BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

CARDINAL CARLO MARIA MARTINI, S.J. (1927-2012)

From left, with B16 in May 2005; on his 80th birthday in Jerusalem (Feb 2007); next 2 photos taken 2009-2010 after he retired to a Jesuit home in Gallarate, near Milan;last 3 photos taken 2011-2012.


It was not surprising that the major Italian newspapers paid major tribute to Cardinal Martini on his death - after all, he had been their hero for more than three decades, since he first presented himself as a liberal voice against the Magisterium of the Church. But Corriere della Sera, for which he wrote a twice-monthly column in the final years of his life, has also stirred up all the embers of that conflict by publishing an interview with the Cardinal, recorded a few weeks before he died, in which he seemed to see nothing good in the institutional Church and to have completely ignored whatever Benedict XVI has done to engage the Church in an internal purification... As I have not had the time to read through the interview, here is BBC's account of it, which I can only call 'gloating' - as if to say, "Look, he's addressing this incorrigible, unregenerate Church even in death!"! - in the certainty that, with the cardinal not even buried yet, no one at the Vatican would dare make any statement in response.

So against my best hopes, MSM is not passing off the opportunity to use the cardinal's death - and his own unilaterally negative view of the Church - for a bonus round of Church-bashing and Benedict-bashing!


In his last interview given in August,
Cardinal Martini said the Church was
'200 years behind the times' and urged
radical change, starting with the Pope

September 2, 2012


Cardinal Martini lying in state in Milan Cathedral.

Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini has described the Roman Catholic Church as being "200 years behind" the times. The cardinal died on Friday, aged 85.

The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has published his last interview, recorded in August, in which he said: "The Church is tired... our prayer rooms are empty." [Surely, he must have read about WYD Madrid, or even the Mass at the last World Meeting of Families in Milan! Churches in the West have been less than full since secularism overtook even the most Catholic of countries, and even back in the 1990s in his book-length interviews, Joseph Ratzinger was realistic enough to see the foreseeable future of the Church as a 'creative minority', but the participation of the young in WYD appears to be one indication that, as Benedict XVI said in his iaugural homily, "The Church is young, the Church is alive".]

Martini, once tipped as a future Pope, urged the Church to recognise its errors and to embark on a radical path of change, beginning with the Pope.

[Perhaps we should see it as the obstinate insistence of an 85-year-old man stuck in his ideological niche, but the cardinal spoke in this interview as if he had not been reading at all what Benedict VXI has been saying and doing as Pope. As if Benedict XVI has not been singlemindedly intent on purifying and renewing the Church internally. As if Benedict XVI has not been setting the example himself for all this. I hope readers are discerning enough. If he had not died, I - along with other Catholics who follow what Benedict XVI is doing - would be most outraged at this last message. As for the Church being 200 years out of date, surely the cardinal did not think that Vatican II accomplished nothing at all in this respect!]

Thousands of people have been filing past his coffin at Milan's cathedral, where he was archbishop for more than 20 years.

The cardinal, who had retired from the post in 2002, suffering from Parkinson's Disease, is to be buried on Monday.

Martini, a popular figure with liberal stances on many issues [or perhaps more rightly, 'a popular figure with the media because of his liberal stances on many issues'], commanded great respect from both Pope John Paul II and his successor Pope Benedict XVI.

The cardinal - a member of the Jesuit religious order - was often critical in his writings and comments on Church teaching, says the BBC's David Willey in Rome.

He was a courageous and outspoken figure during the years he headed Europe's largest Catholic diocese, our correspondent says.

Cardinal Martini gave his last interview to a fellow Jesuit priest, Georg Sporschill, and to a journalist at the beginning of August when he knew his death was approaching.

Cardinal Martini was a renowned academic and biblical scholar, as well as a prolific author of popular books on religion.

But it is highly unusual for a leading member of the Catholic hierarchy openly to challenge Church teaching - or rather to criticise the way in which the Church often expresses its teaching with negatives and prohibitions rather than encouragement to believers. [Excuse me, BBC, how many times has Benedict XVI said - and shown by example - that the Catholic faith must be taught in a positive way, by pointing out how it is true, good and beautiful, and not in terms of saying NO!]

Pope Benedict is now faced with a difficult choice: whether or not to attend Cardinal Martini's funeral in Milan on Monday - which many leading Catholics say would be a powerful affirmation of Church unity. [There was never a question of 'choice', but of common sense and long-standing practice. When was the last time a Pope ever travelled anywhere for the funeral of a cardinal? Why should an exception be made for Martini? When Poland's Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski died in 1981 - he who had been Karol Wojtyla's mentor and dubbed at the time as Primate of the Millennium for his uncompromising stand against the Communist regime in Poland during the Cold War - did anyone say John Paul II ought to have travelled to Warsaw for his funeral? Not to compare apples and oranges, but surely if one must assign rankings for the overall significance of a cardinal in the life of the Church, not many would dispute that Wyszinski, who was also papabile in his time, far outranks Martini even though none of that would matter for Benedict XVI, who has given unsolicited public tribute to Martini on many occasions, even after the latter's harshest statements against the official Magisterium. And what 'Church unity' would be affirmed by such a trip, which would rather seem to be a concrete sign validating the propriety of an eminent Prince of the Church openly disputing the Magisterium of the Church!]

In 2008, the cardinal had returned to Italy from Jerusalem, where he had settled on retirement in 2002 to continue his biblical studies.

Catholics lacked confidence in the Church, he said in the interview. "Our culture has grown old, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our religious rites and the vestments we wear are pompous."

Unless the Church adopted a more generous attitude towards divorced persons, it will lose the allegiance of future generations, the cardinal added. The question, he said, is not whether divorced couples can receive holy communion, but how the Church can help complex family situations. [Again, how many times has Benedict XVI said the same thing about this issue, except he has been more direct in telling couples concerned, "You can still be part of the Church, even if you cannot receive Communion - there is always spiritual communion".]

And the advice he leaves behind to conquer the tiredness of the Church was a "radical transformation, beginning with the Pope and his bishops".

"The child sex scandals oblige us to undertake a journey of transformation," Cardinal Martini says, referring to the child sex abuse that has rocked the Catholic Church in the past few years. [Yeah, right! And has Cardinal Ratzinger/Benedict XVI not led, almost singlehandedly since 2001, in radically overturning the situation of 'filth' in the Church? What transformation does Benedict XVI need apart from the transfiguration effected by the Holy Spirit in those whom he causes to be elected Pope? Both Leo the Great and Gregory the Great could not have found anything to reproach Benedict XVI with!]

He was not afraid, our correspondent adds, to speak his mind on matters that the Vatican sometimes considered taboo, including the use of condoms to fight AIDS and the role of women in the Church. [And why would he be afraid? He said he considered himself to be the 'ante-Pope', precursor of Popes, who could tell them what he thought they ought to do. It's the easiest thing in the world to speak out against the Church, because the dominant means of communication amplify and disseminate the message for you, as they did with Martini's various heterodox messages, and hail you as the 'anti-Pope'. But as a Cardinal of the Church, did he not have the obligation of communion with the Successor of Peter, or failing that, the duty to avoid any situation that could cause confusion for the faithful? Is that not the first duty of a bishop? When the highly-publicized cardinal frequently advocated positions different from that the Church officially says, was that not just improper conduct. but one that was harmful to the Church?]

In 2008, for example, he criticised the Church's prohibition of birth control, saying the stance had likely driven many faithful away, and publicly stated in 2006 that condoms could "in some situations, be a lesser evil".

Corriere Della Sera plans to give a copy of his last book entitled Speak From The Heart to all its readers. [I am going to reserve my comment about the cardinal's books until much later, at a respectful distance from the moment.]

P.S. I have no intention at all of reproducing any of the hagiographical stories in the Italian media about their hero, but I have identified a few articles that need translation - one by Giuliano Ferrara, who as a non-Catholic, presents a disinterested view of Martini's heteredoxy, and one by Antonio Socci, who says openly that the cardinal revelled in the role given to him by the media, never objected to it, and openly frequented and courted progressivist secular circles. A third one clarifies that the cardinal's choice not to be fed through a nasogastric tube, given that his illness was terminal anyway, was not an endorsement of euthanasia, as the liberal media have sought to do, but entirely in keeping with what the Catechism says

Here first is Ferrara, who presents his conclusions about Cardinal Martini as a journalist who is also a 'devout atheist' enthusiastically supportive of Church orthodoxy in all things ethical and moral. (Even if I have not forgotten, nor can overlook, his uncharcteristically cockamamie idea months ago that Benedict XVI should resign the Papacy to make way for someone of his own choice as Pope - no way I can rationalize such idiocy, or egregious lapse of intellectual judgment.].

The Jesuit
by Giuliano Ferrara
Translated from

August 31, 2012

With Cardinal Martini, it is not that a great heart has passed away, nor even a pastor. Above all, he was a failed reformer, a theologian of indifferentism and relativism who tailored his intellectual means to whatever was needed to promote his ideas.

Let us see what Ignatius of Loyola says in his Spiritual Exercises: "It is therefore necessary to make oneself indifferent to all things created, as far as everything that is left to our free will and is not prohibited, such that, on our part, we shall no longer prefer health over sickness, wealth over poverty, honor over dishonor, a long life nopt a short one, and so on, in everything else. But we must only desire and choose that which will lead us best to the end for which we were created".

This Jesuitic 'indifference' is a theologically vertiginous concept that could also be a mystic take-off of blinding beauty and modernity.

In applying such indifferentism, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini was a loyal oppositor to the Ratzingerian Magisterium and to the overall trajectory of the Church under John Paul II and his successor.

One understood this in a lucent and tremendous way when the emeritus Archbishop of Milan, ex-rector of the Gregorian and of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, brought forth his conclusive argument for three decades of opposing the Magisterium of two Popes: "Christian relativism also exists".

Jesuitic indifferentism and relativism are twin modalities of conceiving life in general, and Christian life in particular. Ignatius's dictum to "desire and choose only that which will lead us best to the end for which we were created" is the root - in its own way sublime - of Ignatius's idea of "every way to find the will of God", and the reason for the suspicion of crypto-Machiavellianism ['The end justifies the means'] which has always attached to the Society of Jesus. [Not by chance that the adjective 'jesuitic' was coined for their logic!]

In everything that has to do with human freedom, except the precriptions and prohibitions against absolute evil, Jesuits have manifested that this field of relativistic indifference can and must be conquered, as an analytical and discreet mentality open to the variations of time and to the hope that every variation and novelty is supposed to contain.

Such indifffrerentism is Christian relativism. It does not take account of the nexus between reason and faith - that rational complex of ethical and political witness to mundane reality ('all things created'), which has been the nucleus of papal teachings in the tempestuous history of the Church following Vatican II.

In a rather deceptive, careless and sentimental way, the departed cardinal was always presented as someone with a big heart, humanitarian in every fibrillation, devoted to everyone other than himself [but apparently not to the Popes], and a thousand other para-philosophical equivocations. All of them pseudo-Pascalian manipulations, except the intention to render homage to a man of the Church and of God who for more than two decades had exercised the functions of a pastor of souls, but who was not in fact one.

The poster image of the great all-comprehending priest, who sees his closeness to the poor and lowly as a proof of love for the incarnate God - which is true but does not explain anything of the prelate's personality - was in fact a poster image, equivalent to sending a flying kiss to the world of contemporary spirituality, while claiming to divest the Church not so much of her monopoly but even her own reading of the Christian faith, which he thought 'opinion-makers', even those lacking all modesty, were more entitled to do.

Martini was a failed reformer. He introduced an element of radical contradiction into the ecclesial establishment. He wished to relaunch Vatican-II, doubling its progressivist reach with his 'new' premises which tormented Paul VI and led his successors to compose a rational theological, liturgical and pastoral response.

In full adherence to the anti-Syllabus spirit, certain that the crusade of the 19th century Church against indifferentism and relativism had brought incommensurable damage to the People of God and to the 'true doctrine', Martini did not think it was possible to have a critically aware relationship with the contemporary Christian called upon to live and bear witness to his faith.[???]

He had the intellectual means that he could tailor to fit any need, he knew what he had to do to orchestrate his ideas and implant them into the fabric of the Church, and thus, he was often called an anti-Pope, or as he preferred, an ante-Pope. [Actually, he did not need to implant his ideas - they had already taken root long before he came to 'pastoral' prominence, because they were the usual laundry list of liberal goals to remake the Church as they want her to be. What he did was to provide the dissidents and progressivists with a figurehead distinguished enough in the Church hierarchy (not an outcast like Hans Kueng) that he could continually keep their ideas in high profile, which apparently, he was only too glad to do.]

But he was loyal. He said what he had to say, always - or almost always - with deference [To whom? Certainly not to the Popes, of whom he thought himself their precursor-guide!] In his pastoral letter 'Il lembo del mantello' (The edge of the cloak), he extolled a young TV newsman for his performance in talk shows. I think he was mistaken. [I.m sorry. I really can't quite figure out this last paragraph, especially since I am unfamiliar with the pastoral letter cited. ]

Ferrara had a P.S. of sorts today, as follows:

I wanted to write the usual piece, in anticipation of the funeral tomorrow of Cardinal Martini, who was never my ecclesiastical cup of tea. I said to myself, "Go on, Giuliano, take the opportunity and use all the many generics and stuff that have appeared in all the journals in tribute to him, and do what you have to do - attack the sterile and hypocritical compunction of all the Martinian eulogists of doubt, of dialog, of listening, believers and atheists alike who are so devoted when it has to do with wafting incense for a Prince of the Church who served their ideological necessities. But why do I have to?

9/3/12
P.S. As it turns out, Ferrara did write a full column completing the above paragraph, for the 9/3/12 issue of IL FOGLIO. I will translate ASAP.

Of course, the obligatory hypocrisy that comes with the death of any VIP, no matter how negatively you felt about him when he was alive, plays a great part in my decision to refrain from posting any eulogies here, even from eminent churchmen like Cardinal Bagnasco. I think the OR biographical essay said far more objectively positive things about the cardinal than anything I have read so far, so I am glad the Vatican newspaper had the good judgment to do what it did (even if the article never mentioned that he had been a papabile).

The lack of substantive background about the late cardinal in most of the MSM stories tends to prove my hypothesis that those who hyped him the most were hardly interested in his entire career to acquant themselves enough with what he actually achieved, other than providing them with propaganda points against the Church.

In which connection, Andrea Tornielli had a good piece in La Stampa in which he points out that despite all the hype of his liberal supporters in the media, Martini was never reslly a viable candidate in the Conclave of 2005 if only because he was afflicted with Parkinson's, the same disease that ended the life of John Paul II. That, in fact, the only strong candidate by the time the cardinals headed into the Sistine Chapel was Joseph Ratzinger (whom no one in the Italian media even recognized as 'papabile').

The proof of this was that Martini is thought to have received no more than 9 votes at the first ballot, and by the second ballot, his fellow Jesuit, Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, was polling far ahead of him. Various accounts since then tried to portray him as the kingmaker in that Conclave, by 'releasing' his supporters to vote for Ratzinger. But assuming Benedict XVI was elected by 87 votes (lowest estimate) or 112 (the highest), surely in a contest which came down to only two contenders, 9 delegates is hardly substantial. Besides, he may have 'released' his voters but that does not mean they would have voted for Ratzinger - it is more likely they gave their votes to the other Jesuit whom liberal or liberal-tending cardinals perceived to be their only other chance for anybody-but-Ratzinger!

Then there's the other story, resurrected again this time, that after the third ballot, Martini apparently thought that Ratzinger and Bergoglio would go into deadlock and reportedly said, "Tomorrow, we'll have a different story altogether", which was interpreted to mean, "If we have a deadlock, we start anew with a compromise candidate" (as the Conclaves of 1978 had done). As it happened, Joseph Ratzinger was decisively elected on the fourth ballot.

P.P.S. i have decided to post the Socci article in a separate box.