BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

The Guardian editors must be patting themselves on the back for coming up with what they must believe to be a 'rational', 'sane' and 'balanced' editorial stand on the Pope's visit. But just because they defend his trip as a state visit - a defense that he does not need, thank you, because he is, after all, the invitee, whose visit was solicited by the previous UK government - does not at all make up for the shameless ad hominem attack that precedes that 'defense'. Nor does their acknowledgment that perhaps not even the President of the United States could attract as many crowds as the Pope does.

In effect, they're saying, "He's really a big big gun, so as much as we dislike him and his Church, we have no choice but to pay attention". After all, people only aim to cut down the tallest tree in the forest.

And yet, they are shamelessly dishonest because not a single point they attack him on, personally, and then projected onto the Church, is based on fact - and that, indeed, the very opposite of what they claim can be proven with an abundance of facts and figures.... The impending avalanche of outright lying, ill will, bad faith and odium is just gathering force. I suspect much of what will be coming out between now and Sept. 19 will be destined for the toxic waste bin...


Papal visit:
Bad tripper, good trip
There are powerful arguments against Benedict XVI's visit –
but the head of the Catholic church is a force that cannot be ignored
Editorial

Monday 6 September 2010

The Vatican is no ordinary state, and the Pope's trip to Britain this month will be no ordinary state visit. No other leader who comes to these shores takes time out between the official meetings and dinners to conduct a beatification, as Benedict XVI plans to do.

None, probably not even the President of the United States, would expect to draw the same crowds, attract the same adulation [What? didn't the Guardian join everybody in hailing Obama as the Messiah two years ago???? And now they acknowledge the Pope is a greater draw????] – or stir the same resentment. It will be a big deal. The gathering storm over the cost of £10m or so to the taxpayer needs to be placed in that context.

Proselytising atheists are encouraging public resentment against the expense of policing the Pope's visit, and yet the same gang are inflaming these costs by suggesting that they will try to arrest him. The financial argument is a distraction, a mere veil for deeply held feelings about whether or not it is right for Whitehall to roll out the red carpet for the world's greatest theocrat.

[A label erroneously used for the Pope, because the Vatican as a state is no theocracy - 'a form of government in which a god or deity is recognized as the state's supreme civil ruler, or in a higher sense, a form of government in which a state is governed by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided': The Pope's function as head of Vatican state is a civilian political necessity that is 'ex officio' to being the Pope - one that he holds because he is Pope - but it has nothing to do with his spiritual role as the Vicar of Christ and Successor to Peter. Likewise, his spiritual leadership of the world's Catholics does not have the all-encompassing authority that true theocrats like Iran's council of ayatollahs exert over all Iranians.]

The following paragraphs shown in purple are extremely offensive for their deliberate distortion of facts and outright mendacity:

The moral case against Benedict is powerful – and persuasive. For all the admirable work against poverty that Roman Catholicism inspires around the world, the Church directly aggravates the plight of vulnerable people. [EXCUSE ME! What moral case against Benedict? And how has the Church directly aggravated the plight of vulnerable people? By not giving condoms to people who trust Church workers enough to go to them for help about AIDS, rather than to the proliferation of do-gooding deluded 'only condoms can prevent AIDS' secular organizations in Africa and Asia???? What, for instance, has the Guardian and its sanctimonious pontificators ever done to improve the plight of vulnerable people???? Have they ever raised funds to help a single victim of a sex-abusive priest or the greater number of victims of sexual abuses committed by preponderant others who do not happen to be Catholic priests????]

It rails against IVF giving children to the childless, against stem-cell research giving hope to the sick, and against the use of condoms – even as a means of preventing the spread of HIV.

[Lie, lie and lie! 1) About IVF, the Church does allow one form of it, GIFT OR ZIFT, and just because it does not allow all forms of IVF does not mean some Catholics don't go ahead and do as they please anyway: the Church can only indicate, it cannot impose! 2) the Church does not oppose all stem-cell research, only when embryos are used for research - it is, in fact, encouraging and even funding adult stem-cell research. 3) There are other ways of fighting AIDS that have to proven to be more effective but do involve discipline and reining in the sexual-freedom-at-any-cost principle that is so sacrosanct to liberals!]

Its rigid views on homosexuality and the role of women are not unique in world religion, or even within Christianity, but the extent of child abuse for which its priests have been responsible has been shocking, as has its tendency to close ranks in response to the scandal. [This is blatant falsehood, rank exaggeration by any measure of the so-called 'extent of child abuse for which its priests have been responsible', and a deliberate denial of documented facts.]

Benedict himself, an arch-conservative, has in the past manoeuvred to preserve the autonomy of the Church in such matters, as opposed to having them immediately handed on to the police. [That is a clear lie, and a deliberate misreading of instructions referring to canonical handling of offenses - instructions that never ruled out reporting to the police in any way, but do not state this explicitly because such a step has nothing to do with canonical procedures

He has also indulged the standing of Catholic figures who have turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities. [Figures? Did Richard Williamson suddenly multiply himself? Another deliberate mis-statement of fact by the Guardian, aggravated by an utter lack of logic in the other statements: Lifting Williamson's excommunication, which had nothing to do with his personal historical opinions, is in no way 'indulging his standing', whatever that means, nor 'turning a blind eye to Nazi atrocities'. The Guardian is really also trying to insinuate all over what the UK media have always tried to pin on Joseph Ratzinger - that he must have been a Nazi because he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth and the German armed forces.]

A case against Benedict, however, is not the same thing as a case against allowing him a state visit. All manner of tyrants have been welcomed to London over the years, and – to take one example – the human rights record of China, which is uniformly dismal where the Vatican's is mixed, was no bar to President Hu Jintao enjoying a grand trip in 2005.

Purists would make a stand against flattering thuggery in all circumstances, but most of the rationalistic punters protesting against the Pope's visit would accept that peace and prosperity often rely on dealing with power as we find it, as opposed to power as we might like it to be.

[In the above arguments, the Guardian, in effect, equates the Pope to tyrants and thugs who have been state visitors to the UK!]

The argument then comes down to claiming that the Vatican is not a proper state, a point recently run by the philosopher AC Grayling, who speculated on what treatment world leaders would give him if he declared his south London garden a nation.

There is, perhaps, an echo here of Stalin's contemptuous question about how many divisions the Pope had. As a matter of fact the Pope is a head of state, one that conducts diplomatic relations with 178 capitals around the world.

As a matter of what foreign-affairs wonks label soft power, he is a force that cannot be ignored. The spiritual leader of a billion people around the world is, for better or worse, somebody with clout.

The Catholic Church flexed malign muscle within our own politics a few years ago by forcing Labour ministers to drop a scheme that would have encouraged a measure of religious mixing in faith schools. But it has been a force for good, too, in securing the writing-down of poor countries' debt, and is increasingly a useful voice on climate change.

London is right to recognise that the Pope is in a better position to protect the Brazilian rainforest than the Foreign Office.

The Pope could come in a purely pastoral as opposed to diplomatic capacity, as his predecessor did in 1982. Even so, the last Pontiff's arrival was said to have coincided with brief restraint in the Falklands war, and the truth this time is that there is serious diplomacy to do. Unattractive as the holy visitor is in so many respects, his trip is wholly justified.

[I am unable to come up just now with any statement that is strong enough to condemn that last sentence and the hateful and hate-full arrogance of the Guardian editors.]


An English priest who is spending a sabbatical year in a Michigan parish contributes this from his blog 'Caritas in veritate':


BBC Profile on Pope Benedict XVI


www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00tk7s9/Profile_Pope_Bened...

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Typical BBC 'objectivity': plenty of airtime to Hans Kung plus a sister from 'Future Church' who says the Pope is too concerned with a narrow vision of the Church, preserving it as it was or is and not thinking of where it needs to be, ruled as it is by a small number of men in Rome. The Pope has managed to offend Muslims, Jews and the Archbishop of Canterbury, says the BBC.

Joseph Fessio, a former pupil of Ratzinger's and founder and editor of the utterly reliable publishing house Ignatius Press however says what his professor taught was wonderful. Cardinal Murphy O'Connor, sounding ever more ancient, says the Pope will want to tell the people of Britain about a coherent truth that is good not just for Catholics but for everyone.

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I listened to the 15-minute audio clip, and though I couldn't make up some parts of it, it is a typical 'show of objectivity' which mentions facts that are quickly embroidered by negative opinion. Such as that the five-year-old Joseph Ratzinger's admiration for a visiting cardinal lives on his 'love of fashion and finery' exemplified by... TA-DA! the fact that he has used the camuro and the saturno (both of which happen to be utilitarian head gear that protect against cold and heat, respectively).... Someone at the start quotes Benedict XVI wrongly, describing the moment when it appeared he would be elected as 'I felt the noose tightening around my neck' when the new Pope actually used a much stronger metaphor, "I felt like the guillotine was coming down on me"...

John Allen, described as 'the Pope's biographer' [though he is only one of many who have written biographies of Benedict XVI, most of whom have never even talked to him but depended on secondary and tertiary sources], actually gets more air time than Hans Kueng. He is good when he says that he does not doubt Joseph Ratzinger's attitude towards priestly sex offenses: "I've interviewed him - it is horrifying to him, you can see revulsion on his face", but then he goes on to say that the Hullerman case in Munich is 'the most serious blotch' on the Pope's record, because, he claims, the buck stopped at his desk insofar as the assignment of Hullerman to pastoral duties went. The BBC narrative never makes the timeline clear about Hullerman and makes it appear that his assignment to pastoral duties and his eventual recidivism all took place under Joseph Ratzinger, citing the New York Times as its authority for its 'facts'!

As for Hans Kueng, the BBC reporter goes along with his demand for a 'personal apology' from the Pope - but for what exactly, neithEr Kueng nor the reporter say. For Hullerman????

The nun they use as a resource person is as hateful as the worst of the Vatican-II nuns (yes, I am very biased and uncharitable about feminist ideologues and liberal activists whose minds are closed to reason and logic, and I find the Joan Chittisters of the world as insupportable as the worst of Catholic dissidents, but that's just me!).

Very likely, Hans Kueng really does not mind that MSM openly uses him as their Star Witness to impugn Joseph Ratzinger - it's probably the only use they have for him now. Sort of like getting Salieri to testify against Mozart, except that Kueng has really fed more poison about Joseph Ratzinger than any poison, real or imagined, that Salieri could have used against Mozart - if only because Kueng has been at it for at least four decades now!

Imagine the persons today whose reputations are largely based on their instant, reflex and most uncharitable opinions of anything Joseph Ratzinger says or does - types like Thomas Reese and David Gibson, to name just two who consistently do their worst to impugn Benedict XVI, and in a way, live off his reflected glory in a truly self-serving but perverse manner! After all, who would remember Salieri today if Mozart was not who he was?

P.S. It just occurred to me - if my conjecture is right that the apparent urgency the Holy Father gave to granting the interviews with Peter Seewald and getting the book to print before the end of the year is his way of directly answering all the manifold wide-ranging attacks against him while setting the record straight about the first five years of his Pontificate - then we may all get to learn from him directly 'what he knew and when knew it' about the Hullerman case. I cannot imagine Seewald would let that question pass, and perhaps more likely, the Pope himself may have wanted to clear that up once and for all... And John Allen will have his questions answered about this 'most serious blotch' on Joseph Ratzinger's record.