Amy Welborn sums it up well

Amy Welborn revisits what she wrote on the one year anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI.

There are enormous problems in our Church and in our world. Some of us wish there would simply be some concerted head-knocking to take care of it all. But Benedict knows history, and he also knows what is at the heart of our problems: we have turned from Christ. Even in our Church, our fundamental problem is that too many of us have argued ourself out of serious, commmitted belief in Jesus Christ, modulating and contextualizing it to the point of emptiness. Too many of us have put ourselves at the center of this enterprise rather than Christ. Too many of us have simply sold out to whatever culture that surrounds us, letting it be our Lord, not Jesus Christ.

I have no great statements about his impact on the Curia or the bishops’ conferences or liturgical life or diplomacy. What I have heard over and over this year is a wise father gently, surely re-grounding us in Scripture and the witness there, as well as in the voices and art and holiness of Christians through the ages, articulating what we know is true about the strains, temptations and deserts in our lives, weaving it all together and in rather startling simplicity, pointing us to Jesus.