The personal side of Pope Benedict XVI

I think of all the things I've read about His Holiness since his election, the most poignant I found personally was the observation in a recent Newsweek article that, after his election, the new Pope went back to his apartment outside the Vatican walls and began making plans to personally carry the books of his personal library over to the papal apartments. Perhaps only an academic can fully appreciate the charm of that. We academics love our books. They constitute a "world" for us, if not the world itself. But the most touching dimension of all this is his assumption that he would personally be moving them to the papal apartments! Of course, he was accustomed to walking from his apartment to the Vatican and back again everyday, a solitary figure crossing the cobblestones, pausing to browse the bookstores. He was used to living in a manner that was comparatively private and ordinary, compared to the life he will be compelled to live as Pope. But imagine! Can't you see it--His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, laboring across the cobblestones with suitcase-load after suitcase-load of books, all morning and all afternoon, transferring his personal library to the Vatican!

My only other observation concerns the coverage of the former Cardinal Ratzinger and current Pope Benedict XVI in the print media since his election. My reading hasn't been that extensive. People have shared their periodicals with me. I've read TIME, NEWSWEEK, a number of newspapers, even PEOPLE MAGAZINE, and my very subjective impression is that, of those periodicals I've read, the most balanced and fair treatment His Holiness has received in the secular press has been from NEWSWEEK. Not only has NEWSWEEK allotted generous space to George Weigel, the authorized biographer of the Pope, in key issues covering the papal election. It's own columnists, most notably Kenneth Woodward, have been comparatively balanced and less apt to view matters exclusively through the politicized lenses of trendy lefty hostility and opposition to nonrevisionist Catholicism. Again, this is only a very subjective impression, and I should be glad to be corrected by the observations of more balanced and wide-ranging readers. Don't take this as a blanket endorsement of NEWSWEEK. Some of its recent articles such as the cover story on "Faith and History: How the Story of Christmas Came To Be," I found completely wrong-headed and tendentious, blindly embracing all the uncritical philosophical assumptions about the historical-critical and deconstructive approaches to biblical interpretation found among most contemporary biblical scholars. But that's another story.