Posted on 12/12/2004 8:54:32 AM PST by Land of the Irish
Cardinal Ratzinger
Discovers America
John Rao, Ph.D.
REMNANT COLUMNIST, New York
Cardinal Ratzinger has discovered America. Troubled by the total secularization of European life—reflected, most recently, in the battles over European unification and the continental chorus of criticism accompanying Professor Rocco Buttiglione’s reiteration of the Church’s teaching on homosexuality—the cardinal now suggests that the United States may perhaps offer the better model of Church-State relations for a desacralized world. According to a November 25, 2004, report on Zenit.com, the Cardinal, responding to the secularization of Europe, made the following comments on Vatican Radio:
I think that from many points of view the American model is the better one. Europe has remained bogged down. People who did not want to belong to a state church, went to the United States and intentionally constituted a state that does not impose a church and which simply is not perceived as religiously neutral, but as a space within which religions can move and also enjoy organizational freedom without being simply relegated to the private sphere… One can undoubtedly learn from the United States [and this] process by which the state makes room for religion, which is not imposed, but which, thanks to the state, lives, exists and has a public creative force. It certainly is a positive way.
This, of course, was the position of the Americanists of the 1890’s, who argued that things spiritual thrived in the United States to a degree that Europeans, passive and obedient to their manipulative governments, could never match. Cardinal Ratzinger has apparently arrived at a similar judgment in typical contemporary Catholic fashion: much later than everybody else, and naively uncritical.
It seems to be the fate of the post-conciliar Church to take up the banner of erroneous causes just as their poisons are beginning to become somewhat clearer to the rest of the outside world. I hope that His Eminence has been misquoted. If not, I pray that a deeper study of the system in the United States will reveal to him just how much the so-called religious character of America is, at best, heretical, and, at worst, a “spiritualized” secularism emerging from errors inherent in Protestant thought.
One still hears the argument that the threat of Americanism was exaggerated at the time of Leo XIII’s encyclicals against it, and that, in any case, it disappeared shortly thereafter. Certainly many people in Rome as well as the United States wanted to make believe this was the case, using the Modernist crisis, and undoubted American loyalty to the Papacy throughout it, as proof positive of the country’s orthodoxy. But the crises warned against by St. Pius X’s pontificate precisely involve the sort of philosophical, theological, and exegetical issues that Americanism sweeps aside as a horrendous waste of time and energy. Modernism’s intellectual character stood in the way of the Yankee pragmatism that simply wanted “to get the job done” without worrying about anything as fruitlessly divisive as unpaid thought. It was part and parcel of all that pretentious European cultural hoo-ha responsible for the Old World’s ideologies, revolutions, wars, and bad plumbing. Americans could recite the Creed and memorize catechisms better and in larger numbers than anywhere else. Confident in their orthodoxy and the Catholic-friendly character of their political and social system, they could “move on” to devote themselves to the practical realities of daily life. Criticisms of what the “practical life” might actually mean in the long run could be disregarded as unpatriotic, communist, and useless for short or long-term fund raising.
America, with Catholic Americans in lock-step, thus marched forward to nurture what St. Cyril of Alexandria called “dypsychia”: a two-spirited existence. On the one hand, it loudly proclaimed outward commitment to many traditional doctrines and “moral values” making it look spiritually healthy. On the other, it allowed “the practical life”, to which it was really devoted, to be defined by whatever the strongest and most successful men considered to be most important, silencing discussion of the gross contradiction by laughing such fruitless intellectual quibbles out of the parlors of a polite, common-sense guided society. It marched this approach into Europe in 1945, ironically linking up with one strain of Modernism that itself encouraged Catholic abandonment to the direction of anti-intellectual “vital energies” and “mystique”. Vitalism and Americanism in tandem then gave us Vatican II which, concerned only with “getting the practical pastoral job done”, has destroyed Catholic doctrine infinitely more effectively than any mere straightforward heretic like Arius could have done. Under the less parochial sounding name of Pluralism, it is the very force which Cardinal Ratzinger is criticizing inside the European Union, and which is now spreading high-minded “moral values”, “freedom”, and “democracy” around the globe through the work of well-paid mercenaries and five hundred pound bombs.
If, heaven forbid, Cardinal Ratzinger honestly believes that true religion prospers under our system better than under any other, he is urging upon Catholics that spiritual and intellectual euthanasia which Americanism-Vitalism-Pluralism infallibly guarantees. The fate of many conservative Catholic enthusiasts for this false God, in their response to the war in Iraq, should be one among an endless number of warnings to him. No one is more publicly committed to orthodoxy than they are. No one praises the name and authority of the Pope more than they do. And yet never have I heard so many sophistic arguments reducing to total emptiness both profound Catholic teachings regarding the innocence of human life, as well as the value of the intellect in understanding how to apply those teachings to practical circumstances, as I have heard coming from their circles.
May God save His Eminence from adulation of a system that waves the flag of moral righteousness and then tells us that we are simply not permitted to use our faith and reason to recognize a wicked, fraudulent war for the anti-Catholic disaster that it is; an evil that a number of Catholics are some day legitimately going to have to apologize for having helped to justify. May God save His Eminence from a religiosity which will eventually line “fundamentalist” Catholic “terrorists” against the wall along with other “divisive” enemies of the system who cannot live or die under a regime of dypsychia.
Governor OF THE CHURCH. You misinterpret your own citation.
Well, pardon me for thinking that there are some good points to democracy and human rights. I hope you enjoy your hierarchical, autocratic little fantasy world.
Oh yes, poor little Germany, put upon by all those evil democratic, popular regimes, including France, which the Hollenzollerns invaded and took land from by force. (I would note that the creation of the German Empire was not sanctioned by long prescription, but was a pure Realpolitik creation of the Chancellor Bismarck. In addition, they were not Catholic, so they don't even fit the Catholic monarch paradigm.) Yes, we shouldn't restrain the great German Uebermensch as it teaches a lesson to less advanced societies that don't practice autocratic monarchism, that most blessed of regime types! If you think democracy and America is so evil, I suggest you go live elsewhere if you are American, where your authoritarian and servile (if you are not a ruler or aristocrat) instincts will be better appreciated.
That's correct. It is.
"...a false supposition."
No it isn't.
Some very wise men, over 230 years ago, thought it was. They have been proven right.
Especially since 70% of the populace are ignorant morons.
Same attitude that kept blacks out of public life.
Loyalty to the United States constitution is contrary to Catholic doctrine? That is simply not true, and no pope has ever said that. That's just crazy!
The very fact that Emperor Joseph II, a man who attended mass daily and tried to bring the Protestant Prussians to heel, stands out as such an anti-Catholic is proof itself of just how good the Hapsburgs actually were. If Joseph II is the most radical anti-Church Hapsburg you can come up with, they must be doing pretty good.
As for the 30 Years War, the Hapsburgs fought damn hard throughout, and were everywhere victorious until some little bit of trickery turned the tables on them. Had Cardinal Richelieu cared a little more about Christendom than his own France, the Hapsburgs would probably have won. As for the Reformation, if the Pope would have taken seriously the repeated please of the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V to call a reform council, the Protestant rebellion might, God willing, have been nipped in the bud. The Hapsburgs were having to fight off the French, the Muslims and Lutheran rebels all at the same time. They beat the French, beat the Muslims, won the Knights War, put down the Peasants Revolt and yet you're still going to say they weren't trying just because the betrayal of Maurice of Saxony forced the Emperor to contain Protestantism rather than destroying it entirely? Why not just demand perfection while you're at it?
And, BTW, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, Catholicism WAS banned in all but one or two colonies. After that, it was quite easy for the US to be "tolerant" of Catholics, considering they were too few to even have a prayer of being an influential force. Anti-catholicism was one of the driving forces behind the American Revolution. When King George III allowed Quebec Catholic toleration, the Protestant sensationalists of New England immediately began to cry that George III was slipping into that "Roman religion" of royal absolutism and would bring back the Catholic Church to British lands. There was no truth to this of course, but it certainly shows what a paranoid and fanatic hatred of Catholics there was even in the idyllic American colonies. Catholics weren't even a majority in Maryland, and they founded the colony!
When Catholics did start to arrive in America in considerable numbers, the people who met them were far from tolerant as any historian can tell you.
Did I leave out anything? I'm sure I'll be told...
St Edward of England, St Louis of France, St Fernando of Spain, St Elizabeth of Portugal, St Hedwig of Poland, St Stephen of Hungary and Bl Charles of Austria, pray for us in our republican arrogance!
From Leo XIII's encyclical Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae against Americanism:
"The rule of life laid down for Catholics is not of such a nature that it cannot accommodate itself to the exigencies of various times and places."
Same encyclical:
"He alone could wish that some Christian virtues be adapted to certain times and different ones for other times who is unmindful of the apostle's words: "That those whom He foreknew, He predestined to be made conformable to the image of His Son."— Romans viii, 29."
Hahaha! Hey... could I adopt you as my Auntie Thesis?
No it isn't.
You are wasting your time with people who think that Prince Charles is more enlightened than Tony Blair.
There. I've covered my bases. You know how I detest ambiguity.
If I were a liberal, I would have been offended.
That was a hook.
You REALLY find polo-playing Charles to be a stronger leader than Tony Blair?
Nice "either / or" close.
You in sales?
Polo, anyone?
I'm just here to cancel out your efforts in such a manner as that the others may continue on with an intelligent conversation. About the Catholic Faith. I'm good like that.
I like the monarchists for the stunning irony they supply. Most, given their attitudes toward the pope, would make lousy subjects.
Where is the intelligent conversation? All I see are guys running around thinking it would be keen to put a queen at the head of the most powerful military on earth.
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