Benedict XVI: Taking youth seriously.

John Allen writes that Pope Benedict XVI has demonstrated that his attitude towards young people is as if they were, well, people. 

Despite the fact that professional pedagogues spend a lot of time worrying about whether material is "age-appropriate" or "relevant," somewhere along the line most people have had a teacher who stands out precisely because she or he refused to assume that young people are incapable of adult thought. They acted as if young people ought to be perfectly equipped to read Flaubert, or to do advanced calculus, or to master organic chemistry, and that faith often pushed their students beyond mediocrity.

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…Such teachers pay young people the compliment of not patronizing them.

After the 20th World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany, Pope Benedict XVI seems to be emerging as that kind of pope.

In a world of rapid-fire, MTV-style cutaways in television programs and movies, driven by the assumption that young people have limited attention spans and thus little capacity for following a line of thought, Pope Benedict made no apologies Sunday morning for veering into a lengthy exegesis of the Greek word proskynesis and the Latin adoratio. (He later tossed in a Hebrew term, beracha, to boot). He used words such as "positivism" and "transmute" without bothering to explain them…

Many will come away inspired because this man, whom most of the World Youth Day participants regard as brilliant and holy, didn’t water his thinking down. He didn’t act as if he was saving his best stuff for someone else — he assumed these young people were capable of meaty content.

I like the line about "professional pedagogues."  So much of the spiritual material directed toward young people assumes that it has to put on a young mask—which is really the product of an adult’s distorted imagination.  People, including young people of course, can spot that fake a mile off.   Can’t the Gospel be spread intact even to children?

Sounds like Benedict is going to speak his message without trying to simplify it.

I’m reading the books Truth and Tolerance and Introduction to Christianity right now.  I picked them almost at random, the first because it sounded topical, the second because it sounded, well, introductory.   (I was half right!)

I hope I get a chance to blog them.  They are both very dense, compared to most of the Catholic reading I do.  But they are also studded with gems—tiny moments of I never thought about it that way.  That’s amazing.