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Posted on 06/09/2002 7:12:29 AM PDT by big'ol_freeper
The Catholic Church continues to bleed. Her wounds were (mostly) self-inflicted, to be sure. Worse still, she is putting band-aids on them when surgery is required. For most it’s a sad spectacle. For some it has become the opportunity to pounce on the wound in the hopes of exacting the maximum amount of pain.
And then there are those who are out of control. Bill Keller, until a few months ago the managing editor – the number two hot-shot – at The New York Times, has now compared Pope John Paul II and his church to the Communist Party, a sick joke on such a great man who helped crumble that great evil armed only with his moral authority.
Keller writes, "One paradox of the Polish pope is that while he is rightly revered for helping bring down the godless Communists, he has replicated something very like the old Communist Party in his church." The church is "intolerant of dissent, unaccountable to its members, secretive in the extreme and willfully clueless about how people live." While Soviet subjects joked that we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us, "For American Catholics, the counterpart is: They pretend to lead, and we pretend to follow."
I’m sure Keller is well pleased with his analysis, except it collapses quickly under its own idiocy. American Catholics are not Soviet subjects. They do not suffer from forced obedience to their parish priest. They need not fear a concentration camp or a quick execution for disagreeing with the Holy Father. They have every liberty to disagree, and every right to walk out of the Church, never to return. But, much to jaded journalists' dismay, the Church is not a democracy that gets to veto the Ten Commandments or achieves mass salvation by a CBS-New York Times poll. To paraphrase Ted Koppel’s wonderful observation years ago, they weren’t called the Ten Suggestions for a reason.
But Keller is on a roll and sinks even further by rooting for John Paul's death as an occasion for the church's hostile takeover by the lifestyle-left. He suggests "one reason many Catholics see the moment as ripe for reform is that this pope is on his last legs. Soon, the hope goes, a vigorous new leader may emerge. Maybe so. But like the Communists, John Paul has carefully constructed a Kremlin that will be inhospitable to a reformer." He has committed the offense of forming seminaries that are "begetting a generation of inflexible young priests who have no idea how to talk to real-life Catholics."
One imagines that Keller is looking for the ecclesiastical equivalent to John McCain, a secularized savior who would throw out all that musty far-right orthodoxy and let in the utopian sunshine of man's perfectibility under "progressive" nostrums.
But logic points in the opposite direction. That abusive monster Father Paul Shanley, that man-boy sex enthusiast, rejected Catholic teaching. Wouldn't his victims be better off today with a priest who was "inflexible" on his vows of celibacy?
The reasons for Keller's acidulous take on the Pope are revealed when he identifies himself as "what a friend calls a ‘collapsed Catholic' — well beyond lapsed." Keller claims no right to reform the church from within, but only as part of the "larger struggle within the human race, between the forces of tolerance and absolutism." Recalling the Crusades and the Inquisition, Keller condemns the Catholic Church for failing "small-c catholic values, which my dictionary defines as ‘broad in sympathies, tastes, or understanding.'"
But the Catholic Church is not a small-c church with a small-g god. For decades, Keller and his ilk have committed drive-by journalism on traditional religion, aiming to reconcile God to the arrogant conveniences of man, instead of reconciling repentant man to an omniscient God. Despite oafish media protests, media polls have found a broad mass of American Catholics agonizing and praying to cure the church of this sex-abuse sickness. They have refused to join Keller in collapsing away from their faith.
These believers are not comforted by the conceit that when their time of judgment comes, they can tell God He had no idea of how to talk to them; that He failed to embrace the needs of "real life;" that He is a force for intolerance and absolutism. When they die, they hope to hold up their lives of noble devotion and sinful failure and trust God, not The New York Times, to welcome them home.
The greatest threat to the Church is from the people in the pews who are already dropping their contributions and may quit going to church or look to some other denomination if this mess isn't cleaned up.
The hierarchy is also falling victim to it's own liberal mindset. The same people who lament the execution of mass murderers were also too willing to forgive and forget the crimes perpetrated by their own members.
I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn that the Times hierarchy is populated by phonies. Comparing the Pope to a Commie is particularly ironic for a newspaper that used to LIE REPEATEDLY about the nature of Communism - Walter Durranty - to help it metastasize and enslave and murder scores of millions of Christians.
. Is it possible to hate these sob's more than I do?
Other than that, you seem to agree with Bozell. The solution is not to drop out of the Church or to liberalize it, but to return to the fullness of the faith. People like Keller are trying to conceal that basic truth from their readers.
The Catholic Church's handling aside, I think your statement here is true, but far too simplistic.
The media and Hollywood don't just have "anti-Catholic" biases. They have pure, unadulterated anti-Christian biases.
If you are a person of faith (unless Islamic), you are subject to being ridiculed and ostracized by the media. It's just par for the course.
I agree. Let Satan and his minions in the door, and you get what you ask for.
In theSoviet UnionDemocratic Party, while the masses were eking by, the bosseswereare wallowing in opulence, luxury and splendor, in violation of all the messages they were sending to the clueless faithful.
arkady
It must go to make way for the one world religion of Gaia worship,
the one world government of political correctness,
and the mark so that no man my buy or sell without it to share the wealth equally, or a one world ecomony of sharing.
According to liberal socialists: religion, free will, and the motovation to succeed creates war. Instead , the truth is -free will oppression will create the biggest war of all.
One man will rise to rule over this new one world in the name of peace, and because of it will destroy it all and those who follow it.(It won't be long before he rears his ugly head)
Well, I'm sure they notice it; but then, I guess they aren't really eager to claim their well deserved "credit" for the epidemic of evil in the Church. Maybe they're just being humble about it.
There is certainly a parallel between the leadership selection techniques and management styles of the Roman Catholic Church and those of the Soviet Communist Party.
Those who, unlike OPH, have a cutting edge sense of history would first note that the Roman Catholic Church has been selecting its leaders in the current fashion for at least a thousand years since the creation of the College of Cardinals which chooses the pope as the old Soviet Politburo chose the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The reds imitated us.
The politburo also functioned as does the Roman Curia as a sort of cabinet for the General Secretary with specific executive responsibilities. The reds imitated us.
Generally, popes did not succeed their fathers as had been the case in secular absolute monarchies during much of the thousand years (and notably later than elsewhere in tsarist Russia). We never wanted to have leadership fall into the hands of such hapless and inept rulers as Nicholas II. Neither did the reds. The reds lasted only from 1917 to about 1987 and so it would be too small a sample to know whether they would have developed their own nobility such as the Medici and chosen numerous leaders from such families. The reds imitated us.
The relatively recent phenomenon of universal franchise and popular election of leaders which is becoming, beginning in 1992, a dangerous all too high stakes adventure in our own country is not standing the test of time. To those who think it is, read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and Bill of Rights and see whether you still recognize your country as founded by people like Jefferson, Madison, Patrick Henry or even the Federalists like George Washington and John Adams. More importantly, would Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Henry recognize it? Of course not. The Soviet Union was still quite obviously communist at the end. The Roman Catholic Church is still quite obviously the Roman Catholic Church of the ages. Both much more so than the United States is now what it was originally.
The United States must remain a democratic republic of some sort or it will be too obvious that the basic principles have disappeared. In rejection of universal suffrage and democracy, the reds imitated the Roman Catholic Church. For a thousand years and more, no pope has been elected more democratically than the limited and special democracy of conclave in which only cardinal electors vote but in which they also determine the policy of the next papacy before voting. In conclave, the policy is a platform that will be carried out if humanly possible and with the assistance of God, not the usually ignored party platforms in secular democratic systems which basically serve as sucker bait although they are worth fighting over for organizing and propaganda purposes. The politburo behaved in much the same manner. The reds imitated us.
BUT, someone may say, that if the Soviet system collapsed after a mere 70 years, that means that the goddess of reason may yet dance nude on the altars of Rome (which would certainly delight some). Don't hold your breath. The Roman Catholic Church invented its leadership selection system and has used it, in one form or another for a very long time. The soviets recognized the merits of the system for any movement of hard-line beliefs. The reds, totally inexperienced with that system at the outset and making a rare prudential error in underestimating their most sophisticated opponent while emulating its leadership selection and operating methods, exposed their vulnerable vitals to Rome which was much more experienced in the system and its strengths and weaknesses.
No doubt there are also those who would regard this post as opportunistic Monday morning quarterbacking. I refer them to the 1977 novel The Final Conclave of the late master Catholic writer and novelist Fr. Malachi Martin who predicted that the next conclave (1978) would re-establish a policy of operational enmity toward the Kremlin with a purpose of destroying soviet power in response to the evident attempt of the soviets to infiltrate and seize control of the Church. Read the novel before allowing your knee to jerk. The first pope elected in 1978 was Albino Cardinal Luciani, a protege of Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, who headed the Holy Office (former Inquisition and now Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith). Luciani, elected as John Paul I, was the son of a communist father and Catholic mother. He rejected his father's political commitments and embraced his mother's faith, entering the seminary at 14 and was an absolute warrior against internal corruption of the Church. His very quick death was reasonably suspected to have been assassination by poison by someone on the household staff.
The second 1978 conclave chose JPII, a Polish cardinal who had been an active lay member of the anti-Nazi underground in his youth, went literally underground in Cardinal Sapieha's basement after the murder of his girlfriend by the Gestapo and who served his entire priesthood under the communist dictatorship in Poland which did not undermine his faith or his strength but augmented both. He would not forget Stalin's crack to FDR at Yalta responding to FDR's concerns about Catholic reaction to handing Poland over to Stalin: How many divisions has the pope? He fired the entire papal household staff immediately upon his election as the spinmasters assured us all that John Paul I had died a natural death.
The soviets would not ignore that background and attempted the assassination of John Paul II via Mehmet Ali Agca of the Turkish fascist Grey Wolves, trained and contracted by the Bulgarian KGB, instigated by Soviet KGB director Yuri Andropov and his deputy one Mikhail Gorbachev. JPII was grievously wounded but the attempt failed.
Not all wars are matters of bloodshed on a massive scale or military world wars. The Cold War had violent outbreaks in Korea, Vietnam, and in many "National Liberation" movements and in the brutal application of the knout and the gulag to those who resisted or merely disagreed. In the last analysis, however, at the end of the day, as our liberals are fond of saying, ideas have consequences in the formulation of Richard Weaver.
Ronald Reagan was motivated by the basic tenets of Western Civilization and American freedoms and dedicated to the destruction of the Soviet Union and its system of satellite nations. Margaret Thatcher was likewise motivated (so very rare among British PM's). She was ultimately done in for her courage by the despicable Tory elite. JP II added the moral and intellectual weight of the oldest of Christian faiths and its apparatus, however locally flawed, to surgically destroy the intellectual base of the soviets, even behind the Iron Curtain itself, as Reagan and Thatcher applied secular flamethrowers to the soviet enterprise and its crimes and as Reagan bankrupted the soviets.
Yes, communism survives in the Gramscian form of libertinism without other liberties as a pathetic ideal. The RCC has been there and done that in destroying far more powerful forces than the those who worship sensuality as the sole surviving "freedom." Our best is yet to come and we will not be deterred by AmChurch pygmies and their allies.
What does this mean to those not Catholic? To the Russian Orthodox in Russia and Eastern Europe, your bishops are no longer nominees of the soviet secret police. Your wonderful faith is again free and Rome does not interfere. No price is owed or exacted. We draft no one.
As to Protestants who do fervently follow the reformed path of sola gracia, sole fide, sola Scriptura (by grace alone, by faith alone, by Scripture alone), your steadfast practice of your faith has always played a role in that struggle, whatever our differences.
As to Jews, the destruction of any tyranny, much less the virulently anti-Semitic tyranny of the soviets, is always a benefit and a mitzvah and an intellectual legion of Jews waged magnificent warfare against the soviet beast. We draft no one and in this papacy, have witnessed particular and overdue tribute to our elder brothers and sisters in faith.
As to every other honest person of faith or otherwise, the destruction of the soviet system is a blessing, like a gentle rain falling upon us all.
There is certainly a parallel between the leadership selection techniques and management styles of the Roman Catholic Church and those of the Soviet Communist Party.
Those who, unlike OPH, have a cutting edge sense of history would first note that the Roman Catholic Church has been selecting its leaders in the current fashion for at least a thousand years since the creation of the College of Cardinals which chooses the pope as the old Soviet Politburo chose the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The reds imitated us.
The politburo also functioned as does the Roman Curia as a sort of cabinet for the General Secretary with specific executive responsibilities. The reds imitated us.
Generally, popes did not succeed their fathers as had been the case in secular absolute monarchies during much of the thousand years (and notably later than elsewhere in tsarist Russia). We never wanted to have leadership fall into the hands of such hapless and inept rulers as Nicholas II. Neither did the reds. The reds lasted only from 1917 to about 1987 and so it would be too small a sample to know whether they would have developed their own nobility such as the Medici and chosen numerous leaders from such families. The reds imitated us.
The relatively recent phenomenon of universal franchise and popular election of leaders which is becoming, beginning in 1992, a dangerous all too high stakes adventure in our own country is not standing the test of time. To those who think it is, read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and Bill of Rights and see whether you still recognize your country as founded by people like Jefferson, Madison, Patrick Henry or even the Federalists like George Washington and John Adams. More importantly, would Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Henry recognize it? Of course not. The Soviet Union was still quite obviously communist at the end. The Roman Catholic Church is still quite obviously the Roman Catholic Church of the ages. Both much more so than the United States is now what it was originally.
The United States must remain a democratic republic of some sort or it will be too obvious that the basic principles have disappeared. In rejection of universal suffrage and democracy, the reds imitated the Roman Catholic Church. For a thousand years and more, no pope has been elected more democratically than the limited and special democracy of conclave in which only cardinal electors vote but in which they also determine the policy of the next papacy before voting. In conclave, the policy is a platform that will be carried out if humanly possible and with the assistance of God, not the usually ignored party platforms in secular democratic systems which basically serve as sucker bait although they are worth fighting over for organizing and propaganda purposes. The politburo behaved in much the same manner. The reds imitated us.
BUT, someone may say, that if the Soviet system collapsed after a mere 70 years, that means that the goddess of reason may yet dance nude on the altars of Rome (which would certainly delight some). Don't hold your breath. The Roman Catholic Church invented its leadership selection system and has used it, in one form or another for a very long time. The soviets recognized the merits of the system for any movement of hard-line beliefs. The reds, totally inexperienced with that system at the outset and making a rare prudential error in underestimating their most sophisticated opponent while emulating its leadership selection and operating methods, exposed their vulnerable vitals to Rome which was much more experienced in the system and its strengths and weaknesses.
No doubt there are also those who would regard this post as opportunistic Monday morning quarterbacking. I refer them to the 1977 novel The Final Conclave of the late master Catholic writer and novelist Fr. Malachi Martin who predicted that the next conclave (1978) would re-establish a policy of operational enmity toward the Kremlin with a purpose of destroying soviet power in response to the evident attempt of the soviets to infiltrate and seize control of the Church. Read the novel before allowing your knee to jerk. The first pope elected in 1978 was Albino Cardinal Luciani, a protege of Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, who headed the Holy Office (former Inquisition and now Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith). Luciani, elected as John Paul I, was the son of a communist father and Catholic mother. He rejected his father's political commitments and embraced his mother's faith, entering the seminary at 14 and was an absolute warrior against internal corruption of the Church. His very quick death was reasonably suspected to have been assassination by poison by someone on the household staff.
The second 1978 conclave chose JPII, a Polish cardinal who had been an active lay member of the anti-Nazi underground in his youth, went literally underground in Cardinal Sapieha's basement after the murder of his girlfriend by the Gestapo and who served his entire priesthood under the communist dictatorship in Poland which did not undermine his faith or his strength but augmented both. He would not forget Stalin's crack to FDR at Yalta responding to FDR's concerns about Catholic reaction to handing Poland over to Stalin: How many divisions has the pope? He fired the entire papal household staff immediately upon his election as the spinmasters assured us all that John Paul I had died a natural death.
The soviets would not ignore that background and attempted the assassination of John Paul II via Mehmet Ali Agca of the Turkish fascist Grey Wolves, trained and contracted by the Bulgarian KGB, instigated by Soviet KGB director Yuri Andropov and his deputy one Mikhail Gorbachev. JPII was grievously wounded but the attempt failed.
Not all wars are matters of bloodshed on a massive scale or military world wars. The Cold War had violent outbreaks in Korea, Vietnam, and in many "National Liberation" movements and in the brutal application of the knout and the gulag to those who resisted or merely disagreed. In the last analysis, however, at the end of the day, as our liberals are fond of saying, ideas have consequences in the formulation of Richard Weaver.
Ronald Reagan was motivated by the basic tenets of Western Civilization and American freedoms and dedicated to the destruction of the Soviet Union and its system of satellite nations. Margaret Thatcher was likewise motivated (so very rare among British PM's). She was ultimately done in for her courage by the despicable Tory elite. JP II added the moral and intellectual weight of the oldest of Christian faiths and its apparatus, however locally flawed, to surgically destroy the intellectual base of the soviets, even behind the Iron Curtain itself, as Reagan and Thatcher applied secular flamethrowers to the soviet enterprise and its crimes and as Reagan bankrupted the soviets.
Yes, communism survives in the Gramscian form of libertinism without other liberties as a pathetic ideal. The RCC has been there and done that in destroying far more powerful forces than the those who worship sensuality as the sole surviving "freedom." Our best is yet to come and we will not be deterred by AmChurch pygmies and their allies.
What does this mean to those not Catholic? To the Russian Orthodox in Russia and Eastern Europe, your bishops are no longer nominees of the soviet secret police. Your wonderful faith is again free and Rome does not interfere. No price is owed or exacted. We draft no one.
As to Protestants who do fervently follow the reformed path of sola gracia, sole fide, sola Scriptura (by grace alone, by faith alone, by Scripture alone), your steadfast practice of your faith has always played a role in that struggle, whatever our differences.
As to Jews, the destruction of any tyranny, much less the virulently anti-Semitic tyranny of the soviets, is always a benefit and a mitzvah and an intellectual legion of Jews waged magnificent warfare against the soviet beast. We draft no one and in this papacy, have witnessed particular and overdue tribute to our elder brothers and sisters in faith.
As to every other honest person of faith or otherwise, the destruction of the soviet system is a blessing, like a gentle rain falling upon us all.
And, OPH, please continue to post your obsessive insolence and ignorance for all to see. It helps Catholics to focus their attention and organize as it always has. You continually prove to be, in the words of Lenin, a useful idiot. Grow up and get over it!
And, OPH, please continue to post your obsessive insolence and ignorance for all to see. It helps Catholics to focus their attention and organize as it always has. You continue to be, in the words of Lenin, a useful idiot. Grow up and get over it!
Additionally, I read yesterday an article that, of the 300 currently pending civil cases against pervert priests and their protectors, fully 113 are pending in your own Commonwealth of Kentucky and many of those in the despicably liberal AmChurch Archdiocese in which you live and where, despite it being the site of your own experience, you are nonetheless forever joining with AmChurch's little liberal marionettes like sinkspur in trying to divert attention from the homosexuality, from the pink palace seminaries, from the love that once dared not speak its name and now will not shut up, and from the very liberals in the AmChurch ranks of disobedient and defiant leftist bishops who have made a career of covering up the lavender culture of their lavender pals and, all too often, of their lavender selves, as in Milwaukee, Palm Beach, et al.
You do seem strangely placid as to former archbishop Rembert Weakland, the revealed Lavender Queen of Milwaukee.
Try though you might, y'all will not spoil our enjoyment of this moment, this era, this long overdue and awaited magnificent upcoming purge.
Regardless of the current controversy, there is no denying that the Times (et al) are vigorously anti-Catholic, anti-Orthodox Jew, and anti-fundamentalist Christian.
Means that all those 'enemies of the Times' must have something in common..how about a transcendent, omnipotent Creator who left 'the rules' in stone with Moses???
Hmmm??
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