Sorry to have to post something unpleasant again - but this is what passes for conventional wisdom in the liberal media these days. In many ways, this is worse than the JTA article I posted earlier today.
This article easily qualifies as one of the most stupid I have seen lately - perpetrated by unthinking editors who do not see the absurdity of calling anything 'a rush to Pius XII's sainthood": The man has been dead for 50 years, the cause for his canonization was introduced in 1965 - 45 years ago - and that's a rush?????... The rush is in the liberal media seeking to discredit a Pope for their own reasons - pandering to the Jews, genuine dislike for Catholicism and using anythng to beat it down with, who knows?
Everything about this article drips with shameless ignorance and bitter bias against the Church! It's incredible how seemingly intelligent people can pontificate in print over the internal affairs of a Church they do not even seek to learn more about. Would they dare to pontificate about strictly internal religious decisions made by, say, the Supreme Leader of the 'Islamic Republic of Iran'? Or the Chief Rabbis of Israel, for that matter?
Nothing in this article leads me to believe that the reporter is or ever was a Catholic. And if she is, then she is being willfully ignorant about the Church.
Why a rush to sainthood for Pius XII?
By CELESTINE BOHLEN
Published in
January 1, 2009
PARIS (Bloomberg News) — Does the world really need yet another Roman Catholic saint, particularly if that means canonizing
one of the most controversial popes in history?
[How rash! Has she ever stopped to consider the entire history of the papacy????]
By one count, there are already more than 10,000 saints and “beati,” or blessed, accumulated since Roman times, with at least three saints already assigned for every day of the year.
[Why do non-Catholics care at all? If they find nothing exemplary about the lives of known and recognized Catholic saints, that's their loss. They misunderstand the nature and significance of sainthood if they think the Church can have 'too many saints'!]
That’s just one of several reasons why Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to proceed toward the canonization of Pius XII, the Church’s World War II-era Pope, was so surprising.
Another two miracles to his name, and Pius will have cleared all the hurdles to sainthood, where he will be among the ranks of such beloved figures as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Joan of Arc.
[So? Considering how many hundreds of millions of Catholics lived under the Papacy of Pius XII [compared to the population of the Middle Ages] and who venerated him as Pope - as Catholics still did in those days, who is to say that he was not - and is not - 'as beloved as other saints'? Can anything be sillier?]
It’s hard to see the urgency or the necessity of an act that was sure to anger and upset large groups of people — most significantly, Jews who worry that Benedict has again delivered a setback to the difficult and delicate task of reconciling Catholicism and Judaism.
There may be explanations for Pius XII’s studied silence about the Holocaust in the early 1940s: it is true that public criticism might have put more innocent people in danger, and it is also true that the Pope, like many Catholics, took risks to protect Jews.
The question of Pius’s wartime record remains open, and will stay that way as long as the relevant archives are closed.
Benedict himself had
previously asked Vatican officials to hold off any decision on Pius until the opening of the 1939-58 archives, now slated for 2014.
[He did no such thing, and this is blatant falsehood. He said at the time that he was going to reflect on the matter some more (he didn't say how long) - and meanwhile, without publicity, he ordered his own private review of the available documentation by a reputable adn respected Church historian. At the same time, the head of the Vatican Archives said in 2008 that it would take its technicians at least six years to catalog all the documents before they could be open to the public. A year has passed, so the Vatican recently said 'Five years more".]
This approach was endorsed by Jewish leaders, who are now left expressing puzzlement and dismay over Benedict’s decision
to jump the gun and issue a decree proclaiming Pius’s “heroic virtues,” setting the stage first for beatification, and then canonization.
So what was the rush?
The answer is politics — which does not make for an edifying religious spectacle.
[Nor does it make for valid analysis. It is passing off sheer speculation for analysis!]
The common perception
[by whom????] , disputed by the Vatican, is that by pairing Pius XII with John Paul II in the Dec. 20 decree, Benedict had hoped to satisfy both the conservative and the liberal wings of the Catholic Church.
[The pairing hypothesis is something that has been put forward by some Vaticanistas. Their speculation does not necessarily make it true.]
Let’s just leave aside the fact that there isn’t much of a public constituency clamoring for a St. Pius XII (Pius IX is beatified, and Pius I, V and X are already saints), as there is for a St. John Paul II, a charismatic Pope who played a key role in the collapse of Communism. At his funeral in 2005, crowds called for a quick beatification, with chants of “Beato subito.”
[Brava! She can't even get this one right - anyone ever heard that line 'Beato subito' before????]
In contrast, Pius XII — born Eugenio Pacelli, scion of Rome’s so-called black nobility, which has staffed the church’s upper ranks for centuries — was a lifelong Vatican bureaucrat-turned-diplomat, with a dour, ascetic manner.
[And that's all this woman knows about Pius XII? How pathetic that she doesn't even try to learn more about one of the most erudite and holy men among the Popes of the modern era!]
This isn’t Mother Teresa, the Albanian-born nun who spent her life caring for the poor of Calcutta and was beatified in 2002, or even Father Jerzy Popieluszko, the Polish priest who was beaten to death by the Communist secret police in 1984 and who this month was put on the path to sainthood, together with Pius XII and John Paul II.
[Who is she to decide - on the basis of media images - who is worthy to become a saint or not? The Church has used stringent criteria for proclaiming saints for centuries - they have become more stringent in the past four decades that there has been a Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood - and the process is long, involved and intensive. This willfully ignorant reporter makes it sound as though saints were created by papal whim!]
So the Vatican once again found itself trying to calm waters stirred by one of Benedict’s decisions. Last February, when the pope offered an olive branch to leading figures of a conservative schismatic movement who included a Holocaust-denying ex-bishop, the Vatican blamed “a management error.”
This time, the Vatican press office issued a statement explaining that the pope’s decree on Pius’s “heroic virtues” wasn’t an assessment of “the historical impact of all his operative decisions,” but a confirmation that he had led a deeply Christian life. Surely, that was a requirement Pacelli met when he was chosen to be the Pope in 1939.
Many experts think that Benedict is trying to reconcile the Church with its own history, with teachings that prevailed before the Second Vatican Council, the historical gathering of church leaders convened by Pope John XXIII in the 1960s.
That was when the Roman Catholic Church entered the modern age, adopting such principles as
separation of church and state [Excuse me! Does this woman even review history at all????], freedom of religion, a more modern liturgy and a repudiation of anti-Semitism.
“Benedict wants to emphasize the continuity of the Church’s teachings, to make the point that the Second Vatican Council was not a break with the past,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit scholar and senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.
This isn’t a surprising line of thinking from a conservative Pope who, as a theologian, once kept watch over the Church’s doctrine.
But he didn’t need to add another Pope to the roster of saints to make the point.
[For the nth time, Ms Biohlen, whoever you are, it's not the Pope who is 'adding' to the roster of saints. He only acts on the outcome of the Congregation's rigorous norms.]
Of the 265 popes in history, 76 are already saints: six are blessed. Perhaps now is the time to declare a halt to the practice, for liberals like John Paul II and John XXIII, as well as for conservatives like Pius XII.
As Father Reese aptly noted,
Popes cannot be examples for ordinary Christians: Popes can only be examples for other popes.
[Excuse me???? How can a Pope not be an example for all Christians? He is the spiritual leader of Roman Catholicism.! Would Reese say that Obama should not be an example for all Americans, but only for Presidents? Spare us the ponderations of people like Thomas Reese who are, in juridical parlance, 'hostile witnesses' to begin with.]
After President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a lot of people argued that heads of states should not be nominated for that kind of award until after they have left office. Maybe in the case of Popes, sitting on the throne of St. Peter should be honor enough.
Dear God! Forgive them for they know not what they write so cockily about - and do not mind exposing their blissfully willful ignorance!...
Some reporters really delude themselves into thinking that their criticism and contempt will do anything to influence the course of the work undertaken by the Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood, in particular, or Benedict XVI's decisions in general!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 03/01/2010 00:11]