Swompdonkey

The Rock Under John Paul II

Father Ray DeSouza in the National Post speculates on the name choice of the new guy, whom has already been pilloried in the media for his rigour and orthodoxy -- as if those were flaws in a Pope:

...what then did the new pope wish to say to us? Vocabor Benedictum. "I will be called Benedict."

Commentators immediately looked to Benedict XV, the last pope of that name, who, assuming the papacy in 1914, tried to stop a Europe on the brink of the First World War from committing suicide. With Europe today in an advanced state of cultural decline and demographic suicide, the comparison is apt.

Yet it was likely that the newest Benedict had in mind none of his predecessors on the Throne of Peter, but St. Benedict himself, the father of Western monasticism and patron saint of Europe. Benedict (ca. 480-547) studied in Rome as a young man, but was soon disgusted with the decadence and degeneration he discovered amid the detritus of the Roman empire. He fled the city, and so attracted to himself the monks who would found the monasteries that would preserve the cultural patrimony of the West during the Dark Ages.

There will be no fleeing from Rome for Pope Benedict XVI. He must now attend to what he indicated on Monday was the pressing need of preserving the Christian patrimony of faith and culture in the third millennium.