Mr. Neumayr is the editor of the montly magazine Catholic World Report. The American Spectator is a monthly journal of ideas whose writers are politically conservative. Here, Mr. Neumayr provides solid specificity for the philosophical animus evident in the reporting and in-house commentary of the New York Times on the Pope.
A liberal fantasy:
The end of history and 'the last Pope'
By George Neumayr
April 8, 2010
Post-Enlightenment liberalism has long regarded the Catholic Church as the last obstacle to its final triumph. The Enlightenment-era French dilettante Denis Diderot spoke of strangling the last priest with the "guts of the last king."
The ceaseless attacks on Pope Benedict XVI over the last few weeks form the most recent scene in this historical drama. Unlike Napoleon, today's forces of secularization can't imprison a Pope. Well, at least not yet; Christopher Hitchens is working on this, calling for the European Union to seize Benedict's traveling papers.
But they can strangle him politically and culturally. That his popularity poll numbers have apparently dipped below those of the most inane and rancid celebrities testifies to this perverse power.
The children of Diderot at the
New York Times understand the secularist Enlightenment project very well. Its executive editor, Bill Keller, telegraphed this in a 2002 column.
Since he wrote the column before he was promoted to editor, he didn't bother to hide his anti-Catholic bigotry with circumspect throat-clearing. He described himself as a "collapsed Catholic" -- "well beyond lapsed." He affected a
false modesty about this, saying that for this reason he claims "no voice in whom the Church ordains or how it prays or what it chooses to call a sin." But
of course he does claim that voice -- and thinks all should obey it.
He made it clear that he was rooting for "reforms" that would reduce Catholicism to a captive of modern liberalism:
"…the struggle within the Church is interesting as part of a larger struggle within the human race, between the forces of tolerance and absolutism."
In that one sentence lies the whole subtext to the paper's campaign against Pope Benedict in the last few weeks.
The Holy Father represents for Keller and Dowd and Goodstein the hated "forces of absolutism" that the tolerant and enlightened think themselves called by history to stop.
For an elite drunk on its own enlightenment, the ends will always justify the means against religion. So what, Keller figured, if my reporters could only come up with
straining, half-baked pieces that cast fragments of information about Benedict in the worst possible light? Let's run them anyways, so that the forces of tolerance can triumph over the forces of absolutism!
And if it turns out that the forces of tolerance are largely responsible for mishandling these abuse cases (the ousted homosexual Archbishop Rembert Weakland, the subject of flattering profiles over the years in the
New Yorker and
New York Times, is the person most responsible for dereliction in the Milwaukee case the
Times claims to find so outrageous), well, let's blame it on Benedict anyways. He could have done more!
In that 2002 column, Keller oozed contempt for the Church, speaking of the hierarchy as
"aging celibates" (imagine Keller ever writing an equivalent sentence about imams) who refused to embrace the "equality of women, abortion on demand, and gay rights."
Keller had little use for Pope John Paul II, whom he likened to an authoritarian Communist:
One paradox of the Polish Pope is that while he is rightly revered for helping bring down the godless Communists, he has replicated something very like the old Communist Party in his church.
Karol Wojtyla has shaped a hierarchy that is intolerant of dissent, unaccountable to its members, secretive in the extreme and willfully clueless about how people live. The Communists mouthed pieties about ''social justice'' and the rule of the working class while creating a corrupt dictatorship of bureaucrats….
…like the Communists, John Paul has carefully constructed a Kremlin that will be inhospitable to a reformer. He has strengthened the Vatican equivalent of the party Central Committee, called the Curia, and populated it with reactionaries.
He has put a stamp of papal infallibility on the issue of ordaining women, making it more difficult for a successor to come to terms with the issue. He has trained bishops that the path of advancement is obsequious obedience to himself.
Alarmed by priests who showed too much populist sympathy for their parishioners, the Pope, according to the Notre Dame historian R. Scott Appleby, has turned seminaries into factories of conformity, begetting a generation of inflexible young priests who have no idea how to talk to real-life Catholics. {He did that???? That must be news to seminaries around the world who gladly took on the laissez-faire fallacies of the Vatican-II progressives to turn out priests practically unschooled in the elements of the faith, much less in its Tradition!]
Of course, if John Paul II had been a real Communist like Alger Hiss or Van Jones, Keller wouldn't have talked about him so scathingly. But any stick would do at the time and the Communist analogy appealed to his imagination at the moment.
Notice that these days the opportunistic complaint from the Keller-led Times is not that the Church is too authoritarian but that it is too lax. Apparently, it is not autocratic after all. The paper can't decide if Benedict is a Rottweiler or lap dog.
Upon his election, the
Times called him "hard line" and "divisive." Now he is soft and clubby. But imagine if Benedict did govern the Church like the autocrat of Keller's imagination, sweeping down to sack every derelict bishop and corrupt priest across the globe, the
Times would be the first to engage in
ACLU-style whining about the lack of due process, etc., etc.
In fact, when he issued his renewal of the Church's ban on the ordination of homosexuals in the first year of his pontificate -- a ban which the "forces of tolerance" within the Church had suspended for decades, a factor contributing greatly to the abuse scandal -- the Times was the first to object.
"How many divisions does the Pope have?" secularists, inspired by Stalin, used to scoff. The Pope, as they know, enjoys no such power, yet in recent weeks they have acted as if he had a military and police at his disposal which he simply refused to use against abusers.
It is the "forces of tolerance" which command the divisions, and they will continue to march through history, displaying all the tolerance of French Revolutionaries as they look forward to that final moment when the last priest can be strangled with the guts of the last Pope.
Is it the time of purification for the Church
first predicted by Joseph Ratzinger in 1969?
Editorial
by John-Henry Westen
April 7, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The near-constant battering of the Catholic Church during the past month over the sexual abuse scandal has most Catholics reeling and much of the media in a feeding frenzy, seeing the scandals as an opportunity to bring down the archenemy of the sexual revolution.
This latest cycle of the sexual abuse scandal is different from that which took place in Canada and Boston years ago. It involves new and disastrous revelations daily and from all over Europe and North America, with sustained coverage in the media.
For over 35 years Pope Benedict XVI has predicted a smaller, more faithful Church. The 1970 book
Glaube und Zukunft[Faith and the Future], based on five lectures by then-Fr. Joseph Ratzinger given in 1969 at radio stations in Baviera and Hessen, is the first recorded mentioning of this prediction.
In those lectures the future Pope said, "From today's crisis, a Church will emerge tomorrow that will have lost a great deal. She will be small and, to a large extent, will have to start from the beginning. She will no longer be able to fill many of the buildings created in her period of great splendour. Because of the smaller number of her followers, she will lose many of her privileges in society."
In discussing the matter with my colleagues the consensus is that this crisis is definitely part of that long-predicted purification. Unfortunately, however, it comes in a very confusing package.
It would be easier to see truth in an obvious conflict between good and evil: where, for instance, some in the church were advocating for abortion or at least ‘choice,’ versus those who maintained the defense of the sanctity of human life.
But the murkiness of this crisis has the influence of evil written all over it.
The abuse is not exclusively tied to liberalism in the Church, such as was the case with former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland. Weakland was a notorious liberal who, in addition to admitting to transferring priests with a history of sexual misconduct back into churches without alerting parishioners, admitted to homosexual encounters while serving as archbishop.
Weakland retired in 2002 after it was revealed he paid hundreds of thousands of church dollars to a former homosexual lover who threatened to publicly accuse Weakland of sexually assaulting him.
But the ongoing and mindboggling revelations of abuse by Legion of Christ founder Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado show that this crisis touches even what seemed like an oasis of orthodoxy.
This crisis reminds me of Christ’s prophecy in Matthew 24:24 where he warns that times will come when ‘even the elect’ will be deceived.
It shakes the faith of many, as even bishops are found to be guilty not only of horrendous cover-ups and unthinkable enabling by shuffling around abusive clergy, but also of sexual abuse and perverse activity themselves.
Today’s revelations about Norwegian Bishop Georg Muller are
devastating. Muller, 58, who resigned last year saying only he was unsuited to the work, now has admitted that the reason for his resignation was his sexual abuse of a 10-year-old choir boy 20 years ago.
[At least, Mueller had the good sense to own up when confronted and to resign.}
In another
devastating revelation this week, retired French Bishop Jacques Gaillot of Evreux in France said of his taking in a convicted Canadian pedophile priest in 1987, who later went on to abuse children in France: "Back then, that's how the Church operated."
[One must take Gaillot's statement warily. He is a very controversial figure whom the Vatican removed as Bishop of Evreux (Normandy) in 1995 because of a long history of flagrant political activism in every liberal cause out there - from Green Peace and the first Gulf War to married pirests and gay marriages. He appears to be truly committed to social activism, with a consistent apostolate of working with the poor and with prisoners, for instance, but also takes pride in his doctrinal heterodoxy. He remains a bishop but with no assignment, which allows him full reign for his heterodoxy.
[Also, I strongly disagree with the indiscriminate use of the adjective 'devastating'. It is not as if anyone is any longer surprised that sexual offenses can and do happen among priests asnd bishops. Nor that any of the recent revelations were about recent offenses. What happened after the US scandal broke at the start of the millennium appears to have significantly diminished the incidence of such offenses among the clergy. Too little significance - or even attention - is given to that in all the current reporting. Even by a constantly supportive group as the Lifesite News people.]
But at the same time the media’s coverage on the scandal must be viewed with a very critical eye, as was seen in the recent attempts by the
New York Times to unjustly smear Pope Benedict.
As Colleen Raezler of the Culture and Media Institute points out, the broadcast media relentlessly pursued their objective of smearing the Catholic Church during the holiest week of the year for Catholics.
“ABC, CBS and NBC featured 26 stories during Holy Week about Pope Benedict’s perceived role in the sex abuse scandal the Catholic Church is now facing,” she reported. “Only one story focused on the measures the Church has adopted in recent years to prevent abuse. In 69 percent of the stories (18 out of 26) reporters used language that presumed the Pope’s guilt. Only one made specific mention of the recent drop in the incidence of abuse allegations against the Catholic Church.” [There you are!]
While the media is now focused on the Catholic Church, this is an attack on all Christianity and Christian morality. That is why Lutheran pastor John Stephenson has come out so strongly in defense of the Pope.
Will the Church survive the crisis? Believing Catholics say that it will, since Christ promised (Matthew 16:18) that the gates of Hell would not overcome it. But, as the Pope predicted, it will likely be a smaller and purer Church.
[An equally significant statement by Benedict XVI enroute to the USA in April 2008: "I would prefer to have less priests but good priests".]
Many Catholics are ramping up their prayers for the Church, and the Pope. The Knights of Columbus are encouraging all their members around the world to join in a special novena for Pope Benedict XVI, beginning Divine Mercy Sunday, April 11, and concluding Monday, April 19, the fifth anniversary of the Pope Benedict’s election in 2005.
Canadian Catholic author Michael O’Brien, a good friend of mine, spoke with me today about the crisis. Michael warns of where he sees things going from a spiritual vantage point. And while his is a stark vision, it remains hopeful.
The famed author of the prophetic novel
Father Elijah said: “It has been ever thus with the Church. Satan sifts us like wheat.”
“In a generation (if we should be granted that much more time in history), the aging self-deceived liberalism of the Churches in the West will be gone, as dead wood that has dropped from the tree. At the same time, the internal rot that has disguised itself as orthodoxy will have been burned away by trial and tribulation, indeed by persecution.”
And here's the reaction of America's most popular radio commentator and leading conservative Rush Limbaugh, who was asked by a caller on his radio show what he thought about all the current media fuss about the Catholic Church... Limbaugh is not Catholic, but being conservative, he sees the liberal game all too well...And not being Catholic, he does not know - as the gazillion-greedy US lawyers seem not to know - the actual and real autonomy of local Churches in the matter of administration (an autonomy that dates back to the beginnings of Christianity) - a common point of ignorance which explains the last part of Limbaugh's remark.
Why the American left
is trying to discredit the Church
From the broadcast of
April 7, 2010
LIMBAUGH: ...What really is going on here is that the forces of the left are in the process of trying to tear down and destroy every institution in America that stands for something other than big government, other than liberal Democrats.
The Catholic Church is despised by the left because of its abortion stance. It is despised because it is a religion other than the earth. It is a religion other than liberalism. So they're full-court press in trying to discredit the Church.
What they're gonna end up doing, though... Some guy just said, "If we bail out California, Washington gets more powerful." If the Pope finally figures out, "You know what? These local Catholic churches in their areas, the dioceses, can't control themselves. We're going to have to step in," the Vatican may end up getting more powerful here...
It could be a dual-edged sword for these people trying to destroy the Church.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/04/2010 20:57]