BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Forgive the time lag for these posts. My attention was called to the first one by a commentary about it in La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, so of course, I had to look up the article itself. Which turns out to be eminently fiskable - and outrageous = in a way that progressivist views usually are to hidebound conservatives like me. And I am glad I have the chance to point out even more egregious objections than those employed in the Bussola article...

A proposal against the wars of religion:
On the family and ‘non-negotiable’ values
by Pierluigi Battista
Translated from

January 18, 2012

“Ethically sensitive” questions are held prisoner by the long-standing wars of religion. [What exactly does Battista mean by this term? That religion - Catholicism, in Italy - has been waging symbolic wars on various fronts in behalf of its beliefs? And why not? And in what way are these issues kept hostage by the Church, when it is the Church that constantly brings up these issues in public?]

That is why no one has been able to reach a politically pragmatic conclusion, a law, a reasonable settlement among various cultural and moral options. [No, the reason no 'settlement' has been reached is that some issues raised under the Prodi government - that of legalizing civil unions, heterosexual as well as homosexual - failed to get a parliamentary majority.]

Instead, one must clear the playing field of mines. Without ‘silencing’ or humiliating anyone. But discarding the logic of reciprocal vetos. Politics, even on such sensitive issues, should be able to negotiate and find useful compromises. [Yada, yada... Easy to say, but try it!]

But if the logic of ‘non-negotiable values’ and of ideological extremism is perpetuated, one will get nowhere. Or one gets bogged down infinitely in nonsense. [Since when are ‘non-negotiable values’ unacceptable, and how can sticking to basic principles be considered ‘ideological extremism’?Or 'nonsense' for that matter? Otherwise, the temptation to shortcuts or tests of strength will prevail.

To clear out the mines, one can proceed – in this electoral campaign in which rightly, the citizens wish to know what their representatives will do – along two lines: the ‘unpacking’, so to speak, of ‘ethically sensitive’ issues, and the parliamentarization of the debate on such issues, which would require the government, any government, to have the support of a majority which, in an election where ‘conscience’ votes prevail, will not necessarily coincide with the majority needed to support an executive (a prime minister).

One can rescue a nucleus of themes that are truly non-negotiable from those for which compromise is possible and acceptable. In the matter of life, for instance, Catholics believe their position on this is not negotiable, and it would be unjust, and even arrogant, to ask someone who believes that human life begins from the moment of conception and that the embryo is already a person, to renounce such a fundamental belief. [Gee, such condescension! As if both premises were not also scientific. But secularists are notorious for ignoring science that does not fit into their mindset. Remember the global warming extremists and how they had to fake data to fit their far-from-proven hypothesis? How can any reasonable person say that the original zygote, the first stage of the organism – a full human being – that results from the union of a female egg with a sperm cell at the moment of conception, or the fetus into which it develops during its months in the womb, are any less ‘valuable’ than a baby who is born and the adult into which it will grow? It is one and the same individual, all the time, only at different life stages. There would be no adult if there had been no baby that was born, no baby if there had been no fetus that developed in the womb, no fetus if there had been no primordial zygote resulting from the fertilization of an egg by sperm at conception. The human life is a continuum from conception onwards - that is scientific fact, and secularists cannot arbitrarily reject its earliest stages..]

Catholics who oppose abortion on principle, norms in assisted reproduction that allow massive destruction of ‘unused’ embryos, the use of embryonic stem cells for research, have every right not only to vote against laws that oppose their beliefs, but also to wage a cultural and political battle against politicians who, in their judgment, violate the sacredness of life.

But what is non-negotiable about a blind and extreme war against the recognition of civil unions, whether heterosexual but especially homosexual? [The fact that it is not ‘blind and extreme’, but a logical expression of natural law. The entire biological universe would not exist if God (or Nature, if you will) had not built in the complementarity of sexes – male and female – to perpetuate each species. The demographic decline of the West is alarming enough without aggravating it, to whatever degree, by encouraging sterile same-sex unions who must resort to adoption to simulate a family, but that is just what they are doing – it’s like adults ‘playing house’. They cannot be serious, no matter that they think they are. Not all mothers and fathers are perfect, but does that mean that ‘two mothers’ or ‘two fathers’ instead of father-and-mother would be better for children? Besides, the record in the USA for couples who rushed into SSM the moment they could do it anywhere legally has shown that most of them have tended to be short-lived, i.e., they’re no better than heterosexuals at faithful monogamy.]

A reasonable law, that safeguards the fundamental rights of homosexuals, that gives juridical recognition to unions between persons of the same sex, is in a sphere outside that of non-negotiable values. Does same-sex ‘marriage’ provoke fear? [It is not fear, Mr. Battista, that the idea provokes – it’s disgust, at the very idea of legalizing anything that is so obviously contrary to Nature and to natural law.]

Granted that it provokes fear – even if the British Conservatives under David Cameron no longer fear it, nor even Republicans in the United States who would not even oppose adoption by same-sex couples [Where did Battista get this bizarre idea about the Republicans?], and the moderate French left, is it possible that In Italy there could not be a similar law to that accepted in Germany even by the Christian Democrats, who are such an important part of the European Popular Party?

And why not detach as well from ‘non-negotiable’ values a non-authoritative law [What exactly is a non-authoritative law"; if it is law, it ought to be authoritative! I think he means a law that does not require but allows the options he goes on to mention] on ‘the end of life” or on a ‘biological will’ which even, while rejecting euthanasia, will allow citizens to declare voluntarily and in full awareness their right to die when medicine has shown it can do no more?

['Corrierone is a pejorative term for the Corriere della Sera.]

The 'Corrierone' and
the Catholic frog
by Mario Palmaro
Translated from

January 21, 2013

There are articles that reveal a world. The one written by Pierluigi Battista in Corriere della Sera on January 18 must be read and meditated upon in bishops’ palaces, in the local curias, in parishes and in Catholic homes. Because in his article, Battista summarizes in exemplary mode the recipe by which the world is 'cooking' Catholics under a slow fire.

It is a small masterpiece, very lucid, that anticipates how we Catholics will end (and end up). [I think Mr. Palmaro very much overrates Battista's very impugnable piece!]

An end that is very much like the parable of the frog in boiling water: If you toss the proverbial frog into a kettle of boiling water, he will simply jump out right away, but if you put him into the kettle and only then put it over a slow flame, then the frog will get to be boiled without a problem.

The enemies of the Church – let us not forget that the Church has her enemies in the world – have understood by now that firing squads, guillotines, nooses, torture, genocides, lagers and gulags, massacres of nuns and priests, after their initial and undeniable uses – end up producing martyrs which only serve to reinvigorate the faith that they so hate.

So they must change tactics. They must boil the Catholic frogs under a slow fire. And this task must be entrusted to democratic and liberal institutions, to reputable organizations who work for peace, European unity and utopia, to technico-political leaders who go to Mass on Sundays, who say “values, values “ every five minutes and must therefore be “good persons” who have not the least idea where Freemasonry lodges are located.

In short, the Catholic frog will not be aware that the temperature in the kettle is slowly rising, and will ultimately find himself boiled without as much as a groan. Let us say of Battista’s article that it is a true masterpiece of this tactic.

Battista says in effect: Non-negotiable principles are a colossal annoyance because they hinder the modernization and Europeanization of an over-aged Italy which has been Catholic and Papist too long. Whereas all this time, strong para-Masonic powers wish to make of the Bel Paese (beautiful country) a glacial and inhuman land similar to the efficient and very clean Lutheran nations of northern Europe, where the trains run on time, the hospitals function, everyone pays taxes, people get drunk on Friday but by turns (so someone can drive the car home) – and suicides are increasing visibly, out of desperation in a life that is bereft of any sense of the transcendent.

Battista writes: “Poiitics, even on such sensitive issues, must be able to negotiate and find useful compromises. But if the logic of ‘non-negotiable values’ and of ideological extremism is perpetuated, one will get nowhere. Or one gets bogged down infinitely in nonsense”. Therefore, whoever speaks of these principles – say, Benedict VXI – is spouting nonsense!

His solution: Two moves. The first – to ‘unpack’ non-negotiable issues, by separating those that are “truly non-negotiable” from those for which compromise is possible and acceptable. The second – To parliamentarize the debate on ethically sensitive issues. [That was done by the Prodi government back in 2008 - they couldn't get the votes to legalize SSM along with heterosexual de facto unions.] So in the kettle prepared for the Catholic frog, the temperature is slowly rising.

And how should this 'unpacking’ be done? Here, Battista’s reasoning gets perfidiously subtle. Corriere’s editorialist distinguishes from issues “that have to do with life” – such as abortion and artificial reproduction – from the burning issue of same-sex ‘marriage’. On the first, Battista writes benevolently that Catholics “have every right not only to vote against laws that oppose their beliefs, but also to wage a cultural and political battle against politicians who, in their judgment, violate the sacredness of life”.

But after the carrot comes the big stick. And his tone suddenly becomes harsh and menacing. “But what is non-negotiable about a blind and extreme war against the recognition of civil unions, whether heterosexual but especially homosexual? A reasonable law, that safeguards the fundamental rights of homosexuals, that gives juridical recognition to unions between persons of the same sex, is in a sphere outside that of non-negotiable values. Does same-sex ‘marriage’ provoke fear? "

In the kettle, the Catholic frog is getting to feel the heat. The scheme outlined by Battista is subtle and banal at the same time – namely, to appear conciliatory on arguments (abortion and test tube babies) that Catholics have already lost and about which unjust laws have been inexorably consolidated, while asking for an attitude of compromise and surrender on an issue – same-sex marriage – in which the defeat has not yet been consummated. Ingenious, And diabolical.

The tone of the article also indicates that the secular world attributes a fundamental importance to this legal and symbolic official sanction to homosexuality. And that any attempt to block this plan will be swept aside ruthlessly.

Catholics have been warned: If they insist on thinking and saying that there are natural relationships as well as unnatural ones, which contradict nature, the reaction from the Europist and internationalist establishment will be terrible. And woe to whoever is thinking of promising voters that, if he ever governs, he will oppose this ‘gay’ trend in the law: he will be struck down by plague!

Obviously, in Battista’s thinking, Catholic non-negotiable principles are on the level of the most irrational beliefs of an animist tribe in black Africa. Two thousand years of philosophical tradition, of well-reasoned moral and political doctrine, of the natural law invoked by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, Thomas More and Charles of Hapsburg, have all been tossed into the secular-progressivist incinerator.

For Battista and his ilk, to be against abortion, or even worse, against same-sex ‘marriage’, is the outcome of irrational impulses that can, for now, survive but only within the religious sphere. However, in public life, where the sun of enlightened revolutionary reason shines, every person of good sense ‘should’ know that SSM is a most reasonable proposal. And that if Catholics cannot get that, let them be re-educated through the mass media, and if it helps, even through democratic courts.

And so the fate of the Catholic frog seems sealed. Battista and laymen who think like him are not the only ones bringing the kettle to a slow boil. This is also favored by the obvious doctrinal disorder within the Catholic camp.

In Italy, not a single pastoral council, or parish, or catechists’ group, has made it clear – much less, made accepted - to everyone what are these non-negotiable principles and what exactly they are about. Usually, the ‘Catholic' candidate who comes from a parish environment discards Catholic doctrine from his speeches within five minutes, mostly out of ignorance. [If this is so, can it be that Cardinal Bagnasco and the CEI are completely oblivious to this failure of basic instruction at the parish level? If they are, it is shamefully unacceptable and a disservice to the Pope who is Primate of Italy.]
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Humanly speaking, the plan of the Corrierone, the European Union, and of revolutionary progressivists and conservatives (From Hollande to Cameron) appears to be a done deal, and the Catholic frog is almost cooked.

Fortunately, there is that something that seems nothing, and is ignored by Battista and not a few ‘adult’ Catholics, which we call Providence.