NOT ME.
Posted on 05/24/2003 2:03:49 PM PDT by sinkspur
Although the shooting in Iraq is over, the war of words between Rome and Washington continues, as the Vatican has again criticized American policy in remarkably strong terms. As things turn out, the “clash of cultures” most exacerbated by the Iraq war may not be between Christianity and Islam, but between the Holy See and the United States.
If so, it would mark not a new chapter in relations, but a return to the ambiguity that has long characterized attitudes in Rome to the superpower across the Atlantic. This reserve has been rekindled in recent months not only by the war, but also by the sex abuse crisis, both of which have suggested to Vatican observers that the ghost of John Calvin is alive and well in American culture.
The vehicle for the latest critique was the Jesuit-edited journal Civiltà Cattolica, whose pages are reviewed by the Vatican Secretariat of State before publication. In the lead editorial of its May 17 issue, the journal asserted that “the United States has put international law in crisis.”
The editorial said the U.S.-declared war on terrorism has generated strong anti-American sentiment in Europe. Especially repugnant, it said, has been the decision to hold 600 Taliban, including five teenagers between 13 and 16, and five men over 80, at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba without recognizing them as prisoners of war.
In another explosive charge, the editorial said the rebuilding of Iraq is “chancy” because “the western countries that should make it happen seem more interested in exploiting Iraqi oil than in the reconstruction of the country.” It is not the first time Civiltà Cattolica has suggested that oil interests are driving American policy.
The editorial bluntly said the war was unjustified.
Noting that Iraq’s army was weak, and that weapons of mass destruction have not been found, the editorial said these facts “have clearly shown that there were not sufficient reasons for moving against Iraq, because the country did not constitute a true threat for the United States and its allies.”
The editorial said the most urgent task now is to “reestablish international legality, wounded by the ‘unilateralism’ of the United States.” It called for the United Nations, not the United States, to direct the post-war work in Iraq.
“It’s a matter of relaunching the spirit of the United Nations charter, based on cooperation, rather than on competition among enemy states and on domination of an imperialistic sort by the hegemonic superpower.”
Many Americans have been surprised to hear this sort of language, which calls to mind the harsh anti-American broadsides of the European left, from the Holy See.
Indeed, key officials in the Bush administration were initially taken off guard by the depth of Vatican opposition to the war. Condoleeza Rice was not being disingenuous when she told the Italian weekly Panorama that she “didn’t understand” the Vatican’s argument. That incomprehension was widely shared among American personnel both in Washington and in Rome.
The surprise reflects the fact that the political psychology of many Americans, including Bush administration officials, took shape in the Reagan years. During the Cold War there was a clear intersection of interests between the United States and the Holy See in support of anti-Soviet resistance in Eastern Europe, above all Solidarity in Poland. Some American Catholic thinkers, most eminently George Weigel and Richard John Neuhaus, saw this “holy alliance” as a harbinger of a broader global partnership between America and the Catholic Church, based on shared values (pro-life, pro-family) and on shared political objectives (human rights, economic freedom and democracy).
The project, on this theory, was delayed by eight years of Clinton liberalism, but the election of Bush put things back on track. And indeed, there was a “Catholic honeymoon” in the early days of the Bush administration, as the president’s elimination of public funding for abortion, his restrictive decision on stem cell research, and his two visits to the pope all played to positive Catholic reviews.
From this point of view, the rift over the Iraq war is a temporary disruption of a natural alliance, and the needle will eventually swing back into place. In fact, however, history suggests another hypothesis — that Cold War politics made temporary bedfellows out of the Vatican and the United States, and what is reemerging now is the caution and reluctance that have always characterized Vatican attitudes about America.
Papal reservations are well documented, from Pope Leo XIII’s Testem Benevolentiae, condemning the supposed heresy of “Americanism,” to Pius XII’s opposition to Italy’s entrance into NATO based on fears that the alliance was a Trojan horse for Protestant domination of Catholic Europe. Key Vatican officials, especially Europeans from traditional Catholic cultures, have long worried about aspects of American society — its exaggerated individualism, its hyper-consumer spirit, its relegation of religion to the private sphere, its Calvinist ethos. A fortiori, they worry about a world in which America is in an unfettered position to impose this set of cultural values on everyone else.
The last 18 months have confirmed many Vatican officials in these convictions. Two episodes have been key: the sexual abuse crisis in the American Catholic church, and the Iraq war.
On the crisis, many Vatican observers have been shocked at what they see as the punitive and unforgiving response to priestly misconduct in American culture. Certainly no one in the Holy See defends the sexual abuse of minors, and most realize that the Church left itself vulnerable because of its history of covering up wrongdoing. Still, the clamor for permanent removal from the priesthood of men with even one offense, potentially decades in the past, seems excessive to many in Rome. Even more puzzling was the decision of the American bishops in Dallas to craft policy based on this unforgiving standard. One Vatican cardinal recently asked a delegation of Americans visiting Rome, “How could your bishops adopt a policy so removed from the gospel?”
The war has similarly awakened traditional reservations. When Vatican officials hear Bush talk about the evil of terrorism, and the American mission to destroy that evil, they sometimes sense a worrying kind of dualism. The language can suggest a sense of election, combined with the perversity of America’s enemies, that appears to justify unrelenting conflict.
In the view of some in the Vatican, underlying both the harsh American response on sexual abuse, and its dualistic approach to foreign policy, is the legacy of Calvinism. The Calvinist concepts of the total depravity of the damned, the unconditional election of God’s favored, and the manifestation of election through earthly success, all seem to them to play a powerful role in shaping American cultural psychology.
After Cardinal Pio Laghi returned to Rome from his last-minute appeal to Bush just before the Iraq war began, he told John Paul II that he sensed “something Calvinistic” in the president’s iron determination to battle the forces of international terrorism.
Recently I was in the Vatican, and happened to strike up a conversation with an official eager to hear an American perspective on the war. He told me he sees a “clash of civilizations” between the United States and the Holy See, between a worldview that is essentially Calvinistic and one that is shaped by Catholicism.
“We have a concept of sin and evil too,” he said, “but we also believe in grace and redemption.”
Vatican officials, it should be noted, are not the only ones to detect a strong Calvinist influence in American culture. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago made a similar statement during the Synod of Bishops for the Americas in November 1997. George said that U.S. citizens “are culturally Calvinist, even those who profess the Catholic faith.” American society, he said, “is the civil counterpart of a faith based on private interpretation of Scripture and private experience of God.” He contrasted this kind of society with one based on the Catholic Church's teaching of community and a vision of life greater than the individual.
One can of course debate this line of cultural analysis. Right or wrong, however, it is widely held in the Vatican, and has been strengthened by reflection on both the sex abuse crisis and the war.
This does not mean relations between the United States and the Vatican are in dire straits. The Vatican is realistic enough to understand that if it wishes to exert influence on world affairs it needs to work with the Americans, and the Bush team continues to desire the moral legitimacy it believes Vatican support can lend its policies. At a personal level, Bush’s emissaries to the Holy See, especially Ambassador James Nicholson and his staff, are liked and respected in the apostolic palace. None of this is likely to change.
What seems increasingly clear, however, is that this is not destined to be the “special relationship” enjoyed by American and Britain, allies linked by a common history, language, and worldview. This is a dialogue between two institutions with some common interests, but also divergent cultures that will from time to time flare up into sharp policy differences.
No one should be shocked, in other words, the next time Civiltà Cattolica takes America to task.
* * *
The Spanish settled California beginning in 1776 with Misson San Diego; the last mission, San Francisco de Solano, at Sonoma, was built in 1820, the year Mexico became independent.
The mindsets in Anglo-America and Mexico are, of course, incredibly different: they enslaved and converted their Native Americans, killing most of them. We pushed ours West and ended up killing most of them, but we never tried very seriously to enslave the Indians. I suppose the Spanish were more thorough, but we can see the difference in the results: Mexico is a third world country, corrupt beyond hope.
He never explains why various peoples reacted to circumstances differently. He says, e.g. the grains were different, and some were more easily domesticated than others, but never, ever explains why some peoples who had them prospered and others didn't. Or why technologies emerged in one area and spread.
If all he were doing in his book were suggesting things to think about, it would be unobjectionable. However, he claims he's going to answer the question why the West has "more Cargo", i.e., why the West has been uniquely successful. He does a very poor job of what he claims to do.
Much of his speculation is interesting, but is merely that, speculation.
I commend to you especially pp. 408ff:
The answers to Yali's questions are longer and more complicated than Yali himself would have wanted. Historians , however, may find them too brief and oversimplified. Compressing 13,000 years of history on all contiennts into a 400-page book works out to an average of about one page per continent per 150 years making brevity and simplification inevitable.....Naturally, a host of issues raised by Yali's question remain unresolved.
Indeed. Diamond is not trained as an historian and hasn't a clue about how historians consider evidence; rather he has a vague inkling a knows what he's done won't wash with the professionals.
The book is most impressive to the layman without much historical knowledge, but fails utterly as serious history.
NOT ME.
So is Hobbes, as in Thomas Hobbes... And I'm sure they don't want to talk about this, from Leviathan:
Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness
[21] ...For from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succsession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy (or kingdom of darkness) may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies (that is, to the old wives' fables in England, concerning ghosts and spirits and the feats they play in the night). And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. For so did the Papacy start upon a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.
[22] The language also which they use (both in the churches and in their public acts) being Latin, which is not commonly used by any nation now in the world, what is it but the ghost of the old Roman language?
[23] The fairies, in what nation soever they converse, have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons. The ecclesiastics likewise, in whose dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one universal king, the Pope.
[24] The ecclesiastics are spiritual men and ghostly fathers. The fairies and ghosts inhabit darkness, solitudes, and graves. The ecclesiastics walk in obscurity of doctrine, in monasteries, churches, and church-yards.
[25] The ecclesiastics have their cathedral churches, which (in what town soever they be erected) by virtue of holy water and certain charms called exorcisms have the power to make those towns cities (that is to say, seats of empire). The fairies also have their enchanted castles, and certain gigantic ghosts that domineer over the regions round about them.
[26] The fairies are not to be seized on and brought to answer for the hurt they do. ***So also the ecclesiastics vanish away from the tribunals of civil justice.***
Notice the last sentence...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.