of a huge set of propositions, claiming that if faith had this character it would be impossible for most people to have.

Pope Benedict subscribes to a traditional notion of faith that is neither a package deal nor an a la carte menu. One would have thought that local churches would seize the opportunity to explain what this often misunderstood notion is. And yet, amazingly, they have so far let people without faith and people with faith but without a solid theological formation get away with a misrepresentation.

My amazement is greatest when Pope Benedict is quoted on what he considers "evil". He uses the word in a philosophical sense that is hugely different from the way it is colloquially used - so different that it needs translation.

In ordinary English, something is evil if it is particularly repugnant and very, very harmful. Genocide, torture and paedophilia are evil. Shoplifting, minor lies and pre-marital sex are not evil - even if you still disapprove of them.

But Pope Benedict follows an ethical tradition that uses the word "evil" to mean anything that is missing from something that is good, and "intrinsically evil" or "absolutely wrong" for something that is wrong in itself or under any circumstances, even if it is almost harmless. Thomas Aquinas, for example, considered lying to be absolutely wrong, but not killing. But that does not mean that Aquinas was a twit who thought that lying was always worse than killing.

Having Pope Benedict's use of the term "evil" translated into ordinary language for you will not necessarily make you share his opinion about the wrongfulness of homosexual practice, say, or contraception. But it does help you realise that you are not dealing with a fanatic. (In fact, his ethical thinking on homosexuality shares much ground with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who believes that homosexual love is capable of being mature. Pope Benedict rejects homosexual love for almost the same reasons that Archbishop Williams accepts it.)

Indeed, the more I have looked up what the Pope has actually said on an array of topics, the more my respect for him has risen. Or perhaps I should say that my dismissive disrespect for many of his conclusions has been transformed into a "respectful disrespect". Pope Benedict is not a fundamentalist who has all the answers, a dogmatist who spouts off untouched by reality. He really is what he says, afflicted by a "holy disquiet", troubled, because he can see the problems as well as anyone else, and often more perspicaciously than his liberal critics.

He rejects, for example, married priesthood as a solution to the shortage of priests but this is in part because he thinks that marriage is here being presented as an easy option, when it is not. For him, the difficulties of marriage will only lead to a displacement of the "priest problem": from a problem of shortage, the Church would find itself (as Protestant churches do) with a "divorced priest" problem. You may reject his judgment, but I, for one, find him a great deal more aware of the nature of human affairs than many of his critics.

Pope Benedict's ideas about truth, value and objectivity are as opposed to fundamentalist ideas about these subjects as they are to the sort of relativism that claims that there are no criteria for sorting out truth from falsehood, right from wrong. On the topic of truth he shares a great deal with liberal and Marxist critics of relativism, like the late Ernest Gellner (even though he thought Catholicism was a mediaeval relic) and Terry Eagleton (even though he thinks the election of John Paul II was a right-wing conspiracy and a disaster for the Church).

And his "holy disquiet" shares some of the troubled existentialism of secular thinkers like Max Weber, Franz Kafka and Robert Musil, all of whom produced pictures of humanity changing into something less than itself in the conditions of modernity. It would be a tragedy for his papacy if the Pope's friends and followers behaved like a fan club, instead of exploring more closely how his thinking relates to some of the most important secular diagnosticians of our time.