BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Thanks to Lella and her followers

for alerting me to this.

I am unable to find more information about the writer of this blog, other than he must be fairly young (he graduated in 2004) and that he is the CEO of a company called S.A.F.E. involevd in 'renewables and the environment'. I have read a number of his essays on his blog FIDES ET FORMA which is primarily dedicated to the importance of beauty and form in the faith as indicators of substance and content.

I find this overview of Benedict XVI's Pontificate - from the perspective of the progresivist opposition to it - both compelling and long overdue. I have interjected a few points where I thought it necesssary.


The post-Vatican-II progressivists'
'strategy of tension' against the Pope
by Francesco Colafemmina
Translated from

Sept. 22, 2009


We have been witnessing for the past several months - if not for at least three years - a true and proper strategy of tension that has clusters of powerful rebels opposed to the actions and directives of His Holiness Benedict XVI.

This strategy deserves to be uncovered once and for all and analyzed in its most intimate phenomenology.

In 2005, the College of Cardinals elected Cardinal Ratzinger Pope. The cardinal's measured and prudent views were well known regarding the 'revolution' carried out after Vatican-II in open contradiction of Conciliar decisions and yet claimed to be done in the 'spirit of the Council".

Cardinal Ratzinger was not only John Paul II's trusted right-hand man who could assure unquestionable continuity with the late great Polish Pope. He was also the Prefect of what had been the Holy Office, who had kept Catholic Orthodoxy firm and focused during almost a quarter century of ethical and doctrinal upheaval.

The election of Ratzinger was seen by many as a sign of profound continuity with the Pontificate of John Paul II. Also, that it was certainly the work of the Holy Spirit.

Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that since April 2005, the new Pope immediately found himself facing a tenacious group of cardinals and other high prelates ready to oppose him in every way.

They have chosen to wield a strategy that is subtle, fluid and flexible. Mainly by seeking to 'expose' the Pope to secular winds, hoping thereby to ditch everything that with great courage and goodness, he has been offering to Catholicism in order to rescue it from the abyss into which it seemed destined to fall.

They understood quite evidently that the only way they could defeat him, their ideological 'enemy' - along with all those who oppose the secularization of the Church and the interpretation of Vatican-II as a rupture with the past and adherence to the contemporary world - was not simply to oppose him but also to inconvenience in every way his interaction with the world.

If the Holy Fahter is attacked by 'civilian society' (perhaps the better term is 'uncivil society') and by the media for his 'entrenched' positions (in the words of neo-Catholic Tony Blair) on abortion, contraception, euthanasia, etc., then the task of these ecclesial rebels would be made much easier, and their subtle ability to maneuver the levers they can within the Church also becomes rwarded almost every day in the media.

It will be clear to the informed reader that such levers can be counted on one hand, and that they can easily be found simply by walking from the Vatican press office, to the cubicles of those who are in charge of translating papal speeches, after going through the Curial undergrowth of the Secretariat of State.

To these practically unassailable and omnipotent bastions, through which all information about the Vatican is filtered and controlled, even if they do not appear to have any visible prestige, one must add some Curial congregations and Pontifical Councils who are on permanent war footing with the Pope, starting from their very heads.

If we add to these systems the interpersonal relationships and charisma of the individual combatants [as a result of their long experience in the Church], then one has a complete picture of the forces in play.

Now let us recapitulate, briefly and dwelling only on the most obvious aspects, what has happened in the past four years.


2005
Despite the fact that the start of the Ratzinger Pontificate was almost simultaneous with the Italian referendum on liberalizing the law on assisted reproduction ['won' by the Church], the initial monhts were relatively smooth.

The Pope roused great fervor from the young people in Cologne, he surprised everyone by receiving Hans Kueng in Castel Gandolfo, and he was clearly in continuity with John Paul II even if he had a style completely his own.

Until December 22, 2005, when in his Christmas address to the Roman Curia, it was clear that something new was in the air. The Pope asserted the hermeneutic of continuity for the correct reading of Vatican-II - and many trembled at the very thought of any 're-interpretation' of the Council other than what they had managed to make of it for 40 years. But they had yet to make their moves.


2006
In January Sandro Magister wote a very detailed article identifying the 'adversaries' of the new Pope: 1) the Neocatechumenals - who insist on defining their own liturgy and defying the dioceses where they operate; 2) the internal dissident fringe of cardinals and prelates; and 3) the office for the translation of papal texts. it was an analysis that would prove to be very well-founded.

Benedict XVI's first encylical, Deus caritas est, was published - and some quarters saw an affinity between Ratzignerian thought and that of the late great theologian Romano Amerio [whose views were not particularly welcome to the Church of the 1950s]. But still, this had more to do with cultural, not ideological, tastes.

Still to come was Benedict XVI's first truly worldwide media exposure [and baptism by fire!]: the Regensburg episode.

This episode was born from a combination of journalistic ignorance, anti-Papal prejudice and the deep underground workings of the rebels within the Vatican itself. [Not incidentally, an Arabic trnaslation of the speech was not made available by the Vatican ujtil after several months!]

The Press Office was obviously incapable of stemming the controversy, issuing belated and hardly incisive bulletins on what had happened. Worse, voices within the Vatican itself distaned themselves from the Pope and expressed their 'surprise' [as well as disapproval] at what the Pope said [the citation about Mohammed].

And they came to define the Regensburg lecture - which was a hymn to Logos and to the classical culture founded on Logos as reason - as Benedict XVI's first 'diplomatic fiasco'.

(Personally, I contributed ny own bit to the subsequent discussions of the Regensburg lecture by publishing the first complete translation of the dialog between Manuel Paleologue and his Persian interlocutor, from which the Pope took the controversial citation).

In November, he gave a series of incisive addresses to Swiss bishops who were on ad limina visit, but to which few paid attention.

And by year's end, the Wielgus case erupted in Poland, the responsibility for which lay almost entirely with the Congregation for Bishops [and the Secretariat of State, through its Nuncio in Poland - since both organisms are responsible for vetting candidates for a bishop's miter before submitting names to the Pope]

The man recommended to the Pope to be the next Archbishop of Warsaw turned out to be a documented collaborator with the Communist regime. On December 21, the Vatican Press Office issued a statement that the Pope had been informed 'exhaustively' about the candidate, Mons. Wielgus, and that he had full confidence in his nominee.

Then the 'incriminating' documents from Polish secret archives were exposed, and by January 7, Mons. Wielgus was forced to resign before he could be formally installed.


2007
In January, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini launched one of his most visible anti-papal and secularizing statements in a wide-ranging L'Espresso interview on questions regarding the sacredness of life.

In March, the Pope and the bishops of the Holy Land strongly reproved the Neo-Catechumenals for their 'autonomous' activities.

Then, with the publication of JESUS OF NAZARETH, Cardinal Martini, in the guise of a favorable book review, managed to oppose the Pope's theology from the pages of Corriere della Sera.

The climax of anti-Benedict dissent was to come in July with the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum. The dissenting voices were strident and found welcoming support in the newspapers.

The rebels decided this was the time to come out in force. They knew that their opposition to the 'Latin Mass' would be seen by secular society as a dutiful and necessary protest against a 'retrograde' Pope who would take back the Church to the 19th century. Open warfare was declared.

In September, during the Pope's visit to Austria, the outgoing master of papal liturgical celebrations, Mons. Piero Marini, allowed him to appear in ridiculous Smurf-colored garments at the Mass in Mariazell. [In fairness to Mons. Marini, the primary responsibility for that spectacle goes to the Austrian bishops' conference under Cardinal Christoph Schoneborn who approved the Mariazell vestments before they were presented as a fait accompli to Marini when he made his pre-visit site inspection.]


2008
New nominations to the Curia would appear to assure the Pope more peace and calm. But at the same time, the insidious work done in the past one-and-a-half years by the in-house rebels started to bear good fruit for them: their incitement of secularist dissidence found resounding expression when the Pope was forced to cancel a speaking engagement at the Roman university of La Sapienza, which had been founded by a Pope.

At around the same time, a dispute with the Jewish world had started.
[Actually, it started in May 2006, when Jews protested that the Pope's remarks in Auschwitz said nothing aout anti-Semitism and did not apologize for the Holocaust in the name of the German people; then blazed up ferociously soon after the Motu Proprio in July 2007.]

The liberalization of the traditional Mass was a cue for the Jews to protest the Good Friday prayer for the Jews used in the old rite [even if they never protested it during the John Paul II years when it was used by the few communities granted an indult to celebrate the traditional Mass.

Benedict XVI promptly revised the prayer using the language of St. Paul in the Letter to the Romans, to express an eschatological wish for Jews and Christians to come together at the end of time - in place of the open wish for conversion expressed in its previous form, even after it was revised by John XXIII in 1957 to eliminate its references to the 'blindness' of the Jews. But that did not 'placate' some Jews who seem determined to say "Gotcha!' to Benedict XVI every chance they can get.

BTW, were these 'venerable' rabbis never taught that age deserves a certain respect? It's hard to understand why they delight in slamming 'Gotcha!' in the face of an 82-year-old man who also happens to be the spiritual head of the world's largest religion?].

This tension with the Jews has been growing constantly to include their opposition to beatifying Pius XII and the Pope's revocation of excommunication from a Lefebvrian bishop who minimizes the Holocaust, and indirectly, the re-acceptance into the Church of a traditionalist minority who have been pictured in the media as generally anti-Semitic.

[Not to mention the perennial Jewish carpers who continually call into question Benedict XVI's own personal commitment to anti-Semitism and his 'responsibility' for the Holocaust by the mere fact that he is German.]

The double track of opposition to Benedict XVI by secularists and rebels within the Church itself is reinforced every now and then by the doctinal statements from Cardinal Martini which seem to become more borderline heterodox with time.


2009
The annus horribilis so far. It all started with the 'Williamson case'.

As revealed in behind-the-scene stories reconstructed by Il Riformista and Il Giornale from a dossier circulated in the Vatican after the Pope had revoked the FSSPX excommunications, the 'direction' behind the elaborate anti-Papal plot started with two lesbian journalists in France, working with some moles in the Vatican, Germany and Sweden.

Certainly, it must have been a Vatican informant who gave the cue for Sweedish TV to broadcast a November 2008 interview given by Mons. Williamson on the very day (January 21) the Pope was to sign the decree lifting the excommunication. The decree itself was not made public until January 24.

As usual, the Secretariat of State under-estimated the situation and did not react at all until several days later - with a terrible communique that appeared to include 'recognition of the Holoaust' among the dogmas of the Catholic Church!

Days in which the Pope was alone in the center of a media storm that was negative and relentless, further incited by many bishops and cardinals who outdid each other in giving interviews meant to show that the Pope was 'isolated' and that the Vatican did not have its act together.

Benedict XVI - who was buffeted at the same time by strong Jewish pressures demanding repeated condemnations by him of the Holocaust (and 'Please do not forget to specify that six million Jews were murdered!') - decided to write a letter to all the Catholic bishops of the world to explain his reasons for opening a door to the Lefebvrians [and to reiterate his priority mission 'to bring back God to the world'].

The media would give it little play [nor would dissident bishops, it seems, for they continue to be defiant]

Shortly thereafter, he travelled to Africa. A statement about condoms and AIDS [mis-stated as well as reported out of context] - during a brief in-flight Q&A enroute to Cameroon re-ignited worldwide controversy around Benedict XVI.

Indeed, representatives of international institutions and some European governments rained down invectives on him [Never mind that he had merely stated documented fact that just happens to contradict the conventional and politically correct belief of the condom ideologues].

It seemed to be the point of no return. From then on, everything the Pope said would be used against him, [I disagree it was only 'from then on'. As far as his diehard critics are concerned, it was always so!]

In May, his pilgrimage to the Holy Land - when every word and gesture of the Pope was closely watched for any word that could be exploited or any action that would ignite a new battle.

And so it was - although the most his Jewish critics could manage was to protest that at Yad Vashem the Pope had said Jews had been 'killed' in the Holocaust when he should have said 'murdered', and that again, he failed to say the murderers were Germans and that their victims numbered six million.

In July came the publication of Caritas in veritate which signalled a momentary truce. The Pope's words were appreciated by almost everyone, and even the secularists approved much of what the encyclical said.

The apparent good will was such that some newspapers even wrote about a possible conversion to Catholicism by Barack Obama after meeting the Pope! [I never mentioned any of that arrant foolishness on the Forum, because the two articles I read were clearly wishful thinking by a couple of Obama fanatics in the Italian media. Though why they would want their Messiah to become Catholic is rather baffling. Shouldn't they have a new church all his own?]

But in the Apostolic Palace, the strategy of tension shows no signs of faltering.

On Wednesday, Sept. 23, Swedish TV is launching is second attack on the Pope, a sequel to their January 'bombshell' about Williamson. This time, the protagonists of the attack are clearly from within the Church. [Who apparently had no hesitation whatsoever about expressing their disapproval and/or distancing themselves from the Pope on the pre-and post-handling of the Williamson case, for a project they knew would be used against the Pope!]

The year has not ended, and I don't think I am presuming to be a prophet when I say that there will be new media assaults on the Pope [incited from within the Vatican!] before long.

Nonetheless, for those who may think that these attacks are simply against the person of Joseph Ratzinger must understand that, more importantly, he is being used as the instrument to attack the Catholic Church from within.

Perhaps from those who are seeking to pave the way for future Popes who may yet seal the tomb of the Church's bimillenary tradition in order to adhere to the world completely - and be assimilated by it.