Our Liberal Pope, Our Liberal Church

The Guardian's John Hooper has penned an objective and interesting article on "the apparent contradiction of the current papacy – that a man as mild as Benedict should have upset more people than perhaps any pope in history" — Is the pope a reactionary or a prophet? "Benedict was once regarded as a liberal, even a radical," Mr. Hooper reminds us, going on to state that "Benedict's supporters (and even some of his detractors) argue that to see him purely as a conservative is to do him an injustice."

"This is a pope who accepts the language of liberalism, in the original sense of the word, and wants to engage with all those who use that language, Mr. Hooper quotes Italian senator Marcello Pera, who collaborated with the pontiff on a 2004, as saying. "This is a pope who quotes Kant – a rationalist and Protestant, one of whose books was on the Index."

Mr. Hooper closes by reminding us that "one of the key ideas in Benedict's intellectual make-up [is] that many of the most treasured (and progressive) 'western' values are inextricably bound up with Christianity and threatened by its decline." Mr. Hooper goes as far to suggest "that today's Catholic church – hostile to abortion and contraception, antipathetic to homosexuality and dismissive of the idea of women priests – might be a bastion of enlightened values."