Pope Benedict XVI, in an appeal to the sheep newly his own on the day of his enthronement, said, “Pray for me that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.”  We can be sure he knows who these wolves are after a quarter-century as head of the Holy Office.

Here are some of his words directed at the wolves.  First, to the wolves outside the Church: On May 13, 2004, he gave a conference to the Senate of the Italian Republic in the chapter room of the Minerva in which he provided an overview of the “irrefutably Christian”—words from his first general audience as Pope—past, present, and future of Europe.  “In our current society . . . those who dishonor the faith of Israel, its image of God, its great figures [are] fined.  Whoever degrades the Koran and the convictions of Islam is fined as well.  However, wherever one treats of Christ and what is sacred to Christians then suddenly freedom of opinion appears as the supreme good . . . There is a strange self-hatred in the West which could be considered something pathological; the West tries to open itself to the understanding of values from the outside, but it no longer loves itself . . . The multiculturalism which is constantly and passionately encouraged and favored is often above all abandonment and denial of that which is one’s own, a flight from one’s own things.”

Second, to the wolves within the Church: On March 25, 2005, Cardinal Ratzinger gave the meditations on the Via Crucis at the Colosseum in Rome.  “How often is His Word twisted and misused!  What little faith is present behind so many theories, so many empty words!  How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to Him! . . . His betrayal by His disciples, their unworthy reception of His Body and Blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces His heart.  We can only call to Him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison.”

Now, some words for sheep—first, the laity: At the end of the Liturgical Conference at the abbey of Fontgombault on July 24, 2001, he spoke (along with Roberto de Mattei, a friend of Chronicles and The Rockford Institute) of the difficult but necessary truth that authentic, traditional liturgy can only be successfully restored in an objective, local context and not by a gathering of persons motivated simply by subjective, ideological forms.  “I am in this local Church, and I don’t look for my friends there, I find my brothers and my sisters; and these brothers and sisters are not people we look for[;] we just find them there[;] . . . this is a very important principle[;] . . . this is not my choice[;] . . . I am in the common Church, along with the poor, the wealthy, with people I like and people I don’t like, with intellectuals and with uneducated people; I am in the Church which was there before me.”

Now, for religious: In the same speech in the old cloister of the Minerva cited above, he indicated the necessity of monastics for the survival of culture.  “Monasticism . . . has remained the essential bearer of cultural continuity, and above all of the fundamental religious and moral values and of the ultimate destiny of man, and insofar as it is a force which is pre- and supra-political, it is also the bearer of the ever necessary rebirths.”  The new pope’s insistence on the maintenance of tradition in the concrete, local reality of faith and worship, family and monastery, is as good news in Rockford as it is in Rome.  Small wonder that the Russian Orthodox bishop-representative to the European Union, Hilarion Alfeyev, in an interview given in Rome, invited the new Pope on his enthronement day to a new alliance, not dedicated to ecumenical dialogue but to cultural action in the “noble, but extremely painful and difficult combat . . . against secularism, liberalism, and relativism.”

How the Holy Father will go about this work of defense and restoration depends, as it did for Cephas, on how God’s grace uses his temperament and character, which means, above all, his cultural formation.  This being the case, we should be very hopeful indeed, for these are Benedict XVI’s words about his childhood from an earlier interview as cited by the almost always reliable Sandro Magister: “The Catholicism of the Bavaria in which I grew up was joyful, colorful, human.  I miss a sense of purism.  This must be because, since my childhood, I have breathed the air of the Baroque.”  From this and all the above, I infer this practical and hopeful resolution for the reader: Attending The Rockford Institute’s 2005 Summer School with its Romantic Counterrevolutionary theme will be a great way to inaugurate the program of the pontificate of Papa Ratzinger and fight what he called, in a conference given in 1999 in—of all places!—Northern California, die Verdummung durch Unglauben (“dumbing-down through unbelief”) brought down on us by the Enlightenment.  Then, you’ll be ready to help when, God willing, the German Romantic brio of this Pontiff confronts “the dark Satanic mills” of the contemporary West.