The Pope is Peter:
A Rock in this world
The Pope would gladly be reproached for being from 'day before yesterday'.
Because he is from many yesterdays before: He embodies a 2000-year Tradition
and for this, he is in the crossfire today.
Yet he is not only radical and modern but also a rock in the current sea of shortlived trends.
by Paul Badde
Translated from
February 1, 2010
The headline of BILD that proclaimed "WE ARE POPE! - Our Joseph Ratzinger is Benedict XVI'
ROME - We are not Pope, nor is, thank God!, either the author of this lines nor Klaus Wowereit nor Dietrich Bohlen, and that is as it should be.
Never was Angela Mekerel nor Margot Kaessman Pope, much less all of us Germans together. The 'cliche' that meant the opposite was a clever headline on Page 1 [when Benedict was elected Pope] that was really nonsense with a wink, typical of the Frankfurt school of journalism.
Nor have we been French, for that matter, since Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected to the Academie Francaise in 1992!
Thus, even Alexander Smoltczyk's observation in
Der Spiegel that in April 2005, the Germans lost 'their belief in Godlessness' never meant anything either.
This feeling was only due to the overpowering experience of that day on St. Peter's Square, when even completely unmusical people heard something of an angel's choir in the death agony of John Paul II.
Others were overcome by the illusory assumption that with the election of Benedict XVI, the Second World War finally had come to an end for the German people.
All such euphoria is now gone. Now the Godless are back proclaiming themselves, more dogged than ever before in my lifetime, and as aggressive as they need to be to win back lost ground.
It is obvious that Benedict XVI is in the crosshairs of their barrage. Not that he cares. He does not defend himself. He does not go on the talk shows. In fact, there is nothing that stands in the way of the rage from the determined and infuriated ranks of yesterday's social engineers.
Not a few of them have meanwhile become word police or the men in control of the new civil religion which worships everything - except God - that could serve man's self-authority over life, death and destiny.
Among them are the good old masters of Agitprop who have now come to the last bastion that has so far resisted them: the Church and the Pope.
What's disconcerting for Roman observers, however, is how easily all the many brave heros in Germany have ducked away from countering the defamatory and demagogic accusations against the Church and the Pope.
For instance, even the German Bishops' Conference appears to be in terrified paralysis, and allows their own news agency - instead of saying the truth courageously - to feed yet again to every newsroom ebtween Aachen and Passau the sensation-mongering 'news' over something that a great uncle of Joseph Ratzinger had said in the 19th century about the Jews - a kind of retrograde generational bad press for the Pope!
[So they're holding him responsible for any opinion any in his family might ever have held? Hard to believe such an attitude could be held by any right-thinking person, but apparently there are those in the DBK who do - a pox on all their houses!] Yet not a word of outrage about that from Berlin.
In Italy, on the other hand, almost every word of importance that the Pope says gives rise to weighty debates in all the newspapers from left to right.
The Poles, in their identification with their Pope, were able to bring the Soviet system to collapse from the Berlin Wall to Beringstrasse.
And yet the worst reproach against Pope Benedict outside Germany itself, after analyzing all the arguments, is really that he is German (and therefore, 'naturally' a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, etc. etc.).
That the English brought this up as soon as he was elected was self-explanatory. But that this was so hyped up in the land of the Reformation should not be cause for many in Rome or Warsaw or Paris to wonder or to rub their eyes in disbelief. Because, in Germany itself, no one seems willing to stand with the Pope.
He is the most modern Pope there ever was - his erudite brilliance world-enowned, his doctrine of the separation of Church and State radical - a Buddha on Peter's Chair, the Pope who unlike any other has occupied himself with the beliefs of Judaism, and perhaps, the most ecumenical Pope we have ever had (though not for ecumenism at any cost), even if many are already thinking that the next Pope should come from the Third World.
But he is German. And therefore, we must dwell a bit on what he believes.
Catholics do not only believe in one God. They also believe, as a consequence of this conviction, that there is Truth. One Truth - not two, three, four or countless truths. And what is true cannot be untrue at the same time. No amount of repetition will make lies true.
Pious Catholics share this belief in the existence of one Truth with pious Jews and pious Muslims. But because of religious freedom, one is not supposed to share the Catholic Creed with others.
In our part of the world, this truth in the modern era was expressed by the Catholic Alexis de Tocqueville, who was a contemporary of Karl Marx: "I believe I have loved freedom at all times, but in the times in which we live, I feel inclined to worship it".
That is why the Catholic Church's rigorous relationship with Truth seems even more inflexible, in the face of everyone else who believe one thing today and another tomorrow, maintaining that anyway, there is no universally valid truth. That's according to those who flaunt the spirit of the times.
Yesterday they were Communists, tomorrow they will Be Buddhists, day after perhaps moon worshippers. But they are also quite human, all too human. But less human is the Inquisition-like fury with which they attack full throttle at every new bend and curve.
I must admit there are two incompatible worlds in opposition. Whereas believers in Truth (even when part of the Truth is still hidden to them) depend on it as a deeply anchored guidepost, genuine atheists lack any such calming support. They can only rely on themselves since they find nothing else reliable. They would like to be on the right side this time, for once. And that is what they are striving for, which is rather dangerous.
It is exactly what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, on the eve of being elected Pope, warned against when he denounced the threatening 'dictatorxhip of relativism'. Because those who would level out the difference between truth and lies will also level out other differences.
And why not? When one can say anything one pleases? Everything is relative. There is no truth. There exists only what one accepts.
What has the Pope been accused of? That he did not say and do enough in Auschwitz or in Jerusalem? What is 'enough'? Is he supposed to yield and allow himself to be used as the funereal celebrant of a rite centered on the totalitarian apocalypse?
The truth is that it was not the Catholic Church that committed a criminal breach of civilization in the 20th century nor was it responsible for it. Those responsible were the new pagans a la mode in the 20th century.
And yet these clanging cymbals are now stirring up hatred for the Pope that smells exactly like the hate the Nazis harbored against Pius XII.
Because Benedict XVI deranges them. And so they rail against him as if he were the Taliban. That's the way it is.
Yesterday I read that the Pope from Bavaria is not just German, but a German 'from the day before yesterday', and this is where it becomes rather ridiculous.
And yet, he is not a man from day before yesterday. He is a man from many yesterdays before. He is 2000 years old. He is Peter, a Galilean from Bethsaida by the lake. And that is why he is reconciling the Church so radically with its authentic apostolic Tradition - uninterrupted despite a checkered history - and back to Jesus of Nazareth himself who said "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life".
Those who do not get that do not understand anything about the Catholic Church. Benedict XVI has devoted himself utterly to the Truth of the merciful God, for whom he too will give his life as his predecessors did.
He is a man from long before yesterday and for long beyond tomorrow. How many empires have crumbled in the past 2000 years? The Pope remains.
In this world, Peter is the rock.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/02/2010 03:41]