I cannot share the assumptions made by this article that recent statements made by Italian 'intellectuals' who have heretofore been downright hostile to Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI necessarily make them 'friends' to him now, or worse, 'Ratzingerian'.
It's a surprisingly naive conclusion from the writer, an experienced Vatican reporter, who, nonetheless, has shown signs in the past of 'forcing' facts to fit his hypotheses. This is extreme 'forcing'. It is also a kind of slavering and groveling, just because a few – he mentions 3 – anti-Ratzinger professional polemicists now see fit to say something good about the Pope! The Pope is by no means desperate for 'approval', least of all from such types!
Any approving statements that these critics may have made recently of the Pope appear to have been prompted mostly by the Pope's declaration that the persecution of the Church these days is mostly born from within the Church itself (because the massive criticism has been caused by offenses done by some priests and bishops). But they are using that statement to justify all of their own attacks against the Church...
Benedict XVI's new friends:
Strange turnabouts by
Italian intellectuals
by PAOLO RODARI
Translated from
June 23, 2010
The most recent Italian intellectual to turn in favor of Papa Ratzinger is someone considered 'big' in lay opinion: Gian Enrico Rusconi.
[A professor of political science in Turin and a scholar on 20th-century Germany, according to Wikipedia. I really do not know what makes him 'big' in Rodari's estimation.]
Yesterday, in
La Stampa, Rusconi did not enter into the merits of "suspicions about an improper use of the Church" by Cardinal Crescencio Sepe when he headed Propaganda Fide, but limited himself to praising Benedict XVI,
'The Pope rather snubbed by everyone', who, "notwithstanding the Curial deference that surrounds him, is perhaps finding his own unexpected profile!" [GEE, thanks! HOW CONDESCENDING! 'Snubbed by everyone'? 'Everyone' meaning his fellow liberals - certainly not the world's 1.2 billion Catholics! - and 'perhaps finding his own unexpected profile'??? As though Benedict XVI never knew himself or would have succumbed to 'Curial deference', which in any case, is owed to him as Pope. I cannot believe Rodari considers that statement 'praise'!.
It is a profile Rusconi called "unpopular because it has spiritual dimensions that are
not usual for a Church that has lived to project itself towards 'public relevance' with the presumption that it exclusively possesses a monopoly on morality. A Church that still has a nostalgia for great communicative charism, without heed of the costs that she has paid for it". [My God, it gets worse! It goes from condescension to contempt - and an unwarranted and uncharitable reference to John Paul II. Besides, Benedict XVI's spirituality does not detract from the fact that he wants the Church to have a voice in public affairs and has been actively working for that!]
The defense by Rusconi of the Pope - yesterday,
L'Osservatore Romano called his words 'lucid and prompt' - was as strong as the criticism he had written in the same newspaper two months ago.
[I have not seen the Rusconi article yet, but going by what Rodari has quoted, I wouldn't call it a 'defense' of the Pope at all, but an opportunistic and cynically sardonic comment on the Church! Perhaps even damning the Pope by faint praise!]
On April 16, Rusconi spoke in an interview about the Pope and the 'mediatic short circuits ' he has 'provoked' in the past five years since he became Pope.
He called Regensburg 'a provocation' in which the Pope 'gives a scholastic lecture on Hellenization and arrives at a criticism of Kant'. [Would you put your trust in someone who reduces the seminal Regensburg lecture to something as superficial and deliberately-missing-the-point as that statement? Would you even say he was an 'intellectual'? Would you then set any store by what he has to say about anything else concerning the Pope and the Church? His biases are too obvious.]
He said, "Ratzinger is a professor who over-estimates himself... This Pope is considered in the popular mind as a great theologian, but that is wrong. He is a professor of dogmatic theology. And he is naive!" [Rodari, what were you thinking???? If Rusconi can say that in an article you consider to be 'praising' Ratzinger! A zebra never loses his stripes, much less overnight! Nor can he help showing them, either.]
On March 12, when the German and US press rained down criticism on the Vatican and the Pope
for failing to denounce pedophile priests in the past [A failure one cannot lay on Joseph Ratzinger!],
Rusconi joined the demands of rebel theologian Hans Kueng that "what the Church lacks is a theological revolution on the subject of sexuality, of which no signs are to be seen". [What possible revolution can there be in the Catholic view of sexuality? That, suddenly, irresponsible sex for pleasure and/or sex that takes place outside of marriage, not to mention homosexual sex, are theologically right?]
Having reached and gone beyond the first five years of his pontificate,
Papa Ratzinger finds himself suddenly surrounded by new friends. [Excuse me while I snort! If he means 'new friends' in the media, that has hardly been evident to anyone but Rodari! Certainly no one else in the media has come to this absurd conclusion.]
These include eminent representatives of the so-called 'critical Church' - intellectuals and big names in progressivist Catholicism but even atheists who until yesterday were the harshest opponents of his Pontificate.
The points raised these days by Benedict XVI in his battle against ministers of God who yield to the temptations of the flesh and of power are causing people
to jump on the Ratzinger bandwagon one after the other - names who during the entire Wojtyla Pontificate and during the first five years of Ratzinger's, were on the other side.
[First of all, it is not just recently that Joseph Ratzinger has preached against priests who do not live up to their calling in every respect. Did any of these 'names' - who do not mean anything to Catholics outside Italy - react in any way at all when Cardinal Ratzinger commented in April 2005 on the sins of priests as specifically as he could, in the context of a meditation and prayer on the Ninth Station of the Cross? Significantly, the station is 'Jesus falls a third time' - because Jesus falls everytime one of his ministers transgresses.
And how many times in the past five years has he warned priests against careerism, in particular! To say that he has availed of the Sepe case to warn against careerism is to ignore all that he has said before, and also makes it appear that he is, in effect, accusing Sepe of careerism!]
There have been quite a lot of occasions for them to line up with Benedict XVI [Really, name them! And did they line up with him, in fact?]
Two occasions especially: One is the strike from Vienna by Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn against John Paul II's Secretary of State, Cardinal Sodano - a serious denunciation of how sex offenses by the clergy were handled by the Vatican in the past.
[A general and cowardly denunciation made 'off the record' to Austrian editors and never substantiated. We can all hope that Sodano will, sooner rather than later, clarify what his own personal involvement was in any cover-ups or 'special treatment' in the case of the late Cardinal Groer, but since this case goes back to 1995, when John Paul II was still a considerable presence, it is not possible to believe that Sodano alone could have been responsible for any special treatment of Groer and that John Paul II would not have been made aware of it!]
The second is taking place, when accusations have been made that have forced one of the most prominent of John Paul II's formidable 'men-machines', Cardinal Crescencio Sepe, to defend himself. Sepe was in the inner circle of Wojtyla's 'pontifical family', a friend of both Mons. Dsiwisz and Wanda Poltawska.
Sepe said in a news conference on Monday: "I accept the cross and forgive frm the depth of my heart all those, within and outside the Church, who have wished to strike me," obivously suggesting that he has enemies even within the Vatican.
[Personally, I find the statement rather pharisaical. If there was one man in the world who fully deserves to say that, it would be Benedict XVI, but he is Christian enough not to be that presumptuous!]
The terms of the old conflict seem to have changed.
Those who were fierce opponents of the Pope until recently are now full of praise. [That's a generalization that cannot possibly be backed up. So far, Rodari has only mentioned one, and his evidence is ludicrous! He will mention two others further on - which still does not justify his rash generalization.]
"It's a paradox," notes the dean of Vaticanistas, Benny Lai
[I thought the dean was Arcangelo Paglialunga, 90!]; "Martinians have become Ratzingerians. More than that, they now seem to claims that there is no difference between Ratzinger and [Cardinal Carlo Maria] Martini!"
[With all due respect to Lai, who is 85, that is also another rash and improbable generalization!]
Ratzinger's call for a clergy that is holy and free of careerism, personal ambition, the corruption of ingrained habits culminating in abuse of minors, is the narrow door though which a certain progressivist and liberal Catholicism has chosen to go over to his side.
[One must reiterate: The absurdity of this claim lies in the fact that Joseph Ratzinger has not been making that call only lately. All his interview books, starting with The Ratzinger Report in 1994, and every discourse he has given to priests and bishops, has always stressed the need for the priest himself to be holy if he is to preach the Word of God credibly. Why have these supposed 'cross-overs' - and Rodari himself - not taken note of it before????]
These liberals consider Cardinal Schoenborn - "one of the bishops who has been most lucid in facing the crime of pedophilia", in the words of Alberto Melloni - an ally, as is Sepe and all those whom he considers his enemies.
[Melloni's praise of Schoenborn is a slight to those bishops of the United States and of other places who have played prominent roles in fighting priesly sex offenses long before the last three years that Schoenborn has been vocal about it].
Giancarlo Zizola, one of the Vaticanistas most sympathetic to the liberal elements in the Church, wrote explicitly in
La Rpubblica that
Schoenborn's line is exactly that of Ratzinger's. [
Yeah? What was Schoenborn saying in April 2005 at the time of the Via Crucis? Did he use Cardinal Ratzinger's words then as a rallying cry for the priests and the faithful of Austria? And how can he be so condemnatory of sex-offender priests but say nothing at all about the Austrian priests who are openly living in concubinage today and declaring so proudly?
I think that is the fact that bothers me most about Schoenborn's double dealing! And apparent shallowness. His openness to married priests, as he recently expressed, is clearly not at all Benedict XVI's thinking about the necessity for priestly celibacy, expressed most recently at the Prayer Vigil with the priests of the world - which Schoenborn chose not to attend because he was taking part in some secular debate.]
Zizola wrote:
"The cardinal from Vienna is wagering his theological and human closeness with Papa Ratzinger, dating to when they worked side by side on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. He is giving voice to the current of thought in the Church that interprets the present crisis as a necessary instrument for liberation from a hidden evil that has been long ignored, a painful but necessary passage in order to regain the perspective of ecclesial erform. He is aligned with those who are convinced that to undergo this crisis thinking that the black clouds will pass and then resume the idea of the Church as 'a perfect society' is a losing proposition."
[Now see what use the Church's enemies are making of Schoenborn's double-dealing? Zizola appears to ignore Benedict XVI's own words and example towards true Church reform - as renewal in continuity - to push the liberals' limited idea of reform as having to do only with overturning the Church traditions regarding priestly celibacy, sex and homosexuality!]
Zizola who a year ago had pitilessly condemned the Pope's action lifting the excommunication of the four Lefebvrian bishops, now praises Ratzinger and his "purifying action...(which has) dismantled the organized system of
omerta" in the Church.
[That doesn't mean Zizola takes back anything else he has said against Benedict XVI! He is here praising the Pope for doing something that he, Zizola, happens to agree with.]
For Zizola,
Ratzinger's desire to carry out "a radical institutional and interior healing of the ecclesiastical system... is the same conviction that led Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini to greet with approval the fact that society demands full light be shed on these criminal doings and that the victims have had the courage to denounce the criminals". [This is ridiculous! So now whatever Benedict XVI is doing must be right because it fits Cardinal Martini's thinking? As though, Benedict XVI had come to a belated recognition of something Martini has always known! Has Martini ever said anything about the internal sins of the Church as strongly and as directly as CArdinal Ratzinger did in April 2005 and since?]
In short, Ratzinger and Martini, the Pope and he who has several times proposed a Third Vatican Council
in order to bring the Church in line with lay society,
are now totally in tune with each other.
[What could be more misleading?]
"In fact," says Sandro Magister, "the infatuation that some liberal intellectuals and newsmen now profess towards Ratzinger is their absolutization of one single aspect:
that the Pope calls for penitence from the offending priests and does not cite the Church's enemies on the outside. Since he has not blamed others for the sins of these priests, these liberals want to read it as a sign that he is identifying with their 'frontline' Catholicism. But his message is not simply for penitence".
[Too bad Rodari does not cite more of Magister than this. Magister hits the point precisely that these so-called 'new friends' are simply using the Pope's words for now to 'bolster' their own liberal-secular agenda! Have they reacted yet to his pure defense of priestly celibacy? I bet they would quickly revert to type on that subject!]
Before Rusconi and Zizola, there was Alberto Melloni among the new 'friends' of the Pope.
[EEEWWW!] The relationship between the Pope and Melloni, the progressivist church historian of the 'Bologna school' that espouses the 'hermeneutic of rupture' for Vatican-II, has swung high and low.
[It's not a relationship in any sense, rather Melloni's attitude towards Benedict XVI. I don't remember any high at all in the past five years. In fact, Melloni has been one of the most dependable for a Pavlov's-dog negativereflex to anything Benedict XVI says or does.]]
Initially, Melloni appeared to be strangely fascinated by the new Pope whose Magisterium is the polar opposite of what the Bologna school espouses. In an article entitled "The start of the Ratzinger papacy", Melloni says he believes 'a decisive turning point' is possible. By which he meant: After the 'mediatic' and 'aristocratic' Wojtyla pontificate, coudl Benedict XVI open a new chapter?
Melloni said, "Perhaps. All the features of 'public Wojtylism'
[whatever that means!] have been abandoned without unnecessary polemical explanations... The travels have changed. High visibility especially on TV has been dimmed down.... If only because
the man's intellectual credibility will allow him to make the most awaited moves: reform the central ecclesiastical institution, especially in a synodal sense, one that a (papal) candidate supported by Italian politicians whould have ignored, and a candidate of those who advocate openness would probably not dare to make".[In other words, Melloni was not so much praising Benedict XVI but projecting his progressivist hopes on him!]
This was the focus of Melloni's hopes: a change in the governance of the Church in synodal mode
[another term, I suppose, for 'more collegiality' with the bishops] by a Pope who is not Italian and not progressivist, by virtue of which he would be able to do what others not similarly conditioned would be unable to do:
a turning point towards greater collegiality.
[Ah, there it is! It has always irritated me that progressivists, whenever they speak of collegiality, always consider it to be one-sided: that the Pope should be more 'collegial' with the bishops, while they never bring up the fact that even Vatican-II repeatedly underscores that bishops should be in communion with the Pope! 'Communion' is a far more accurate and spiritual term for the 'collegiality' envisioned by Vatican-II.
But the progressivists have interpreted 'collegiality' to be synonymous with 'democracy' in the sense of a majority vote or consensus. And yet the doctrine of the Church was set by Jesus Christ and cannot be changed or determined by consensus. Vatican-II whose documents were voted on by the Council Fathers did not alter Catholic doctrine - they simply cast new light on certain outstanding issues that have to do with the Church in the context of today's world, which is subject to legitimate vote.]
In the following months,
Benedict XVI did not seem to respond to Melloni's expectations.
[So? Was he under a duty to act according to Melloni's expectations?]
On December 22, 2005, the address of the Pope to the Roman Curia marked a rupture with the 'Bolgona school' that appeared unhealable.
[It was always unhealable! How can you reconcile a hermeneutic of continuity with one of rupture? They are diametrically opposite!].
Papa Ratzinger - in a speech that one of Bologna school's most prominent representatives, the Church historian Joseph Comonchak who is the American editor of the Bologna school's five-volume
History of the Second Vatican Council, called 'the most important intervention by Benedict XVI" - clearly set apart the hermeneutic of discontinuity promoted by the Bologna school and their fellow Catholic progressivists.
Papa Ratzinger was clear: there is no pre-conciliar Church and post-conciliar Church. The Council did not create a rupture: the Church is one and the same, and renewal of the Church can only take place in continuity with the past.
Alberigo and Melloni did not react until around March 2007. When the Pope called on Italian politicians not to betray the 'non-negotiable principles' of the Church with respect to life adn the family, the two progressives signed an open letter that said the Italian bishops' conference, newly under the leadership of Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco,
should not speak in public against the legalization of de facto unions - whether heterosexuasl or homosexual - and
should "desist from a disgrace that will bring our Church and our country outside history". [P.S. And the Church did manage to scotch that homosexual marriage legislative draft by the Prodi government - it is unlikely to be brought up by Berlusconi's government.]
The distance between the two sides is enormous. The encounter was also about 'Ruinism'
[after Cardinal Ruini who was CEI head for 16 years], by which, the anti-Church critics claimed,
the Italian Church sought to impose its morality on laymen by actively mobilizing in the public space.
This became even more acute when the Pope signed the motu Proprio
Summorum Pontificum -
which his critics say he sprung by surprise [What surprise? The media had been speculating about it almost from the day he became Pope!] and without consulting bishops around the world
[Another lie! Part of the long delay for the issuance of the MP was the consultation period!]
Melloni wrote in
Corriere della Sera in July 2007 that
the MP was a 'gross mockery of Vatican II, a useless negotiating instrument with the Lefebvrians, a polemical gesture against Paul VI, an eccess of generosity by a Pope in whose family Mass was celebrated with the priest turning his back to the assembly". [My God! That's the kind of vicious sputtering by detractors that I managed to avoid in the aftermath of SP, as I did not want anything to spoil the joy of it! After such malicious ill will, would you trust any 'praise' coming from Melloni? Yet Rodari apparently does!
And I just hate that formulation of 'the priest turning his back on the assembly' - did anyone ever use that at all in all the centuries before Vatican II? There are pictures galore online of Mass celebrated facing the tabernacle in St. Peter's Basilica during Vatican II. The very formulation betrays the Vatican-II 'spiritist' preoccupation with the 'assembly' at Mass, rather than considering Mass as the sacrifice of Christ being offered and recreated ‘in persona Christi', facing the tabernacle where he dwells in the Eucharist.]
Melloni’s judgment of Benedict XVI’s Pontificate at the time was ‘definitive’:
“A pontificate of decisions and counter-decisions: He criticized Assisi and then went to Assisi. He went te Regensburg and then goes to Turkey for reparation”. [That is the most asinine comment ever! The ‘Assisi’ Benedict XVI criticized was the first inter-religious kumbaya in which a consecrated altar was, for instance, used for pagan sacrifices; whereas he visited Assisi as Pope on a pastoral visit. On the other point, his visit to Turkey was on an invitation from Patriarch Bartholomew more than one year earlier and confirmed by the Turkish President later – way before the Regensburg lecture. And he definitely did not go to Turkey ‘to make reparation’ – everyone tried to persuade him to cancel the trip – since the primary objective of the trip was and remained the ecumenical visit with Bartholomew on the Feast of St. Andrtew... Having a reputation as an ‘intellectual’, no matter how ill-deserved, does not give anyone the right to cite wrong data !]
And now? Melloni is apparently with the Pope.
[WHO CARES??? The Pope is not that desperate for allies he has to grasp at any apparent ‘support' especially dubious ones!] And also with Cardinal Bagnasco whom in 2007 he asked to shut up.
[And Melloni will promptly do so again the moment the CEI takes any stand on any public issue that the Church considers non-negotiable!] At the end of May, Bagnasco closed the plenary assembly of the Italian bishops saying that the Church in Italy is with the victims of priestly abuse and that bishops must act accordingly.
Melloni wrote an article called ‘Praise for the bishop who sides with the victims’ – and likens the CEI to ‘that of the Belgians at the time of Cardinal Daneels’
[What a hoot! After all the Belgian sex abuse cases that surfaced after Daneels had retired, including one about which he had recently spoken to the victim of one of his bishops, no less, and never revealed anything until the case exploded in the media!] or “of the AmericanChurch at the time of Cardinal Bernardin”
[Another dubious reference, when Cardinal Bernardin himself bcame the target of a running campaign that he was involved in a homosexual affair!] because, Melloni claims,
“perhaps it is finally being felt even outside the Church that the communion among bishops is the most important instrument that the Church has to making everything right, without attenuation and without simple moralisms.”
[Gosh, I don’t know why Rodari feels melloni is worth quoting at all with such stupid statements! As if that ‘communion of bishops’ had done anything positive about the sex abuse problem without Vatican initiative and leadership – in 2002, for the Americans, with the meeting of the US cardinals that John Paul II called and the preceding overhaul of the sex-abuse reporting system by making the CDF the central ‘agency’ rather than relying on the diocesan bishop. And with the Pope’s Letter to irish Catholics this year in the case of Ireland. And why were all the media libs outraged that Benedict XVI had not written a similar letter to the Germans if Melloni thinks that only the bishops can ‘make everything right’?]
Melloni does not mention the CEI leadership before Bagnasco. He does not cite Cardinal Ruini. But behind his words, many thought he was targeting one thing: the CEI policy before Bagnasco, and in general the policy of the Church under the Pontificate of John Paul II
[Which is unfair because whatever the problems were under that Pontificate, John Paul II did take that most important step of giving the CDF the clout to investigate and canonically adjudicate sex abuse cases!] - saying Bagnasco’s words had repudiated “a deceitful language that Catholic culture has often affected, according to which the Church is up there on the balcony of truth while secular society is wallowing in the mud below.”
[Gosh, how much more contemptuous can you get than that?]
Melloni’s rosy view of Ratzinger further improved with the clearer distance taken by the Vatican from the errors of the past: the cover-up of pedophile cases and the questionable, possibly illicit business affairs by some principal figures of the Wojtyla Pontificate.
[Rodari is using a tar brush widely. Besides the Propaganda Fide case, is there any other Curia principal involved in a questionable business affair?]
In a
Corriere della Sera column, Melloni does not just praise the patience of the Pope but picks up the line that he took at the start of the Pontificate: namely
that the Church can reform itself.
[What, he never heard of ‘chiesa semper reformanda’? Rodari is pathetic if he can rejoice that Melloni says “The Church can reform itself”! ‘Semper reformanda’ is precisely the spirit of Benedict XVI’s hrmeneutic of continuity which he defines as renewal and reform in continuity - and he did not need Melloni to tell him that!]
Melloni writes: “The idea of a new Council, so much forgotten that the rather late cock crows for a Vatican III is taken to be new today, corresponds to the most traditional thing in the history of Councils and of the Church in all times – namely, to take the bad (usually bishops) and make them be the cure itself
[HUH????], not because of any magic but because of the power of the Holy Spirit. But that idea may take centuries or years to mateiralize without appreciable difference. Until then, the institutution, which is Rome’s boast over its sister churches, remains ungilded”.
[What crap! Incidentally, among those 'late cock crows for a Vatican III' is Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, darling of the liberals.]
It has been said that the new friends of Benedict XVI are the enemies of the late Pope who was the object of ‘papolatry’
[He did not ask for it!], who waged an anti-Communist Crusade
[And what was wrong with that? It was a historical contribution], and was fixated on the Gospel of life
[And again, what was wrong with that? Every Pope is! It’s their duty]; the same writers who then held up John Paul II as a model in order to run down Ratzinger for Regensburg, for his program for the Catholic Church enunciated in Verona, for ‘failing to reform’ the Roman Curia; and now, they are apparently fervent Ratzingerians at a time when it is fashionable to disparage the Wojtylian Curia in ways not conducive to propagating the holiness of the late Pope that the crowds at his funeral had acclaimed with their cries of ‘Santo subito’.
[Rodari’s concluding paragraph makes my case: Does anyone really care about the opinion of ‘intellectuals’ – I don’t care what local reputation they have in Italy, they all read like hacks, and it’s clear none of them is anywhere near being a Voltaire or a Pascal – who are happy dissing the Church and the Pope most of the time, but are not above literally using the Popes and the Church when doing so could push their agenda?
The ability to string together paragraph after paragraph of weak and fallacious argumentation does not make a piece analytical. Rodari should learn from his editor, Giuliano Ferrara, who marshals his arguments compactly and forcefully, and in elegant language on top of that.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/06/2010 14:29]