Pope Benedict’s Scylla and Charybdis in Britain: the Media and His Own Bishops

LifeSiteNews.com ^ | September 7, 2010 | Commentary by Hilary White

[topher]

Tuesday September 7, 2010

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Pope Benedict’s Scylla and Charybdis in Britain: the Media and His Own Bishops

Commentary by Hilary White

ROME, September 7, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – So, hands up everyone who thought the papal visit to Britain, set for September 16, was going to be a smash success; a revelation of the orderliness, devotion and unity of British Catholicism, and of the dedication of the secular media to cool, even-handed objectivity.

Anyone? … Bueller?

Watching the cringeworthy festival of pre-visit idiocy bursting out of Britain, both secular and ecclesiastical, has been a lesson for many in just how deeply the elite British institution hates and fears the traditional Christian mores and the world’s last unequivocal upholder of them - the Catholic Church. The media, to no one’s surprise, has let out all the stops and has abandoned even its normal thin pretense of objectivity, while the local Church has responded with a ringing silence, if not open agreement, to the increasingly personal attacks on Benedict XVI and his goals.

A small sample will illustrate. The Independent, a publication not widely praised for its total devotion to factual accuracy in religious matters, today ran the headline “Pope chooses rap song as soundtrack for his UK visit.” The pope, writes Jerome Taylor, the paper’s religious affairs correspondent, is “a liturgical traditionalist who is known to favour the Latin mass with all its ancient trimmings. But when it comes to finding a song that will appeal to young worshippers, the Pope has opted for rap.”

This is demonstrated to be a lie in the next sentence, in which Taylor comes clean, saying, “The committee overseeing Pope Benedict’s itinerary in Britain next week announced today that they have chosen a hip-hop track to be the official ‘youth anthem’ for his three day visit.” So it was not, in fact, the pope – who has had almost no personal say in the arrangements in Britain – who is betraying his own deeply-held aesthetic sensibilities, but the organizing committee in Westminster who have an axe to grind against Benedict’s reforms in liturgy and doctrine.
 
Here is a nutshell example of the Scylla and Charybdis Benedict must navigate between in Britain: a brazenly mendacious and viciously anti-Catholic British secular media on one side, and on the other, obstructionist “Magic Circle” Church officials who will cling, to their last breath, to the now-institutionalized liturgical and social revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s.

A formal tenet of the worldview of these greying ecclesiastical hipsters is that “the youth” will not be interested in religion unless it is accompanied by the heavily amplified “latest sound.” This, despite the evidence of young people around the world flocking to the traditional Latin Mass, breaking down the doors of classes in Gregorian chant and polyphony and besieging seminaries and convents where these cultural treasures are preserved. Meanwhile, the British secular media will do anything, including make things up, to make Benedict look like a hypocrite.

Both sides, which in peacetime amuse themselves by sniping at each other, have joined, according to their respective talents, to derail the first formal state visit by a Roman Pontiff to Britain. A historic moment it will be, certainly.

Some small efforts are being made – not by the bishops – to form a united Catholic response to these kinds of attacks, but their effectiveness is likely to be negligible. In a surprisingly candid admission, a piece in the Guardian says the deck is already stacked against such efforts. Paul Donovan wrote, “The media may not want to hear” from such groups. “It is good copy to get the most outrageous Catholic voices who can be found on issues such as abortion, civil partnerships and child abuse.”

“Many in the media are not interested in a rational voice from the Catholic church – it’s not good box office.”

Indeed.

Since August, we have had a set of “documentary” hit pieces against religious belief from the independent television station Channel 4 featuring Richard Dawkins. In the programs, titled “Enemies of Reason,” and “Faith School Menace?” Dawkins, with his usual devotion to careful distinctions, has lumped all “religion” together, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and thrown in New Age beliefs with “Spiritualism,” the pursuit of séances and spooks. Unsurprisingly, all is judged to be nonsense at best, and a grave threat to the well-being of children and society at worst.

But aside from the obvious external attacks, Benedict will be facing even greater problems inside.

The Guardian has asked: “Is Pope Benedict's media team up to the challenge?” It’s a good question. The Holy See Press Office, run by the invincible Fr. Frederico Lombardi, has not had the greatest track record of smooth responses, even to the direct questions even of those relatively unhostile members of the press who are allowed to accompany the pope on his trips abroad. How can we forget Father’s glacially cool response to the assertion by a media type that the young Joseph Ratzinger had once been pressed into membership in the Hitler Youth? Is a man given to such histrionics ready to defend the pope from the onslaught of the slavering British media?

In the lead-up to the visit, the Bishops of England and Wales have been accused, in part by their own priests, of doing nearly nothing to defend or promote Benedict and his program to the faithful, apart from asking for money. Back in June, Fr. Ray Blake, a parish priest in Brighton and the second most popular priestly blogger in Britain, said, after sending around collection envelopes: "That is all we have heard from Eccleston Square.”

“The exam season is underway, so there will be little possibility of much preparation or catechesis in our schools. The holiday season is beginning, so people are already starting to go away on holiday, parishes are winding down. The high point of the visit is the beatification of [John Henry Cardinal] Newman, so far nothing has been issued to encourage an English cultus or even knowledge of the great theologian.”

“The rest has been left to Tatchell, Dawkins and Hitchens…”

The depressing thing, the really disappointing thing, is the sheer childishness of it all. While he is striving to restore moral sanity, and the Christian culture of Western Europe; while he is facing down threats – and his priests, bishops and nuns being murdered – in the Islamic world for suggesting that reason ought to be the guiding principle of religious and secular culture; while he is battling his own bishops on the continent to stop homosexuals and other unstable characters being let into the priesthood; and while more revelations of institutionalized homosexual abuse come to light, Benedict has been left to fight alone.

John Smeaton, a devout Catholic and the head of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children said in a phone call today that he has striven to break through the tangle of PR talk coming from the official administration and alert the competent grown-ups in Rome about the true situation of Britain.

At least one of these grown-ups is listening. In response to the plans for the papal liturgies, Monsignor Guido Marini, Papal Master of Ceremonies, has at least set a limit on the usual “progressivist” fare of dancing girls and pop musicians. Marini told Scotland’s Herald newspaper that Pope Benedict will celebrate the major parts of all his Masses in Latin, “to emphasise the universality of the faith and the continuity of the Church.”

But Smeaton was referring more specifically to a statement from Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster. Now rumored to be in the running for a red hat in November, Nichols said through a spokesman last week that he is not in agreement with comments by one of his officials, Edmund Adamus, that Britain is the “geopolitical epicentre of the Culture of Death.”

Even more outrageously, Nichols’s colleague, Bishop Keiran Conry of Arundel and Brighton, told the Guardian, “Pope Benedict is coming to a country where Catholicism is unusually stable, cohesive and vibrant enough in the current overall context of decline of interest in the church in Western Europe.” Pope Benedict, he said, “may well be relieved to be coming to a place where, unlike some of his other recent trips, there are no big problems for him to sort out.”

Smeaton said, “If the pope were listening to Archbishop Nichols, if he were to believe a word of what Nichols said, there would be no point in his coming.

“It is essential that the pope is made aware” that what Nichols and other members of the British hierarchy have said about Britain is totally untrue.”

URL: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/sep/10090703.html

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[RobbyS]

This is why I stand with the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, who is getting hell for his assertion that Islam is an evil religion. I doubt he has a good opinion of Catholicism either. If only he knew that how many Catholics also have a “Fundamentalist” view of Scripture, including the pope, leaving aside the question of the role of the Church.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Disagree.

Unlike the Fundamentalist Churches, the Catholic Church reads the Bible to its members in a three year cycle.

That means if a Catholic attends Daily Mass every day for three years, he/she hears the entire Bible (for the most part).

What one gets in Fundamentalist Church is based on the mood of the pastor/minister. If he/she likes certain passages, then that persons flock may not hear other parts of the Bible.

Admittedly, this makes Catholics lazy, i.e., they do not have to read the Bible, but then that forces others who do not have such structure in their church to do alot of extra work.

But even more importantly, the Roman Catholic Church has amassed 2000 years of literature for interpreting the Bible.

That is why folks like Scott Hahn is now Catholic and even the unusual story of Father Paul Schenck.

Father Paul Schenck started as an orthodox Jew, then became a Fundamentalist, and then converted to the Catholic faith.

Recently, he was ordained a Catholic priest.

And he does have the additional distinction of winning a SCOTUS decision by an 8-1 margin...

I don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps you should go back and re-read my post, because I said not one thing about who reads/hears read the most Bible in church. Apparently I pushed a button and the recording began to play.

I said that Fundamentalists make the most conservative Catholics seem like screaming reds in comparison (true). I said that no Fundamentalist church has a ministry for "gay persons" (true, so far as I know).

I said the root of the Catholic Church's current situation is its abandonment of Biblical inerrancy and its caving in to higher criticism and evolutionism. That has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with how much Bible one reads or hears read. As a matter of fact, the atheists in Biblical studies departments probably read more of the Bible than anyone else, but they still reject it.

What good does it do to read the Bible if you don't believe it? What?

Scott Hahn is an evolutionist and higher critic.

No Jew has any business converting to any form of chr*stianity.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Do you honestly think that any of those denominations that are waffling on homosexuality were in any way distinguishable from what you call "Fundamentalist" at their founding?

Yes, and even the Catholic Church was probably "Fundamentalist" at one time. So? The churches that are still fundamentalist are the ones that stand strong; the ones that ceased being Fundamentalist are the problem--precisely because they ceased being fundamentalist.

It's their allegedly "high view" of the Bible that's the problem, not the solution. And I'm talking about sola scriptura, not creationism. And I don't think it's really a "high view," but a low view; one that subsumes the meaning of God's word to "whatever I want to believe today".

Since I don't believe in "sola scriptura," I don't know why you're preaching at me.

If more people settled for getting religious truth from the Bible, we'd be better off. Instead, a whole lot of them don't get religious truth, or secular truth, or scientific truth, or any other truth out of it. They simply ignore or gloss over the parts of it that don't fit with what they want, until they get what they do want: a mirror, showing them the "God" they really wanted to find, themselves.

And Catholic theologians and clergy are right there along with everyone else who does it.

And that goes for people of every religious stripe, Catholics and fundamentalists included.

Sermon over.

I still don't know what that had to do with anything other than your need to prove that the Catholic Church is more solid on moral issues than Fundamentalist Protestant churches (it's not).

[Zionist Conspirator]

Read his books.

Blech. No thanks. I know what he says about Genesis.

Other than that, I appreciate everything you said.

[narses]

Dr. Eckleburg wrote:

It is a sacrilege that Ratzinger is going to conjure up a Roman Catholic mass in Westminster. Are there no RC churches in London? This profanity illustrates how far Anglicanism has sunk. They yoke themselves with superstition, tyranny, and wizards who think themselves to be "another Christ."

What say you?

[RobbyS]

You might be impressed by what he says about the Jews .He is anything but a supercessionist.

[Campion]

Sorry, I just plain don't buy your contention that the rejection of literal 6-day young earth creationism and the oral traditions surrounding it, as recorded by various Jewish sages, is the original sin. I never will.

the ones that ceased being Fundamentalist are the problem--precisely because they ceased being fundamentalist.

And they ceased being fundamentalist precisely because the inexorable logic of sola scriptura took them there. Why do you think unitarianism -- which is as liberal a faith exegetically and in every other way as you can imagine -- sprouted out of the Calvinist ground of New England?

I know you don't hold to sola scriptura, but the fundamentalists you're so fond of certainly do.

As far as fundamentalists being more morally solid than Catholicism, show me a fundamentalist church that teaches that contraception within marriage is wrong, and you have the beginnings of a case. Almost none of them have any problem with it. Once you endorse the idea that sterile sex acts are okay, it's a short jump to the idea that sterile sex acts between people of the same sex are okay. You don't have to take my word on it; the former Anglican Abp. of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, said the same thing.

[Domestic Church]

I went to a Catholic Mass one Sunday at Westminster Abbey back in 1970 with my mother. My mother looked quite a bit like the Queen so it was interesting to say the least.

[Zionist Conspirator]

You might be impressed by what he says about the Jews .He is anything but a supercessionist.

So?

[RobbyS]

I say that the old Puritan concept of “living saints,” makes such people the equal of priests and the ministers they call the equal of high priests. A spiritual hierarchy is a spiritual hierarchy.

[RobbyS]

Because then your quarrel with him boils down to a disagreement with Jesus as to the meaning of Torah.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Sorry, I just plain don't buy your contention that the rejection of literal 6-day young earth creationism and the oral traditions surrounding it, as recorded by various Jewish sages, is the original sin. I never will.

Imagine that pic of Claude Rains here.

Proves what I said, though. "Conservative Catholics" want the Middle Ages, only with evolution and higher criticism.

And they ceased being fundamentalist precisely because the inexorable logic of sola scriptura took them there. Why do you think unitarianism -- which is as liberal a faith exegetically and in every other way as you can imagine -- sprouted out of the Calvinist ground of New England?

If Fundamentalist logic inexorably leads to liberalism, then why are there any Fundamentalists left? Why didn't they all morph into liberals long ago?

I know you don't hold to sola scriptura, but the fundamentalists you're so fond of certainly do.

Thanks for pointing that out! Else how would I have known?

As far as fundamentalists being more morally solid than Catholicism, show me a fundamentalist church that teaches that contraception within marriage is wrong, and you have the beginnings of a case. Almost none of them have any problem with it. Once you endorse the idea that sterile sex acts are okay, it's a short jump to the idea that sterile sex acts between people of the same sex are okay. You don't have to take my word on it; the former Anglican Abp. of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, said the same thing.

And yet the Catholic Church is more "gay"-friendly than those awful Fundamentalist churches.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Because then your quarrel with him boils down to a disagreement with Jesus as to the meaning of Torah.

My quarrel with him is that he abandoned the Torah for a false religion and the True G-d for a false "gxd." The only thing that keeps it from being despicable is the ignorance from which the poor fellow probably suffers.

[topher]

There is such unity in Fundamentalists! [ /sarcasm off ]

How many different denominations/fractions of the Fundamentalists are there? [ unable to count because it is so badly fractured ]

Do Fundamentalists agree on the same interpretation for the same passage from the Bible? [ No. Otherwise, they would not be so badly fractured and fragmented. ]

He who lives in a glass must not throw stones...

The Roman Catholic Church has one billion members and has a very organized way for determining Canonization (via non-disputed miracles)

I guess my bottom line is that you are just spewing useless dribble from my perspective...

[Zionist Conspirator]

There is such unity in Fundamentalists! [ /sarcasm off ]

I never said there was "unity." I said that by not buying into the "the Bible is mythology" line that Fundamentalists have remained more morally solid and less compromised than Catholics and liberal Protestants, as you well know.

I guess my bottom line is that you are just spewing useless dribble from my perspective...

No, your bottom line appears more like digging up straw man arguments against points I never made because you're so embarrassed at how liberal your church as become.

Just keep right on defending evolution. Let me know when any such church "puts its foot down."

[Mad Dawg]

Wow. Thanks for the question!

One of the most interesting reserve deputies was a very intelligent guy. He'd made a bundle in software, worked as a deputy for a while, and quit to go to law school -- with the intention of being a prosecutor.

AND he was a very sincere and learned Calvinist. And a good guy, so we had some great conversations.

I think it is good to see what the good is in our opponents POV. After all, they ARE our brethren, and all but the most desperately lost seek the good.

What he loved was justice. What he despised was the sloppy and sentimental compromise that leads even the just to compromise justice in a kind of squishy counterfeit of mercy.

This is an admirable guy with an admirable love.

That's point #1. Here's point #2:

We rightly long to see the vindication of our God. But, as I said over in the humility thread, there's a part of me that wants to advise God concerning whom to punish and how.

When Jesse Jackson's Cadillac Escalade gets stolen and stripped in Detroit, to my shame I respond with glee.

There is a providential justice there. In that we are right to rejoice. There is also Jesse's pain. I confess that I kind of enjoy it, may God forgive me -- AND May God use that pain to bring Jesse deeper into the solace and wisdom of the Sacred Heart.

I've babbled at length in other threads about how the worst of Protestantism (which has many lovely characteristics) combines the gnostic excessive valuation of a certain kind of psychological experience with the voluntaristic opinion that God is utterly inaccessible to reason. He is not Justice itself, He defines justice by what He wills, and our role is to behold and to adjust our opinions. "I don't get what's fair about sentencing infants to eternal torment, but He does it, so it must be just."

Or, even more starkly: He has caused infants to be born with the foreseen and inescapable destiny or eternal torment -- Blessed be He! The whole thing, as far as they are concerned, is that He made them for excruciating sorrow which they could not escape.

Now there's a difficult intellectual problem there. It can seem to be a conclusion we cannot escape.

But, you know, once I had actually killed one of my lambs (you know I ran sheep for about a decade, right?) with a well-placed sledgehammer blow, I was going to tend to insist on the moral rightness of that act against all comers.

Likewise, once I conclude that it is okay for God to intend that some children are born not only to die but for eternal torment more dreadful than we can imagine, the horror of that conclusion will fuel the fervor with which I defend it.

"You feelin' me, bro?"

We feelthy Papists have generated a LOT of paper. I read to day that a fragment of Egyptian papyrus was found in an Irish bog, somehow inside a breviary or somesuch thing. I think it was BEFORE Augustine of Cantgerbury!

Yet with all our paper, and all our opinions, we are content to say we simply cannot understand some things -- BUT that we are pretty sure that a God who is Love would not make a baby for the purpose of torturing him forever. We are content to shrug, and to hold in check our sinful lust for seeing someone else in pain.

Our Calvinist brethren, whose persistent anger is all too evident, would rather have the specious appearance of a consistent system than to acknowledge the incomprehensibility of the mystery of evil and damnation.

AND this view provides justification for the all too evident wrathfulness from which they all too clearly suffer.

I remember the witch in "The Magician's Nephew" whose lips were stained with the juice of the fruit she had stolen, though it would have been given to her had she known how to ask. She took some solace in the pain she suffered because as "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" makes clear, she would also inflict much pain and death.

We all suffer. The thought that God has decreed that some will suffer forever gives solace to some. Jeremiah says, "Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived!" Our brothers say, You bet! And now you will suffer forever, because God decreed it from before the foundation of the world.

It is a dreadful error. If you know the Narnia books (and if you don't, read them RIGHT AWAY) you will understand when I say that they are content to worship Tash as long as they don't fall into his hands.

They are gloriously right to praise the incomprehensible Providence of a transcendent, mighty, and loving God. They are catastrophically wrong to think He desires the death of a sinner and willingly afflicts the children of men, when Scripture so clearly contradicts that.

This error gives entry, appears to baptize, the deadly sin of wrath and her attendant demons, resentfulness, vindictiveness, and falsehood. They have not been reticent in showing their handiwork on these threads. Many sins 'present' in a way similar to addiction. On the religion forum we have been given plenty of examples of the addictive qualities of wrath and of the 'systems' which seem to excuse that sin.

I hope this heap of verbosity is a useful response to your question.

[married21]

BTW, I had to ask my daughter, a mythology buff, about Scylla and Charybdis. Just in case I was not the only one unfamiliar with them, Scylla was a dragon with nine dog heads. (Posiedon’s wife turned a pretty nymph into that monster because Posiedon had been pursuing her.) Charybdis was some creature that lived at the bottom of a whirlpool and had a huge mouth so it could swallow a whole boat.

The author could simply have said that Benedict was between a rock and a hard place or something, but, hey, why be common when you can show off your classical knowledge instead?

[topher]

As far as I am concerned, you are misinformed. Period.

I knew a fundamentalist who claimed that Judas Iscariot and Judas Thaddeus were the same person.

You are making assumptions, as far I am concerned, that are not true. Period.

We agree to disagree. That is all we have in common.

[RobbyS]

It is false only if Jesus is not the messiah.

[RobbyS]

Catholics don’t think that the Bible is “mythology.” It is dogma, for instance, that Adam and Eve were real persons and our first parents. It is Catholic teaching in general that story and fact are the same.