AP only came out with their commentary on the Holy Father's seventh anniversary as Pope on Friday, 4/27, and predictably harps on the MSM meme these days about the return of the Panzer-Pope though the writer does not use the term. She starts out by loading all the negatives against the Pope and the Church, using the Pavlov-reflex anti-Magisterium arguments of dissident Catholics and seculars, but does end up giving the pro-Church view (knowing full well that those would tend to be cut off if the article exceeds the space allocated to it by the editor!). But at least, she presents it. However, her presentation necessarily cries out for a whole lot of fisking because she tends to perpetrate established media commonplaces that are a priori biased against the Church.
Entering his eighth year as Pope,
Benedict XVI presses traditional views
by Nicole Winfield
VATICAN CITY, April 27 (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI began his eighth year as Pope this week after spending the waning days of his seventh driving home his view of the Catholic Church, with
a divisive crackdown on dissenters and an equally divisive opening to a fringe group of traditionalists.
The coming year may see more of the same as the Vatican gears up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 church meetings that reshaped the Catholic Church and are key to understanding this papacy and Benedict's recent moves
to quell liberal dissent and promote a more conservative brand of Catholicism.
[However MSM and his critics may choose to preesent it i.e., as negatively as they can), Benedict XVI is only doing - gladly, prayerfully and vigorously - his duty as Pope to preserve and defend the faith handed down to him. If he did not, he would be derelict as Pope. Even John Paul II's popularity in MSM did not prevent them from excoriating him every time he reaffirmed traditional Catholic teaching and practice, as, most notably, when he wrote that the Church - and the Pope - do not have the ability to authorize ordination ofd women.]
Tuesday marked the anniversary of the start of Benedict's pontificate, which officially began April 24, 2005, with an inaugural Mass in St. Peter's Square.
The Pope promised then not to impose his own will on the Church but to rather listen “to the word and the will of the Lord, to be guided by him, so that he himself will lead the Church at this hour of our history.”
[And he has not deflected from that in any way. He has never imposed 'his own will', any more than he has imposed 'the will of the dissidents'.
Certainly neither the dissidents nor AP can say that what they want is 'the will of the Lord'. They claim instead that it is 'the spirit of Vatican II', even if nothing in the Vatican-II documents overturns anything the Church has taught through the centuries. Not even the traditional Mass, as any simple reading of Sacrosanctum Concilium will show. But the over-zealous Vatican-II progressivists, who insist that the Council was the beginning of a 'new Church', claim that all their 'reform' demands are 'according to Vatican II' - and this claim has not been questioned at all by willfully uninformed MSM reporters who have not bothered all these years to fact-check those blatantly false claims!]
Seven years later, Benedict certainly has left a mark on the Church. He has pressed a conservative interpretation of Vatican II's key teachings, appointed like-minded bishops, and made his priority the revitalization of traditional Catholicism in a world that, he often laments, seems to think it can do without God.
He set out many of those priorities in a December 2005 speech to his closest collaborators running the Vatican, insisting Vatican II didn't represent a break from the past as many liberal-minded Catholics would like to think, but rather a renewal of the Church's core teachings and traditions.
The Vatican last week put those words into action, cracking down on the largest umbrella group of nuns in the United States, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. [It wasn't just 'last week'. Benedict XVI has been consistent about standing up for Tradition whenever he has to, and to demonstrate what he means by his own example, as in what the liturgy ought to be. As he said in giving back full legitimization to the traditional Mass, what was good enough for all the saints of the past - and helped make them the saints they are - cannot suddenly be evil or objectionable overnight. I, for one, am very eager to see when the dissidents will be able to produce the first candidate saint from their ranks. If they even believe in sainthood, at all!]
The Pope's old office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, appointed a bishop to revise the conference's statutes and review its programs and publications, and accused the group of taking positions that undermine Church teaching on the priesthood and homosexuality, while promoting “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
Two weeks earlier, the Pope himself took to task a dissident group of priests in heavily Catholic Austria who have called for ordaining women and relaxing the celibacy requirement for priests, questioning whether their call for disobedience was more about imposing their own ideas on the church than renewing it.
Yet on the very day it announced the crackdown on the U.S. nuns, the Holy See said it was nearing agreement to bring an ultra-traditionalist conservative group of Catholics back into communion with Rome after two decades of schism.
The group, the Society of St. Pius X, broke from Rome after rejecting many of the teachings of Vatican II, particularly its outreach to Jews and people of other faiths, and the sanctioning of the New Mass that essentially replaced the old Latin Mass. [Yes, but Nicole, their remaining objections are to new pastoral teachings, not to new doctrine, because Vatican II introduced no new doctrine.
Benedict has gone to tremendous lengths to reconcile with the group,
fearing the expansion of a parallel conservative church that already boasts more than 550 priests and 200 seminarians.
[A misleading statement of why the Pope has been pushing for reconciliation. Once again, it is his duty as Pope to uphold Church unity. The FSSPX happen to be the only significant dissent group in the Church to have had the courage to take their own path completely - with their own seminaries and priests - adhering to everything the Church has taught up to 1965 but rejecting what they consider objectionable in Vatican II's pastoral teachings. None of the other organized progressivist dissident groups has dared to leave the 'refuge' of the Church no matter how openly they flout her teachings. Down the centuries, the Church has always had such dissenters - but only Martin Luther had the balls to break away.]
To critics, the coincidence was remarkable:
The Vatican was in a way rejecting the U.S. nuns who had embraced Vatican II and its call to go out into the world to serve the poor [The sisters are not being reproved for 'serving the poor', but for teaching and advocating positions against Catholic teaching in their own ultra-liberal interpretation of Vatican II, which never changed an iota of traditional Church treaching!]), while embracing the Society of St. Pius X that rejected Vatican II.
Top officials at the Leadership Conference of Women Religious have said they were “stunned” by the Vatican decision and surprised by its gravity.
[Yeah, right! Very much like Captan Renault in the film Casablanca who says he is 'shocked, shocked!' that ganbling is taking place at the bar, even as the croupier is handing him his cut of the earnings!]
Online petitions supporting them have been launched, and Jesuit author Father James Martin has started a Twitter campaign, WhatSistersMeanToMe, highlighting individual nuns who had an impact on him and others.
“Catholic sisters are my heroes: they've been my teachers, my mentors and my friends,” Martin said in an email. “The women represented by the LCWR fully embraced the changes that the church asked of them after the Second Vatican Council, revisiting their founding documents, throwing themselves into work with the poor, and reimagining community life, all while remaining faithful to their vows.”
[Fr.Martin should be ashamed of 'stretching the truth', to say the least, in asserting LCWR activities in totally positive, uncritical terms, fully ignoring the reality that has been obvious to informed observers and as stated by the lcwr women themselves in various statements, books and documents over the years. And, if only for consistency, the LWCR should reject Martin's 'helping hand' since he is, after all, a man. Why should his support for them be any less 'patriarchal' than the priestly function of celebrating Mass which they denounce as wrongly patriarchal?
Yet conservative Catholics long have complained that the majority of sisters in the U.S. have grown too liberal and flout Church teaching on issues such as homosexuality and a male-only clergy.
The Vatican in its admonition of the LCWR complained that speakers at its assemblies often contradict or ignore core church teaching and that Catholic doctrine as a whole isn't stressed enough in the conference's member communities.
Conservatives have championed Benedict's move to bring about a more orthodox faith to the Church, even at the expense of popularity among liberals.
[The issue of following Church teaching and practice has never been about being conservative vs liberal, which are essentially convenient labels with various degrees of connotation - it's simply a question of orthodoxy vs heterodoxy bordering on heresy. Orthodoxy is what the Church and its Magisterium teach and practice; everything else is, at the very least, dissidence and willful selfishness.]
“Benedict understands his mission as custodian of the faith,” said Father Robert Gahl Jr., an Opus Dei priest and professor of moral philosophy at Rome's Pontifical Holy Cross University.
"The Pope has little interest in opinion polling and focus groups. He is not going to adjust the doctrine according to popular opinion or majority belief. Benedict's aim is to unite the Church around the faith handed down by Jesus, the Church's founder."
[I somehow doubt that Winfield or her like-minded colleagues in the media will even take notice of that statement. Though if they simply read any source material about the functions and duties of the Pope, they would not even have to be told! No one is so ignorant as one who simply doesn't want to know, much less take into account, anything that is incompatible with his/her world-view!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 28/04/2012 16:01]