BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

To understand the Pope's position
in the Berlusconi-Boffo case,
read 'Caritas in veritate'
by Bruno Mastroianni
Translated from

Sept. 9, 2009


There's something unseemly about the way the newspapers hasten to find in his words, gestures and any sign whatsoever a possible indication of what the Pope thinks about the recent media tempest [over Dino Boffo, Avvenire and what the Italian Prime Minister may have had to do with the Il Giornale article that accused Boffo of questionable morals].

Various analyses have speculated on everything: the deterioration of the relationship between the Church in Italy and the present government; a settling of accounts between the Italian bishops' conference (CEI) and the Vatican Secretariat of State; even fantasizing over a possible 'great center' (political) in the future.

But one cannot find an answer at this level. If one really wishes to see what Papa Ratzinger has in mind these days, one must aim higher!

For instance, by re-reading the paragraph in Caritas in veritate that is dedicated to the significance of the mass media.

It says that in order to make a genuine contribution to human development, the media should be "animated by charity and in the service of truth, of goodness, and of natural as well as supernatural brotherhood".

Because otherwise, the Pope says, media risk being subordinate to "economic calculation, aimed at dominating the markets, and not the least, the desire to impose functional cultural parameters on activities that have ideological and political power".

In the face of what has been happening in Italy, it is difficult to believe that Benedict XVI could only be concerned with an equilibrium between the Vatican and the political world, or on the power dynamics between the Roman Curia and the Italian bishops - the aspects that have preoccupied the media.

[How true! Even the most reputable commentators have not seen beyond the political implications - intra-Church and between the Vatican and Berlusconi's government - of the case, to the pastoral and spiritual perspective of the Bishop of Rome and Primate of Italy.]

In all likelihood, the Pope sees once more how much our over-mediatized world needs to recover a sense of proportion, first of all, even before grasping the ultimate significance of current events.

Ah, but then, the media never has a sense of proportion when it concerns the Church and the Pope! Nothing negative involving the Church or an individual Catholic is too trivial not to be blown up into major scandal whenever and wherever possible.

Worse yet, they use a different set of standards for the Church and its followers than they do for any other institution, organization or private individual, much less for other religions (especially, not the Muslims or Jews!) - movable 'standards' that are arbitrarily adjusted as needed to cast the Church and Roman Catholics in the worst possible light.

In concrete terms, it is not difficult to imagine that the Pope would like the whole truth [the fashionable term is 'transparency'] - as opposed to half-truths, insinuations, deductions and speculations - to be reported in the media about Berlusconi, Il Giornale, Feltri, Boffo, Avvenire and the CEI; while distinguishing the sin from the sinner, as Christian charity dictates.

Truth is really the ultimate charity in media matters - one must be objective with facts and write in good faith, so that good things are appropriately credited and wrong things may be redressed.

This week's issue of TEMPI, also has this provocative article about a question that Italian media have largely ignored as an issue in the Church, because of their general sympathy for the liberal positions affirmed every now and then by the emeritus archbishop of Milan, Carlo Maria Martini.

I would conjecture that perhaps there is some element of deference to his age in all this, except that the media have not shown any deference to Pope Benedict XVI at all for that reason! (Martini is just two months older than the Holy Father).

The item properly belongs to ISSUES or the CHURCH&VATICAN thread, but the issue here is basically public adherence - or lack of it - to the Magisterium of the Church, as represented in part by what the Holy Father says, by an eminent representative of the Church.

If a Cardinal, once considered a papabile, can be so openly - and scandalously, in the sense that the Catechism uses the word scandal - defiant of the Magisterium, no wonder a preening priet in Linz flaunts his far-from-celibate life even as he mocks the Holy Father's 'conservatism'.

If only for that, Cardinal Martini should think long and hard about his part of the responsibility for open dissidence in the clergy, as he has pursued his uninterrupted ego trip for decades now in defiance of two Popes. And I say ego trip because he has acted as though the rules of the Church do not apply to him.


A professional question
for Martini, the cardinal
who 'blesses' an anti-life
politician and his work
By the Editors
Translated from

Sept. 9, 2009


"Go to hell, dear colleagues. We will all see each other down there". Those were perhaps the most convincing words written by Vittorio Feltri in the wake of the storm stirred up his now infamous 'scoop'. [Feltri is the editor of Il Giornale, who cooked up the vicious attack on Dino Boffo by mixing up objective fact with anonymous defamatory information and his own tendentious judgment of Boffo's morality.]

Feltri rejoices in exposing the hyprocrisy of his colleagues. But he has always been that way - he does not pretend - although he has now become a tragic figure in our profession.

"Enough with the poetry", he said, for instance, reproaching Gad Lerner [Jewish italian journalist and TV host], when Feltri did us the favor of presenting the first issue of TEMPI at the Meeting in Rimini in August 1995. "Our business is to sell newspapers. Period."

Mutatis mutandi, what is the business (or profession) of Carlo Maria Martini?

Is he not a Biblical scholar and a pastor in the Catholic Church? Then why has he written a very flattering introduction for a book-manifesto of Ignazio Marino in the latter's bid to become head of the Partito Democrata [new leftist party born earlier this year, which lost badly to Silvio Berlusconi's center-right coalition in the parliamentary elections]?

Everyone knows Marino advocated euthanasia for Eluana Englaro, and has openly said he questions the actual relevance of Catholic church teachings on life and death issues.

A true believer in so-called individual self-determination, Marino represents the unconditional surrender of 'weak thinking' - perhaps as a result of being too parochial ideologically - to the dominant radical philosophy of self-possession/self-sufficiency and total immanentism [in which nothing can possibly transcend material things verifiable by the senses].

Marino is a 'meek Pannelliano', taking on all the ethical battles that surround Marco Pannella [leader of the Italian Radical Party] who is a Capaneus [in Greek mythology, an arrogant king who defied Zeus to stop him from invading Thebes] intent on lecturing God and every Church which is not his own voluble and rarefied conscience.

Why then has Cardinal Martini positioned himself for hosannas from the ministers of radicalism? Why does a Prince of the Church give his blessing to an aspiring political leader whose draft legislation on biological wills would allow euthanasia to creep into legitimacy?

We know what Feltri's profession is. But what does the emeritus Archbishop of Milan really profess?


The article does not mention that Marino was Martini's interlocutor in that infamous long interview in 2006 for L'Espresso, in which Martini advocated bioethical positions contrary to the Magisterium, such as denying that a fertilized egg could be considered a human being, advocating adoption by gay couples, and under certain conditions, favoring some forms of artificial procreation and the use of condoms by married couples.

On euthanasia, he notes that "this can never be approved by the Church" but says he sympathizes with those who, for various reasons, decide on euthanasia for themselves or their loved ones.

The way things are, however, Martini, who suffers from Parkison's disease, will probably remain 'untouchable' in his dissidence for the rest of his life.

BTW, Ignazio Marino is an Italian American (and Catholic) who was, at the time of the Martini interview, director of the organ transplant center of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Apparently, he enjoys dual citizenship.