At the The Federalist Thomas Griffin has an article honoring Pope Benedict XVI entitled We Can Celbrate Pope Benedict By Keeping 'Encounter' and 'Truth' At The Center of Chritianity.
When our first son was born in 2020, my wife and I named him Benedict, in part after the witness of the tremendous Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who died Saturday morning in Rome at age 95. Benedict will forever be remembered for his deep faith and capacity to transmit church teachings with cogency and depth, but what stands out perhaps more than anything else from his writings, speeches, and life is the stress he placed on two realities concerned with being a Christian: encounter and truth.
In his encyclical (formal letter written by a pope) called Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love,” in English), Benedict noted, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” As a learned theologian and a man of intense prayer, Benedict knew that people needed to hear this message: Being Christian is about a relationship with a person who actually lived and is alive today.
So many confuse the church’s mission and reason for existence. The church does not exist to bore its worshippers on Sundays, take their money, and give them orders on how to live their lives. The church exists as the concrete reality by which people today can experience Jesus as God and as having risen from the dead. Encounter-focused faith was a major mark of the pope’s ministry because without this being conveyed, Christianity, and the rest of the world, would disintegrate.Pope Benedict's gentle, straight forward approach apparently brought many back to the faith. He will be missed, even by those of us who are Lutheran.
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