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When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, the choice of the Vatican‘s guardian of orthodoxy cast a pall over the liberal wing of the flock and left conservatives giddy with the prospect of total victory. Fr M. Price Oswalt, an Oklahoma City OK priest who was in St Peter’s Square that April day, told The New York Times, “He’ll correct the lackadaisical attitudes that have been able to creep into the lives of Catholics. He’s going to have a German mentality of leadership… either get on the train or get off the track. He’ll not put up with rebellious children”.
Now, however, with Benedict set to leave office eight years later in an unprecedented departure, many on the Catholic right are counting the ways that Benedict failed them, and wondering how their favourite watchdog turned into a papal pussycat. Michael Brendan Dougherty, a Latin Mass enthusiast, lamented the day the pope made the shocking announcement that he would resign on 28 February, “Although Pope Benedict XVI’s highly unusual resignation is said to be for reasons of health, it fits the character of his papacy… all his initiatives remain incomplete. He was consciously elected to rescue the church from itself, but he failed to finish what he started”.
Since then, the criticisms have continued to come in from a range of onetime champions, and on a spectrum of issues… Benedict didn’t sufficiently clean house in the clergy sex abuse scandal and he didn’t appoint enough hard-liners to the hierarchy; he didn’t bring the old Latin Rite schismatics fully back in the fold, a mission that’ll likely end with his pontificate; he was too quick to mollify Muslims or pursue ecumenical gestures; and he charted, as Dougherty put it, “a precarious middle course” theologically. Even his three encyclicals… the most authoritative documents a pope writes… focused on social justice issues and often embraced the kind of liberal policy prescriptions that sent conservatives into conniptions.
To be sure, liberals would note that, under Benedict’s rule, theologians, and even American nuns, suffered investigation and discipline, and that he appointed some serious conservatives as bishops and promoted others to the College of Cardinals, which’ll choose one of their number to succeed Benedict. Nevertheless, if he was not exactly a pleasant surprise to the left, neither did he fulfil the great expectations of the right. That vaunted German managerial instinct? It seemed to have no effect, as the Vatican under Benedict became a mismanaged palace of court intrigue and financial scandals, lurching from gaffe to disaster, and all exposed to public view when the pope’s own butler leaked reams of internal papal documents. Joseph Bottum wrote a withering verdict delivered in the latest edition of The Weekly Standard, Benedict was “as bad as a pope has been for 200 years. All in all, a terrible executive of the Vatican”.
Even his resignation confounded many of his conservative supporters. Some saw Benedict’s act as a repudiation of the decision by his predecessor, John Paul II Wojtyła, to die with his boots on despite his public struggle with infirmity… a move conservatives loudly proclaimed the only possible option at the time. Others, like New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, worried that Benedict, this most traditional of churchmen, was introducing a modern innovation that would undermine future popes and embolden those looking for a more accountable papacy. However, disappointment was inevitable. The hopes of Benedict’s fans had blinded them to the parts of his writings (on charity and justice, for example) or his personality traits (such as his loyalty to friends, no matter how incompetent) that didn’t fit with their plans.
That leads to a second factor, which is that popes may enjoy great authority, but they can’t act like autocrats. Benedict, more than his supporters, knew that he had to be the pastor of a huge global flock, not just a “bad cop” who tells people to follow the rules and drums them out when they disobey. As he told dinner companions early in his pontificate, “It’s easy to know the doctrine. It’s much harder to help a billion people live it”. Finally, Ratzinger was always at heart… and in his head… a scholar and theologian. He had a German intellectual bearing, but little of his countrymen’s renowned knack for organisation. He warned his fellow cardinals during the 2005 conclave as he saw the momentum swinging in his direction, “I’m not an administrator”. Benedict spoke the truth then, as clearly as he always did. The irony is that his most ardent fans, rather than his liberal foes, apparently didn’t want to listen.
18 February 2013
David Gibson
As quoted in USA Today
http://www.guampdn.com/usatoday/article/1928889?odyssey=mod%7cnewswell%7cimg%7cFrontpage%7cp
Editor’s Note:
There are two very important takeaways in this piece. Firstly, do note the vitriol and spleen that the righties spew at those who refuse to follow their notional fantasies. Benedict had to deal with the real world; ergo, his decisions and actions angered these sorts. As for Joseph Bottum, he was the third-rate successor to Richard John Neuhaus… First Things deteriorated badly under his mismanagement and rightwing fanaticism… it had to shitcan him and replace him with Russell Reno (for the record, the Weekly Standard isn’t known as expert in religious matters, it’s a stridently-neocon publication).
Secondly, do note how everyone’s quick to blame Benedict for long-simmering troubles in the Vatican. To be blunt, as an experienced curial infighter, he knew what was going on, and he knew that it was beyond anyone’s competence to put right. Let’s not be coy, the current troubles plaguing the RCs started in John Paul’s tenure… that’s one reason why Benny’s resigning… he doesn’t want things to get worse, he knows that the Holy See needs a younger, more vigorous, man to deal with this unpleasantness.
In short, the malevolence of the right is on display for all to see, and the fact that it’s unfair to blame Benny for the frolics that John Paul either shoved under the rug or was too weak to counter is just as obvious. I’d say that B16 resigned because he didn’t want the mess to get worse. No doubt, he didn’t want the post to begin with, but we don’t know what the alternative might have been. That’s the 64,000 Dollar Question, and the cardinals are going to carry the answer to that one to the grave.
Yet, the most important thing I’d like you to attend to is:
It’s easy to know the doctrine. It’s much harder to help a billion people live it.
I think that Benedict was completely in the right on that one… and that the Orthodox konvertsy are completely in the wrong. Do note how they accuse all and sundry of “laxity” and “indifference”… they don’t understand that the canons have to fit real people and actual situations grounded in reality… not the other way ’round. I’ll say that Benedict did know that… and that’s why the righties hate him. Do think on that. It makes him a sympathetic and human figure, no?
BMD
Is This Election Really All About Race And National Identity? (slightly condensed)
Tags: Barack Obama, GOP, Lindsay Graham, Mitt Romney, New York Times, Obama, political commentary, politics, Republican, United States, USA, Willard Romney
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There certainly is an argument over government finances under way… it isn’t about spending or taxes. It’s an argument about race and national identity. It hasn’t really been about fiscal policy for decades. Any democratic system of wealth transfer relies on a sense of social solidarity. During the post-WWII boom, Jim Crow laws insured that African-Americans were under-represented in the country’s political life. This allowed a thin version of national solidarity to take hold. This version envisioned a white nuclear family, which in turn, undergirded Social Security and progressive tax rates. White people could hold to the basic assumption that redistributed wealth flowed mostly to fellow whites who might be “slightly poorer than themselves”.
Then, came the civil rights movement, voting rights for minorities, and integration of the public sphere. This produced white flight from the nation’s cities and from the public school system, in both the north and the south. Many resisted the racial integration imposed by the federal courts. Instead of money being distributed to white nuclear families, these dissenters saw money flowing to “shiftless” blacks and immigrant Hispanics. For those who resist these changes in the national life, their understanding of the basic compact of citizenship is being threatened. In this new atmosphere, the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, in 1965, would be the last welfare initiatives until the passage of Obamacare half a century later.
Mitt Romney’s proposed tax cuts are irrational if viewed as a contribution to debate on sound economic policy. However, they make perfect sense as an expression of deep animosity towards the idea of a shared national life. Obama may have said when he took up his presidency that there were no black, white, or Hispanic Americans, just Americans with a shared destiny. Nevertheless, what if a large part of the voting population doesn’t see inclusion as a desirable goal? For politicians on the right, Obama’s vision threatens to drag people back into an integrated public space they’ve been trying to escape most of their political lives.
It would explain the re-alignment of the two political parties in this country, with the GOP taking over the conservative South and more or less abandoning that nation’s cities. A majority of whites voted against Obama last time around, and seem poised to do so again. As viewed through this lens, the efforts of conservative judges to limit social justice initiatives such as Affirmative Action, and to undermine the entire structure of Roosevelt’s New Deal, make perfect sense, as do GOP attempts to restrict the voting rights of minorities. It might even explain the GOP’s obsession with being belligerent overseas, for if you see your own identity group losing power over fellow citizens with darker complexions, it makes you feel better if you can hold sway over what are seen as “lesser breeds without the law”, as Rudyard Kipling put it, in foreign countries.
It also might explain all the efforts of commentators on the right to brand Obama as somehow un-American, as the proverbial “other”, either as a socialist, or even a communist, or an anti-colonialist Muslim. The New York Times recently editorialised against anti-Obama conspiracy theories, and efforts to discredit important but non-political institutions in our government, writing, “Mistrust of the most basic functions of government can destroy the basic compact of citizenship”.
However, a good portion of the population already believes that the basic compact of citizenship has been undermined, if not broken, by the politics of inclusion personified by Barack Obama. Some Republicans are aware that time is not on their side. Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina said, “The GOP isn’t generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term”.
20 October 2012
H D S Greenway
Global Post
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/commentary/election-really-all-about-race-and-national-identity