BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

BAD NEWS ON THE ORTHODOX FRONT

I've been desperate for news in the MSM about the Oct. 16-23 meeting in Cyprus of the Mixed Internal Commission for Theological Dialog between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches - and now I have found a report on the final communique from an Orthodox blog - and it is very dispiriting. The Holy Spirit is not breathing on the Orthodox for now, it seems. I have posted the reports in the CHURCH&VATICAN thread.


And a personal insult
to the Holy Father

By a man who is not worthy to breathe the same air that Benedict XVI breathes, let alone tie his shoelaces. A man who fancies himself the Pope of secularism, whose soul must be so corroded by diabolical malice, bitterness, and envy to be able to write what he has been writing against the Church and against Benedict XVI. I see him as a creepy crawly yucky maggot beneath the red shoe of the Successor of Peter.

"...The people of God is one thing, ministers of worship and of souls another, and the members of the church hierarchy yet another. The Popes represent a phenomenon sui generis. There have been great ones, mediocre ones, vicious ones, exemplary ones. I would say that the last exemplary popes were John XXIII, Paul VI and Papa Wojtyla. The present one is a modest theologian who makes us miss his predecessors."

This is a paragraph that appears in a rather lengthy column for this week's issue of L'Espresso magazine by that odious bloatedly egocentric, narcissistic founder and first editor of the ultra-liberal La Repubblica, Eugenio Scalfari, who deliberately threw in that single line to 'put down' Benedict XVI in the most dismissive way possible, with a phrase that also manages to disparage even his intellect, professional competence and reputation ['A modest theologian'???).


In case the reader is too obtuse not to realize that Bagnasco is used simply as stand-in for Benedict XVI, look at the photo they chose to illsutrate the column.

The column was ostensibly a tirade against Cardinal Bagnasco for insisting that Catholic religious instruction should be retained in Italian public schools (as provided by law, and as favored consistently by more than 90% of parents). But it is accompanied by the usual ballast Scalfari uses to pontificate, enumerating all the wrongs that the Church and the Popes have done down the centuries ("Yes, there have been saints, too, but on the whole, the Church has done far more harm than good to anyone").

The insult to Benedict XVI is so obviously absurd, and wickedly so, that it does not need to be answered. Moreover, who the hell is this maggot anyway?

I checked what Italian Wiki says about him. Compared to Joseph Ratzinger's 120+ books, he has written 12 (from the titles, they seem to be books of reportage, opinion and personal memoir - none of them underlined as a particular success), starting in 1968 with an 'investigation' into the Italian secret service undertaken with another journalist. One of the generals they wrote about sued them, they were sentenced to 16 months in prison, but avoided serving the sentence because the Socialist Party of Italy ran them for public office so they could gain parliamentary immunity. So he became a member of the Italian Parliament in 1968.

Born in 1925, he studied law and began as a newsman writing for Fascist newspapers before the war. After the war, he wrote for liberal newspapers. He helped found the Radical Party in Italy in 1955, and turned to the Socialists only because they 'saved' him. As editor at L'Espresso and Repubblica, he began engaging in ideological-cultural wars, particularly on the questions of divorce and abortion, although until then, his principal subjects were politics and economics. In recent years, he became fiercely engaged in advocating secularism and denouncing the 'interference' of the Church.

There is nothing to show why a convicted felon (presumably for having slandered a prominent person - do we see a pattern here?) should consider himself so high and mighty as to speak ex cathedra, with such violent animosity, about the Church and anything that has to do with it.

Yet this is the man who would look down at Benedict XVI! Someone like Giuliano Ferrara could squish him underfoot, in argumentation and in language, on any subject. (I like the image of 'the Elephant' -Ferrara's appellation - squishing the maggot.)

How can a supposedly intelligent man get to be 84 years old and be so relentlessly venomous, so full of himself and so petty? It is people like this I sincerely wish could rot in hell, as un-Christian as that thought may be.