BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

This has often been observed incidentally, but it needs to be underscored specifically and strongly this way.

Thanks to Lella on her blog;

for the lead.


Stop labelling the Pope:
He is neither progressivist
nor conservative -
he is simply Christian
by Lucio Brunelli
Translated from

July 15, 2009


But is Benedict XVI a conservative Pope or a pregressivist one?

Ritanna Armeni, a journalist for Rifondazione (the current incarnation of the Italian Communist Party) and an intelligent woman, advises the left to read and underscore the encyclical Caritas in veritate, and has admiring words for the past in which Papa Ratzinger speaks about 'the stunning experience of gift'.

Piero Sansonetti, Communist and editor of the Communist paper Altro, after praising the 'very beautiful' part of the encyclical dealing with labor issues, opens his arms wider to say [very condescendingly, I think]: "Even in the Vatican gardens, there can be something good. Even the Pope, at times, is right".

And in Europa, the newspaper of the formerly influential leftist party called Margherita, the unadorned headline on the encyclical was "The progressivist Ratzinger'.

Leonardo Boff, speaking out after years, says he is surprised by the 'social openness' of his former adversary, and the Washington Post comments that with the new encyclical, even "Obama is to the right of the Pope" on economic issues. [A very disingenuous remark, in view of Obama's unabashedly radical left agenda straight out of Saul Alinsky's manual on how to turn America socialist before people realize it!]

It is too easy, and perhaps unfair today, to remind the Italian left, which is in a crisis of identity, that they cannot condemn as 'unacceptable clerical interference' those Catholic statements they oppose [on life, marriage, the family), and then, turn all excited and approving when the Pope or anyone in the Catholic hierarchy takes positions more in tune with their own political culture (any critique of capitalism, the dignity of immigrants, etc).

This, of course, is plainly evident. But the same observation, mutatis mutandi, must be made for the political right - which finds it hard to support the social commitment of a Church that they consider to be their natural ally, as they were allied against the aborted DICO pro-gay marriage legislation of the previous Prodi government or in the Englaro case. But they are far less subdued now about the new encyclical.

But that's how it is.

The Church is not a sovereign that looks down upon its subjects from on high and expects nothing from them but reverence. It is the mystical Body of Christ. Where it concerns even a single aspect of its teaching - like what it says about caritas - the faithful cannot step back as they choose.

Some Catholics who consider themselves 'realistic' think that hatred in the world against the Church is the most objective indication of its consistency with the Gospel.

Yes, but provided one does not confuse consistency with smug knowing-it-all. And to keep in mind that Jesus met with everyone, embraced everyone, was unfazed by hostility.

And if this a priori by 'hard and pure' Catholics were completely true. would they consider John XXIII not an evangelical Pope because he was loved by everyone?

Perhaps, progressivists may follow the advice of Armeni. They will discover that concern for the poor and indignation over injustice is in the very DNA of Christianity and its tradition.

[My very basic objection to the liberation theologians has been that they behave as though they were the first Christians ever to feel concern for the poor and for social injustice! Which says a lot about how they have not really studied Christian history and tradition at all - or chosen to ignore it, and/or correlatively, they think they have 'invented' a new Church, as the Vatican-II 'spiritists' claim to have done. How blinded they are by their egos!]

And that the encyclical of the gentle Benedict XVI is entirely in continuity with the social magisterium of the 20th century Popes.

They will discover that Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum was called 'socialist' by Corriera della Sera in 1891, and Paul VI's Populorum progressio was derided by the Wall Street Journal in 1967 as 'warmed-up Marxism'.

And may the conservatives truly take to heart the eventual fate of the family and the problem of children conceived but never born. Not just in words, but with useful and realistic activities, not to mention through their own example.

Marcello Veneziani, one of the few true thinkers of the Italian right, has tried in Libero to answer the question we started out with: Is Pope Benedict XVI progressivist or conservative?

"I would say," Veneziani wrote, "that the Church embodies, in its sphere, the role of the moral civilian right and of the social and economic left - roles which are not now represented in public life".

Veneziani claims the growing public role of the Church is a collateral effect of the emptiness of ideas and the scant credibility of the principal cultural and political currents today.

For this reason, the Church is virtually constrained to highlight its own techings on the most authentic questions raised by the right (on moral and civi issues) and by the left (on social questions).

But even this may be an analysis that is too idelogical.

The Church has always exercised a role of 'moral authority' amid the conflicts and viscissitudes of every era in its history. But it has never forgeotten its first task: to produce Christians, or remake them even when they seem to be destined for extinction.

If only because Christian ideas cannot work unless there are Christians.


I must note here that a major part of the commentary and reactions to Caritas in veritate in the Italian media has been from labor unions and representatives of big business, and I think there is at least one article I can translate that summarizes their positive reception of the Pope's ideas.

The lack of anything similar so far from the Anglophone press reflects the lag in dissemination of the Pope's ideas - when they do not concern the buzz words that interest the media for their polemical value and potential for sensation - in the English-speaking world.