Less Diplomacy, More Gospel

Sandro Magister writes:

ROMA, September 18, 2006 – As soon as he returned from his trip to Bavaria, Benedict XVI, as had been planned, installed cardinal Tarcisio Bertone as head of the secretariat of state and promoted archbishop Dominique Mamberti as the Holy See’s new foreign minister.

At the same time, he found himself facing a wave of unprecedented protest on the part of the Muslim world – on account of things he had said at the University of Regensburg on September 12.

The two facts are not disconnected from each other. Bertone is not a career diplomat, but a man of doctrine and a pastor of souls. More than secretary of state – he has said – he wants to be secretary “of Church.” By installing him, the pope has confirmed that what is expected from the secretariat of state and the pontifical representatives is, above all, collaboration in the task that belongs to him as successor of Peter: “strengthening the brethren in the faith.”

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Less diplomacy and more Gospel: this is the course that Joseph Ratzinger is setting for the Church’s central governance. Even in the choice of archbishop Mamberti as foreign minister, what the pope kept in mind even more than his diplomatic competency was his direct familiarity with the Muslim world and with the related questions of faith and civilization. Born in Marakesh, with French citizenship via Corsica, Mamberti was a pontifical representative in Chile and to the United Nations, but also in Algeria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and most recently in Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia.

And it was again this criterion – less diplomacy and more Gospel – that led the pope, in the course of his trip to Germany, to say such politically incorrect, and such potentially explosive, words.

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