Recovering a Forgotten Chapter
by J. Peter Pham

Nowadays, any serious discussion of the shifting demographics of Christianity inevitably leads to Philip Jenkins, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of the Humanities in History and Religious Studies at Penn State University.

With the monumental trilogy he completed two years ago—The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (2002, revised 2007), The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (2006), and God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis (2007)—Jenkins transformed perceptions of Christianity in the world today with the convincing case he made that not only has the center of gravity in the Christian world “shifted inexorably southward, to Africa and Latin America,” but much of conventional wisdom about religion in Europe (and, ultimately, North America) needs to be reconsidered. In the course of developing his argument about the present and future, Jenkins also hinted that the dynamics driving the changes were not entirely new, and the church’s past contained more than its share of surprises.

Thus, like its predecessors, Jenkins’s most recent book, The Lost History of Christianity (HarperOne, 2008) challenges what most of its readers thought they knew, in this case, about the faith’s historical itinerary. The volume’s subtitle, “The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died,” points to its author’s aim of recovering for today’s globalized world a more inclusive vision than the tendency of “thinking of Christianity as traditionally based in Europe and North America.” In contrast to that limited perspective, Jenkins argues:

The particular shape of Christianity with which we are familiar is a radical departure from what was for well over a millennium the historical norm: another, earlier global Christianity once existed. For most of its history, Christianity was a tricontinental religion, with powerful representation in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and this was true into the fourteenth century. Christianity became predominantly European not because this continent had any obvious affinity for that faith, but by default: Europe was the continent where it was not destroyed. Matters could have easily developed differently.

While Christianity was born in the Levant, today its history is largely thought of in terms the two great centers, both in Europe, around which the ecclesiastical politics within the Roman Empire coalesced—Rome and Constantinople. What gets forgotten is that there were other great centers beyond the frontiers of the oikoumene and that much of what is now referred to as “the Islamic world” was once Christian.

To illustrate his point, Jenkins focuses on the figure of Timothy I (727-823) who, in 780, was enthroned as patriarch, or catholicos, of the Church of the East, then based in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Seleucia, less than two dozen miles southeast of modern Baghdad. According to Jenkins, “in terms of his prestige, and the geographical extent of his authority, Timothy was arguably the most significant Christian spiritual leader of his day, much more influential than the Western pope, in Rome, and on par with the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople,” since “perhaps a quarter of the world’s Christians looked to Timothy as both spiritual and political head.”

World Map, Heinrich Bunting, 1581.

While the medieval English church, for example, had only two metropolitans, the archbishops of Canterbury and York, Timothy presided over no fewer than 19 metropolitans and 85 other diocesan bishops. During his more than four-decade-long patriarchate, Timothy created no fewer than five new metropolitan sees, including one at Rai, near modern-day Tehran, and erected a diocese in Yemen alongside the four on the Arabian Peninsula that he had inherited from his predecessor. In a letter quoted by Jenkins, the patriarch boasted about how, after the conversion of the Turkish great king who ruled over much of central Asia, the khagan, “the Holy Spirit has anointed a metropolitan for the Turks.” This outward expansion was not unprecedented: missionaries from the Church of the East, whose adherents had been branded heretical Nestorians by the Council of Ephesus (431) and were largely driven out the Roman Empire, had roamed as far as China and Tibet and succeeded in establishing bishoprics in those parts by around 600.

As Jenkins points out, the Nestorians, along with the Egyptian (Coptic) and Syrian (Jacobite) Christians, who were anathematized as Monophysites by Rome and Constantinople following the Council of Chalcedon (451), not only constituted “the Christian mainstream in large portions of the world” but also “possessed a vibrant lineal and cultural connection to the earliest Jesus movement of Syria and Palestine,” being rooted in the Semitic languages of the Middle East with faithful who still thought and spoke in Syriac. Even after the Arab conquests, these believers retained such vibrant culture that “in terms of the number and splendor of its churches and monasteries, its vast scholarship and dazzling spirituality, Iraq,” for example, “was through the late Middle Ages at least as much a cultural and spiritual heartland of Christianity as was France or Germany, or indeed Ireland.” Nor were these Eastern Christians turned inward. Rather, together with Jewish sages, they dominated the cultural and intellectual life of what was to become the “Muslim world.” Jenkins notes:

It was Christians—Nestorians, Jacobite, Orthodox, and others—who preserved and translated the cultural inheritance of the ancient world—the science, philosophy, and medicine—and who transmitted it to centers like Baghdad and Damascus. Much of what we call Arab scholarship was in reality Syriac, Persian, and Coptic, and it was not necessarily Muslim. Syriac-speaking Christian scholars brought the works of Aristotle to the Muslim world: Timothy himself translated Aristotle’s Topics from Syriac into Arabic, at the behest of the caliph. Syriac Christians even make the first reference to the efficient Indian numbering system that we know today as “Arabic,” and long before this technique gained currency among Muslim thinkers…Such were the Christian roots of the Arabic golden age.

While the Arab Muslim conquests of the seventh century subjected the Christians of the Middle East to incredible pressures, the ancient communities nonetheless not only survived, as underscored by the remarkable renaissance of the Church of the East during the patriarchate of Timothy I, but even managed to thrive. “Only around 1300,” writes Jenkins, “did the axe fall, and quite suddenly.” The factors for this tragic turn of events, he argues, were global:

The aftereffects of the Mongol invasions certainly played their part, by terrifying Muslims and others with the prospect of a direct threat to their social and religious power. Climatic factors were also critical, as the world entered a period of rapid cooling, precipitating bad harvests and shrinking trade routes: a frightened and impoverished world looks for scapegoats.

Thus “Muslim regimes and mobs now delivered near-fatal blows to weakened Christian churches.” According to Jenkins, the number of Christians in Asia fell, between 1200 and 1500, from 21 million to 3.4 million. During the same years, the proportion of the world’s total Christian population living in Africa and Asia combined fell from 34 percent to just 6 percent, and the remnant that survived virtually disappeared in the massacres of Armenians, Assyrians, Syrians, and other ancient Christian communities during the 19th and 20th centuries, which led the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin argue for a new category of crime to which he subsequently gave the name “genocide.”

Had the author been satisfied with merely rendering accessible to a broader audience this fascinating, but little known, story, The Lost History of Christianity would nonetheless already constitute an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of the Middle East and Africa. For Jenkins, however, the historical narrative he assembled is but the foundation on which to pose several questions of considerable contemporary relevance.

Shifting focus from Mesopotamia to Africa, Jenkins considers the very different fates of the church in Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa. In the sixth century, there were more than 500 bishops, successors of church fathers such as Cyprian of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo, ministering in what today are Libya, Algeria, and Tunisia; barely two centuries later not one was left, their churches having vanished in the face of the Muslim invasion.

In contrast, in Egypt, which was conquered by the armies of ‘Amr ibn al-‘As in 640, not only did the Coptic church survive, but it continues, even today, to be the faith of at least 10 percent of the population. After discounting a number of explanations, Jenkins concludes that the key factor is “how deep a church planted its roots in a particular community, and how far the religion became part of the air that ordinary people breathed.” Whereas the Latin church of North Africa was essentially a colonial faith, appealing mainly to urban elites, the Coptic clergy translated their doctrine and practices into the idioms readily grasped by ordinary people, both city dwellers and rural peasants. Thus, despite persecutions, the Copts survived and their patriarchate spread Christianity up the Nile, deep into Africa to Nubia in present-day northern Sudan, which remained a Christian kingdom into the 15th century, and to Ethiopia (which also had contact with Syriac Christians), where the local church remains in communion with the see of Alexandria to this day. The lesson Jenkins draws here—although some might well be discomfited by the terms with which he articulates it—is that “for churches as for businesses, failure often results from a lack of diversification, from attaching one’s fortunes too closely to one particular set of circumstances, political or social.”

Jenkins also uses the chronicle of the long endurance of ancient Christian communities in areas which came under Muslim rule to inquire just how far churches, which he asserts must adapt when faced with “a powerful and hostile hegemonic culture,” can take accommodation:

Historically, Christians faced the issue of whether to speak and think in the language of their anti-Christian rulers. If they refused to accommodate, they were accepting utter marginality…Yet accepting the dominant language and culture accelerated the already strong tendency to assimilate to the ruling culture, even if the process took generations. Although a comparable linguistic gulf does not separate modern Western churches from the secular world, Christians still face the dilemma of speaking the languages of power, of presenting their ideas in the conceptual framework of modern physics and biology, of social and behavioral science. To take one example, when churches view sin as dysfunction, an issue for therapy rather than prayer, Christians are indeed able to participate in national discourse, but they do not necessarily have anything to offer that is distinctive…Too little adaption means irrelevance; too much leads to assimilation and, often, disappearance.

Since so much of the story that Jenkins reconstructs is centered in historical Mesopotamia, it is fitting that he draws his account together with several vignettes from contemporary Iraq. As recently as the 1970s, Christians made up five or six percent of that country’s population. That number is now barely one percent, and it is declining rapidly. Even as late as the onset of the first Gulf War, Christians made up as much as one-fifth of Iraq’s teachers and other professional groups. The devastation of the economy under international sanctions, however, pushed many to leave, and the Islamist militants unleashed in the wake of the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime quickly turn on those still left in the country.

Jenkins relates the tale of one of the most active priests in Mosul, Father Ragheed Ganni of the Chaldean Catholic Church, a body that, although in communion with Rome, actually traces its origins to the Nestorians of the Church of the East. Father Ragheed was known for the many messages he sent out abroad about of his desperate co-religious: “Priests celebrate mass amidst bombed out ruins; mothers worry as they see their children face danger to attend catechism…the elderly come to entrust their fleeing families to God’s protection.” On Trinity Sunday 2007, the priest and three subdeacons were kidnapped and killed, their bodies booby-trapped to make recovery even more difficult. Less than a year later, just days before the beginning of Holy Week 2008, the slain Father Ragheed’s own bishop, Archbishop Mar Paulos Faraj Rahhos, was kidnapped and then murdered by Islamists who demanded that his parishioners pay the jizya, the Islamic poll tax on non-Muslims. Not surprisingly, since the United States-led invasion in 2003, two-thirds of Iraq’s remaining Christians have fled abroad.

But Jenkins manages to preserve a small sliver of optimism, pointing out that while thousands of Christians from the Middle East have gone into exile, the story of their churches continues outside the region. In recent years, ancient Syrian Orthodox (Jacobite) orders have founded monasteries in the Netherlands and Switzerland. Timothy’s distant successor Catholicos-Patriarch of the Church of the East, Mar Dinkha IV, makes his home in Chicago, from where he oversees new sees in North America, Europe, and Australia which have taken the place of the historic bishoprics in places like Basra, Kirkuk, and Tikrit (the hometown of Saddam Hussein), which no one conceives of as the Christian strongholds they once were. Jenkins observes that, in the West, “members of these ancient communities are annoyed to be asked just when they converted to Christianity,” having to explain patiently that “their Christian heritage goes back a good deal further than that of their new host countries.”

Jenkins’s well-crafted new volume, filled as one has come to expect from the author with a good number of provocative insights, is not only a welcome addition to the literature on Christianity as a truly global religion, to which he has already made substantial contributions, but also an invitation to retrieve a forgotten chapter of history that has not inconsiderable relevance to current events. Recovering the memory of that “lost world,” with all its experience and wisdom, might lead to a better appreciation in our own age of the changing realities of a faith that is both ever ancient and ever new.

J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Virginia, is the author of numerous works on religion, international affairs, and African politics. An ordained priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy, he also serves on the advisory board of Save Iraqi Christians. He last wrote for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on the Anglican Communion.

by J. Peter Pham

Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are Reshaping Anglicanism. By Miranda K. Hassett. Princeton University Press, 2007.

The bishops and other leaders gathering this month in Canterbury for the fourteenth Lambeth Conference will be considering the future of the Anglican Communion. The last meeting ten years ago is best remembered for the major role which the bishops from the “global South” played, especially in the 526-70 (with 45 abstentions) passage of a resolution upholding as the “teaching of Scripture” the ideal of “faithfulness in marriage is between a man and a woman in a lifelong union” and abstinence “for those not called to marriage” as well as “rejecting homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture,” while calling for pastoral ministry and sensitivity to “persons who experience themselves as having a homosexual orientation.”

Far from putting the matter to rest, the tensions raised during the often acrimonious debate leading to the declaration have only been exacerbated over the course of the ensuing decade. In fact, nearly one-quarter of the more than 800 bishops invited are snubbing this year’s conference in protest over the presence of prelates whom they accuse of sanctioning same-sex unions and ordaining non-celibate gay and lesbian clergy. In June, the boycotters held a separate summit in Jerusalem, the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), where they were also joined by sympathizers who are nonetheless attending Lambeth.

As Philip Jenkins has argued in his recently completed trilogy of studies, a great deal of this theological contretemps can be explained by the fact that “the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward, to Africa and Latin America,” where the approach to theological and moral issues is more traditional than in that found among more progressive believers in Europe and North America. Certainly there has been a decisive shift in the demographic center of the Anglican world in the last one hundred years. The fifth Lambeth Conference, which met under Archbishop Randall Davidson in 1908, represented a church 80 percent of whose communicants lived in the British Isles. In fact, the principal concern of that meeting was foreign missions to places like Africa, where less than 1 percent of Anglicans were then to be found. Today, the situation is the reverse: more than 55 percent of the world’s Anglicans live in Africa, while only 33 percent reside in the United Kingdom (the latter figure is somewhat deceptive, however, since, according to the Church of England’s statistics, only about 1 million of the 26 million nominal Anglicans attend church). The U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church, counts some 2 million members, a decline of more than one-third since the 1960s, who account for approximately 3 percent of the worldwide body. In fact, just between themselves, five of the archbishops not present in Canterbury–the primates of the Anglican churches of Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and the Southern Cone of the Americas–represent nearly one-half the Anglicans in the world.

As simple and elegant as this demographic explanation is, it did not completely satisfy Miranda K. Hassett, who made the tensions in Anglican family the subject of her research as a graduate student in anthropology at the University of North Carolina. Anglican Communion in Crisis is distilled from her 2004 doctoral dissertation. Hassett has a personal stake in the object of her study: not only is she admirably forthright in disclosing that her “personal sympathies were with the liberal side,” but she was recently ordained a transitional deacon by the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina and has taken up the position of assistant rectors at a parish in the Diocese of New Hampshire, a jurisdiction whose choice of a gay man living in a partnered relationship, V. Gene Robinson, as its bishop in 2003 her own book notes “drew an intense outcry from Anglican leaders around the world” and led several Anglican provinces to downgrade relations with the Episcopal Church. These factors render all the more laudable Hassett’s treatment of the subject which, within its limits, is generally balanced and, unlike many other recent works, free from rancor. The volume’s subtitle–How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are Reshaping Anglicanism–hints at her conclusion: “The Episcopal Church’s [conservative] dissidents and their Southern allies are not merely carried along by global trends, but have actively shaped the character and impact of globalization on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.”

Hassett’s research opens in the period after the 1998 Lambeth Conference and focuses on the transnational alliances which were forged between some seemingly unlikely partners, “American social conservatives, commonly stereotyped as having little interest in including the marginalized, and Southern church leaders, whose demands for greater influence threaten the Northern-dominated status quo.” Her key insight is her appreciation that globalization is not an inexorable and impersonal force, but a dynamic process which can be shaped by human agents. Thus her research included extensive time with a congregation in the southeastern United States she pseudonymously calls “St. Timothy’s,” which had left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) under the jurisdiction of the Church of the Province of Rwanda, as well as six months in central Africa, where she focused her efforts on the Uganda Christian University, an Anglican university and seminary with close ties to a number of more conservative U.S. parishes and organizations. (In accordance with the conventions of her discipline, Hassett protects the anonymity of her sources. While the discretion, especially in the case of laypeople, is understandable given the nature of some of the issues with which she grapples, it also makes impossible any independent assessment of the ecclesiastical weight to give to pronouncements she attributes to bishops and other prominent church leaders.)

From the narrative of the fieldwork as well as Hassett’s nuanced analysis of her observations, it is clear that she is a dispassionate scholar, willing to challenge widely held stereotypes about conservative Anglicans in both the United States and Africa.

While the members of St. Timothy’s originally joined AMiA as what Hassett describe as “a lifeboat” away from an Episcopal Church they perceived to be increasingly errant in its leftward drift while still maintaining their connection to the larger Anglican Communion through the archbishop of Rwanda, she found that the new relationship had a profound impact on both parish and parishioners that went far beyond canonical formalities to forge “a transnational relationship of significant local meaning.” Describing the congregation’s efforts to “think more seriously about what their connection to Rwanda might mean”–which ranged from a display and sale of African handicrafts to assisting an African priest raising money for AIDS orphans to a trip to visit their new provincial see by several congregants–Hassett notes that the “congregation’s experience of finding an alliance with an African church first thinkable, then desirable, involved more and more members’ coming to see African Christianity as a positive model.” As a result, members of St. Timothy’s “were coming not only to think about Africa in new and positive ways but also to look more critically on their own way of life as Americans.”

If “conservative dissidents point to the orthodoxy, zeal, and other desirable traits they perceive as characterizing the churches of the global South, and seek to bring that moral force to bear in transforming the Episcopal Church,” the Anglicans Hassett encountered in Uganda–the heirs of a colonial church if ever there was one, as Danish Africanist Holger Bernt Hansen’s monumental study Mission, Church, and State in a Colonial Setting: Uganda, 1890-1925, authoritatively documented–have been excited by the discovery that “Africans have something to teach American Christians.” According to Hassett, African Christians see this as an exchange not unlike that of economic globalization whereby “each region is envisioned exporting what it has in plenty, trading those goods for what another region can readily provide”–in this case, spiritual aid in return for material assistance. Consequently, Hassett posits broadly: This collective and individual rethinking demonstrates that globalization, as represented by the transnational Anglican dissident movement, is not simply Westernization, a one-way process in which the Southern partners take on the culture and ideas of Northerners. Instead the people of St. Timothy’s were influenced by their Rwandan allies to adopt new ways of thinking and talking, indicating that such global relationships have effects in both directions. While she cautions conservatives that an idealization of African Christianity “invokes concepts ultimately derived from older and negative views of Africans as childlike, primitive, and uncivilized,” Hassett reserves a stronger criticism for liberals who, long presuming on the solidarity of the developing world due to “the bias toward the Left in the scholarly literature on global movements,” have reacted angrily to the unexpectedly strong doctrinal stances of Southern bishops by describing them as “superstitious, ignorant, and opportunist.” In contrast to scholars like Ian Douglas, subsequently her professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as a member of the design group for this year’s Lambeth Conference, who propose a vision of globalization which she describes as “diversity globalism”–that is, “characterized by the affirmation of cultural and experiential diversity” and “nothing more clearly defined than general mutual good will”–Hassett writes that conservative Northerners and Southerners have together built various networks into the interconnected structure she labels “accountability globalism”: This is no veiled anti-globalism or reactionary vision, in which older authority structures of white male Euro-American dominance are reestablished to maintain order in an increasingly complex worldwide organization. Instead, this conservative vision embraces the diversity and complexity of the contemporary world…call[ing] for power to shift away from traditional centers and to locate instead in a worldwide network of church leaders united in their commitment to Anglican orthodoxy. New, global patterns of discipline are envisioned in the service of correction, help, and, above all, accountability among Anglican churches around the globe. While Anglicans, like Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, have historically organized their ecclesiastical polities around local bishops whose jurisdiction is largely defined by territorial boundaries, Hassett sees the potential of the nascent affinity networks which are manifestations of accountability globalism to radically transform relationships within the church: [P]articular connections between individuals, parishes, dioceses, and provinces…bypass and even subvert the centralized, nested geographical authority structure of the Communion. It remains to be seen whether the total “realignment” of the Communion into networked clusters of Anglican bodies defined by affinity rather than geographical proximity will come to pass…Today many believe that such networks will become, functionally if not officially, the new organizing structure of the whole Anglican Communion. Certainly there have been moves towards such realignments across the Anglican world. In the last year, the Nigerian, Ugandan, and Kenyan provinces have followed the Rwandan province in consecrating “missionary bishops” for work in the United States. More recently, the bishop and diocesan convention of the Diocese of San Joaquin, California, have voted to align themselves with the South America-based Province of the Southern Cone, and other Episcopal dioceses are reported to be considering “exit strategies.” And while strategic partnerships between Northern conservatives and Southern Anglican leaders and churches have clearly become more common, there is no reason to preclude moderates and liberals within the Communion from creating their own affinity networks. Hassett, for example, chronicles the founding in 2000 of a Ugandan branch of Integrity, an advocacy organization for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Anglicans, and the subsequent controversy within the province over the involvement of a retired bishop, Christopher Ssenyonjo, as the group’s counselor. The author’s most important contribution might well prove to be her disentangling of this bewildering collection of efferent strands and reweaving them into a comprehensible narrative heralding one vision of how today’s feuds might eventually be resolved.

As an academic work, Anglican Communion in Crisis is not without its share of problems. For example, while differing attitudes about homosexuals has certainly received a great deal of media attention, is it really “the defining issue in contemporary Episcopal Church (and, arguably, Anglican Communion) conflicts” that Hassett characterizes it as? A credible case can be made that the fault lines run much deeper into clashes over fundamentals of faith and that the controversy over homosexuality is perhaps better understood oftentimes as a proxy used by some on both sides of the revisionist/traditionalist divide. Despite serious efforts to “struggle against [her] eagerness to offer [her] own solutions or conclusions” and to “avoid adjudicating in matters of debate,” Hassett occasionally lapses into making assertions which are at the very least methodologically weak, undocumented, and possibly even inaccurate. To cite one case, since she correctly reports that most Episcopalians “are not particularly mobilized on the issue of gay rights” and that “public, outspoken activism for the full inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) Episcopalians in the church is largely limited to the leaders of the Episcopal GLBT rights group, Integrity, and a few outspoken bishops, other church leaders, and scholars,” as a matter of social science how can she then claim that “the mobilized liberal camp represents a position with general support of a majority of Episcopalians” in the absence of any reference to survey data supporting that conclusion? Also, the book is bogged down at times in a tendentious disputation with certain conclusions in Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom, a conceit all the more disappointing since Hassett does not appear to have taken into account any of the subsequent work by the Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University that would have obviated a substantial part of the critique.

Notwithstanding these shortcomings and the fact, modestly acknowledged by the author, that its “account of current debates in the Anglican tradition is contestable,” Anglican Communion in Crisis is a must-read, not only by those most directly involved in what are, frankly, often unseemly fracases within the Anglican body politic–especially the mitered heads at Lambeth (as well as GAFCON) who are called, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, “for the work and ministry of a bishop…the edifying and well-governing of the Church”–but also by anyone interested in the future of Christianity as a whole amidst constantly shifting global dynamics.

J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Virginia, is the author of many works on religion, international affairs, and African politics. An ordained priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy, he has written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on books by Pope Benedict XVI and Philip Jenkins.

DEBORAH POTTER, guest anchor: Benedict XVI heads to the U.S. this coming week (April 15-20) for his first visit here since being elected pope three years ago. He’ll be spending a total of five days in Washington, D.C. and New York. The Vatican released a video message from Benedict urging Americans to pray for the trip:

Pope BENEDICT XVI: I am very much looking forward to being with you. I want you to know that, even if my itinerary is short, with just a few engagements, my heart is close to all of you, especially to the sick, the weak and the lonely.

Benedict arrives in Washington Tuesday (April 15). The next day, he’ll have a private meeting with President Bush at the White House, where the war in Iraq is expected to be high on the agenda. On Friday (April 18), Benedict travels to New York, where he will address the United Nations General Assembly. The UN event was his original reason for coming to the US, and many experts believe that speech could be the most important of his trip. Kim Lawton takes a look at the unique role the pope and the Vatican play on the world stage.

KIM LAWTON: Soviet leader Josef Stalin was once questioned about the influence of the Vatican. Stalin is famously said to have replied, “The pope? How many divisions has he got?” The answer, as it turns out, is more than Stalin and many others might have guessed. Experts say the pope and the Vatican wield considerable global influence.

JAMES NICHOLSON: (Former U.S. Ambassador): They don’t have economic engines they have to feed. They don’t have armies. They don’t have land. The Vatican is only 106 acres. It’s the smallest nation-state in the world, but it is a huge moral, spiritual superpower.

LAWTON: As the Bishop of Rome, Pope Benedict XVI is the spiritual head of the Roman Catholic Church worldwide. But he also wears another hat: head of state for the independent territory of Vatican City and the Catholic Church’s government, called the Holy See.

Professor J. PETER PHAM (Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs, James Madison University): It’s the tension between those two roles that actually gives him a resilience on the international stage, that he doesn’t just speak for a geopolitical unit but also for a demographic within the world.

LAWTON: The Holy See has played an active global role for centuries. It has permanent observer status at the United Nations and has all the rights of full UN membership except voting. The Holy See has formal diplomatic relations with 177 countries around the world, including the US. Ambassadors, called apostolic nuncios, represent the Holy See from embassies like this one in Washington, DC. The US has sent an ambassador to the Holy See since 1984. The current U.S. ambassador at the Vatican is Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, who took up her post in February. James Nicholson held the position from 2001 to 2005.

Ambassador James Nicholson

Mr. NICHOLSON: I always said I practiced moral diplomacy.

LAWTON: During the more than 25 years of his pontificate, John Paul II dramatically raised the profile of the papacy on the international level and played a key role on many fronts, such as helping to bring down communism in Eastern Europe. Throughout his extensive travels, he was a vigorous global voice for freedom, human rights, peace, the alleviation of poverty, and fostering what he called “a culture of life.” Benedict has continued that advocacy, which experts say reflects foundational Catholic beliefs.

Reverend THOMAS REESE, S.J. (Senior Fellow, Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University): We have a moral obligation. Jesus told us to feed the hungry, care for the sick. These are things that are — impact international relations. It’s not just about economics and power. It’s about moral and ethical issues.

LAWTON: The policy goals may be the same, but times have changed since John Paul became pope.

Rev. REESE: We don’t have the Soviet Union anymore. What we have is the problem, problems in the Middle East, which is where Pope Benedict has been directing his attention.

LAWTON: The personalities have also changed.

Prof. PHAM: Whereas John Paul, if you look at the entire pontificate, was very much outwardly oriented toward the Church and the world, I think Benedict is inwardly focused — that in order to engage the world Benedict’s view is the Church has to be stronger from within.

Mr. NICHOLSON: Benedict is more cerebral, no question, more professorial. If he wasn’t being pope he would probably be a professor.

LAWTON: Some analysts believe that academic impulse has created a foreign relations challenge.

Rev. REESE: Benedict has had some problems on the world stage, because I think sometimes he thinks he’s still in a classroom where he can use words that have technical meanings that he has defined and that students are supposed to understand and know. But when he says them on the world stage, people take them at their street level meaning, and as a result there’s misunderstanding.

Professor J. Peter Pham

LAWTON: The most obvious example was his 2006 speech at the University of Regensburg in Germany, where he quoted a 14th-century emperor who criticized the Prophet Muhammad and accused Muslims of spreading their faith by the sword.

Rev. REESE: He spoke about Islam as being irrational. Well, what he meant was that it’s a religion based on faith, where faith is much more important than reason, you know. He wasn’t saying that Muslims are irrational, you know, but that’s the way it was heard.

LAWTON: The speech set off violent protests in several Muslim nations, a vivid demonstration of the impact a pope’s words can have. The Vatican issued a clarification, and during a visit to Turkey Benedict made a high profile visit to a mosque.

Prof. PHAM: On one hand, a great deal of setback in dialogue certainly occurred. On the other hand, after the initial setback a number of moderate Muslim scholars actually wrote to the pope, 138 of them, and said, “Well, we have some differences clearly, but now that they’re highlighted maybe we should engage in a dialogue,” and so a process of dialogue has begun.

LAWTON: But Benedict again generated controversy in the Islamic world on the Saturday before Easter, when he baptized a prominent Muslim journalist at a service in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Prof. PHAM: It could have occurred anywhere. The parish priest could’ve done it very quietly, discreetly. But I think the pope chose to do it himself and highlight it to emphasize the principle of religious freedom. Religious freedom cuts both ways. It’s not just freedom to practice one’s faith, but also freedom to change it.

LAWTON: The Iraq war has been another foreign policy challenge, beginning with John Paul’s papacy. John Paul strongly opposed the U.S. invasion.

Mr. NICHOLSON: He saw Iraq differently, there was no question about that, and spoke in January of ‘03 saying no to war — a real challenge for me as the interlocutor between the president and our government and him and his government.

LAWTON: Benedict also opposed the invasion and has sharply criticized its humanitarian consequences, especially for Iraq’s minority Christian community.

Prof. PHAM: Christians are leaving Iraq in huge numbers. This is a community that’s been there since the time of the apostles, and so I think Benedict’s concern now is the survival of Christianity in this ancient land and the fate of those Christians who are now refugees.

LAWTON: Other foreign policy priorities for Benedict include pushing for peace in the Holy Land and decrying rising secularism in Europe. On another diplomatic front, even though Benedict has criticized human rights abuses in China, he’s also been quietly working to establish relations, something that was not possible during the last papacy largely because of John Paul’s role in the fall of communism in Poland.

Father Thomas Reese SJ

Rev. REESE: The Chinese obviously didn’t want John Paul II running around China doing the same thing. Pope Benedict is not that kind of a threat to China, so I think they’re more comfortable in working out some kind of an arrangement.

LAWTON: Most of the time in places around the world, Vatican diplomats work outside the spotlight, where experts say they often have an advantage.

Prof. PHAM: They’re also there as religious representatives of the pope and therefore have close contacts with the local church, and the local church is often, in many countries, the closest to the people, and so their sources of information are often much better than that of, say, an embassy of a large Western country where for security reasons most of the diplomats are essentially living in a fortress.

LAWTON: Some question how much government leaders of today truly listen to what the pope has to say.

Mr. NICHOLSON: The pope will also say that we’re in an era of what he calls the “dictatorship of relativism,” and that indicates that there will be too many people, probably in his view and in mine, that won’t listen. But many will.

Prof. PHAM: Even if diplomats reject the Holy See’s position, which they often do on a number of issues, at least it gets them thinking that perhaps they will look to their own faith traditions or perhaps they’ll look to their own ethical systems, that there is another calculus involved other than the strict material calculus of power, security, and influence.

LAWTON: And that, observers say, is a moral authority that can’t be measured by economic strength or military divisions — a moral authority Benedict hopes to draw upon when meeting with US officials and speaking before the United Nations.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

Q: Let’s talk about the double duties of the pope and the foreign policy-political aspect of his position.

A: Pope Benedict, like his predecessor and their predecessors before them, really [has] a dual-hatted position. He’s primarily, first and foremost, a religious leader, the spiritual head of Roman Catholics throughout the world. But he’s also the sovereign of the Holy See, which is recognized in the international community as a state. In fact, the UN recognizes it in the unusual category of state non-member of the United Nations, with the full right to participate in UN deliberations without a vote. And the Vatican currently maintains diplomatic relations with almost every country in the world, some exceptions being the People’s Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, but very few are those exceptions. And so the trip to the US really comes under two roles. Certainly he’ll be coming to the United States as the spiritual leader of Roman Catholics to meet with the American church and also other faith communities, but he’ll also be meeting with President Bush and government leaders here in Washington as a political leader as well, and most importantly, I think, for the trip, in New York at the United Nations as the not only spiritual head of the largest single faith community in the world, but also as a sovereign speaking to other sovereigns.

Q: How important do you consider his UN address to be?

A: I think it’s important for several points. One is that although the pope is sovereign over a very small less than square mile plot of land in the middle of Rome, he also speaks as a spiritual leader, and so it’s the tension between those two roles that actually gives him a resilience on the international stage — that he doesn’t just speak for a geopolitical unit but also for a demographic within the world, and certainly within the era in which we live today, where there are tensions between large blocs of countries and the tensions are heightened at times by religious considerations, his voice is going to be very important, especially when he calls for peace and for greater dialogue between countries.

Q: Do people listen to him? Do countries and government leaders listen to what this pope has to say?

A: Well, I think the most famous quote was one by Joseph Stalin in the middle of the century when the French foreign minister asked him what the Holy See, the pope might object, and Stalin replied, “The pope, how many divisions has he got?” And I think history has sort of answered that, that although the divisions of the pope currently are about 120 Swiss guards, that’s not the relevance of, but really the relevance is the soft power that the papacy brings by being able to focus attention not just of Roman Catholics but Christians of all denominations and other people on issues that he chooses to highlight — that power to focus attention, to speak up, to be a point of dialogue or a point of contention.

Q: This pope has a very different personality than John Paul II, and on the international stage John Paul played an enormously influential role, in the fall of communism and other issues like that. How do you compare the two, and where do you see the differences?

A: Well, I think the two — there’s a discontinuity certainly in personality and style. There’s also a continuity in themes. For example, religious freedom was very important to John Paul II, and he spoke for freedom, first in the Soviet bloc but then throughout the world. Benedict is continuing it and also bringing it to a different level. He’s now talking about freedom not only to practice one’s beliefs, but freedom to change those beliefs, and he recently, although it caused a bit of controversy, gave a powerful symbol of that when he baptized, at the Easter Vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica, a very prominent former Muslim who’s the deputy editor of Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s leading newspapers, and he publicly baptized him as a Roman Catholic.

Q: I want to talk more about that Muslim baptism in a minute, but first what are some of the foreign policy priorities you’ve seen in Benedict’s papacy?

A: Whereas John Paul, if you look at the entire pontificate, was very much outwardly oriented toward the church and the world, I think Benedict (part of it is personality, but I think part of it is also an agenda) is inwardly focused, that in order to engage the world Benedict’s view is the church has to be stronger from within. It has to solidify its own base, and so a lot of his attention has been focused turning inward within the church, matters within the Catholic Church, and also the Catholic Church’s relations with the Christian bodies with which it is closest — the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Anglican Communion, and then other groups. So his agenda in a way has been inwardly focused, but it’s an inward focus meant to strengthen it for that dialogue with the outside.

Q: Let’s go into relations with the Islamic world. They’ve been a little rocky for Benedict on a number of fronts. Let’s talk about the Regensburg speech first. How much of a challenge was that? How do you assess that speech and all the brouhaha that followed?

A: I think part of it was a surprise not just to Benedict but really to the Holy See, the responses that came up from some quarters of the Muslim world and all the unfortunate violence that occurred, the Italian nun [shot dead] in Somalia, etc. But Benedict — I think if you actually read the text of the speech it was very much his own persona as a university professor. This was a man who was a professional academic before he became a bishop and ultimately a cardinal and pope, and the speech itself he began by citing, “I recently read a critical edition” [and] named the editor, very much like a lecture that any university professor would give. Unfortunately, that critical volume that he cited had this incendiary quote in it, which was a historical quote, so in many respects I think the reaction was unanticipated and came as somewhat of a surprise. Now I would also assert at the same time, though, although the reaction to the quote was perhaps a surprise for Benedict and his closest collaborators, I don’t think that the use of the quote was necessarily unintended. I think the intention was, here is a story of the emperor who had been held prisoner as a hostage by his Muslim interlocutor, and he had engaged in this long dialogue with the man, and the two ended up talking about their respective faith traditions and agreeing to disagree at the end, and the emperor was let go and in fact lived to write this dialogue out of which the pope quoted from, and I think that was a not too subtle signal that perhaps, maybe there is something to be said that we’ve actually regressed in the six or seven centuries since that event occurred, because nowadays you get violent reactions for saying things, whereas this man was actually a prisoner in someone’s power. He said the things he said and was let go after they agreed to disagree. And so I think that was the intent of the address, to raise that point. Unfortunately, it was taken in a different sense, as if the pope himself had said those words rather than quoted them, and unfortunately we had the reaction to that.

Q: Should Benedict realize or anticipate these things more, that he’s no longer the university professor? Is there a difference in how things are perceived when you are the pope and you have that platform? Did he have some trouble recognizing that he was in a different position?

A: I think there was a bit of that. There was certainly a bit of getting used to the position. It’s a unique position. There’s really nothing that would train any man for that position, even if Benedict had been close by John Paul’s side all these years. That being said, however, I think Benedict was always a man of principle, and as a result he’s not going to let what we might call political considerations get in the way of speaking the truth. His motto for many years was “Cooperators with the Truth,” and so that’s his view of man’s vocation irrespective of one’s place in life — [it] is to cooperate with the truth, to let the truth stand on its own, and so in that sense he’s not going to mince words, and unfortunately, in the world in which we live, that often leads to consequences.

Q: How much damage was caused for relations between the West and the Islamic world?

A: On the one hand, a great deal of setback in dialogue certainly occurred. On the other hand, after the initial setback a number of moderate Muslim scholars actually wrote to the pope, 138 of them, and said, “Well, we have some differences clearly, but now that they’re highlighted maybe we should engage in a dialogue,” and so a process of dialogue has begun. So sometimes it’s good in any sort of relationship to lay everything out on the table and proceed from there. The first few moments may be awkward, but hopefully beyond that one can at least move on to a greater dialogue. Now, whether that dialogue takes place, under what circumstances — that we will remain to see.

Q: You mentioned the baptism of Magdi Allam, editor at Corriere della Sera newspaper, on Easter weekend. Was that an example of how the pope’s dual roles are sometimes in tension with one another? This was a religious act, a baptism, yet it had political consequences.

A: I for one don’t think that the public, prominent nature of that baptism was at all an accident in the sense that if the baptism was to occur, it could have occurred anywhere. The parish priest could have done it very quietly, discreetly. But I think the pope chose to do it himself and highlight it to emphasize the principle of religious freedom. Religious freedom cuts both ways. It’s not just freedom to practice one’s faith, but also freedom to change it, and in this case, the Corriere della Sera editor chose to change his faith and in fact adopted a new name, Christiano, Christian, as his new first name, and I think that’s part of the emphasis — that freedom of religion really means freedom of religion for everyone. Just as some Christians in the West or people of no faith choose to embrace Islam because that’s where they find spiritual fulfillment, then Muslims are also free to change their faith which is a principle that is not admitted in Islamic law, and I think it was a willful and intended challenge to that — that universal rights including religious freedom apply to everyone.

Q: What does it say that this pope worked that into this particular setting?

A: I think it is another indication of the man and his stand on principle. One can agree or disagree. I don’t agree about everything he says, and I doubt if many of his closest collaborators necessarily agree with everything, but he will stand on principle. He’s always done that throughout his career. He’s maintained friendships that would have not been considered helpful to one’s career because that was a matter of principle, and I think this was a principle in which he believes very strongly, in the right of the individual to have liberty in their faith and the expressions that they choose to adapt for that faith, and he chose to, if you will, highlight that very prominently on the night which in the Christian liturgical tradition is the most important and solemn night, the Paschal vigil, to use that as an occasion for this man’s expression of that and his endorsement of his right to do so.

Q: Let’s talk about some of the specific areas of the world that have been tension points for the Vatican. China is one of the few places where there are no diplomatic relations. How has Benedict been trying to work through that?

A: A year ago, Pope Benedict issued a letter to the Catholics of China, and in the letter he revoked a number of the special provisions that Pope Pius XII, more than 50 years ago, had put in place for the Chinese church. The clear signal being sent from Rome to the church in China was that there needs to be a reconciliation between the underground church and the official, state-recognized church, that there’s enough room for both sides to move on that. And by revoking the special provisions, it encourages that because now the underground church will no longer be consecrating bishops without the authorization directly of the Holy See, and the Holy See has been moving to quietly recognize bishops that were consecrated by the patriotic church, and the government knows this. So in a way there’s a certain movement. For a number of years already, the Vatican’s embassy on Taiwan with the Republic of China has been downgraded to the level of a charge d’affaires without a full papal nuncio, an ambassador, posted there. So I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next few years we didn’t see some sort of explicit accord between the Holy See and China and the establishment of a papal nunciature in Beijing.

Q: How significant would that be if it were to happen?

A: This would mean that the Holy See has diplomatic relations on an ambassadorial level with all 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council. It would leave as outlyers countries without diplomatic relations with the Holy See, being Saudi Arabia and a few small states here and there. So it certainly would enhance the Holy See’s diplomatic position. It would also enable the church to communicate openly and less through back channels with the large Christian community, which no one knows quite the number, but estimates are upwards of 15 million Catholics throughout China, and a new scope for action there. And so it would be a great impulse for the life of the church in China as well, so I think it would be a major and historic step.

Q: What about Iraq? Both John Paul II and Benedict opposed the U.S. invasion. How controversial an issue is that still?

A: Although Benedict will stand by the Holy See’s diplomatic position that the invasion of Iraq did not meet the norms of international law and John Paul’s interpretation that it did not meet the requirements of the just war doctrine, I think Benedict’s emphasis on Iraq is a different one, because his concerns are not necessarily war or peace. War has occurred, conflict is going on. Although one can pray and work for peace, that’s not his primary concern. His primary concern is the fate of Christians in Iraq. Iraq did have a large Christian community — both of several Catholic Eastern Rites, primarily the Chaldean Church, but also of Orthodox churches like the Assyrian Church of the East in Iraq — and Christians have suffered tremendously. The Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, for example, was brutally killed just over a month ago. Christians are leaving Iraq in huge numbers. This is a community that’s been there since the time of the apostles, and so I think Benedict’s concern now is the survival of Christianity in this ancient land and the fate of those Christians who are now refugees, undocumented persons scattered throughout the Middle East and around the world.

Q: And he has similar concerns in the Middle East for Israel, the Palestinians, Christians in the Holy Land?

A: Yes, the Christian community there is shrinking, and I think the Christian presence in the area will be a concern not only of this pope but, really, of the Holy See. Now there is a change that’s going to come in Jerusalem, forthcoming, when Michel Sabah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the first Palestinian to hold that position, is due to retire and will be succeeded actually by a Jordanian, which will be a very interesting dynamic that will be introduced into that.

Q: How much truth is there to the image that within the Holy See there is a sophisticated diplomatic corps with envoys going out to all these areas of conflict?

A: Actually, the diplomatic service of the Holy See is very small. Most people are surprised at how small it is. In most countries there is an apostolic nuncio, the Vatican equivalent of an ambassador, who is usually at the rank of an archbishop, and then perhaps one or two middle or low-ranking diplomats working under. So it’s a very small diplomatic mission. However, in many countries they often are exceptionally well-informed because their connections — they like the pope are dual-hatted. Not only are they there as diplomatic representatives; they’re also there as religious representatives of the pope and therefore have close contacts with the local church, and the local church is often, in many countries, the closest to the people, and so their sources of information are often much better than that of, say, an embassy of a large Western country where for security reason most of the diplomats are essentially living in a fortress. So they don’t have the full program of action, the capabilities of what we would consider a modern embassy. On the other hand, they do have the contacts and that human intelligence, not in the security sense of intelligence, but in the sense of knowledge of culture and terrain.

Q: The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone, was in Cuba when Fidel Castro stepped down. The envoys are often strategically placed and have great influence.

A: Yes, and also Pope Benedict, because he doesn’t travel as much as Pope John Paul II, has used his secretary of state in a far wider scope, giving him travel. Cardinal Bertone, the Secretary of State, who used to work for Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, has traveled most recently to the Caucasus, to Azerbaijan and Armenia, both countries that are on the verge of possibly reopening another conflict. And so certainly [Benedict] has not just the diplomats in place but also officials he regularly sends out to these places that don’t get that attention, perhaps, from other world leaders.

Q: How important is it that the Vatican has this international role, that there is this voice of the Church at this level of international relations?

A: I think it’s very important, because it enables not just the voice of Catholicism to be heard but also just simply the voice of a different set of values, a different calculus, so that when a papal envoy speaks up at the United Nations, for example, it won’t be the calculus — the Vatican has no products it needs to sell, it has no imports or exports that — really, you know, minor things like water and electricity are supplied by Italy, so its concerns are not those of your typical nation-state, and so it can reflect greater questions and even if its positions are not the one ultimately adapted, at least it injects into the discussion the idea that there are issues other than the raw material ones that are often the “metal” that diplomats work with. And even if diplomats reject the Holy See’s position, which they often do on a number of issues, at least it gets them thinking that perhaps they will look to their own faith traditions, or perhaps they’ll look to their own ethical systems, that there is another calculus involved other than the strict material calculus of power, security, and influence.

Q: We’ve talked a lot about geopolitical issues, issues of war and peace. But on the international level the Vatican has also been a strong voice for other issues — family, opposition to abortion, bioethical issues.

A: Yes, and I think one of the interesting things is it’s because of the church’s strong position on the sanctity of the family and the value of the family that, for example, the issue of immigration, not just in Europe but, I think, will play out here in America. When the pope talks about the family he’ll certainly use Spanish, for example, in the two public Masses that he plans to celebrate in Washington and New York, and he’ll talk about family and family unification, and the Church has often spoken, and Benedict himself has spoken up, comparing the lot of many immigrants to that of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in exile in Egypt, as he did most recently just a couple months ago. So I think that’s going to inject another dimension into our own political sphere, and I think that’s the other important thing to keep in mind when you talk about the international influence of the Holy See. It’s not just that international, multilateral level of the United Nations, or at the level of bilateral diplomatic relations; it’s also the fact that the pope is a spiritual leader who speaks. His flock doesn’t necessarily always respond to what he has to say or agree with it, but at times they do, and that, in many democratic countries, represents a considerable voting bloc.

In 1316, after the tumultuous papacy of Pope Clement V, the cardinals of the Catholic Church elected an elderly French colleague serving in the Roman Curia, Jacques DuËse, who took the name John XXII. Although his advanced age — he was seventy-two years old when elected — predicted a transitional papacy, John took to his new office with almost miraculous energy and went on to occupy the papal throne for some eighteen years, during which time he not only reorganized the church’s central bureaucracy and strengthened the powers of his office by removing the election of bishops from cathedral chapters, but also intervened in a number of theological controversies, including the one between the Conventual and Spiritual Franciscans, ultimately excommunicating the latter, including the most famous of their number, the philosopher William of Occam.

 But John XXII is perhaps best known for being one of the few popes — and the only one in times recent enough for an accurate record to be extant — to stand accused of heresy. In a series of sermons he undertook to preach between All Saints Day 1331 and the Feast of the Annunciation 1332, Pope John expounded his conviction that the saints do not see God until the day of final judgment, contradicting the traditional doctrine that they enjoyed the “Beatific Vision” immediately after death. He also speculated that devils and the souls of the damned were likewise not yet in hell (since they, like the saints, had to await the Judgment Day).

In an age in which such obscure theological disputations were followed as passionately as the culture wars are today, the pontiff’s musings provoked outrage, as theologians at major universities leaped to condemn his views and a number of his cardinals began planning a council to depose him for straying from the path of orthodoxy. Ultimately, under extraordinary pressure and on his deathbed, John gave in to his critics and professed his belief that the saints see God “as their condition allowed,” insisting that, in any event, his theologizing was an academic exercise undertaken in his purely personal capacity rather than an expression of papal teaching.

John’s convenient distinction between his personal theological inquiry and his official position became an increasingly difficult one to maintain as the claims of papal infallibility expanded over the centuries that followed. His successors managed it by refraining from expressing personal theological opinions and limiting their doctrinal pronouncements to official declarations. The late Pope John Paul II, however, partially reopened the issue with the “catechisms” he delivered at his weekly Wednesday audiences as well as the books he published after his election to the papacy. But while the Polish pontiff’s literary efforts consisted primarily of semi-autobiographical personal reflections, with the publication of JESUS OF NAZARETH (Doubleday, 2007) by his German successor, Benedict XVI, for the first time in nearly seven centuries the world is confronted with systematic work by a theologian who is simultaneously, in Catholic belief, the custodian of the faith and the keeper of the keys originally entrusted by Jesus to the Galilean fisherman Simon Peter.

An academic theologian — indeed, the first to be elected to the papacy since Pius VII in 1800 — Benedict already has to his credit a distinguished list of publications so extensive that they could be fairly reckoned a respectable accomplishment for several scholars. In his volume TRUTH AND TOLERANCE (Ignatius Press, 2004) — a book-length response to the uproar caused at the publication by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which he headed at the time, of the declaration DOMINUS IESUS, affirming the absolute universal claims of Christianity in general (and Catholicism in particular) vis-ý-vis other religions — then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger surveyed his own considerable body of work and pronounced it “quite fragmentary and unfinished.” Hence the urgency that has motivated him to devote “every free moment” since his election to the papacy to finish a book he described as having has “a long gestation.” That same urgency — “I do not know how much more time or strength I am still to be given,” the eighty-year-old author writes — results in JESUS OF NAZARETH being just the first ten chapters of what is projected to be a longer work. It covers a narrow period in its subject’s public career, extending from his baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist to Peter’s confession of faith and the Transfiguration.

The book takes as its starting point the author’s observation over the course of his career that “the gap between the ‘historical Jesus’ and the ‘Christ of faith’ grew wider and wider and the two visibly fell apart.” This distinction, first raised by critical biblical exegetes such as Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), who helped pioneer the liberal Social Gospel movement, “has by now penetrated deeply into the mind of the Christian people at large” and to no good effect, according to Benedict, who asks: “[W]hat can faith in Jesus the Christ possibly meanÖif the man Jesus was so completely different from the picture that the Evangelists painted of him and that the Church, on the evidence of the Gospels, takes as the basis of her preaching?”

An example of Benedict’s own preferred methodology is found in his treatment of the baptism of Jesus. He dismisses as “more akin to a ‘Jesus novel’” than an actual interpretation of the gospel texts the broad consensus of modern interpretation of the event that presents it as a “vocational experience” whereby Jesus, after having lived a relatively ordinary existence is, at the moment of his baptism by John, made “aware of his special relationship to God and his religious mission,” which “supposedly originated from the expectational motif then dominant in Israel.” The texts, according to Benedict, “give us no window into Jesus’ inner life” because “Jesus stands above our psychologizing.” Instead, carefully read in the light of the entirety of the canon of scripture as a whole and the living tradition of the church (Benedict cites extensively the liturgies of the Eastern churches and their theology of icons, as well as the Roman liturgy), they “enable us to ascertain how Jesus is connected with ‘Moses and the Prophets’; they do enable us to recognize the intrinsic unity of the trajectory stretching from the first moment of his life to the Cross and the Resurrection.”

As JESUS OF NAZARETH unfolds, it is clear that its author has little patience for popular modern Christologies portraying Jesus as wise teacher on a par with the founders of other religious or philosophical movements, or as a preacher of tolerance and understanding, or even as a political revolutionary. No wonder the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger investigated the Christological writings of Jesuit theologians Jacques Dupuis and Roger Haight and more recently issued a warning about those of another Jesuit, Jon Sobrino, who in its view transgressed into those respective faulty understandings. (In the interest of full disclosure, I was a student of Dupuis, whose official defender during Ratzinger’s intervention, Gerard O’Collins, directed the dissertation for my theological doctorate.) For Benedict, however, the flaw with all these interpretations is that, no matter how well-intentioned, they end up detracting from the truth that “in the end, man needs just one thing, in which everything else is included,” God, the source of objective, absolute truth beyond the ephemeral interests and fancies of humankind.

Thus, in his exegesis of Jesus’ temptations in the desert when he was called upon to “command this stone to become bread” (Luke 4:3), Benedict admits, “Is there anything more tragic, is there anything more opposed to belief in the existence of a good God and a Redeemer of mankind, than world hunger?” In answer to his own query, he quotes the German Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, who was executed by the Nazis for his work with the German resistance: “Bread is important, freedom is more important, but most important of all is unbroken fidelity and faithful adoration.” Benedict then proceeds to draw out the practical implications of this theological perspective on feeding the world today:

The aid offered by the West to developing countries has been purely technically and materially based, and not only has left God out of the picture, but has driven men away from God. And this aid, proudly claiming to “know better,” is itself what first turned the “third world” into what we mean today by that term. It has thrust aside indigenous religious, ethical, and social structures and filled the resulting vacuum with its technocratic mind-set. The idea was that we could turn our stones into bread; instead, our “aid” has only given stones in place of bread. The issue is the primacy of God. The issue is acknowledging the he is a reality, that he is the reality without which nothing else can be good. History cannot be detached from God and then run smoothly on purely material lines.

The limitations of international development assistance are nowadays well known: witness the devastating critique by William Easterly, the subtitle of whose most recent book THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN (Penguin, 2006) was “Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.” What is characteristic of Benedict is his emphasis, echoing his repeated calls for postmodern Europe to recover its Christian roots, that in this world “we are obliged to resist the delusions of false philosophies and to recognize that we do not live by bread alone, but first and foremost by obedience to God’s word.” Only when this obedience is put into practice, Benedict insists, will “the attitude develop that is also capable of providing bread for all.” Thus the reason for the pontiff’s emphasis on Christology (and its role as the hermeneutical key to his own “fragmentary and unfinished” theological corpus):

What did Jesus actually bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world? …He brought God, and now we know his face, now we can call upon him. Now we know the path that we human beings have to take in this world. Jesus has brought God and with God the truth about our origin and destiny: faith, hope, and love.

Unlike his fourteenth-century predecessor, Benedict’s theological treatise comes with a proviso: “It goes without saying that this book is in no way an exercise of the magisterium, but is solely an expression of my personal search ‘for the face of the Lord’ÖEveryone is free, then, to contradict me.” No doubt a number of theologians, both Catholic and non-Catholic, will dispute one or another of the scholarly preferences of the author (for example, JESUS OF NAZARETH takes issue with the influential commentaries of the Gospel of John by well-known theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Hengel, while favorably citing less well-known figures such as Protestant biblical scholar Peter Stuhlmacher, a onetime colleague of Joseph Ratzinger’s at the University of T¸bingen, who holds that “the Johannine school carried on the style and thinking and teaching that before Easter set the tone of Jesus’ internal didactic discourses with Peter, James, and John”– a distinctly minority view in academic circles).

The real question, however, is not what professional theologians think but whether anyone else in today’s world will take up Benedict’s invitation to engage in dialogue. The answer to that query might well determine whether or not another seven centuries will have to pass before another Bishop of Rome takes up his pen to open an intellectual debate.

J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Virginia, is the author, among other works, of HEIRS OF THE FISHERMAN: BEHIND THE SCENES OF PAPAL DEATH AND SUCCESSION (Oxford University Press, 2006).