The January/February issue of The Atlantic Monthly came yesterday. It has a lot of neat stuff in it, including a 21-page piece about JPII/B16 by Paul Elie (senior editor at Farrar Straus & Giroux, Flannery O'Connor's publisher, so he can't be all bad). I'm guessing the article is 15,000-20,000 words long, making it a miniature book. I read about 1/3rd of it last night, and it's a good read. Here's the subcriber-only link, if you care to check out the introduction.
I'll post more about the essay/book later, but here are a few choice passages for now. Whether they're accurate or not, I don't know:
Ratzinger's support of Wojtyla for pope, then, was no simple act of deference to a cardinal older and more magnetic than himself. It was a placing of his gifts in the service of a man who was in many ways still a question mark–but who would emerge in the short term as greater than he. . . .
In the previous interviews Ratzinger had cited John Paul continually and spontaneously. This time [in 2000] he referred to John Paul only a dozen times in three days, and rather distantly at that, calling him "the pope," "this pope," "the present pope," or "the Holy Father." At one point he even referred to John Paul's pontificate in the past tense: "It was occupied in dealing with all the basic questions of our time–and over and beyond this, it gave us a running start, a real lead." It is a startling moment. ("He really said that?" my friend John [a cleric at the Vatican] asked in astonishment.) Ratzinger's "us" no longer included Wojtyla, and John Paul's long pontificate was a thing of the past; Ratzinger was looking beyond John Paul to the Church's next stage.
