BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

I suppose this article is an honest attempt to present a 'balanced' view of Benedict XVI, but it still perpetrates many half-truths and misconceptions about the Pope and the Church that reflect the most common errors of secular media and commentators, who mostly gaze at their navels and echo each other instead of doing honest research and fact-checking of their stereotypes... But this is probably the 'best' we can expect of the kind of information (much more misinformation and disinformation than it is information!) that the UK media are purveying about Benedict XVI between now and his visit.


Pope Benedict XVI:
Man with a mission
to keep the faith alive
By Stephen McGinty

Sept. 7, 2010


Iona, the little island off the coast of Mull, has a large place in the heart of Pope Benedict XVI. For it was here among the salt water and sea-spray that St Columba ensured the survival of Christianity in Europe during the Dark Ages.

So when Benedict XVI touches down at Edinburgh Airport next Thursday, he will be aware of the nation's role and anxious that Scotland's Catholics are prepared for the new 'Dark Age' to come.

Five years ago, when Joseph Ratzinger took off the scarlet robes of a cardinal and pulled on the white soutane of Pope he knew his advanced age could herald a short time as the successor to St Peter and so his goal was clear.

As his biographer [He is only one of at least a score of 'biographers' by now, and hardly a neutral biographer, much less the most authoritative] John L Allen explained: "His big picture aim is that he wants to equip Catholicism in the West to survive in an era of secularism. His diagnosis on how to do that is that you encourage, however small in number they may be, those Catholics who seem most on fire with the faith. The image he uses all the time is the Church as 'a creative minority'.

"The idea is to foster this numerically small but passionate form of living the Gospel, who will keep the light of the faith alive in an overwhelmingly secular world. That is the goal not just for Scotland and the UK but for the entire Pontificate."

Yet it is a message he has struggled to get across. If John Paul II was a global and charismatic rock star, never happier than when his sermons were interrupted by the cheers of the faithful, Benedict XVI is a quiet professor who frets that those who cheer aren't listening to the words he speaks. The media, however, are only too willing to note each controversial statement and they have not lacked for copy.

In September 2006 during a speech in Regensburg he triggered protests among Muslims by appearing to link Muhammad with violence, while three years later on the Papal plane en route to Africa he said condoms were not the solution to AIDS but, in fact, make the problem worse. Then, there was his decision to lift the excommunication of four traditionalist bishops, including one who has denied that the Nazis used gas chambers, and the appointment in Poland of a new Archbishop who was forced to resign after the revelation that he had collaborated with the Soviet authorities. [The usual yada-yada but a shorter list than the one John Allen habitually reels off...]

And yet nothing has damaged the Pope and the Catholic Church more than the issue of child sex abuse by priests. [That's the MSM take, and is not necessarily true for everyone,certainly not for Catholics who are solid in their faith.]

The cases may be largely historical and spread across various nations but the image of a Church more intent on protecting itself than innocent children, will take years to undo. [For as long as the dominant media and public opinion choose to see only the negative about this issue and ignore everything positive the Church has done, that 'image' will remain. The Church is less concerned about 'image' than reality.]

As Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with Church discipline [primarily doctrinal discipline, including crimes against the faith and the sacraments, and only since 2001, with sex abuse crimes by priests], Cardinal Ratzinger would listen as the testimony of victims was read out.

"The physical disgust you could see on Ratzinger's face," said an individual briefed by those who attended the meetings. "He would project an almost despair and a sense of disbelief that a priest could do that to someone."

In recent papal visits he has made time to speak in private to the victims of clerical sexual abuse, where he has prayed and wept with them. It is not yet known if he will have a similar meeting in London, but one will not take place in Scotland.

According to the Bishop of Paisley, Philip Tartaglia, a new hostility has flared up against the Church. "It seems to be now that there are people who genuinely hate the Church - not that they are against it, but hate it with an anger and a bitterness and even hate this Pope which is so astonishing when you are in the presence of his gentleness. He is very very gentle and maybe it's because he expresses himself so clearly, in ways that you can't misunderstand what he is saying. He is not the Superstar and perhaps people see him as vulnerable and they can have a right go."

Yet those who know him attest to a deep serenity that comes in thinking "in centuries" not in years.

For six years Monsignor Henry Docherty worked side by side with Josef Ratzinger in the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and insists the reality was far from the media caricature of 'Cardinal Rottweiler' or the 'Panzer Cardinal', steam-rolling his plans through.

"He has a quiet, confident, diffident manner but has a brilliant mind," said Mgr Docherty, the retired secretary of Scotland's Bishop's Conference. "He was also humble, you would always see him walking across St Peter's Square in his black soutane and beret with a battered leather briefcase." Immediately on accepting the role, he defied public expectations by stating that after the papacy of John Paul the Great he was "but a humble worker".

He is also the first Pope to have belonged to the Hitler Youth. [What kind of a stupid statement is that? - There is no other Pope who happens to be German and lived under Nazism. After Mr. McGinty's efforts to be objective so far, that's an odd way to work in the UK bias that has cast the teenage Joseph Ratzinger's wartime conscription in the worst light possible!]

The son of a rural Bavarian police officer, he was six when Hitler came to power in 1933. His father, also called Joseph, was an anti-Nazi whose attempts to rein in the activities of Hitler's Brown Shirts forced the family to move home several times. In 1937 his father retired and the family moved to Traunstein, a staunchly Catholic town in Bavaria. The young Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth at the age of 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941, though he soon won a dispensation on account of his training at a seminary.

As a Cardinal he said that although he was opposed to the Nazi regime, any open resistance would have been futile. His brother, Georg said upon his brother's election: "Resistance was truly impossible. But neither of us ever used a rifle against the enemy."

As a priest and theologian, Joseph Ratzinger gained attention as a liberal adviser during the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The Marxism and atheism of the 1968 student protests that swept across Europe shocked him to the core. Students threw books at him as he tried to lecture and this prompted him to become increasingly conservative in an attempt to defend his faith against growing secularism. [Too bad McGinty simply reworks the stereotypes about Joseph Ratzinger as a liberal-turned-conservative instead of re-examining them in the light of documented facts.]

After periods as a theology professor and then archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Ratzinger was appointed head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor office to the Inquisition, in 1981.

In that office, he first turned his attention the "liberation theology" popular in Latin America, silencing controversial theologians such as Leonardo Boff. ['Liberation theology' was hardly his priority - it was one in a spectrum of doctrinal deviations on which a number of liberal theologians were lecturing and publishing books. And 'silencing' is a loaded word, when it is not explained that it consisted of asking him to refrain from public dissemination of his theology for a year - though Boff chose to leave the priesthood instead and eventually married.]

In 1986, he issued a firm Vatican denunciation of homosexuality and gay marriage.

He brought pressure in the 1990s against theologians, mostly in Asia, who saw non-Christian religions as part of God's plan for humanity. [There was only one theologian who was disciplined for that reason, and he was an American Jesuit, Pierre Dupuis, who wrote the book Towards a theology of religious pluralism. The statement also misrepresents what he was advocating: namely, that non-Christian religions are as valid for salvation as Christianity, which contradicts the very premise of Christianity. One Asian theologian, Tissa Balasuriya of Sri Lanka, was disciplined for writing a book in which he misrepresented the doctrine of original sin and cast doubts about the divinity of Christ. After rejecting the discipline and being excommunicated by John Paul II, he eventually signed a profession of faith and was taken back into the Church.

What secular writers choose to ignore when reporting on theologians disciplined by the Church is that 1) these theologians' main teaching, or part of it, is clearly against the doctrine of the faith, and it is the CDF's main duty to defend that doctrine; 2) that the discipline has been, at most, to prohibit them from teaching Catholic theology in Catholic institutions - Hans Kueng is the best example of this. He has continued to write and publish as he pleases, only he can't teach Catholic theology. None of the other handful of theologians disciplined by the CDF in Cardinal Ratzinger's time has ever been banned from teaching elsewhere nor from publishing anything!!]

A 2004 document he [the CDF, not he personally] published also sternly denounced "radical feminism" as an ideology that undermined the family and obscured the natural differences between men and women.

During his long career he has condemned women priests, married priests, dissident theologians and homosexuals, whom he has declared to be suffering from an "objective disorder". [Again, a major error, perhaps deliberate, by secular observers. The Church never condemns persons, only the sins they commit, and in the Church, all the categories mentioned by the writer commit specific sins (in the case of homosexuals, engaging in homosexual sex; because Catholic homosexuals who choose to remain chaste are not committing sin in this respect)]

He also upset many Jewish people with a statement he made in 1987 that Jewish history and scripture reach fulfilment only in Christ, a position which was denounced by some as "theological anti-Semitism". [What was McGinty researching? This particularly objection is hardly ever brought up by anyone. The most scholarly Jews know it is a statement by a Christian that is logical for Christians to make and is not a diminution of Judaism in any way. In any case, the literature on Joseph Ratzinger's scholarship and appreciation of Judaism is voluminous, and in all the polemics over the past three years because of Pius XII and the Good Friday prayer, only the most radical ultra-Orthodox militants have ever accused him of anti-Semitism, theological or otherwise!]

He can also be otherworldly. When Benedict XVI returned to his native Germany shortly after his election, he was introduced to a man he did not know - despite the fact the other's fame arguably eclipsed his own. As one million young people gathered in a giant park in Cologne, to celebrate World Youth Day, the Pope peered at his guest and said: "Are you Brazilian?" It took an aide to lean over and enlighten him: "He's Pele. He's the world's greatest ever soccer player."

What Pope Benedict XVI may lack in knowledge of the beautiful game, he more than compensates for with his appreciation of beautiful things. He has been noted for his sense of style: he wears gold Gucci sunglasses and has an iPod nano.[All of this based on media myths!]

When his papal vestments proved too big for him, he had no hesitation in switching from Gammarelli, the clerical outfitters who have clothed every Pope since 1792, to a lesser-known tailor who made his vestments when he was a cardinal, causing something of an ungodly spat over the lace chasuble.
[What ungodly spat is he talking about? Gammarelli was miffed, but the Pope has a right to choose his tailor! BTW, chasubles are never made of lace, and in any case, the papal tailors only make cassocks and 'secular' accessories, not liturgical garments, which a chasuble is. That's the danger when your research - as McGinty's apparently is - is rather superficial and depends only on what the media has reported without independent verification of facts, nor for that matter, basic research about, in this case, papal garments!]

But what is apparent is that Pope Benedict has settled comfortably into the role despite the controversy. [To imagine that with his background and qualities, he would not 'settle comfortably' into any mission he has accepted from the Lord is not to have learned anything from his biography!]

He made a point of transferring all 5,000 of his books, which previously lined the walls of his small flat, into the grand papal apartments of the Vatican, and when asked if he wished to have a new piano he insisted on retaining his old one, on which he still continues to play for 15 minutes every day. [And McGinty cites this superficial item as the extent of his 'settling comfortably' into his role as Pope???]

While his last homily before entering the conclave that elected him was an attack on the forces of relativism that make up the modern world, his first encyclical, the official papal letters to the world, was about love.

In the opinion of Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the leader of Scotland's Catholic Community this will be at the core of his message, one that is not restricted to the Catholic Community but to all Christians and people of faith.

He said: "I would like to think that the Pope's visit will give a great boost to Christianity in general, because there is so much of the Christian message that will come to all denominations. The Christians in Scotland who have had to carry their different crosses in various ways, to give them a boost to say your faith is important, your faith is worth living and there is all sorts of attacks going on because of secularism and atheism, but you have got your Christianity and so live your Christianity."

As John L Allen, a journalist with the National Catholic Reporter who has accompanied the Pope on many overseas trips said: "When he travels he tries to project the most positive and affirming message possible - I would expect him to in a few of these speeches to make pro-forma references to the gay rights issue and other issues but it is not going to be the top note. It will be him stressing over and over that the Catholic Church wants to be a constructive partner with British society."


Once, last April, Brendan O'Neill who founded and edits an online journal called Spiked!, wrote an excellent commentary on what he calls 'the secular Inquisition' in his country. The following article is a development of that idea - with even greater outrage against this breed of hate-mongering would-be tyrants. If only there could be more rational and fair intellectuals like him!


Turning the Pope into
an Antichrist for atheists
by Brendan O'Neill, Editor

7 September 2010


With just a week to go until Pope Benedict XVI arrives on British shores, the campaigning against his visit has become so shrill that soon only dogs will be able to hear it.

And the great irony of this allegedly rationalist protest against the Pope is that it is indulging in precisely the kind of demonology that the Catholic Church once excelled at. Campaigners have turned Benedict into a Satan for secularists, an Antichrist for atheists, against whom they desperately hope to define and advertise their own moral integrity.

As a radical humanist, I hold no candle for the Catholic Church (I held more than enough candles for it when I was an altar boy). But I also don’t like zealous moralism, the irrational demonisation of some Other for the benefit of the Self.

And the current baiting of all things popish stinks to the empty heavens of just that kind of campaigning. The anti-papists are ironically utilising the Torquemada-ish tools of intolerance and fearmongering to turn the Pope into a much-needed bête noire for their social set.

Pope-protesting seems increasingly unhinged. Pick up a copy of this month’s pope-bashing New Humanist and you will struggle to find either anything new (everyone from the English middle classes to the KKK to Ian Paisley has long considered the Pope of Rome to be evil incarnate) or very humanist.

Asked what she would say to the Pope if given half the chance, broadcaster and 'humanist' Claire Rayner says: ‘I have no language with which to adequately describe Joseph Alois Ratzinger. In all my years as a campaigner I have never felt such animus against any individual as I do against this creature.’

Now, I like Claire Rayner, and respect her, but these sentiments sound more like the products of primal emotionalism than considered secularism. Rayner, it seems, has been struck dumb (‘I have no language’) by what she refers to as the Pope’s ‘disgusting, repellent and hugely damaging’ views.

"[T]he only thing to do is to get rid of him", she exclaims, and in the midst of an anti-Pope spread that compares Benedict to fascists and has cartoons showing him as a slobbering beastly midget perched on a throne, it’s not immediately clear whether she means kick him out of Britain or kill him.

Other humanists – seemingly forgetting the bit in humanism that promotes liberty and tolerance – say the Pope should be excluded from Britain.

‘You are not welcome’, says that pope of New Atheism, Richard Dawkins: ‘Go home to your tinpot Mussolini-concocted principality and don’t come back.’

Journalists Francis Wheen and Johann Hari both say that they would say to the Pope: ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.’ Geddit? They’re going to perform a citizens’ arrest on him! (Quite how citizens’ arrests – which were once seen as the tools of busybody ‘swivel-eyed gets’, in the words of Alan Sillitoe – came to be seen as radical gestures is beyond me.)

Where government ministers campaign to keep people like Snoop Dogg out of Britain, lest his drug-praising and ho-baiting turn Britons into carbon-copy gangstas, today’s New Atheists want to keep the Pope out in case his disgusting, repellent ideas turn Britons into anti-condom, Mary-worshipping hysterics.

The same prejudices that drive our illiberal rulers to erect a forcefield against undesirables also fuel the pseudo-liberal campaign against the arrival of the Pope.

A ‘comedian’ called Nick Doody says he wouldn’t say anything to the Pope – he’d simply put a condom over the pontiff’s head until he goes blue and dies. It’s meant to be funny (because the Pope says condoms are porous, you see!) but it isn’t of course. It does, however, provide a glimpse into the emotionally troubled mindsets of the anti-Pope lobby.

When they aren’t demanding that Britain be made a Pope-free zone – with scant humanist or tolerant regard for what that would mean for the six million Britons who follow the Catholic faith – the Benedict-bashers use the politics of fear to exaggerate the wicked works of the Catholic Church.

Now, I know and you know and everyone knows (in way too much eye-watering detail, thanks to the misery-memoir industry) that some Catholic priests sexually abused children. That is disgusting and where appropriate it should be punished.

But there is no justification for describing the Catholic Church as a ‘paedophile ring’, which carried out ‘systematic rape and torture’, giving rise to a palpable ‘stench of evil’. You don’t have to be a friend of the Vatican – and I am not – to be able to state categorically that that is top-notch bullshit.

Once again echoing the tactics of our illiberal rulers, the New Atheists are deploying the politics of scaremongering in order to present their opponents as stinking of evil and themselves as purer than pure.

This has nothing to do with principled secularism, and instead echoes the US and UK governments’ transformation of someone like Saddam Hussein into a creature ‘worse than Hitler’ in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Indeed, the New Atheists also evoke the moral absolute of the Holocaust as part of their campaign to paint the Pope as an uncivilised, non-Guardian-reading brute, reminding us at every opportunity that he was once a member of the Hitler Youth.

And of course, no fear-driven campaign of demonisation would be complete without double standards. Some are criticising Queen Elizabeth II for agreeing to meet the Pope, saying he is an illegitimate state leader and potentially a criminal. I’ll just wait a second while that sinks in.

Yes, Britain’s unelected queen, whose armies have wreaked all sorts of mayhem around the world during her 57 years contracting piles on the throne [That's really rude, quite crass, and uncalled for to say about the Queen, no matter how you dislike or disagree with her!] is being called on to snub Mr Ratzinger. At least he was elected by smoke-making cardinals.

In their rush to get their rocks off by posturing against the Pope, the anti-papists implicitly and uncritically bolster Britain’s own, frequently warped political and moral systems.

Of course people should be free to say whatever they like about the Pope and to protest against him to their hearts’ content. As the editor of a magazine that has argued vociferously against blasphemy laws and religious hatred legislation, I strongly believe that no religion or religious leader should be given legal protection from criticism, ridicule and even bad gags by Nick Doody.

But let’s at least be honest about what the current outbreak of feverish pope-bashing in polite British society represents – not true humanism or intellectual secularism and certainly not Enlightened tolerance, but something like their opposite: a screechy, oftentimes weird attempt to turn one man into a catch-all demon for the secularist middle classes.

These Pope-protesters threaten to drain the last drop of decency from old-fashioned humanism, turning a once-principled outlook into little more than a requirement to hate religion. Yet from Marx to Darwin, the great non-believers of old had little interest in bashing religions or demonising their leaders, believing, in Darwin’s words, that ‘freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds’.

Today it is a powerful sense of lack within modern-day so-called humanist circles – a feeling of directionless and soullessness – that leads them to invent religious demons against which they might posture and pontificate.

That is why they talk in such religious tones (ironically) about the Catholic Church’s ‘clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel’ – because this is about cynically cobbling together some sense of their own goodness and mission.

And in the irony to end all ironies, they make use of the very religious tools that secularists once hoped to supersede with reason – intolerance, fear-stoking, demonology – as part of their self-serving campaign.


A comment on O'Neill's article comes from CATHOLIC VOICES, the group of Catholic laymen assembled by the Church of England and Wales a few months earlier to present the Church viewpoint and respond to attacks on the Church and the Pope:
In studies of mob behaviour, it is well documented that angry crowds project their own fears and tensions onto a scapegoat (a "demon"), in order to reassure themselves that they are "good" and the other "bad".

It happens, especially, when the people that make up the crowd are insecure, anxious and disunited -- as O'Neill observes of the humanists ("a feeling of directionlessness and soullessness). Once the mob disperses, of course, everyone comes to their senses. And feels a little embarrassed.

O'Neill is a true humanist -- and a friend to other humanists -- to warn them about this.


The above comes from a Media Monitor blog opened by CATHOLIC voices last Sunday, Sept. 5 - basically a limited edition of what PROTECT THE POPE has been doing since late July.
catholicvoicesmedia.blogspot.com/
The obvious question is why VOICES did not start this blog as soon as it was constituted last April instead of waiting until 11 days before the visit begins! It would have centralized their efforts and provided blanket coverage of all visit-related/Church-related items for the convenience of interested readers. Their individual efforts were targeted at specific media, often a single one, and one came across it only if it happened to be reported by that target itself! And yet, some of these VOICES are probably among those Catholics who criticize the communications deficiencies of the Vatican...