Posted on 04/26/2005 4:24:53 AM PDT by bikepacker67
It was a move so smooth and bold, accomplished with such backstage bureaucratic finesse, that it was worthy of Dick Cheney himself.
The eminence grise who had long whispered in the ear of power and who had helped oversee the selection process ended up selecting himself. In Cheneyesque fashion, he searched far and wide for a pope by looking around the room and swiftly deciding he was the best man for the job.
Just like Cheney, once the quintessentially deferential staff man with the Secret Service code name “Back Seat,” the self-effacing Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has clambered over the back seat to seize the wheel (or Commonweal). Cheney played the tough cop to W.'s boyish, genial pol, just as Cardinal Ratzinger played the tough cop to John Paul's gentle soul.
And just like the vice president, the new pope is a Jurassic archconservative who disdains the “if it feels good do it” culture and the revolutionary trends toward diversity and cultural openness since the '60s.
The two leaders are a match — absolutists who view the world in stark terms of good and evil, eager to prolong a patriarchal society that prohibits gay marriage and slices up pro-choice U.S. Democratic candidates.
The two, from rural, conservative parts of their countries, want to turn back the clock and exorcise New Age silliness. Cheney wants to dismantle the New Deal and go back to 1937. Pope Benedict XVI wants to dismantle Vatican II and prefers 1397, the muscular medieval days. As a scholar, his specialty was “patristics,” the study of the key thinkers in the first eight centuries of the church.
They are both old hands at operating in secrecy and using the levers of power for ideological advantage. They want Catholics enlisted in the conservative cause, turning confession boxes into ballot boxes with the threat that a vote for a liberal Demo-crat could lead to eternal damnation.
Unlike Ronald Reagan and John Paul II, the vice president and the new pope do not have large-scale charisma or sunny faces to soften their harsh “my way or the highway” policies. Their gloomy world outlooks and bullying roles earned them the nicknames Dr. No and Cardinal No. One is called Washington's Darth Vader, the other the Vatican's Darth Vader.
W.'s Doberman and John Paul's “God's Rottweiler,” as the new pope was called, are both global enforcers with cult followings.
Just as the vice president acted to solidify the view of America as a hyperpower, so the new pope views the Roman Catholic Church as the one true religion. He once branded other faiths as deficient.
Both like to blame the media. Ratzinger once accused the U.S. press of overplaying the sex abuse scandal to hurt the church and keep the story on the front pages.
Dr. No and Cardinal No parted ways on the war — though Ratzinger did criticize the U.N. But they agree that stem cell research and cloning must be curtailed. Ratzinger once called cloning “more dangerous than weapons of mass destruction.”
As fundamentalism keeps marching across the globe, U.S. conservatives are thrilled about the choice of Ratzinger, hoping for an unholy alliance. They hope this pope — who seems to want a smaller, purer church — encourages a militant political role for Catholic bishops and priests.
Ratzinger did not shrink from advising American bishops in the last presidential election on bringing Catholic elected officials to heel. He warned that Catholics who deliberately voted for a candidate because of a pro-choice position were guilty of cooperating in evil, and unworthy to receive communion. Vote Democratic and lose your soul. “Panzerkardinal,” as he was known, definitely isn't a man who could read Mario Cuomo's Notre Dame speech urging that pro-choice politicians be allowed in the tent and say, “He's got a point.”
The Republicans can build their majority by bringing strict Catholics and evangelicals — once at odds — together on what they call “culture of life” issues.
But there's a risk, as with Tom DeLay, Dr. Bill Frist and other Republicans, that if the new pope is too heavy-handed and too fundamentalist, his approach may backfire.
Moral absolutism is relative, after all. As Bruce Landesman, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, pointed out in a letter to The New York Times: “Those who hold “liberal' views are not relativists. They simply disagree with the conservatives about what is right and wrong.”
PMS Alert!
And the New York Times. being a bigoted mouthpiece for the Lib-Dems, prints this drivel in its pages.
Have I missed anything?
Congressman Billybob
Look it up, sweetie.
Sorry, Mo the pope is Catholic. I know that's a disappointment for you and your friends.
;-)
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Absolutely, it's got the right people bitchin' and moanin'.
maureen dowd is going to find something to bitch and moan about even if they had elected ellen degeneris pope
From Brian Saint-Paul of Crisis Magazine:
Four Myths About Pope Benedict XVI
1. "Benedict XVI 'campaigned' for the papacy, outmaneuvering the liberal faction to win the job."
Unfortunately, it's a tendency of the American media to project the styles and categories of U.S. politics onto every other kind of election. Such is the case here. Following this model, the former Cardinal Ratzinger is said to have maneuvered his way into the papacy, through ehind-the-scenes campaigning and deft use of his prominence as the Dean of the College of Cardinals. His magnificent homily at John Paul II's funeral and his no-nonsense criticism of moral relativism preceding the conclave are offered as evidence.
But this is simple nonsense, and it ignores several well-established facts:
First, in the modern era at least, the vast majority of cardinals do not want to be elevated to the papacy, and the few who do are not elected. The life of the Supreme Pontiff is a difficult one. His life is no longer his own. Gone is his privacy, his freedom, his leisure, and his regular contact with friends and family.
Second, it's well known that Benedict XVI did NOT want to be pope. By his own admission, he was never completely comfortable in his role as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and tried to resign several times (John Paul II would have none of it). Furthermore, it was Benedict's dream to leave the Vatican to return to the slow-paced world of teaching. In an interview with Matthew Schofield of Knight Ridder, the pope's brother, Father Georg Ratzinger, recalled a conversation with him over Christmas where they discussed his retiring to a quite life back in Germany.
But what about his strong homily taking on moral relativism at the opening of the conclave? Much of the secular media has described it as though it were a kind of campaign event (one particularly clueless journalist referred to the homily as a "stump speech").
The truth is quite the opposite. Most informed Vatican observers recognized the homily as Benedict XVI's last attempt to avoid election to the papacy. After all, if he were actually campaigning, he would have delivered something softer that appealled to the moderates within the College of Cardinals... not the no-holds-barred assault on secularism that he delivered instead.
Even Fr. Richard McBrien recognized this, managing to get it both right and wrong at the same time. Just after the conclave opened, he noted: "If Cardinal Ratzinger were really campaigning for pope, he would have given a far more conciliatory homily designed to appeal to the moderates as well as to the hard-liners among the cardinals. I think this homily shows he realizes he's not going to be elected. He's too much of a polarizing figure."
In short, a homily is not a stump speech, a conclave is not a polling station, and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger had no ambitions to become Benedict XVI...
Isn't it telling that she thinks the Pope runs a "risk" of his approach backfiring? She immediately thinks of the process in political terms, making the cathedral into the "big tent." As if the only point is to boost the numbers of "Catholics" (never mind that the liberal mindset she promotes tends to shrink Mass attendance). I wonder if it ever crossed her mind that perhaps the Pope is serving a calling higher than poll numbers? Does the media understand that the conclave of Cardinals was not intended as a focus group????
"Drivel" is precisely the right word to describe Dowd's scribblings. I'm constantly surprised and bemused that anyone would pay $$$ for it.
Not a thing, CB...not a thing.....
And the bad part is what???
So, it's a beauty contest?
If so, that's bad news for Dowd!!!
HERE , HERE , Right On , I concur
When we were kids, the public health authorities lined us all up and shot us with smallpox vaccine. Since an air gun took 3 seconds a kid, and an injection took 10 seconds a kid, governments typically opted for the more efficient method, resulting in vaccination scars for hundreds of millions of children.
You think Catherine Zeta Jones thinks that it was worth it to put that big scar on her arm in order to save some faceless public health worker seven seconds? When the government makes decisions for us all, they make stupid choices like this all the time.
Ya know, Mo, those of us in our right minds only wish that Big Richard Cheney had nearly as much cosmic power as you would have us think he does. (BTW - You also vastly overrate your own intelligence and - especially - writing ability!!!)
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