Hear Him

TS O'Rama posts a few quotes that he likes from the days when our new Pope was still Cardinal Ratzinger. And Hugh Hewitt at the Weekly Standard puts up Benedict's (then Ratzinger's) pre-conclave homily in its entirety. Looking over both these entries, and a few things at other places, it occurs to me that this fellow, this Pope, has a gift for diagnosing our cultural and moral ills, and for elucidating the spiritual consequences, in language so clear that, to achieve the same effect, other reputedly more "gifted" writers would end up thrashing around in a knotted tangle of their own syntactical making. This clarity, this ability to make the 'sin of the world' most manifest, will cause it to hate him. In this regard, I fear for him somewhat.