A Moment of Special Grace

National Catholic Register, 28 January 2023

The friendly gathering that included Cardinals George Pell and Joseph Zen in the wake of Pope Benedict’s XVI’s funeral is a treasured memory.

We knew, even as the evening concluded, that it would be lodged in our memories and our hearts as a moment of special grace. That was all the more true when our host died five days later. 

George Weigel called it a “white-martyr cardinals’ dinner,” an evening hosted by the late Cardinal George Pell at his Roman apartment the evening of the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI. Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong was the guest of honor at a small gathering, nine of us altogether.

Cardinal Zen was exceptionally gracious about my writing on China, informing a wider audience of the heroism of many Chinese Catholics, of which he is the true spiritual (grand)father. During the evening we reminisced about his visit to Kingston, Ontario, in 2013, accepting my invitation to address our St. John Fisher Dinner that year. Cardinal Pell had addressed it in 2008. 

Cardinal Zen, whom I did not know when I invited him, told us later that he came because he simply could not refuse an invitation in honor of St. John Fisher, the great bishop-martyr under Henry VIII. As it would turn out, several of our St. John Fisher Dinner speakers knew or would know state persecution, Cardinals Pell and Zen among them, but also Cardinals Robert Sarah and Jorge Urosa Savino.

Why does the Lord permit his faithful ones to suffer, to be buffeted by the world? Does He sleep while they are tormented?

Weigel recalled the high point of the exchange between the white martyrs:

After Cardinal Pell offered a moving toast to his brother cardinal, the conversation turned to those times when the Lord seems to be deaf to the pleas of his people…

Cardinal Zen reminded the group of the appropriate verses of Psalm 44 (“Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord?/Awake! Do not cast us off forever!”); remembered that those verses had been part of the Introit for Sexagesima Sunday in the old Roman liturgical calendar — and then proceeded to chant, from memory and in impeccable Latin, that entire Introit!

I was not the only one who had tears in my eyes as the 91-year-old Zen, under constant surveillance and harassment at home, facing trumped-charges for his defense of human rights against the Chinese communist regime, sang the words of the ancient psalmist: Wake up, Lord!

Returning home that evening, walking past an empty St. Peter’s Square, I recalled the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 2005. When he appeared on the central balcony for the first time — directly above where his coffin had laid earlier that morning — the other balconies were filled with cardinals. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago was on one of them, with Cardinal Pell just behind him, two of the most important prelates in the English-speaking world. 

Cardinal George later recalled that on the balcony, looking out at the obelisk in St. Peter’s Square, he thought that evening about all the popes it had seen come and go. The ancient obelisk was placed in the square because it was thought to be one of the last things Peter himself saw as he was crucified on the Vatican hill. Perhaps every pope had gazed upon it, including all the martyrs who followed Peter. What did they think? What did they pray? 

Exurge Domine! Wake Up, Lord!

That April evening it was now Pope Benedict XVI’s turn. I don’t know exactly why Cardinal Zen thought to chant the Exurge, but it was supremely fitting for the evening of Benedict’s funeral. Benedict framed his entire pontificate within the biblical scene of the boat being threatened by the storm — while the Lord Jesus slept. 

In his meditations for the Via Crucis at the Colosseum for Good Friday 2005, just nine days before St. John Paul the Great died, Ratzinger famously decried moral corruption in the clergy:

How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him! … Lord, your Church often seems like a boat about to sink, a boat taking in water on every side. In your field we see more weeds than wheat. The soiled garments and face of your Church throw us into confusion.

Less than three weeks later, in his “dictatorship of relativism” homily just before the conclave in which he would be elected, the tempest-tossed boat returns:

How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves — flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth.

As it was at the beginning, so it was at the end. In his final general audience before an immense crowd in St. Peter’s Square, Benedict reflected upon his pontificate:

I have felt like St. Peter with the Apostles in the boat on the Sea of Galilee: the Lord has given us so many days of sun and of light winds, days when the catch was abundant; there were also moments when the waters were rough and the winds against us, as throughout the Church’s history, and the Lord seemed to be sleeping.

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