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.


The writer of this article is a senior editor at Avvenire, and one wonders why he did not write this for that newspaper (perhaps the bishops' conference have a compunction against publishing anything 'politically incorrect', especially as it concerns a prominent cardinal)... In its own way, this is a 'the-emperor-is-naked' tale, somewhat salutary at a time when the media myth-making machine is in full gear burnishing their golden legend of 'the man who could have been Pope'.

The truth is Cardinal Martini
was never an alternative -
nor a problem to the Popes he served
by Davide Rondoni
Translated from

September 3, 2012

Some 'radicaloid' circles saw him as the standard bearer of an 'ethicist' Church that does not exist. He was popular in the most elite salons, and maybe he spent too much time looking at the mirror. But one thing is sure - he was never a real 'problem' for Papa Wojtyla nor for Papa Ratzinger.

[Certainly not to them, personally, but a problem for the Church, because of the cumulative effect on those of the faithful who were able to follow the cardinal's various pronouncements of liberal positions that were at variance, to say the least, with the Magisterium of the Church. Yes, he wished to provoke discussion, but this necessarily sowed confusion. Bishops are supposed to teach, not to confuse, the faithful.]

Only someone who has no idea of the history of the Church would be eager to underscore differences or divisions between the late cardinal and the part of the Church represented by Papa Ratzinger - after all they were cordial friends, and Benedict XVI was elected Pope, presumably with Cardinal Martini's vote and that of his supporters. [So we are back to the Conclave and the apparently now-accepted account of it by the anonymous cardinal who broke his vow of secrecy to supposedly reveal the details of the voting that took place in the Sistine Chapel. According to whom Cardinal Martini, for all the hype in the Italian media, got only nine votes on the first ballot, and decided by the third ballot to 'release' his voters to Cardinal Ratzinger. He may have told them to do so, but would they not have voted instead for the Jesuit cardinal from Argentina, who was thought to be a younger and healthy liberal alternative to the ailing Martini?]

Only some anachronistic anti-clerical could maintain that Martini represented a true alternative in thinking and in pastoral approach to Popes Wojtyla and Ratzinger. Just consider the story of famous battling theologians in the history of the Church, like Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux, to have an idea of what an alternative truly means.

They quarrelled over how to know God, not over methods of assisted reproduction, ethical questions of life and death, or social issues which are the main concerns of the radicaloid writers who dominate the pages of our major newspapers.

Cardinal Martini was never an alternative. He did not have the power to be one - which is not a defect, but simply a fact. If Papa Wojtyla had not appointed him to head the largest diocese in the world, he would have remained a brilliant but fairly unknown Biblical scholar.

If he had been an alternative [as in alternative or even parallel Magisterium???], why would John Paul II have offered him what is arguably the second most important cathedra in the world after Rome? The Polish Pope was sure that he could not cause any serious problems from Milan. In fact, there were none.

Especially for men of the Church like Wojtyla and Ratzinger who do not have an 'ethicist' idea of the Church, that which is so dear to the heart of Cardinal Martini's admirers, who, because of the Cardinal's liberal [and ultimately anti-Catholic] openness to contemporary ethical criteria [or lack thereof], considered him close to them - the modernists, the enlightened ones. They never seemed to realize that the game was lost, from the start. Simply because ethics was not 'the game'.

It wasn't about having two opposing ethical ideas - though the secular media loved to peal the celebratory bells whenever Cardinal Martini said something for public consumption, even as they claimed that he had chosen obscurity since his retirement. [How could he be obscure when every two weeks, he was given a whole page by Corriere della Sera to answer letters soliciting his thoughts on every subject?]

The simple fact is that both John Paul II and Benedict XVI have reproposed in different but syntonic ways a Church that is not founded on ethics or morality but on the event that God came to earth as man.

An editorial in a leading newspaper denounced Benedict's first encyclical because of this. The idea of a God-centered Church is resisted strongly, in the Church and out of it, by those who wish to confine the Christian message only to the narrow field of ethics, bioethics or philology.

Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI have reclaimed the idea of Church as the People of God, as an event in human history that is marked by bearing witness to the Gospel in all areas of existence, from charity to science and politics. A Church that speaks to the world about Christ and embodies him through her presence in history. A Church that most certainly will not be defined by political or ethical oscillations that are inevitable in history, but only by her testimony to Jesus.

But we have never seen anything written about Jesus by the cardinal's mediatically powerful friends and supporters, those who have used him all these years in order to reinforce to their readers their idea of the limited ethicist Church. Has any of them ever said that the cardinal made them discover Jesus? They had no use for his faith, which was always clear and limpid. They see the Church only as a springboard for ethical and moral debates.

Martini could never have been an alternative for a Church that is reduced to Biblical philology or even to being the ethical conscience of the world, simply because he did not have an alternative idea of the Church. [And that, Mr. Rondoni, is most disingenuous of you! Especially in the light of the cardinal's posthumously published interview with its intended demolition of the institutional Church! Surely he knew the media would seek to belabor his points - ad infinitum, if they could - using his words to demonize the Church 'authoritatively', and only too happy, because they are even more censorious of the Church than he was, to perpetrate his puzzling and quite uncharitable example of seeing nothing but bad in the Church and her leaders, starting with the Pope!

But he has just given them fresh ammunition, from the grave, as it were, and he did not have to. It's not the cardinal's denunciations I mind (except when he says that purification should begin with the Pope himself!) since we are all sinners, but the fact that he simply ignores everything that Benedict XVI has been doing singlehandedly to engage the whole Church in a purification that will enable a clean start in order that the Church will never cease to be 'ecclesia semper riformanda'. Then there's the secondary insult to Benedict as if he were a moron who has absolutely no idea that there is evil in the Church and is content to just let things be, or is so out of touch with the Church as not to be aware of its urgent problems! Dear Lord, the good cardinal and the villainous valet are wearing the same blinders!]

Of course, he had updated some arguments for his positions, but he had also certainly caused disquiet among many believers. To consider that one believes or not depending on the position of the Magisterium on artificial reproduction or the like, means reducing Our Lord and the Church to a caricature. It means thinking that ethics is more important than grace - and certainly Cardinal Martini could not have thought so.

Secularists and enemies of the Church prefer to think of God as some kind of an understanding father-in-law. And to think of faith as nothing more than an enormous scruple which keeps one from living life to the full.

All such concepts - which Martini certainly did not think, but he made others think of them, in a typical defect of the intellectual who is not a pastor - do not represent an alternative experience of the Church. They are merely secondary. Of course, their diffusion and persistence weaken the ecclesial fabric, which is what happened in the archdiocese of Milan during the years Martini was its pastor, but they do not represent a substantial alternative for the practice of the faith, no matter how much they are hyped by the superficial media who also happen to be committed to weakening the Church. [In fact, they are niche issues addressed to special-interest groups - they directly concern only those priests who want to marry, the women who want to be priests, couples who choose to use new reproductive technologies, homosexuals who want to marry each other, etc, along with their rabid supporters who pride themselves in being avant-garde and 'enlightened' unlike the obscurantist Church that is 200 years behind the times! Would anyone dare to say they represent a significant fraction at all of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics?]

We know that Jesuits have always had the tendency - and the charism - to act as 'prompters' to the powerful. So they have to be well- accepted in the best circles. Even Prime Minister Mario Monti has said so, "Cardinal Martini was my beacon and my counselor," he wrote in Corriere della Sera. I don't recall hearing anything like that from any Italian political leader in the past 30 years.

Imagine the uproar if someone like Ferdinando Casini [president of the lower house of the Italian parliament] or Silvio Berlusconi had said, "I have been inspired by Cardinal Ruini" [who was widely accused by Italy's secularists and leftists to have 'interfered' too much in Italian politics by promoting Catholic teaching in social issues, especially those that become subjects of referenda].

One would have to say that the true 'power' of Martini was not within the Church but outside it. Where power is earthly and moves the media, banks, and ministries. His articles and discourses showed that he (and his imitators) had that typical concern that Charles Peguy saw as a Christian defect: not to give the fashionable salons any reason to smile condescendingly on them.

The 'in' people - who have real power - liked Cardinal Martini. And he knew it (I think he may even have suffered it), even if he was good at striking the right balance between admonition and assurance. One who says of himself, "I am the ante-Pope" accepts that he is not a true alternative, but merely confirms a disproportionate self-pride that is typically 'jesuitic'. And in this sense, I had a soft spot for him, as for a rather timid but awkward boy.

His sponsors and powerful followers self-describe as 'modern', 'advanced', 'enlightened'. But history is strange, and sometimes, as those who study it without blinders know, it is those who call themselves 'modern' who stay behind, not having understood the real direction of events.

Cardinal Martini was a great man of faith. Perhaps he would have done better not to stay too long in front of the mirror held up to him by those who really did not love him and could not have cared less about his limpid and profound faith, but used him as the battering ram for old battles that they must constantly refight.


Rondoni is saying what appeared obvious to even a casual observer like me, who think I have enough basic information to make my conclusions - that Cardinal Martini was shamelessly used by the enemies of the Church to strike against the Church herself, and that he allowed himself to be used. Not that he was weak or naive, but because he truly wanted the platform and the bully pulpit that they made him a gift of, in order to promote his thinking on what Rondoni calls the 'secondary' matters - those that interest contemporary society but do not substantially have to do with the essentials of the faith. I am not sure that a bishop - who has the primary duty to teach - should comparmentalize his faith.

So someone like me, in my outrage at some of Martini's 'socially relevant' statements that seemed like breast=beating at the expense of the institutional Church, did overlook the fact that he was not questioning any basic tenet of Christianity [though I think he did have some 'new' views about the Resurrection - I must check that out] but how the Church interprets Christianity in evaluating contemporary trends which the Magisterium sees as contradictory to Christian values, but which he, Martini, did not. Of course, he was also very careful to frame all his statements not as definitive positions but as openness to such positions ("We should consider..."). Which, in effect, does recommend such positions!]

And if you want to read directly in English the typical hagiography and myth-making attendant to the cardinal's death, read the commentary by Catherine Pepinster, editor of the UK's Tablet [aka 'the poison pill'], published in today's Guardian:
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/sep/03/out-date-catholic-church-cardinal...
which starts with a flight of fancy that has been shot down repeatedly for the wishful thinking that it always was, remembering, from the supposed secret account of the Conclave, that the good cardinal never got more than the 9 votes out of 115 he initially got.

Maybe they should fantasize about what-might-have-been if Cardinal Bergoglio had been elected, as he turned out to be the only other candidate who got a considerable number of votes. If he did get as many as 40 votes in any one ballot before the final one, then I would conclude that was the number of progressivist cardinals who took part in the Conclave of 2005. Considering all the 'traditionalist' actions that Cardinal Bergoglio has been doing in Argentina since then, I think they read him wrong, and thought that because he was Jesuit, he would naturally fit into the Martini mold, or at least, that he was a viable anybody-but-Ratzinger candidate that they could vote for in conscience.

I have translated the Antonio Socci article I referred to earlier, and its in-your-face iconoclasm will be a back-to-earth jolt after Ms. Pepinster's airy-hairy nonsense.

I am not a Martinian, I am Catholic -
and what I can do for the eternal
repose of the late Cardinal
by Antonio Socci
Translated from

Sept. 2, 2012

Seeing the flood of rave eulogies and slavering enthusiasm in yesterday's newspapers, I was reminded of the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus said, "Woe unto you if all men say nothing but good about you" (Lk 6,24-26).
 
The true disciples of Jesus are, in fact, a sign of contradiction. "If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you...If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you" (Jn 16,18-20).

Then Jesus spoke to his disciples about this beatitude: "Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven" (Lk 6, 20-23). [In this respect, the detractors of Benedict XVI have been earning him a load of blessings!]

One thing is sure. Cardinal Martini was always borne aloft in triumph by the mass media around the world, for three decades, and those who wafted him the most incense were those who are most anti-Catholic and most hostile to Jesus and his Church.

Does anyone object to say that it all happened against his will? But the facts say that Martini always sought the applause of the world, he always caressed the Power of the dominant mentality, of the ideological causes advocated by the secular newspapers, for which he gained their encomiums and applause.

He was an assiduous and most honored guest in the most liberal media salons almost to his final days.

Or did you think he rejected the exploitative enthusiasm of the media that for years had acclaimed him as the Anti-Pope, as the counter-Pope to John Paul II and then to Benedict XVI? That did not seem so to me.

And yet, he could easily have done so with firm and clear words as Don Lorenzo Milani did when the progressivist media and the intellectual and political left said of him, "He is one of us!" He answered, indignantly: "What do you mean I am one of you? I am a priest. That's all!" [Don Lorenzo Milani, 1923-1967, was an Italian priest who became nationally known for pioneering new and effective methods of teaching children in the poorest regions of the country, and later for taking up the cause of conscientious objectors.]

When they tried to use him against the Church, he replied bluntly: "But tell me one thing in which I think the same as you do! One thing!... This Church is the Church of the sacraments. L'Espresso will not give me absolution of my sins! And can they give me the Mass and communion? They must realize that they are in no condition to judge or criticize the Church. They are not qualified to do so."

More: "It took me 22 years to leave the social class that writes and reads L'Espresso and Le Monde. They should snub me, say that I am naive and a demagogue, not honor me as one of them. Because I am not... The only thing that matters is God, man's only task is to bea and to adore God. Everything else is rubbish".

We would have wanted to hear similar words from the Cardinal, but we never did. Never. Instead, we kept hearing other words which were disconcerting and confusing to us ordinary Catholics. Words in which he made himself the prompt counterpoint to the teachings of the Pope and the Church.

So much so that yesterday, Repubblica could eulogize him with headlines such as, "He never condemned euthanasia", "From dialog with Islam to saying YES to condoms".

Everything that ideological trends imposed found in Martini a dialogue-ready and possibilistic interlocutor: "It is not bad that two persons, even if they are homosexual, have a stable relationship that the State promotes".

Of course, it is legitimate for anyone to express such views. But by a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church? Is there not a scandalous contradiction? Does loyalty not impose any obligation?

When a cardinal says, "I would be happy to be Catholic, and equally happy that the other is evangelical or Muslim", is he not proclaiming the equivalence of all religions? [Or he may simply be stating the principle of relgiious freedom!]

Does anyone remember any pronouncement by the Cardinal that was not politically correct? Or does anyone remember that he ever made an ardent plea in defense of persecuted Christians?

I don't. The cardinal preferred to chat if up with Scalfari [the presumptuous and arrogant editor of Repubblica, who is an atheist but nonetheless writes and acts as if he, more than anyone else in the world, ought to be Pope, since everyone else is beneath him], who underscores that "He (Martini) never did anything to convert me". I believe him. In fact, Scalfari was only too happy to be seconded by Martini in his philosophical whims.

In his second Letter to Timothy, St. Paul, enjoining his disciple to preach a healthy doctrine, predicts: "For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teacher and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths" (2Tm 4,3-4).

In the last interview he gave, in criticizing the Church, Martini asked where are those "who have ardor for the Church... people with faith like the centurion, enthusiastic as John the Baptist, who dare to do new thins like Paul, who are faithful like Mary Magdalene?"

Evidently, he didn't see them among his own followers, but there are so many in the Church. Too bad that he fought many of them, in some cases, even bringing them before his diocesan tribunal. Quite the example of the intolerance of tolerants.

Martini also incredibly signed a Preface to a book by Vito Mancuso [best-selling lay theologian and would-be architect of a new Church altogether] in which, according to La Civlta Cattolica, Mancuso "gets to reject or, at the very least, to drain of significance a dozen dogmas of the Catholic Church".

But the cardinal called the book 'a courageous presentation' and epxressed the wish that "it should be read and meditated by many". Mancuso, of course, called Martini his 'spiritual father'.

So, to demolish the dogmas of the faith does not faze Martini at all. But when two journalists - in defense of the Church - criticized some Catho-progressivist intelelctuals, Martino called them before the Milan Inquisition and asked to abjure thair criticism.

What a paradox! The only case, after Vatican II, of subjecting lay Catholics to an inquisition for simple historiographic theses carries the signature of the progressivist cardinal. “The cardinal of dialog”, as Corriere and Repubblica call him. [But was this not dialog for dialog's sake, such as favored by the Sant'Egidio Community and their model in matters of 'peace and brother hood', the United Nations? Was there ever dialog to do constructive things together based on principles held in common by opposing camps, as Benedict XVI advocates? And did Repubblica or other MSM ever call Joseph Ratzinger the 'cardinal of dialog' when, in fact, he had so many newsworthy - and fortunately reported as such - encounters with representatives of other religions and public debates with prominent secularists like Juergen Habermas and - forgive me for mentioning him in the same breath - the odious Paolo Arcais da Flores. Surely, no one has a monopoly of dialog.]

The newspapers were usually admiring of his sayings. I must confess that I found these terribly banal. For instance, “The need for struggle and commitment emerges, without letting oneself be overcome by defeatism”. He sounds like Giorgio Napolitano. [That's unkind to President Napolitano, all of whose messages and addresses that had anything to do with the Church have been well-crafted in terms of language, and better yet, sincere!]

Thank God that in the Church there are so many true masters of spirituality and love of Christ. [Which is not to say that Cardinal Martini was not a master of spirituality and love of Christ. It was the aspect of him that his adulators in the MSM completely ignored.]

The other media refrain is on Martini’s Biblical erudition. Which is of course true. But sometimes God shows a certain sense of humor. On Friday, the day Martini died, the liturgy proposed a Reading that seemed to be a demolition of erudition and of the cardinal’s ‘Cathedra of non-believers’ where Massimo Cacciari [secular philosopher and former mayor of Venice] and his like pontificated.

St. Paul wrote that Christ had sent him “to preach the gospel, and not with the wisdom of human eloquence, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its meaning. The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. It Is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the learning of the learned I will set aside. Where is the wise one? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made the wisdom of the world foolish? For since… it was the will of God through the foolishness of the proclamation [on the Cross]… to save those who have faith, the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength" (1Cor 1, 17-25).

And the Gospel was that of the ten virgins, in which Jesus, overturning worldly criteria, proclaims they were wise who had kept the faith to the end and ‘foolish’ those who had lost it. I hope the cardinal kept his faith to the end. [That is a gratuitous comment, Martini's faith was never in question, only his heterodox pastoral outreach, if we may call it that.] The enthusiasm of Scalfari, Dario Fo, Il Manifesto, Cacciari and company are useless if not aggravating before the Judge of the Universe.

I, as the Church teaches, will have Masses said for the Cardinal, and I will earn whatever indulgences I can so that the Lord may have mercy on him, It is the only mercy that we sinners truly need.

Caveat: Socci has written many good, even great, pieces that I have found congenial, and it seemed he was always a Ratzingerian. But he also leads those who insist there was a 'fourth secret of Fatima' that the Church is holding back, and inexplicably - almost irrationally - floated the canard in September 2011 about Benedict XVI contemplating resignation when he turned 85.