BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

A number of book reviews and commentary have now come out in the Italian media on the Rodari-Tornielli book documenting the attacks on Benedict XVI, and despite its great length, I have chosen to translate first this one by Massimo Introvigne, the sociologist and religious historian who heads CESNUR, a center for the study of new religion. Introvigne, whose lucid commentaries and analyses I have had occasion to translate on this Forum and the PRF earlier, is perhaps best qualified by training, temperament, and his own personal inclinations to undertake this commentary. He himself produced a booklet in 2007 to counteract the lies and fallacies purveyed by the BBC documentary on sexual abuses by priests when it was presented on Italian TV in 2007 to widespread 'acclaim' by the Italian MSM.




The three enemies responsible
for the assault on Benedict XVI
by Massimo Introvigne

August 24, 2010

Attacco a Ratzinger. Accuse, scandali, profezie e complotti contro Benedetto XVI {Attack on Ratzinger: Accusations, scandals, propheies and plots against Benedict XVI) (Piemme, Milano 2010) by the Vaticanistas Paolo Rodari and Andrea Tornielli is not a history nor a sociological analysis of Benedict XVI's Pontificate.

But it is excellent journalism, a careful chronicle of the details and the background of the attacks against Benedict XVI - attacks that from 2006 to the present, have made him the Pontiff who has been most systematically attacked through a relentless media campaign.

Rodari and Tornielli list ten principal episodes, and for each of them, they provide details some of which were previously unpublished.

The first offensive against Benedict XVI started with the Regensburg lecture on Sept. 12, 2006, which contained a quotation from the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologue (1350-1425) which was considered by some to be offensive to Islam and Muslims [worse, to Mohammed himself!]

It gave rise to a massive campaign against Benedict XVI, fuelled by the Western press and by Muslim fundamentalists, which degenerated into violent episodes, including tje killing of an Italian nun in Somalia.

Already in this first example, the authors' analysis demonstrates all the ingredients that were at work in all of the succeeding crises as well.

A large part of the media, especially in the West, had extrapolated the Manuel II statement from its context and hammered on the presumed offense against the Muslims in the front pages of the newspapers everywhere.

This media chorus was joined by a second element - which must never be ignored - made up of Catholics hostile to the Pope. In this case, persons like the Jesuit Islamologist Thomas Michel, a typical representative of the inter-religious 'establishment' in the Vatican that Benedict XVI has dismantled for its 'do-gooding' Islamophilia bordering on relativism.

Interviewed by the international press, these hostile Catholics launched 'a frontal attack on Benedict XVI' (p. 26), which was essential in lending credence to the polemical arguments of the lay media.

The third element that Rodari and Tornielli underscore is a weakness in the Vatican communications set-up, which has been too slow to react to controversy in the era of the Internet, has not always anticipated the consequences of some statements made by the Pope which may be too 'strong' for the media, and have not been prepared to take countermeasures as needed.

But turning from the Regensburg lecture as a media event to the lecture as a document, the authors report the opinion of another Jesuit Islamologist, Fr. Khalil Samir Khalil, who believes the Manuel II citation was not a 'gaffe' by the Pope that needed a correction, but an integral and unavoidable part of an analysis of contemporary Islam and its difficulty in correctly applying reason to faith.

Paradoxically, the authors point out, the profound motivation for that brief part of the lecture devoted to Islam was grasped by many Muslim intellectuals but ignored by much of the Western media. [Mainly because most of those who wrote about it apparently never read it in full. Because if they had, they could not have missed the fact that it was a monumental essay, one that was unprecedented for any Pope in modern times, to which my first reaction had been that it should be made required reading for every student who enters university! Like his lecture at the Bernardins in Paris two years later, it is a rare distillation of historical, cultural and philosophical analysis that makes one giddy with its richness and depth, not to mention its elegant economy of language.]

Thus there emerges a pattern on three levels - communications errors by the Vatican [worse than errors- - incompetence!], the aggression of the secular media, and the crucial role of Catholics hostile to Benedict XVI in supporting that aggression - that is found in all the other episodes analyzed by the authors, with few variations.

The role of Catholic progressivist dissent was particularly crucial in the campaign that came on the heels of the 2007 Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum which liberated the traditional Mass of PSt. Pius V [in its 1962 revision by John XXII], and the Pope's 2009 act lifting the excommunication of the four bishops illegally consecrated by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre .

In the first case, Rodari and Tornielli describe a disquieting scenario of resistance from liturgists, Catholic magazines, intellectuals with excellent media connections like Enzo Bianchi, but also bishops and even entire bishops' conferences who agitated, enlisted the secular media, and plotted in numberless ways to sabotage the Pope's motu proprio.

What was at stake, they note correctly - citing a study by Fr. Pietro Antonio published in Cristianita, the magazine of the Alleanza Cattolica - was not just liturgy but the very interpretation of the Second Vatican Council.

Those who have been fighting tooth and nail against the Motu Proprio are those who wish to defend the hegemony of their interpretation of Vatican II as discontinuity and rupture with all that had gone before - an interpretation that Benedict XVI has been trying in various ways to correct and eliminate.

The case of the Lefebvrian bishops, as we well know, became the 'Williamson case'. The Pope became the object of the harshest attacks when it turned out that one of the four bishops, Mons. Richard Williamson, believes the Nazis used no gas chambers on prisoners and that 'no more than' 300,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis, not 6 million.

Without going into that issue, it was obvious that the Holy See does not share such views - Benedict XVI has repeatedly denounced the Holocaust - but anyone with common sense would have known that any measurethat could in any way be considered favorable to a 'Holocaust denier' would surely provoke media reaction. And then there was the question: When did the Holy See know about Williamson's Holocaust views?

Rodari and Tornielli reconstruct the episode in minute detail, and point out that a note about this had been sent by Swedish bishops through the Apostolic Nunciature in Sweden - because in November 2008, a Swedish TV channel had recorded an interview with Williamson in which he expresses his views - to the Secretariat of State, where its potential implications were not appreciated and the report was simply shelved by the minor functionaries at the desk concerned with the Scandinavian countries. [When did they send it, though? The interview was never aired nor reported on until January 21, 2009, the day it was aired. Did they know about the interview and its contents well before January 21?]

On January 21, 2009, when news about the interview appeared on the Swedish TV's website, it was quickly picked up by Der Spiegel, and from them, by the rest of the world. At that time, the decree lifting the excommunications had not been issued [the release was timed for January 24, at the start of the annual Week for Christian Unity], but a copy of it had already been given to the Lefebvrians on January 17[to Mons. Fellay himself who was summoned to the Vatican by Cardinal Castrillon, then head of Ecclesia Dei, principal Vatican liaison with the FSSPX since 1988}.

It was no longer possible to recall it nor to modify it. [And how could it have been modified without making a mockery of the excommunication process? Williamson's excommunication had nothing to do with his personal opinions or knowledge of history, and in any case, excommunication is not a penalty for regular crimes, not even for mortal sins including murder, much less for historical ignorance even if it is willful, but for canonical violations.]

Nonetheless, the authors rightly point out that the Holy See should have accompanied the release of the decree on January 24 with a clear explanation that Williamson's excommunication had nothing to do with his Holocaust views, which neither the Pope nor the Church share [and explaining the canonical bases for excommunication].

This was mot done until several days later, giving the impression that the Vatican was reacting in embarrassment and was on the defensive.

Moreover, as the Pope himself would indirectly note in his subsequent letter on March 20 to all the bishops of the world, Williamson's views could have been found on the Internet even before Swedish TV broadcast its interview.

"I have been told that consulting the information available on the Internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on. I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news".

From Benedict XVI's letter, the authors note, two other elements emerge. The first is the generous spirit of the Pope who personally took on responsibility for errors made by the Vatican, breaking with every precedent in which the Pope's collaborators always carried the blame. [And to this day, none of those collaborators have been man enough to own up, brazenly happy to let Benedict XVI take the whole blame!]

The second is that, even if Benedict XVI obviously had no knowledge of Williamson's views on the Holocaust at the time he approved the decree, the secular campaign launched against Benedict XVI succeeded immediately because of the simultaneous attack by prominent Catholic progressivists who saw an opportunity to avenge themselves for the Motu Proprio.

Thus the Pope wrote the bishops: "I was saddened by the fact that even Catholics who, after all, might have had a better knowledge of the situation, thought they had to attack me with open hostility."

The timing of events in the Williamson case was not at all random. The authors recall the hypothesis - first raised during the worldwide dissemination of the news on the negationist bishop in connection with the lifting of excommunication - of the role behind the scenes of a French lesbian couple Fiammetta Venner and Coroline Fourest, known for their anti-clerical campaigns and for their 'closeness to the Great Orient of France' (p. 99), i.e., to French Masonry. [Introvigne sort of leaves the lesbian couple's involvement in the 'plot' dangling. From what I understood at the time, they orchestrated the timing of the interview broadcast (which, remember, had not been used at all since it was taped in November 2008) and then alerted Der Spiegel to it. Without Spiegel's inflammatory report, before the Swedish TV channel itself advertised the program online, few people might have ever noticed the Swedish broadcast.]

According to Rodari and Tornielli, the Swedish TV interview with Williamson "had not been arranged for beforehand - the TV crew simply showed up at the seminary [FSSPX seminary in Zaitkofen, near Regensburg] and managed to get an interview with Williamson" (p. 88). It seems then that Williamson 'organized' the whole episode.

When he gave the interview in November 2008, the news of a possible lifting of the Lefebvrian excommunication was already circulating in the Internet. Rodari and Tornielli ask who could possibly have instigated the obscure TV journalist Ali Fegana to do the interview.

Personally, I have my doubts about Williamson himself, who would certainly have been in the know about an imminent remission of excommunication - but he was always notoriously against any idea of 'compromise' with Rome by the FSSPX, and at the very least, he was most imprudent in his statements to the Swedish TV crew.

The role of Catholic progressivists in stoking the flames already emerged in two previous campaigns against Benedict XVI, particularly serious since they had succeeded. [Except that the second campaign - against Mons. Wagner - took place soon after the Williamson case, not before - in February-March 2009.]

Two bishops chosen in the regular manner by the Pope [the national bishops conference and the Apostolic Nuncio screen candidates for an upcoming episcopal vacancy and then send on a short list of candidates, with their dossiers, to the Congregation for Bishops, which is supposed to check out the candidates, after which the prefect presents the short list to the Pope with his recommendations] had to renounce their nominations: Mons. Stanislaw Wielgus, who had been named Archbishop of Warsaw and therefore Primate of Poland - after documents turned up showing that he had collaborated with the Communist regime in Poland to spy on the Church; and Mons. Gerhard Wagner, named to be auxiliary bishop of Linz, Austria, who was fiercely opposed by most of the Austrian clergy and some bishops because of statements he had made regarding hurricane Katrina as a punishment from God, the Satanic character of the Harry Potter novels, and the possibility that homosexuality could be 'remedied' through therapy.

Rodari and Tornielli note that these opinions held by Wagner were shared by many in the Church. Cardinal Ratzinger himself had expressed his sympathy for a book written by a German woman who was critical of the Harry Potter novels, even while admitting he had not read the books. However, it is equally true that Wagner's objections were far more heated.

The two cases, the authors note, are not as remote or different from each other as it may seem at first glance. Even Mons. Wielgus, although he was denounced primarily by rightist 'pursuers of Communist collaborators', was then systematically attacked by the Polish media not so much for his collaboraionist past - which, after all, he shared with more than 100,000 persons in Poland, including numerous priests and quite a few bishops - but for his subsequent and current reputation as a conseervative bishop.

If, in the case of Wielgus - who imprudently first sought to deny his collaborationist past - accepting his renunciation was inevitable, one must share the perplexity of the authors in the case of Mons. Wagner.

The apparent yielding by the Vatican to pressure from part of the Austrian clergy and episcopate, among whom the most outsponen was a priest who soon thereafter proudly announced that he has been living in concubinage for years, encouraged global anti-Vatican opposition in Austria, an opposition in which most of Austria's ranking bishops have joined and which continues unresolved.

In March 2009, with the Pope's first trip to Africa, the attack entered a new phase. On the flight to Cameroon, Benedict XVI, following a now-established practice, answered a few questions pre-submitted by the journalists travelling with him.

To a French journalist who asked him about AIDS, the Pope replied that the massive distribution of condoms does not resolve the problem but aggravates it. The Pope, as the authors point out, is technically right [Not just technically - I don't understand this false distinction - but in terms of objective statistics comparing countries in Africa and Asia who rely on condoms alone versus those who empasize sexual responsibility!].

Indeed, in the following days, what he said was confirmed by many top epidemiologists and AIDS experts: By promoting sexual promiscuity and creating a false sense of security, policies to minimize the spread of AIDS based mostly on condom use have simply aggravated the problem in the countries where they are followed.

But that did not stop the international media from focusing on the story during the Pope's entire trip to Africa, and failing to report, especially in the West, all that he said on the other crises in the African continent, and his denunciation of the damages done by international institutions and some multinationals in Africa. Was this perhaps the real reason for the focus on thE AIDS remark?

The entry into the arena against the Pope of the usual dissenting theologians was not surprising. The new elemnt now was the intervention by government officials in Spain, France and Germany who demanded that the Pope apologize, and in the European Parliament, a resolution of censure against the Pope failed to pass but got 199 votes. Unlike the Belgian Parliament which did vote for censure, provoking a harsh response from the Holy See that led to an unprecedented diplomatic crisis between the two states - which appeared to have been reflected later on in the aggressive attiude of Belgian police recenrly against the archdicoese of Mechelen-Brussels in their ivnestigation of sex abuse claims against Belgian priests.

Two of the episodes in Rodari-Tornielli's list are interesting because they did not come from 'the left' as usual but from 'the right' - proving that even persons who are generally respectful can be induced by the general climate to use language against the Pope and the Church that they would never have used in earlier times.

The episodes have to do with criticisms by some conservative Catholics of Benedict XVI's encyclical Caritas in veritate and about the so-called 'third secret' of Fatima.

Regarding the encyclical, two United States Catholic commentators like George Weigel and Michael Novak considered it unjustly hostile to the capitalist model practised in the United Sattes. And on the 'third secret', the Vatican has been accused of failing to reveal the entire message.

Th merits of both cases are certainly arguable, although in the case of the encyclical, the two American critics seem to have been more irritated that they were not consulted, as they were for John Paul II's social encyclicals. But the tone and vitriol were nonetheless signs of the unhealthy climate that had grown around the Pope. {In fairness, Weigel and Novak were certainly sharp-tongued and vehement in their criticism, but not vitriolic.]

The opening given to Anglicans dismayed by the acceptance by the Anglican Communion of women priests and bishops and homosexual unions and who had turned to Rome, was bitterly opposed by the Catholic left as dangerous for ecumenism - but what ecumenism is possible with Christians who would sanctify homosexual marriage in Church? - and also by the Catholic right because it would mean accepting married Anglican oriests into the Church, which in their view, would compromise the defense of priestly celibacy.

Even in this, the most serious aspect is the global misunderstanding [about Angliganorum coetibus] by some self-described conservatives who pour gasoline instead of water on the flames of anti-papal hostility.

The other nine crises described pale in comparison to the tenth which is about pedophile priests. Since the authors amply cite and use material from my book Preti pedofili(San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo 2010), substantially sharing its premises, perhaps I should not summarize the large part of the book dedicated to this issue and simply allow myself to refer the reader to the book itself.

Rodari and Tornielli reiterate what I had underscored regarding absurd criticisms that have unfortunately also come from some bishops and cardinals: If there was one prelate in the Church who was most severe in confronting the problem of pedophile priests - to the point of being accused of violating their right to self defense and of having had disputes about the issue with many episcopal colleagues - this was Cardinal Ratzinger when he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Therefore to present him as the opposite, as having been tolerant on this issue, is simply ridiculous, and yet the claim finds credence among the less-informed who get their news from the media.

The authors do ask whether the obstacles in the way of Cardinal Ratzinger during the final years of John Paul II's Pontificate - when his requests for harsher measures were not always granted - would cast a shadow on the great Polish Pope and would eventually compromise his cause for beatification. But in the case of John Paul II, that question had already been confronted and overcome during the investigation that preceded the decree on his heroic virtues.

However, the conclusion is drawn that certain brakes on Cardinal Ratzinger's work in dealing with the problem of pedophile priests were applied in the last years of his predecessor's pontificate, when John Paul II, increasingly ill, was no longer able to follow routine affairs personally and delegated the responsibility to his closest collaborators, against whom the criticisms should properly be directed.

In conclusion, Rodari and Tornielli ask whether one can speak of a plot against the Pope, citing various opinions pro and con, including mine in an interview that they sought specificially for this book.

They conclude that there have been three different attacks on Benedict XVI by three distinct enemies.

The first is from the galaxy made up of secular lobbies, homosexuals, masons, feminists, the pharmaceutical giants that deal in contraceptives and abortifacients, and the lawyers seeking damages in the megamillions for victims of pedophile priests.

This galaxy - which is too diverse to maintain that they all fall under a single direction - is able to mobilize the new information technologies with a power that no other enemy of the Church has had in all of history, wielded against a Pope who is seen as the principal obstacle to the construction of a universal dictatorship of relativism, in which God and the values of life and family count for nothing. These enmies see the Pope as an obstacle who must be swept away at any cost and by any means.

This lobby has also succeeded because they have enlisted in their cause the second group hostile to the Pope, made up of Catholic progressivists, especially those theologians and not a few bishops who see their authority and power in the Church threatened by Benedict XVI's dismantling of their interpretation of Vatican II as discontinuity and rupture with the past, an interpretation on which they have built their careers and reputations for decades.

Interviews with these progressivists allow the secular media to present their propaganda not as anti-Catholic in any way but as 'Catholic support' for their campaign against a Pope they describe as a reactionary who intends to 'nullify Vatican II' - which means he disputes the so-called 'spirit of Vatican II' that they claim to embody. Especially since secular journalists are not even familiar with the texts of the Conciliar documents, and their travelling companions who call themselves 'adult Catholics' have preferred to ignore what the documents actually say as if the texts were irrelevant.

In the third place, Benedict XVI's third enemy - often involuntary and not consciously, but no less dangerous - found in the Vatican itself, in the many "'self-produced' crises unintentionally brought about by numerous imprudent statements and frequent errors committed by the Pope's own collaborators" (p. 313).

The authors report various opinions on the communications problems in the Holy See - in the era of the Internet, social networking, and cellphones directly linked to the Web, which enable hundreds of millions (500 million of them active daily users of Facebook) to learn the news seconds after anything is posted and that become archivial items within a few hours.

So if a false report is not immediately corrected within 2-3 hours at most, or if there is no response to an attack in the first 24 hours, then the possibility of effective response is reduced to almost zero.

If all this is true, then the opinions of those interviewed by the authors who lament that Fr. Federico Lombardi compares unfavorably as Vatican spokesman to the sharp and astute Joaquin Navarro Valls can be disputed infinitely but fail to go to the heart of the problem.

It is the manner and means of communications that has changed radically since the time of John Paul II, since his death, even. The problem is not the Internet itself but the increasing number of its users - hundreds of millions, not just a small elite - who are wired into the Internet 24/7 through smart phones, netbooks, and iPads; whose reaction time, on demand or by provocation, is measured in minutes not hours. On this point, those in the Vatican should probably read Il tempo breve ('Time is short' is perhaps the most idiomatic translation rather than the literal 'Short time'), a new book by Italian journalist Marco Niada.

Benedict XVI is not unaware of these attacks. He is also very interested in the new information technologies and in the urgency of improving the Holy See's communications capacity.

But Rodari and Tornielli also say that he is too 'calm'. That he keeps abreast of the problems for the Church brought on by the information revolution - one perhaps that is more important than the cultural revolution of the late 1960s against authority and morality - but not to pursue them.

As Pope, he is convinced that the solutions for a persecuted Church will not come from strategies, from diplomacy, from technology - although these are important and must not be ignored - but from faithfulness in prayer and reflection on the Crucified Christ.

He is probably right not only on the spiritual level, obviously, but also on the cultural and sociological levels, in which the Church must not be expected to follow dominant models but to be herself.

But not everyone, including many Catholics, seem to understand this. [Which goes to a basic incomprehension of what faith should be - our faith, the religion, should be accepted totally and not just 'choose and pick', and it cannot change according to prevailing cultural winds, because if it changeable and not total, then it is no longer faith.]