As David Goldman aka Spengler has now reacted to Ross Douthat's NYT column, I have decided to give the Douthat piece and Goldman's rejoinder a separate post.
[I am always a bit wary about Douthat, but he's the New York Times's token Catholic on their editorial pages, and it turns out he filed a column yesterday...WHICH IS WORSE THAN THE WORST I COULD IMAGINE! It's revolting, for its trashing of two Popes, and for the never-appropriate comparison of them....
The Better Pope
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: April 11, 2010
The world didn’t always agree with Pope John Paul II, but it always seemed to love him. Handsome and charismatic, with an actor’s flair and a statesman’s confidence, he transformed the papacy from an Italian anachronism into a globe-trotting phenomenon.
His authority stabilized a reeling church; his personal holiness inspired a generation of young Catholics. “Santo subito!” the Roman crowds chanted as he lay dying. Sainthood now!
They will not chant for Benedict XVI. [Excuse me???? Did Douthat ever bother to watch any of the Pope's public appearances - before and after this current round of Benedict-bashing???? BE-NE-DET-TO chanted tirelessly and enthusiastically and spontaneously at all times! Angelus, General Audience, Mass, encounter with the youth, travelling elsewhere - to a Rome diocese or to some Italian city or abroad....THEY HAVE BEEN CHANTING FOR BENEDICT ALL ALONG, even right after HABEMUS PAPAM! Obviously it's too soon for anyone to shout SANTO SUBITO for him, but in our hearts, we know we are privileged to live during the Pontificate of a future Doctor of the Church.]
The former Joseph Ratzinger was always going to be a harder pontiff for the world to love: more introverted than his predecessor, less political and peripatetic, with
the crags and wrinkles of a sinister great-uncle.
[Did Douthat see the Pope in person at all when he was in the USA? Or look at the dozens of news agency photos taken of him at every event? Of course, he has 'crags and wrinkles - he is 83 - but he carries them beautifully [as we Benaddits would say] but certainly far better than the overwhelming majority of men his age, and NOTHING could possibly make him look like a sinister uncle. When someone who's supposed to be on 'our side' compares the Pope to a sinister uncle because of 'crags and wrinkles' rather than the more obvious and appropriate simile 'kindly grandfather'. we are in trouble! Thanks, but NO THANKS!]
While the last Pope held court with presidents and rock stars, Cardinal Ratzinger was minding the store in Rome, jousting with liberal theologians and being caricatured as “God’s Rottweiler.” His reward was supposed to be retirement, and a return to scholarly pursuits. Instead, he was summoned to Peter’s chair — and,
it seems, to disaster.
The drip, drip, drip of sex abuse cases from Benedict’s past started a month ago with a serious incident: a pedophile priest who was returned to ministry in Munich by then-Archbishop Ratzinger’s subordinates, and perhaps with his knowledge.
The more recent smoking guns, though, offer more smoke than fire. The Pope is now being criticized not for enabling crimes or covering them up, but
because in the 1980s and 1990s the Vatican’s bureaucracy moved slowly on requests to formally laicize abusive priests after they had already been removed from ministry.
[How many cases of that have been brought up so far? Three! All completely out of context and out of whack!]
But the smoke is damaging enough. “The Failed Papacy of Benedict XVI,” ran a recent headline in
Der Spiegel, the newsmagazine of the Pope’s native Germany.
[The context being that Spiegel has always been hostile to both Joseph Ratzinger and Benedict XVI. Long before the New York Times and the AP and all the other Woodward-and-Bernstein wannabees started lining up at the post, Spiegel had staked its claim: it would be the media machine to bring down Benedict XVI a la Richard Nixon!]
If you judge a pontiff on his ability to do outreach, whether to lukewarm believers or the secular world, this is probably accurate. Amid the latest wave of scandal, Catholicism needed the magnetic John Paul, master of bold gestures and moving acts of penance. Instead,
the Church is stuck with Benedict, bookish and defensive and unequal to the task. [AND THAT IS THE WORST ACT OF LESE-MAJESTE I HAVE YET SEEN A SUPPOSEDLY PRO-BENEDICT WRITER COMMIT! The Church is 'stuck with him' and he is 'defensive and unequal to the task'?]
But there’s another story to be told about John Paul II and his besieged successor. The last Pope was a great man, but he was also a weak administrator, a poor delegator, and sometimes a dreadful judge of character.
The Church’s dilatory response to the sex abuse scandals was a testament to these weaknesses. So was John Paul’s friendship with the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ. The last Pope loved him and defended him. But we know now that Father Maciel was a sexually voracious sociopath.
And thanks to a
recent exposé by The National Catholic Reporter’s Jason Berry, we know the secret of Maciel’s Vatican success: He was an extraordinary fund-raiser, and those funds often flowed to members of John Paul’s inner circle.
[Berry wrote about it for the Global Post back in July 2009, only no one was paying attention!]
Only one churchman comes out of Berry’s story looking good: Joseph Ratzinger. Berry recounts how Ratzinger lectured to a group of Legionary priests, and was subsequently handed an envelope of money “for his charitable use.” The cardinal “was tough as nails in a very cordial way,” a witness said, and turned the money down.
This isn’t an isolated case. In the 1990s, it was Ratzinger who pushed for a full investigation of Hans Hermann Groer, the Vienna cardinal accused of pedophilia, only to have his efforts blocked in the Vatican. It was Ratzinger who persuaded John Paul, in 2001, to centralize the church’s haphazard system for handling sex abuse allegations in his office. It was Ratzinger who re-opened the long-dormant investigation into Maciel’s conduct in 2004, just days after John Paul II had honored the Legionaries in a Vatican ceremony. It was Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict, who banished Maciel to a monastery and ordered a comprehensive inquiry into his order.
So the high-flying John Paul let scandals spread beneath his feet, and the uncharismatic Ratzinger was left to clean them up. This pattern extends to other fraught issues that the last Pope tended to avoid — the debasement of the Catholic liturgy, or the rise of Islam in once-Christian Europe. And it extends to the caliber of the church’s bishops, where Benedict’s appointments are widely viewed as an improvement over the choices John Paul made.
It isn’t a coincidence that some of the most forthright ecclesiastical responses to the abuse scandal have come from friends and protégés of the current Pope.
Has Benedict done enough to clean house and show contrition? Alas, no. Has his Vatican responded to the latest swirl of scandal with retrenchment, resentment, and an un-Christian dose of self-pity? Absolutely. Can this pontiff regain the kind of trust and admiration, for himself and for his office, that John Paul II enjoyed? Not a chance. [I WISH I COULD DO THE EQUIVALENT OF A CITIZEN'S ARREST OF DOUTHAT FOR THESE LINES! If he put them in to curry favor with his newspaper so they will keep him on, he's a cheap unprincipled opportunist. If he really believes it, then BEGONE, SATAN!]
But
as unlikely as it seems today, Benedict may yet deserve to be remembered as the better Pope.
As someone who loves the late Pope and who prays to him daily, I obviously have great misgivings about the way Douthat trashes John Paul II for whatever mistakes and shortcomings he had as Pope. Not because he was blameless, but because this is not the time to state all this so starkly and mercilessly. The Church is being battered enough by outside forces as it is. Why should Douthat provide more ammunition that the Church's detractors can use? Not that the faithful will think any less of John Paul II because of what Douthat says, even if the anti-Church legions could conceivably use his words to their ends.
But there's a time and place for everything. Now is not the time to articulate these questions about John Paul II. If only because Benedict XVI stands high on his actions and words alone - he does not need to be propped at the expense of his predecessor.
I have been a fan of Spengler/Goldman since I first saw his articles about Benedict XVI in 2005, but I definitely do not agree with him in giving 'Three cheers' for Douthat's denunciation of John Paul II - for the reasons I give above. Anyway, Goldman leaves that behind to go on to Benedict XVI.... about whom he always has some fresh insight to add:
A Jewish defense of Benedict XVI
by David P. Goldman
Monday, April 12, 2010, 12:25 PM
Three cheers for Ross Douthat’s spirited defense of Benedict XVI as the uncharismatic successor who had to clean a set of messes left by his great predecessor John Paul II. Douthat writes:
[
Goldman quotes the passage starting with "…the high-flying John Paul let scandals spread beneath his feet, and the uncharismatic Ratzinger was left to clean them up...."
down to "But as unlikely as it seems today, Benedict may yet deserve to be remembered as the better Pope".]
As a non-Catholic, I have admired Joseph Ratzinger for thirty years —first because of his impassioned defense of Western classical music (in 1985 he was generous enough to comment on a manuscript I had sent him of a study of Nicholas of Cusa and music theory, later published in the Vatican’s music journal).
When his 1986 interview book
The Salt of the Earth appeared in German, I read about it in
Der Spiegel between flights at the Tokyo airport, and was gobsmacked: there was a Prince of the Church warning that “we might have to bid farewell to the concept of a popular Church” in an era of faithlessness. That showed real guts.
Then there was the Regensburg speech in September 2006, with its bold critique of Islam. And finally — closest to my heart — is the fact that Joseph Ratzinger “is the first Pope since St. Peter to read the Gospels as Hebrew documents,” in the words of the Bonn University theologian Karl-Heinz Menke, writing last year in the German-language edition of
Communio.
As Assaf Sagiv wrote in
Azure magazine, Benedict XVI is in some respects the best friend the Jews ever have had at the Vatican.
Jews have had reason to have had mixed (and sometimes hostile) feelings towards the Vatican over the centuries, but we should wish this Catholic philo-Semite success and pray for his good health. And as I wrote March 26 on the Spengler blog,
There’s something ugly in the air. The two central institutions of the West are the Throne of St. Peter and the Oval Office. That is not an exaggeration, for the Catholic model in Europe and the American model are the two modes of life that the West has developed.
When Catholic universal empire failed with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and was buried by Napoleon, the United States emerged as an alternative model; the non-ethnic nation founded on Christian principles albeit without an explicit tie to a particular Christian confession.
For the first time in history the barbarians have breached the citadel; to have Barack Obama in the White House is the cultural equivalent of electing Madonna to the papacy. America, the source of a civil religion that held together the world’s only remaining superpower, is committed to its own self-demolition. Nihilists around the world are in a triumphant mood and believe that it is time to mop up the remnants of their enemies everywhere.
As an outsider, one observation regarding John Paul II and Benedict XVI seems relevant. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism, to which JPII contributed so much, the Pope believed that the re-evangelization of Europe was imminent.
Without the dead hand of Soviet totalitarianism and the ever-present threat of nuclear war, Europe’s spiritual disease would find remission. Many people thought so; I thought so, too, and said so in print in 1989.
JPII came from the Polish Church which had led the resistance against Russian oppression, and took his message to the world with boundless confidence, allowing the details to take care of themselves.
But it was not to be. JPII was a fisher of men, I wrote some years ago, but sadly, it was catch-and-release. Poles still go to Mass, but their fertility rate is lower than Germany’s, and on the present trend-line Poland will cease to be a viable nation early in the second half of this century. Europe’s spiritual malaise seems fatal.
And it was Benedict XVI who in 1996 foresaw that his predecessor’s hopes — all of our hopes — might be in vain. “
Vielleicht müssen wir von den volkskirchlichen Ideen Abschied nehmen,” he told Peter Seewald – perhaps we must take leave of the ideas of the popular Church.
Perhaps we stand before an epoch of Church history of a different sort, in which Christianity will stand under the sign of the mustard seed, in apparently insignificant, narrow groups, which nonetheless live intensively in opposition to evil and bring good into the world.”
Europe’s evolution was worse than even Benedict’s pessimism foresaw —barely 4 percent of German Catholics attend Church regularly — although the evangelization of the Global South puts another light on the matter.
The prestige and drawing power of the Catholic Church in Germany is so reduced that
Der Spiegel feels empowered to try to take down a German Pope.
If the cultural left succeeds, the sum of good in the world will shrink.
Well, they won't take him down, Mr. Goldman!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/04/2010 02:59]