The Church rejects Jacobine rage:
The Pope accuses the traitors to the faith
but also opens the door to hope
by VITTORIO MESSORI
Translated from
March 27, 2010
Certainly, neither Joseph Ratzinger the man nor Pope Benedict XVI need a defense from me.
The esteem and the respect that this man enjoys even among many laymen testify that he exemplifies best the Catholic synthesis that rejects every 'aut aut' (either-or) but follows the 'law of et-et',
coincidentia oppositorum, the union of opposites.
[One might perhaps call it the Catholic dialectic.]
Those who know him are aware to what extent there has a;ways co-existed in Professor Ratzinger, then Cardinal/Prefect Ratzinger, and finally Pope Benedict VXI, severity and mercy, rigor and understanding, respect for the norms and attention to individual human cases.
There is, in him, the humanity of the earlier men of the Church who, from the pulpit, denounced sin fiercely, but in the confessional, one on one with the penitent sinner, followed Christ's invitation to understand and forgive those who sincerely repent.
His letter to the Catholics of Ireland has an unprecedented severity: the sorrow and the indignation for the betrayal of the Gospel are not attenuated by any theologically correct hypocrisy.
In those dramatic pages, Benedict XVI does not even try to diminish the sin, recalling that many of the accused have preached against sin from their own pulpits.
He did not say a word against the generation-1968 apostles of the 'sexual revolution' who have now donned the robes of fierce and scandalized moralizers.
Nor did he denounce the sanctimonious defense of children by those who habitually preach the elimination at will of the unborn as an untouchable right.
Not a single reference in the letter to the economic interests that have led major Anglo-Saxon law firms to advertise their services openly in the media, with the come-on: "Do you want to be a millionaire? Send your son to a seminary for a year, and then come to us!"
The financial interest here is that common law, which prevails in the Anglo-Saxon countries, gives lawyers half of any damages ordered by a court to be paid to victims - and those have been extremely large.
Agents of these law firms keep a list of old men they hope to convince to bring suit or to testify in cases they expect to rake in millions. But better for them if the accused priest is now dead - many bishops and heads of religious orders have been willing to pay off out of court in order to avoid more scandal.
For years now, the 'Catholic pederast' has been, in the United States, the protagonist of an enormous business that has since brought rich dioceses and orders to financial ruin.
And yet, Benedict XVI has not sought any attenuating circumstance, no matter how legitimate and well-founded. His accusing finger is not pointed outside the Church, but towards her own children who have betrayed her.
For them, terrible words vibrating with the indignation of Biblical prophets. But after the condemnation, also the hope, the appeal to the mercy of a God who can bring good out of evil, calling on the guilty to pay the price required by justice but not to despair of God's forgiveness.
There is no sin so great that it can dry up divine mercy. Repentance and penance can open the way to reconciliation with God, for those who want it.
In this son of old Catholic Bavaria, authentic Catholicism lives:
rejecting an inhuman and ferocious 'jacobinism'
[the 'off-with-their-heads blanket rage of the radical French revolutionaries]; condemnation without right of appeal
[to divine authority]; justice without understanding;
ius, justice, without
pietas, mercy, for the human condition.
Those who are driving the current attempts to drag him into the docket know nothing - apart from their many errors and manipulations - of the Pope's wisdom which draws from the bimillennial experience of the Church.
A wisdom 'with a human face' which - we must hasten to underscore - follows the golden rule of et-et, even as it uses the whip against the sinful, as the Church in Ireland should know.
Those who would want to accuse the former Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of having covered up or ignored cases of sexual abuse, should be reminded, among other things, of that 'sorrowful mystery' which was the case of Fr. Marcial Maciel.
The congregation of the Legionaries of Christ, founded by the late Mexican priest, was very dear to John Paul II, because while many old religious orders were dying out or barely making it, here was a whole generation of enthusiastic priests defending Catholic orthodoxy.
Reports reaching Rome about Fr. Maciel's sexual abuses with seminarians were prudently consiered by Papa Wojtyla, who recalled that in Poland, similar accusations had been used by the Communists to defame the Church.
Well, one of the first measures taken by Joseph Ratzinger when he became Pope was to sanction the founder, ordering him to live in private and dedicate the time left to him (he was 86) to prayer and penitence.
Beyond that, Benedict XVI lost no time in abolishing the 'fourth vow' that had been required of the Legionaries - called a vow of 'discretion' - which imposed on each member the obligation not to speak against his superiors in any way, thus hindering the investigations that the CDF underook into the accusations against Fr. Maciel.
Initially, the Legionaries took the attitude that Papa Ratzinger had been misinformed or even that he was in a conspiracy to bring down the congregation because it had become too powerful.
And so, the man accused from outside the Church of 'failing to act' was accused by some inside the Church of 'doing too much' - not only against the Legionaries, but in other cases of sexual abuse as soon as accusations were established to be rightful.
And this is a paradox that is ignored for all that it is significant.
[But only one of the multitude of facts that the crusading media conveniently ignore for not fitting into their narrative, if not directly contradicting it.]