My mother converted to Catholicism in 1970, in the tender days right after the New Order of the Mass was being rolled out to parishes around the world. My dad converted a couple years later. They’re genuine Novus Ordo Catholics, good faithful products of the Second Vatican Council. Mom’s been a Eucharistic Minister for as long as I remember, Dad started doing the same sometime while I was in college—it wasn’t until a couple months ago that I had any idea that “E.M.” means Extraordinary Minister, not Eucharistic Minister, and that the very design of that position was to be not-Ordinary. But I won’t critique them here; as it stands, the position as an E.M. has been around for as long as I’ve been born: through as many pastors as I can remember, and with the tacit or expressed approval of all of our Archbishops in my lifetime.

Pope John Paul II was elevated to the papacy just a few months before I was born, and until his death in April 2005, was the only pope I had ever known. And with my entire Catholic formation under John Paul II, I think it’s safe to say I was a JPII kind of Catholic. What does this mean? It’s a question for a series of posts, but I think it can be nicely summed up to say that there was a great emphasis on being a good person and not a lot of emphasis on being a good Catholic. We were encouraged to think of piety as second to charity—that the qualities of a Catholic were seen in the quality of a person’s character. And what a lesson! We’d sing in church that song by Rev. Peter Scholtes “They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love” (copyright 1966) and it perfectly fit what it meant to be a Novus Ordo Catholic.

Please don’t get me wrong—that is not a critique! Indeed, our lives should be to love each other—it’s part of Jesus’ Greatest Commandment. And when that pope slipped the surly bonds of earth, I joined in the chorus of people who called him John Paul the Great, and felt like we had really lost a spectacular vicar.

Enter Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the quiet academic who carried the nickname “God’s Rottweiler”, though I didn’t really understand what that meant. I remember reading a few blogs that touched on religion here and there, and all of them portended ominous things from this new pope. I kind of hoped that the new pope would take the name “John Paul III” and that he would continue in the footsteps of his predecessor, so when he took the name “Benedict”, I was taken aback. A pope chooses a name that would suggest what kind of pope he wants to be, and Pope Benedict XV was an interesting pope—his papacy lasted 8 years, during World War I and the years that immediately followed, leading the faithful through some of the most turbulent years of the last few centuries. But most notably, BXV condemned the “modernist scholars” of the Church, a faction that the Church has to deal with from time to time. Again here, I won’t attempt to delve into modernism for the untutored gentle reader because it’s a subject of a unique series of posts, but this seemed alarming to me at the time. After all—my only pope, John Paul II, was a notably modern pontiff—traveling around the world, jogging in the Vatican gardens, and hanging out with U2’s Bono (at a time that doing so would be considered pretty cool).

Not to mention that the original namesake of “Benedict”, Saint Benedict of Nursia, was a pretty strict guy himself. The “Rule of Saint Benedict” literally saved European civilization during the dark ages and he can be quite arguably recognized as one of the most influential people in most of medieval Church history, but the same Rule (a series of rules, actually) is extremely rigorous and challenge to follow—Benedictines lead a pretty austere life, with rigorous work, prayer, meal and sleep schedules, with vows of stability, manners and obedience, even their comings and goings are regulated by their superior.

A pope who would take the name “Benedict” seemed pretty far off and remote to me, a guy who had only known popes who celebrated Mass in soccer stadiums and had the reputation of being a Holy pop star.

So let me say with no understatement, that I was totally caught off guard when I realized that I was a MAJOR FAN of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI.

Here is a quiet octogenarian who suggested that he wouldn’t travel very far outside of the Vatican, a former college professor who is more interested in playing Mozart concertos on piano than hanging out with Bono, a priest who found great power in the words of the Holy Mass—a Mass that I’d always recognized as important, if admittedly, a little banal (I cannot believe that I typed that). And this quiet octogenarian has been thoroughly profound.

Hearing that this pope was going to make small reforms in the Holy See (the “government” of the Vatican, for lack of a better term) by downsizing the numbers and merging some of the Councils (departments, again for lack) didn’t seem to personally matter much, then or now. But as I learned more about his critiques of Relativism, or that Rationalism is inseparable from Christianity, or that Consumerism is a poison to which we aren’t even realizing we are succumbing—I have to tell you that I was really caught off guard. Not that I was caught off guard because he was saying what I wanted to hear; rather, I was caught off guard because I didn’t want to hear this and yet it was striking a chord in me.

Have you ever had a moment where you realize that you had been really really wrong about something?

Gentle reader, I had been really really wrong.

And it kind of caught me off guard that I had been so wrong.

For a lot of my teenage and young adult life, I think you could sum up my religious and moral opinion as Relativist, or in other words, “nothing is wrong or right; religion and morals don’t matter beyond that morality and religion push us to be better people”. I hope I’m explaining this well. I had reduced religion to a “code of conduct” between people, where our greatest obligation was to be nice to each other. I had passively overlooked the first part of that Greatest Commandment—not outrightly abandoning or ignoring it, mind you, but I didn’t spend a lot of time with it. At one point, I had even taken this train of thought so far as to get into a pointed argument with a Fundamentalist Christian where I took a position that I could now describe as “heresy”, though I didn’t have the words or the frame of reference to do that then. But after a while, the trunk of my stunted theology bore its stunted fruit.

If religion is just about being good people, then why bother going to church? After all, I can be a good person on Sunday mornings from my couch watching the McLaughlin Group, right? If religion is just about being good people, then why even pray? After all, I can be a good person without cranking out some “Our Fathers”, right? And if religion is just about being good people, then why even bother with God at all? Atheists can be good people, right?

And indeed, all of these things are true! But they are also only one part of the picture, and the sad logical result that I ended up with because I had left half of the Greatest Commandment behind. So when Pope Benedict XVI showed up, wearing his ancient vestments, saying Mass facing the wrong direction, and riles up the religious world by altering a four sentence prayer that is said once a year in a form of the Mass that MOST of the Church hasn’t used for 40 years, I kind of thought our good Pontiff might be some kind of a space alien. Imagine my further surprise when I found myself curiously drawn to this pope—part of a spiritual reconciliation that I’ve been going through for the last few years—a person who seemed so remote that I didn’t really understand the man at all.

But he’s drawn me in! His Summorum Pontificum (language note: Latin) was a quiet invitation to join in the Church in a way I didn’t even know existed just a handful of months ago. His planned USA visit is a promise so compelling that I considered getting a plane ticket to Washington D.C. just for the hope I might catch a glimpse of the pope (a quick audit of my wallet cancelled my trip). But more broadly and more importantly, Pope Benedict XVI has taught me that some things do matter—a simple lesson that has filled my brain more rapturously than any amount of papal pop-culture cache ever did.

Pope Benedict XVI is going to turn 81 years old here in a few days. And yet, his work is just beginning. In 2005, I surmised (hoped, even) that this new pope was going to be a “transitional” pope, a quiet pontiff who would not rock Saint Peter’s boat until a younger, more charismatic pope could be named. And in small, subtle ways, I am being proven wrong. His Holiness is bringing the Church back to Mass, or in another way, re-placing the Mass at the center of Catholicism. The Holy Mass is the highest form of prayer in which Catholics can partake, and until I found Tradition and re-found Catholicism and discovered just how much I’d been missing.

In short, thank you, Pope Benedict XVI. I am proud to call myself a papist.