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.
Dear Conservative til I die,
"I don't think the Eastern Rite Catholics would appreciate being called Orthodox, since if they wanted to become Orthodox, they'd convert."
Actually, many Eastern Catholics consider themselves Orthodox and Catholic. They would tell you that they are Orthodox in communion with Rome, and are thus both.
Since they retain their own liturgy, their own catechism, their own theology - complementary but not in every way identical with Latin Catholic theology, but never contrary to it - their own hierarchies, their own code of canon law, and since all of these are Orthodox in content, it really isn't a bad way to look at it.
sitetest
Dear Conservative til I die,
"Unless of course, you plan on 'converting' to one of the Eastern Rites. Good luck if you do, since it usually entails going to the 'home country' for that rite, studying in a seminary in that country for a few years, learning the language so you can say Mass, etc."
Of course, you realize that one doesn't "convert" from one Catholic Church to another, but merely changes rite.
As you point out, this used to be very difficult indeed. I was surprised to learn that in recent years, this has become pretty easy.
No need to go to the "home country" at all.
And since sinkspur is a deacon, he can't say Mass, so that wouldn't be an issue anyway for him. ;-)
sitetest
Personal discipline is relative, the church discipline is absolute. There is no give and take when dealing with the Father, even if He is merciful.
Dear BigSkyFreeper,
I don't think I understand your post. Could you clarify, please?
sitetest
You said, "However, one is free to believe that the Church may benefit from a change in the discipline, as disciplines are susceptible to change."
And I said in response to your post, "Personal discipline is relative, the church discipline is absolute. There is no give and take when dealing with the Father, even if He is merciful."
I hope this helps. I'm not saying I disagree with you. I should clarify also that I am not Catholic, but Lutheran, but this is how I understand how discipline relates to self with oneself as well as oneself to God the Father.
Dear BigSkyFreeper,
It helps a bit, but I'm still lost. ;-)
Sorry.
Are we talking about the same definition of discipline?
By it, I mean the rules by which the Church governs Herself and Her members. What days we must assist at Mass as HolyDays (not Sundays) is a discipline. It's binding.
But it can be changed.
How long we must fast before receiving Holy Communion is a discipline. It's binding. But it can be changed.
Is this what you mean?
sitetest
We are on the same wavelength, it's precisely what I'm talking about. Matter of fact, I was talking to this lady friend a few years ago, and she's a devout Catholic, and I honestly told her I wasn't but wanted to learn why the Catholic church was so strict. She told me it's not really strict in the sense of strict, it's just disciplined. All denominations bind together be a set of disciplines, but none like the Catholic church. You are correct though. I remember a time when the Catholic church was so stringent in it's discipline, that the boys in my high school class had to attend funerals even if they had not known the person, or if there was a big exam that day.
I am speaking of it again, tonight.
Try a drink. Anything might help, at this point.
Dear BigSkyFreeper,
Okay.
I'm not altogether sure how discipline always works in other religions and faiths, especially if one doesn't agree with a particular discipline.
sitetest
Sitetest,
I guess I stand corrected. However, I've never heard of any Eastern Catholic referring to himself as Orthodox as well as Catholic. I've heard them talk about the Orthodox heritage and style of worship, but never that they are actually Orthodox.
Anyway, thanks for the info.
Actually, it is. Winston Churchill said so.
What Churchill quote are you actually referring to?
Is it this one?:
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
Or is it perhaps what he said very early in his first volume of his The Second World War on World War One:
"Moreover, this had been a war, not of Governments, but of peoples. The whole life-energy of the greatest nations had been poured out in wrath and slaughter. The war leaders assembled in Paris had been borne thither upon the strongest and most furious tides that have ever flown in human history. Gone were the treaties of Utrecht and Vienna, when aristocratic statesmen and diplomats, victor and vanquished alike, met in polite and courtly disputation, and, free from the clatter and babel of democracy, could reshape systems upon the fundamentals of which they were all agreed. The peoples, transported by their sufferings and by the mass teachings with which they had been inspired, stood around in scores of millions to demand that retribution should be exacted to the full. Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred blood-soaked battlefields. [...] The multitudes remained plunged in ignorance of the simplest economic facts, and their leaders, seeking their votes, did not dare to undeceive them."
Or is it this famous dictum from a not so famous speach on November 11, 1947 against the Labour Party Government's eventual successful attempt to reduce the powers of the House of Lords?:
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
But I don't think so. You wouldn't be using a quote from a defense of a hereditary element in government in your crusade? Would you?
Yes. Preferable to unchecked monarchs? Infinitely so.
With all due respect, the checks and balances of modern democracies hardly reach up to the ankles of the mixed governments of old. As for elections being a check, I concede that there may be violations of relative minor significance elected politicians would not get away with whilst monarchs would, and that it would take relative major violations for a monarch to be removed, on some issues. As a general rule, however, it does not hold water. Just take a look at the size and the reach of the modern democratic absolute state.
What did you say the purpose of the Constitution was? To protect the majority from politicians, the minorities from the majority, or both?
If your answer is not the former, your reasoning makes absolutely no sense.
There is little doubt that Russia by all reasonable standards was a democracy prior to the October Revolution. It was a democratic republic. The mess that was created by the fall of the monarchy allowed the Bolshevik Revolution to take place.
Dear Unreconstructed Selmerite,
1. What's a Selmerite?
2. Why are you an unreconstructed version?
3. What would a reconstructed version look like?
4. Are you talking about the US Constitution, or constitutions in general?
5. Why would my reasoning (which has not yet been offered on the topic) make no sense?
Thanks,
sitetest
One who supports Selmer. Which Selmer? It's just a screen name.
2. Why are you an unreconstructed version?
An unreconstructed version would be one who is unreconstructed in the sense that an unreconstructed Confederate would be. Why I am one? Well, obviously because "reconstruction" hasn't worked on me.
3. What would a reconstructed version look like?
No specific looks. However, he has put the support for Selmer behind him, as a result of "reconstruction".
4. Are you talking about the US Constitution, or constitutions in general?
Obviously, since I was following up on 167 - 175 - 178 - 187 - 201 - 205 - 207, I was talking about the U.S. Constitution.
5. Why would my reasoning (which has not yet been offered on the topic) make no sense?
Well, your reasoning, at least in part has been offered. See for instance 171:
The American Constitution is pretty good. For the efforts of men. It's done a pretty good job for a while, and I think it will likely continue to do a better job than most for at least a little while longer.
If one does believe that the Constitution is to protect minorities, it would make no sense if the only remedy available to violations of the Constitution is for the majority to oust those responsible for those violations.
Dear Unreconstructed Selmerite,
1. "One who supports Selmer."
Usually, one tries to avoid defining a word with a definition that uses a word either derived from the word to be defined, or from which the word to be defined was derived.
Otherwise, the definition is circular.
So then, what's a Selmer?
2. Is it that reconstruction didn't work because it couldn't, or because you rejected it?
3. What does support for Selmer have to do with being a reconstructed Selmerite?
4. Okay. Just checking. Post #207 was one that I posted a few days ago. As age advances, memory declines. ;-)
5. What do you think the connection between these two responses (the first mine, the second yours) is?
"Forms of government will not substitute for the virtue of the people."
and,
"If one does believe that the Constitution is to protect minorities, it would make no sense if the only remedy available to violations of the Constitution is for the majority to oust those responsible for those violations.
"If your answer is not the former, your reasoning makes absolutely no sense."
Thanks,
sitetest
Selmer is a surnname, as Lincoln is a surname. Selmerite is a word derived from a surname, as Lincolnite is a word derived from a surname. Selemerite has roughly the same connection to Selmer as Lincolnite has to Lincoln. Although, needless to say, Selmer was on the losing side of a conflict, which Lincoln was not.
Is it that reconstruction didn't work because it couldn't, or because you rejected it?
It certainly didn't work on me. As for the result as a whole, I'm not very impressed. So, I guess in a way you could say that I rejected it.
What does support for Selmer have to do with being a reconstructed Selmerite?
I suppose reconstructed Selmerite would make as much sense as reconstructed Confederate.
5. What do you think the connection between these two responses (the first mine, the second yours) is?
"Forms of government will not substitute for the virtue of the people."
and,
"If one does believe that the Constitution is to protect minorities, it would make no sense if the only remedy available to violations of the Constitution is for the majority to oust those responsible for those violations.
"If your answer is not the former, your reasoning makes absolutely no sense."
Before the latter I said:
"What did you say the purpose of the Constitution was? To protect the majority from politicians, the minorities from the majority, or both?"
Of course, if you hold that the only purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to ensure that the people (or rather its majority) rule, which I do suspect, then "your answer is the former" and "your reasoning makes absolutely no sense" does not apply.
Dear Unreconstructed Selmerite,
1. Then is it fair to say that you follow someone named "Selmer?"
If so, could you be so kind as to tell me who the Selmer that you follow was or is, and perhaps a little on why he or she is worthy of being followed?
2. So then, perhaps reconstruction didn't work on you both because it couldn't, because perhaps you were unable to do other than reject it?
Or maybe vice versa.
3. I don't know whether a "reconstructed Confederate" makes sense or not. I don't see why it wouldn't.
4. "Of course, if you hold that the only purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to ensure that the people (or rather its majority) rule, which I do suspect,..."
Perhaps along with this spoken assumption, you may have a few unspoken, perhaps even unconscious ones, as well.
You seem to have had a problem with this statement:
"Forms of government will not substitute for the virtue of the people."
Is that a problem?
sitetest
Yes.
If so, could you be so kind as to tell me who the Selmer that you follow was or is, and perhaps a little on why he or she is worthy of being followed?
It is a long story. I will leave it there.
2. So then, perhaps reconstruction didn't work on you both because it couldn't, because perhaps you were unable to do other than reject it?
Or maybe vice versa.
Perhaps.
3. I don't know whether a "reconstructed Confederate" makes sense or not. I don't see why it wouldn't.
I didn't directly say it doesn't make sense.
You seem to have had a problem with this statement:
"Forms of government will not substitute for the virtue of the people."
Is that a problem?
I basically agree with royalcello on that one. See post # 186.
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