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.
Are you completely ignorant of the atrocities of the French Revolution? Are you unaware that thousands of innocent people were murdered in the Reign of Terror, and Europe plunged into war for 23 years, in the name of that evil slogan?
A "crown" for the successor of Peter is a joke.
Somehow all the popes from who knows when up to and including John XXIII didn't think it was very funny.
Incomprehensible and indefensible conduct in one's private life does not make a person an idiot. The Prince of Wales's thoughtful views on subjects such as architecture, history, and rural issues show that he has much to offer those who will listen.
It surprises me not at all that you would favor handing political office from father to son, without benefit of election.
The western hemisphere is gradually being drained of despots. Perhaps you could get a taste of Castro before he kicks off. Democracy is likely to follow him, so you better hustle down there.
John XXIII never wore the Papal tiara after his installation, and Paul VI sold the wretched thing to get it out of the Vatican.
You've got a very strange reaction to the words "Liberty and Equality." We're not in 18th century France, my boy.
But apparently the wholesale slaughter of native Americans is quite acceptable to you. Or how about the 1.5 million abortions that women commit every year. Or that GREAT icon of American Liberalism FDR who put American citizens of Japanese descent into concentration camps by executive order? Yeah, your American experiment is SOOoooo superior to every other political formation on the planet.
Bump to this. In fairness, there were other practioners of total war before the French, but they gave it its modern, ideological character.
Beyond that, though, it warms me to the cockles of my heart to see Prof. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn quoted on FR. It used to happen more often...
You've got a very strange reaction to the words "Liberty and Equality." We're not in 18th century France, my boy.
But the Pope when he used those words was in 21st-century France, where they are still understood to refer to the French Revolution.
You make them sound like American bishops.
Actually, it is. Winston Churchill said so.
Imperfect? Yes. Preferable to unchecked monarchs? Infinitely so.
Jesus and His apostles managed to inspire without bedecking themselves in jeweled mitres, watered silk, and gold tiaras.
This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ we're preaching here, not the trappings of Miss America.
Equality was the ideal of ideals for the communists who saw themselves as the grandchildren of the French Revolution and rightly so. I'll take it that you have no problem with either.
Sorry to disappoint you.
Well you've finally shown your true colors, Sink. In your opinion all the popes until Vatican II were jokes.
A successor of Peter wearing a gold tube on his head is kinda funny, don't you think?
You're right. It would be amazing. That is, if you continue to fail to make the necessary distinctions. The liberty, fraternity and equality spoken of by the Freemasons is a deliberate corruption of authentic L, F and E. The kind you would hold up is the Freemasonry brand.
Pope Leo XIII was careful to point this out as well:
"Amongst the many benefits to be expected from it will be the great benefit of drawing the minds of men to liberty, fraternity, and equality of right; not such as the Freemasons absurdly imagine, but such as Jesus Christ obtained for the human race and St. Francis aspired to: the liberty, We mean, of sons of God, through which we may be free from slavery to Satan or to our passions, both of them most wicked masters; the fraternity whose origin is in God, the common Creator and Father of all; the equality which, founded on justice and charity, does not take away all distinctions among men, but, out of the varieties of life, of duties, and of pursuits, forms that union and that harmony which naturally tend to the benefit and dignity of society."
The Freemasons have their pillars of faith, hope and charity as well. Rerendered in the image and likeness of man, of course. Trashed concepts and wasted ideas, cups clean on the outside but full of filth on the inside. It is the same with L,F & E... the replacement of a real liberty, fraternity and equality with a fool's gold substitute.
Bait and switch. Another stupid sales tactic.
No. Like the United States of America.
You're obsessed with Nazis.
Well then it MUST be true.
Imperfect? Yes. Preferable to unchecked monarchs? Infinitely so.
What enthralls you so? Is it the mass pornography? The abortion on demand? The ability to kill millions with our bombs? Perhaps our divorce rate? Or the violence that can be found on our streets and in our homes. Or maybe its the dumbing down process in our educational system. The drug culture? Or good old all american Hollywood? What is it exactly?
Imperfect? Yes. Preferable to unchecked monarchs? Infinitely so.
It would be subtle but kind to say that perhaps you see the Great Experiment through rose-colored glasses.
He said with a tear in his eye *sniff*. It means no such thing and you know it. The rich and powerful get away with a hell of a lot more than you or I. Where was Hillary Clinton's trial for turning $1,000.00 into $100,000.00 in three months. Or William Clinton for having a ____load of FBI files illegally? Or the latest white house nominee for national security? He broke the law? Will he go to trial? I doubt it, but I know others who have gone to jail for less. Despite how you want to define equality in ideal terms, in practice it has always meant killing and destroying whatever the haves have in order to placate the envy of the have nots. Sorry to disappoint you.
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