POPE’S ADDRESS TO THE CARDINALS


The Pope has made his annual address to the Cardinals. This is his chance to sketch for the leadership his sense of what he’d like to see emphasized in the coming year.

I want to say a bit about it here because of what he has said, and also because of what the American mainstream media are leaving out.

As exemplified here the American MSM have merely selected the material of immediate interest to their own agendas and left everything else. Thus the Pope is concerned about the abuse-crisis (which – take your pick – started in 1985, 1991, or 2002, or all three).

More on abuse below. I’d like to go through the entire piece (only a few pages long; the English translation is here).

Because, frankly, this thing’s a doozy.

He starts off, with a disarming predictability, quoting some Latin: Excita, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni - “Stir up your power, Lord, and come”.

But for anybody who has spent too much time with either Lefty ‘outrage’ or neocon bluster-posture, and thinks that such stuff passes for either maturity, wits, intelligence or diplomatic competence, the Pope’s follow-on comments are worth the first two (or four) years of whatever is left to a once-fabled Ivy League education.

In a marvelously gentle and innocuous-sounding by-the-by, he offers a bit of obscure Latin Church history: this prayer, he papally confides, dates back to the era “when the Roman Empire was in decline”. [italics mine]

Instantly, “in the twinkling of an eye” as St. Paul would put it, you are transported onto a plane of existence and skill-level far beyond anything Americans are used to anymore. “In the twinkling of an eye”. Or, as an iconic old American TV show would suddenly splash across the screen: “BIF! POW! WHACK!”

Because suddenly his hearers are transported back to that very real and sobering era in Western history when the Great Hegemon had overextended itself, given itself over to the most debauched and deranged governmental antics, and … the Church was there, and remembers.

As the Pope puts it: “The disintegration of the key principles of law and of the fundamental moral attitudes underpinning them burst open the dams which until that time had protected peaceful coexistence among peoples. The sun was setting over an entire world. Frequent natural disasters further increased this sense of insecurity. There was no power in sight that could put a stop to this decline. All the more insistent, then, was the invocation of the power of God: the plea that he might come and protect his people from all these threats.”

The Church, he reminds you gently, remembers. And through its institutional memory (80-plus, actually, isn’t very old in Vatican timeframes) he remembers.

You can ask yourself to what extent the Pope is describing a historical event of 2000 years ago, and to what extent he is describing … ummm … something current. The description seems applicable to both the past and the present.

It’s of more concern to think about how many people around the world, who do not rely on the American media to form their opinions, are seeing this phenomenon.

And I don’t mean ‘perceiving’ it – as if it were all merely a matter of how you hold you head, or whether the glass is half-empty or half-full, or merely the result of a bit of undigested beef – but actually seeing what’s really going on ‘out there’, beyond one’s own attitude, expectations, hopes, fantasies, dampdreams, and general ‘perceptions’. Seeing – as the old philosophers say – the objective reality and not simply the subjective perception of the reality. Or seeing merely the subjective perception because you somehow have concluded that there is no objective reality; that since so many blind men report so many different things about the Elephant that it must be that the Elephant doesn’t actually exist.

American decline – and the multifarious, multivalent derangement that has fueled it – is an Elephant. And before long – as the Civil War soldiers used to like to tell newbies – the Elephant will have to be faced. In the Civil War case it was the Elephant of close-up combat; in Our case it is the Elephant of a national decline across a broad spectrum, fed by deeply poisoned wells of thought and action.

The Pope, it may occur to the perceptive reader, is playing varsity ball here. And an awful lot of folks, especially around here, may have brought a knife to a gunfight.

Even more ominous is his accurate perception that the Empire had reached a tipping point where “there was no power in sight that could put a stop to this decline”. Which throws some very maturely cold water on the fatuous American presumption that it will all work out because America is all about Progress that will never end (the New Left) or that America is God’s Deputy so God always covers for it – like some old-timey Southern pappy, swimming in oil money, who always covers for his obstreperous kid (the New Right).

The Boomers and cadres could live with a Pappy like that; Ben Cartwright – not so much.

If American ‘Abundance’ (as I discussed in my recent Post on David Potter) is now coming to an end, perhaps its free-ride, get-out-of-jail-free existence that can give the finger to Consequences is also coming to an end. Such that We might soon have to pray like Edward G. Robinson’s hood with his back against the wall: Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?

It’s anybody’s guess what the New-Lefties will do, since they have declared God a hypothesis for which they no longer have a need – and an oppressive hypothesis at that, or what the Fundamentalist nation-idolaters will do now that their Golden Idol is running out of gold and has troubles of its own.

We live in interesting times. And the Pope knows it far better than We do.

But then, sinful and incomplete and imperfect and lumbering as the Church can be, she still lives day in and day out in the existential adventure of the Vulcan Board: where Great Things are at stake, where Things Unseen and clouds of Presences Unperceived are forever “ascending and descending”, in stern or gentle ministration to humans who are still struggling to bring genuine Truth and Love – those ultimate Realities – into this human life and history. Neither JFK’s “long twilight struggle” nor the glorious march of the assorted cadres can hold a candle to that Great Adventure, that Great Mission, that the Church lives with every day.

Stir up your power, Lord, and come! The Pope hears in this prayer the anxious desperate cry of the disciples who watched the boat filling with storm-waters as Christ slept in the stern. Their faith was “sleeping”, not Christ. But now, of course, faith is not “sleeping” – it has been banished, or invested in Elvis-like entreaties for lotsa nice stuff.

The world – especially the West, under the so often whackulent and frakkulent influence of an increasingly deranged imperial hegemon (behaving with increasing intensity like some Caesar who is losing his grip on sanity as well as competence, and in any case without the guidance of any interior Integrity) – is in profound trouble, and on a level of existential challenge that the current American radar can’t even detect.

In a stroke the Pope speaks both to the hegemon and beyond it to the peoples of the planet.

And then he segues seamlessly into Hildegaard of Bingen, a 12th century woman (Abbess in an era when that Office held huge authority, and raised to Sainthood by the Church) who acutely held the Catholic clergy to high standards indeed.

The Pope quotes her: “And Christ’s wounds remain open because of the sins of priests. They tear my robe, since they are violators of the Law, the Gospel and their own priesthood; they darken my cloak by neglecting, in every way, the precepts which they are meant to uphold; my shoes too are blackened, since priests do not keep to the straight paths of justice, which are hard and rugged, or set good examples to those beneath them. Nevertheless, in some of them I find the splendour of truth.”

She brooked as little mediocrity in priests as she did in the members of her own Abbey. And she had no qualms about giving the Pope of the day a piece of her mind.

Benedict, having recounted some of her vision and her recommendations, says to the Cardinals that “We must accept this humiliation as an exhortation to truth and a call to renewal. Only the truth saves.” [Italics mine] I haven’t heard any recent President say this to the Cabinet or to Congress, although it would certainly be a step in the right direction, especially if it were in writing and ‘on the record’. But the Pope doesn’t have to worry about demographics. And the Game he is playing is on multilevel-board, several vital levels Beyond the checkerboard time-passing that fills the American media’s days.

If there are failures and humiliations, then they must be grasped and turned into the occasion for substantive improvement. Rather like military officers would do: if you make a mistake, learn from it and make things work better the next time.

And in the best tradition of mature competence, he tells the Cardinals that in order to fix what has to be fixed, it will be necessary to examine “the context” of those 1970s when much of whatever went wrong seemed to reach a particular efflorescence. Child pornography, sexual tourism, the treating of bodies and souls as if they were commodities, drugs, and an overall truckling to the “tyranny of mammon which perverts mankind”.

He paraphrases the attitude of that era as “no pleasure is ever enough, and the excess of deceiving intoxication becomes a violence that tears whole regions apart”.

But then he closes his wings and dives to grasp the real core of the problem: “and all of this in the name of a fatal misunderstanding of freedom which actually undermines man’s freedom and ultimately destroys it”.

By this he refers back not only to the subject that was treated at length in his predecessors 1993 “Veritatis Splendor”*, but also to a profound and vital reality that has bethump’t the species since the beginning. Freedom, in a nutshell, cannot stand alone as a Good; if you use it to do evil or if you don’t know the difference between good and evil, or don’t believe there is a difference, then the ‘freedom’ you have is going to be limited indeed. An unskilled pilot who thinks he has the absolute freedom to fly his plane in reverse is going to find out the hard way just how ‘freedom’ without any grounding in objective knowledge and without a subjective commitment to the discipline of abiding by such truth can lead to catastrophe.

In the1970s, to recall the context of that era, strong cultural currents pushed the assertions that all sex was ‘good’ and anyway was nobody else’s business, and there were even those newly-liberated ‘voices’ who insisted that sex with children (or other species) was ‘good’.

Even in Catholic theology – and you didn’t have to travel far within the American Catholic fold to hear this sort of stuff – there were those who insisted that there is no such thing as something that is ‘good’ or ‘evil’ in itself, by its very nature. Indeed, many ‘valorized’ ideas insisted that there was no such thing as a human nature in the first place. And that if you were going to have to be ‘judgmental’ then you’d have to look at intentions and consequences – because you can’t just go around calling stuff ‘evil’ or ‘good’.

Benedict notes that John Paul II robustly dismissed this sort of thinking: there is ‘objective’ Good and Evil; humans can know that reality; and that knowledge simultaneously gives them a Shape for their freedom and lays upon them a moral responsibility to use their freedom to support the Good and choose against Evil.

It was all very judgemental, but then a pilot who doesn’t know how the plane actually works and who doesn’t use that knowledge to judge his contemplated actions isn’t going to be in business for long. Nor are his passengers going to be long for this world.

It is no surprise, I think, that the same New Left that ‘valorized’ such dampdreams as total-autonomy and being-nonjudgmental and sex-as-fulfillment has turned on the Church that has always stood like a firewall in the way of ‘liberation’ as the New Left defines it, working from checkerboard-maps of existence that cannot begin to comprehend the complexity of the Vulcan Chess Board upon which humans must work out their lives.

The Pope doesn’t note, but might have noted, abortion and pansexuality and torture and – given the concern for child welfare – the wide and long-lasting prescription of powerful psychoactive drugs to children who – as if it had only recently developed – had trouble developing attention and focus (a task which in less enlightened times was undertaken by parents). Perhaps he doesn’t want to risk tripping the cartoon-wire, as it were.

He then moves on to a bit of in-house discussion about some meetings with various of the Orthodox episcopacy and the Catholic Church’s relationship with the Orthodox Church. And he wants the Cardinals to grasp Orthodoxy’s recent efforts to reduce “Christianophobia”, that hostility to what the Christian message stands for, that spreads around the world in the postmodern age even more than in the modern age. The Pope implies that the harm that from a rejection of what the Christian message offers to humanity will harm all peoples, though aimed only at Christians.

His thoughts here are prompted by his recent visit to the Synod of the Churches of the Middle East. It was held, appropriately enough, on Cyprus, that densely-textured and troubled island where great religions have shared the same geographic space for centuries. Old hurts must be let-go, because “The wrongs and the deep wounds of the past were all too evident, but so too was the desire for the peace and communion that had existed before. Everyone knows that violence does not bring progress – indeed, it gave rise to the present situation. Only in a spirit of compromise and mutual understanding can unity be re-established. To prepare the people for this attitude of peace is an essential task of pastoral ministry”.

Again, his insight that “violence does not bring progress” stands four-square in the center of his thoughts, drawing upon his own experience, no doubt, of Germany’s unhappy experiences with ‘violent progress’ during the Third Reich in his youth.

The immediate issue is religiously-based violence, increasing in a Middle East (and a Europe that has taken in so many immigrants from that area) where the great religions have shaped the various cultures and where ‘differences’ can stoke deep emotions indeed. Human beings must be adept in the mature competences of reason and patience necessary to strike the complex dynamic balance of a ‘tolerance’ that enables civil comity and peace while not abandoning the vital Ground upon which cultures and lives are built and in which they and their peoples are vitally rooted.

If matters of ultimate meaning, especially when they have to share the same geographic turf, create the potential for disagreement and strife, yet it cannot be realistic or sane to simply wish-away the deep human need for the Beyond or, in the postmodern style, the Beyond itself.

I think there is food for American consideration here as well, although it lies below the surface of the thought (which is not a place most Americans look unless given some help). The ‘revolutionary’ sensibility – in the European, not the Framers’ sense of it – which was imported into this country bigtime through the Frankfurt School in its second phase (see my immediately previous Post), is almost by its very nature dependent upon ‘violence’ in some form or other.

While the democratic and deliberative Vision of the Framers, and the ethos they sought to support as the American key of public political discourse, was precisely intended to enable the Citizens to deliberate in an atmosphere of mutual reason, with an aim to arriving at a workable consensus as to how to order life for the common-weal, yet the revolutionary sensibility is antithetical to that ethos by its very nature. Because the very dynamic of the revolutionary cadre is that there is a great evil, which only the cadres and the ‘revolution’ can see, and which the rest of the populace is too dim or too invested in the ‘status quo’ to admit, which therefore not only justifies but requires revolutionary violence. ‘Democracy’ in this scheme doesn’t work, can’t work, and must be sidestepped or neutralized in order for the cadres to establish ‘revolutionary progress’.

Over here, the many ‘revolutions’ since the Sixties, guided by the thinking of the government-heavy Frankfurt School, have worked not so much through physical violence but through the less-bloody but equally pernicious violence of manipulation and distortions of truth; so much so that after 40 Biblical years not only can the Citizenry barely distinguish between truth and untruth, fantasy and reality, vision and illusion, but the government itself no longer sees the need to make such distinctions. Fear based on fears will do very nicely as a civic fuel, thank yew very much.

Which has reduced American politics to a hodge-podge of fearful and fearsome cartoons, caricatures of serious civic and public concerns and of mature public deliberation.

Which brings him to his third and final point, in another masterful segue.

“Alexis de Tocqueville, in his day, observed that democracy in America had become possible and had worked because there existed a fundamental moral consensus which, transcending individual denominations, united everyone. Only if there is such a consensus on the essentials can constitutions and law function. This fundamental consensus derived from the Christian heritage is at risk wherever its place, the place of moral reasoning, is taken by the purely instrumental rationality of which I spoke earlier. In reality, this makes reason blind to what is essential. To resist this eclipse of reason and to preserve its capacity for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and what is true, is the common interest that must unite all people of good will. The very future of the world is at stake.”

He touches on the often-unmentioned Ground which religion, and especially Christianity, provided through Western culture to the Enlightenment project. While the Enlightenment thinkers sought to free society and culture and politics from the influence of the Church as it had existed in the Dark Ages and the Medieval era, and in so doing figured that folks could find some non-transcendent, purely this-worldly basis of authority and belief on which to conduct a civilization and its civic and public affairs, YET they were working in the still-strong afterglow (sort of like the still usable ‘daylight’ of early dusk) of the powerful and comprehensive Transcendence imparted to the West by the Medieval spiritual vision.

While most of the Framers were from different Protestant traditions, they found common ground – wittingly or unwittingly – in the shared results of common moral formation and a common spiritual imagination. Their common assumptions as to what constituted ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, what made for ‘character’ and ‘virtue’, were anchored below the surface of their ideas in the common ground of Greek and Roman experience, as then enriched by centuries of Christian thought and contemplation.

They could have the ‘light’ without the ‘sun’, as it were, in that still-bright and warm dusk of the Enlightenment. Classical Liberalism (not the same as the shallow, revolution-addled ‘liberalism’ of current American politics) sought to build on the presumption that ‘modern’ humans could ground active benevolence and reason in purely this-worldly soil, with no need for the hard drilling in any serious transcendental bedrock.

For all its good intentions, that Classical Liberalism was built on sand – to use the Biblical image. And it was doomed to insufficiency as a life-Ground the same way that the plan of reading a book outside after sunset is doomed: no matter how much ‘light’ you seem to have when you start out just at sundown, you are going to be running out of sufficient light in a finite amount of time.

In that sense, nicely, it is the transcendent Beyond which provides the Ground that does not queasily shift, the Light that does not regularly fail.

Soused with their Abundance, so dense and layered that it seemed inexhaustible, such that even idiots and fools could get rich quick, Americans have not often contemplated the demands imposed by a this-worldly dimension too shallow and shifting to securely anchor and Ground their deepest and most genuine Selves. The descendants of the Puritans, desperately seeking to square that circle, came to assume that if you got rich then it proved that you were ‘good’ because otherwise God would not have favoured you with wealth ... but that was a ramshackle approach fraught with problems.

The Pope, noticing – I think – the increasingly wild thrashings of a great imperium in decline, and recalling how the Church has seen this sort of thing before, seeks to call the West and the world to a deeper and denser awareness of what is actually necessary to sustain humanity and its civilization.

This may seem, to the happy-faced and to the manipulative, like wayyy too much ‘darkness’ and ‘downness’, wayyy too much ‘unrealistic moralizing’. But it is the Pope’s point that humans are moral by nature and essence, and to ignore that fact is to condemn any ‘progress’ to nothing more than a queasy, cheap simulacrum of genuine fulfilment of humanity’s possibilities and its role in this world.

It will be interesting to see what happens in all this.

NOTES

*John Paul II’s Encyclical is an extended (about 70 pages) treatment of the difference between genuine freedom and false and illusory freedom, and how humans – especially in the modern (and postmodern) world – fail to distinguish between the two types of freedom, thereby causing huge suffering and precluding genuine fulfilment in their own lives and the lives of others. The text is available as a link here, along with a good synopsis.

MORE THOUGHTS ON POPE BENEDICT


Coincident with his official visit to the UK, an article has appeared in ‘The [London] Times On-line’, reprinted from the [London] ‘Times Literary Supplement’.

The piece is by the religion editor of the TLS, Rupert Shortt, who reviews a rather upbeat book entitled “Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed” by one Tracey Rowland.

Rowland’s rather upbeat approach to the subject provides an opportunity for Shortt to take the downbeat approach in his review, which he does. He’s nice enough about it, and comprehensive – and it is that very comprehensiveness that offers me an opportunity to make some comments about Shortt’s review and the general trend of Things Catholic since the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, now 45 years ago.

First, Shortt notes that in Benedict’s own volume of memoirs, published in 2000 and covering the years from his birth (1927) to his elevation to the Archbishopric of Munich (1977) then-Ratzinger did not mention the Holocaust or “the Jews” (Shortt’s term) even once. While a person’s memoirs are his own, and perhaps reflects an un-Correct set of personal priorities, it is a bit much to say that Ratzinger “leaves a sour taste in the mouth” because “given an ideal chance to deplore a catastrophe in which he had been a blameless bystander, [Ratzinger] instead chose to emphasize Hitler’s persecution of Catholics”.

But by 1977 the Israeli Realm had mastered the use of the Holocaust for its own purposes, and the American media had amplified that whole subject exponentially. But Shortt may be giving away a trade-secret of Correctness by taking Ratzinger to task for not Correctly putting himself on the record and – basically – ticking off that box on the Correct checklist.

And given his own religious background, Ratzinger is surely on solid ground by sharing his concern for Catholics. In fact, given that members of the Jewish faith had been historically given difficulties in pre-1933 Europe (although, especially in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany and in the Polish and Russian territory they had developed a robust and comprehensive culture and in Germany had become rather deeply enculturated) it was probably more of a historical anomaly that the Catholics were persecuted.

(And, just to add a poignant note, recall that in the mid-1930s, as the Nazis tried to establish their hegemony over stubbornly recalcitrant Catholic Bavaria and the German South, Goebbels had tried to engineer a public-relations coup by having the State Prosecutor there bring charges against an entire monastery full of Catholic religious on charges of – wait for it – child sexual abuse.* The sturdy Bavarians refused to take that seriously and Goebbels had to back down, no doubt on the orders of a Hitler who realized that he wasn’t going to be changing a millennium-old religious culture of belief overnight. The man was not a complete fool.)

But as I indicated in the immediately previous Post, any totalizing State’s pretensions put it on a collision course with the ancient teaching of the Catholic Church, the essence of which is that there is a God and His Higher Law to which all States and monarchs and governments must conform and by Whom they all stand under judgement. And while in the course of human events national Catholic hierarchies tend to take the side of their national flocks and – alas – their nations, right or wrong, YET the core of the genuine foundational teaching of the Universal Church remains solid as a rock.

And that is gall and wormwood to State-friendly interests, especially when they are especially State-dependent. And this, nowadays, would include both the National Nanny-Regulatory State of the current Left as well as the National Security-Invasion State of the Rightists. (See the immediately previous Post.) So you can see where the Catholic Church is pretty much bound to dissatisfy a whole lotta powerful interests in the modern West, no matter which way it turns, unless it simply takes the ‘mainline Protestant’ approach of diluting itself into some form of a goo-goo religious Chowder-and-Marching-Band Society, spreading ‘liberation’ either in the form of self-indulgent ‘luv’ or in the form of democracy-by-bayonet-and-God's-Will.

And for those wondering where ‘liberation theology’ fit into all of this, it is that by the 1960s the Church became verrry leery of ‘revolution’ given its experience of the Soviet and Nazi revolutions (although Hitler had indeed taken dictatorial power legally, the Nazi and Stalinist Modus Operandi were similar in many vital, insidious, and bloody respects). And when the revolutionary Content and Method arose again, ‘baptized’ – its proponents imagined – by the Good Purpose and Good Intentions of ‘the poor’, the Church hierarchy, functioning as much as a keel and rudder as a sail**, worked to rein that horse in before it took the wagon (and the poor) over yet another revolutionary cliff, as had befallen the hapless Russian people in October of 1917 and subsequently.

Shortt won’t have any of this. Benedict, he says, made two big mistakes. First, “his discussion ignored the largely supine response to the Nazis of both clergy and laity”. Rather true, but grossly incomplete. Western clergy, laity, and commentators never had to face directly a brutal and bloody dictatorship on its own ground. There existed every possibility that if you stood up you – AND your family – would have suffered immediate and awful consequences.

Worse, for any prelate charged with responsibility for his flock, there existed the very real danger that the Nazis would simply start taking ANY members of an offending religious faith-group and use them as hostages or – as the Nazis (and the Kaiser’s forces before them) did in Occupied countries – shoot a bunch to shut-up the rest. Gandhi did not have to face this in the far more respectful – if not indulgent – British rule of India; there were no Gandhis or Martin Luther Kings in Nazi Germany because they would have been taken and executed long before they could work up to speed (as happened to the greatest of the resistant German churchmen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

So it’s not an impressive gambit for a later commentator to tar the Nazi-era German religious leadership and congregants as “supine” (although there were, as ever among humans, a few who went along to get along). A bishop or prelate or leader who declared opposition to the Nazis was risking not only his own life but the lives of his flock – men, women, and children – to State reprisals … and in the Nazi State, ‘reprisal’ tended to be on the extreme and bloody end of that term’s definitional range.

Secondly, says Shortt, Ratzinger “drew the highly contentious lesson that the Church can only resist dictatorships effectively when run as a very tight ship”.

Yeah, well, phooey.

First, the lesson is “contentious” only because there are a number of persons who – for any number of reasons, not to exclude political agendas and a reliance on sentimentality rather than rational deliberation – don’t like ‘tight ships’. And many of them are in the U.S., which in the years 1963-1968 experienced the Second Vatican Council, the success of the first-phase of the Civil Rights Revolution, the increasing failure (in so many respects) of the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, the urban riots, three hugely significant assassinations (JFK, MLK,RFK), and – with an eye to the happy-face ‘success’ of Mao’s youthy and creatively-destructive ‘Cultural Revolution’ – a general sense of gaga over the positive possibilities of wide-ranging and free-range ‘revolution’ (radical feminism being the most organized fruit of Mao’s poisonous tree).

And it’s hugely significant that Shortt makes this classic objection to the Roman Catholic Vatican-heavy mode of governance: the ‘liberal’ Catholics of the Sixties were quite certain that ‘liberal democracy’ could work as well for the Church as it had for America itself. Which assumption seemed back in those days to be reasonable; America was a creative profusion of ‘democratic’ impulses and fever-dreams.

But now, given the inevitable (though never fully predictable) mutations and permutations imposed by almost half a century of vigorous History, there stands the awful Question: has American democracy been done in by too much Boomery, radical, fevered ‘democracy’? Is there any ‘there there’ any longer when you speak of ‘American society’ or ‘the American people’ as anything more than a geographically-defined term? Even Obama is trying to solve a problem he doesn’t dare admit exists: identity politics has shattered the American polity and any sense of common weal or common purpose, and enabled all sorts of ancient demons (Wealth (capital-W) being the most hoary of all) to return.

And – really – can you ever have a ‘radical democracy’?

If the Consequences of the Sixties are expressing themselves only now, half a century later, then perhaps the Church – and Benedict – will be proven right: that without some amount of serious guidance, very large bodies of folks are not going to be able to hold themselves together and sustain any effective sense of national identity. (Look at the mainstream Protestant churches in this country, for example, and ask yourself if they really remain vibrant and vital and distinctive religious communities of Christian belief.)

But of course, this comment of Shortt’s (did Benedict actually use the ‘tight ship’ image himself?) also emphasizes a verrry substantial difference in world view. A ‘ship’ is a constructed machine carrying a burthen of ‘souls’, a human community; moreover it requires a certain knowledge and skill to operate the ship safely, especially since its very reason for being is to traverse a very unpredictable and potentially lethal medium: the ocean, which is itself a potent brew of wind and weather and water – lots and lots of each.

THIS image captures many – but not all – of the major elements of the Church’s vision of humanity’s passage through History. You need a skilled and competent captain and crew to see this thing through, even as the passengers themselves conduct – within the parameters of the ship – their own lives and business.

But can you have a genuinely ‘democratic’ vision of humanity’s presence in this life and in human History and still subscribe to the ‘ship’ image? Surely not since 1968 or so, in the West, and certainly not in the U.S. ‘Total autonomy’ and the post-modern axiom that NOBODY can claim to really know what they’re doing to the extent that they can impose it on anybody else … you can’t very well run a ship and still remain congruent to current trends.***

But perhaps Human life together is neither a Ship nor a Garden, but just a ‘democracy’ of everybody doing what they can get away with and getting what they can get by ‘organizing’ and ‘pressuring’ for themselves and their preferred ‘group’ or ‘identity’ and figuring that there is no larger identity, no larger life, no Larger Life and no Larger Presence or Authority or Being. That’s a Flattening and ultimately enslaving and most surely dis-empowering approach, but in the short-run it sure LOOKS like a liberation … and if the Boomers loved anything more than not ever again being said No-to, they loved surfaces and appearances – since in their youthy salad days they hadn’t been around long enough to have to deal with the ‘bummer’ and ‘downer’ of Consequences and Limits and Reality (which last, by the by, post-modernism helpfully denies exists). Wheeee!

The question remains open at this point. But – if Benedict has bet on the right horse – humanity is still very much at sea on a storm-tossed ocean of existence, and in dire need of competence in order to stay afloat (in the metaphysical and moral, even more than the financial, sense).

Shortt’s conclusion is that the Pope’s memoir gives “the unintended impression … that its author, though urbane and intelligent, lacks common sense”. Which, come to think of it, could be the epitaph of an awful lot of elite commentators nowadays.

In the alternative, I would submit the very real possibility that the Pope’s wisdom – as the songster saith – “sank beneath them like a stone”. To use an image from the Cargo-Cult era of World War 2 in the South Pacific, when you know there are radio-waves, and are talking to South Seas Islanders who don’t even suspect the existence of such a dimension of reality and who are busily devising the best ritual for bringing the big silver birds filled with lotsa nice stuff, then your vision of how the world works is going to be lost on even the most elite of the native leaders.

I suppose there are innumerable modern elites who would take umbrage at being compared to Cargo-Cult natives, but there it is.

Ditto when Shortt then goes on to judge Benedict personally un-ambitious but still a “very ambitious promoter of his own model of church government”.

First, the whole idea underlying Identity Politics – especially in the Postmodern era – is that you promote your own visions and versions of how the world is supposed to work with gimlet-eyed, almost fanatical, resolve.

Second, Shortt seems to think that Benedict’s vision is just his own, personal, Benedict’s-eye-view of how the Church should operate. Perhaps Shortt confuses the Protestant polities with the Roman Catholic Church. But Benedict is standing-tall for the historic Roman Catholic vision, and also for the prudence that says If you’re going to change the foundations of a standing and occupied skyscraper, you really have to do so verrrrrry carefully and with a lot of serious thought; because even if in theory your changes will work, the consequences of your being wrong will wreck an awful lot of irreplaceable and vital human structure. (A thought that proved – alas – a Bridge Too Far for the eager churchy-embodiments of the post-Vatican 2 Boomers.)

Shortt goes on to accuse – gently – the Pope of “legerdemain” in his memoirs: from being a scholar who looked for more rational and reformed changes in the era before Vatican 2, Benedict went to being a rather careful (may I suggest ‘prudent’?) man in the era following Vatican 2’s termination in 1965. Shortt sees this as some form of conceptual inconsistency, and intentional at that. Although you could spend a whole lotta time with a Cray supercomputer trying to find the conceptual consistency in the agendas of today’s assorted Identities or even within each Identity; so, for example, trying to rationally harmonize the many sets, sub-sets, alter-sets, and oppositional-sets of overall Feminism at this point would be like trying to find conceptual consistency in the assorted Mensehivik, Plekhanovite, right-deviationist, left-deviationist, Old Bolshevik and New Bolshevik factions of Communism in the 1910s.

I can imagine Benedict’s thought as quite rational and reasonable: he saw opportunities for substantive reform but then realized that – given the tenor of the 1960s (not at all evident when the Council was conceived by John XXIII in 1959 nor even when it was convened in 1962) – the whole ‘change thing’ was going to go into frenzied overdrive and threaten to vibrate so violently as to wreck the whole structure. Like a car stuck in overdrive and rocking its own motor off the mounts.

So too Shortt thus accuses the author of the book here as subscribing to a “fantasy” – i.e. that Benedict has been fully consistent. To the extent that any serious thinker is ‘fully consistent’ over the course of decades, and to the extent that any serious thinker tries to adapt his presentations of his basic ideas to an idiom of expression suitable to the times in which he finds himself, and to the extent that his basic vision of things has remained steady and stable – to that extent I’d say that Benedict has been very respectably consistent, and far more so than an awful lot of ‘cutting-edge’ and ‘transgressive’ and even ‘progressive’ thinkers on the world scene today. (Which statement is not my commercial for pre-Vatican 2 Catholicism in every single aspect of practice.)

Perhaps Shortt here is simply trying to offer a counter-toned review of Rowland’s upbeat book.

Shortt notes that in the late 19th century, “Enlightenment rationalism was now to be answered with a Catholic counter-rationalism”. He refers to the deep embrace by the Church of Thomas Aquinas’s comprehensive – and I mean that in the fullest, pre-Modern and pre-Postmodern sense – attempt to rationally comprehend the vision of Humanity and its World as created by a loving God yet accessible to humans’ splendid Gift of a capacity for Thought and Self-Reflection that would guide the more universally mammalian Instinct and the unique, vital, but hard-to-master human Emotions.

The Catholic approach has always been an effort to deploy Mind in the service of a Soul that constitutes the most genuine reality of being a Human (Emotions indispensably a part of it as well), all the while understanding that the Human consisted not only of Mind and Emotion but also of a very real Soul, which was created in the image and likeness of a God Who actively seeks nothing less than a relationship-to-genuine-fulfillment with each Human and all Humans.

That’s quite a vision – and I challenge anybody to come up with as comprehensive a Model as Aquinas came up with (himself building upon both ancient Greek and early Christian thinkers). Indeed, while they have individually come up with interesting insights, the whole corpus of Western philosophers and thinkers since the beginning of the Modern Era (1600 or so) can be looked at as a whole bunch of players with their individual instruments trying to play, or even conceive of, a symphonic piece without reference to a Composer or Conductor. Would you pay good money (so to speak) to listen to an evening full of THAT at your local philharmonic hall?

And you always have to factor in – especially these days – a certain selective straw-man approach to commentary on the Church: you pick out what you don’t like, claim that the Church has been doing nothing but that all along, and then triumphantly claim that therefore the Church has to go (or at least ‘change’) in precisely the way you’d like to see. This is evident not only in the matter of deep philosophical and theological discussion but also in such more politically-driven and socio-cultural matters as the ordination of women, the morality of abortion, and the current fixation with a sex-abuse that – however much it may have been an active issue decades ago – appears to have been addressed with some real success (few newly-committed cases are to be found, certainly compared to the lurid intimations you find in the press).

Ratizinger, as Shortt notes, has always been concerned with “structural reform”. Good for him. That isn’t to say ‘foundational change’, but as a professional churchman Ratzinger has always been concerned with preserving the foundations, updating the structural elements that transmit the vitalities of the foundational elements to successive long-ages of human history, and effectively communicating, proclaiming, and sharing the vitality of the Church’s vision with all Humanity. Oh, and that presumes, of course, that you have to maintain a certain consistency of institutional identity. Oh, and that presumes that in the Church’s reality, God is always breathing Genuine and Ultimate Life into her so that she can continue to perform her God-given Mission.

It was for that complex of reasons that Ratzinger – and he was hardly alone – “decided that the liberal genie had to be returned to the bottle” after Vatican 2 began to gyrate wildly off the rails.

Genies – as anybody familiar with fairy-tales knows (at least if the tales haven’t been gutted by the mavens of Correctness) – are notoriously unreliable beings: you think you have formulated a reely reely great Wish, but then the Genie gets going on it and the next thing you know you’ve got what you asked for … but it’s somehow creating a whole mess of trouble that you never imagined but that the Genie helpfully instructs you were consequences contained logically within your dream-wish in the first place. (And can you say Iraq War?)

Or, to look at it another way, Benedict – like a shrewdly experienced emergency services director – realized early on that no matter how great the ‘emergency’ to which you must respond, you can’t drive an ambulance (or a dozen ambulances) at 120mph on crowded city streets.

At this point I’d like to propose something.

For all the decades since 1965 the appearance, if not so often the substance, of Great and Good Change has been maintained in the example – set forth to the world – of the United States: immensely rich and powerful, able to Change every old which way and still be Number One. In that context the Church’s rather prudent caution (she’s seen a lot of Change breed frakkulent unimagined consequences over the course of 2000 years) could easily be spun as stodgy, fuddy-duddy and worse – oppressive, hateful, insensitive, and you-name-it.

But it’s 2010, and 1965 was 45 years ago. And the United States – especially to eyes not soused by rah-rah American media ‘reporting’ – has come a substantial cropper. Its economy is a shambles and may never recover, its economic primacy is gone for good, and domestically its polity is riven and wracked by Identity Politics and the cumulative wrack of many decades of many revolutions; while in foreign affairs its ability to shape events is hugely reduced.

So too with American ‘liberals’ of the post-Vatican 2 era of the 1960s: whatever they demand now, the background context of ‘ever-changing and always-growing Success’ has dissolved into wrack and ruin.

This is NOT simply to say that some sort of neutral Hegelian thesis-antithesis dynamic is doing its inevitable thing. It is, rather, to say that so very much of what was embraced after 1968 or so has proven itself to have borne some awfully lethal poisonous fruit and that damage has now been done that may never be fully repaired. And that – in the eyes of future (read: unbiased) historians, the 21st century may now appear to them as similar to the West’s experience after the 6th century A.D., after the fall of Rome’s hugely advanced level of civilization and culture. (I read somewhere once that after Rome’s fall in the 500s,the average European ‘peasant’ did not achieve an equivalent level of living until the 1800s.)

We are not merely witnessing, perhaps, the end of a ‘change cycle’ and the counter-reaction. We are, I am saying, facing the cumulative Consequences of what can only be seen as the West’s self-destruction. Not through one huge series of world wars, such as World War 1 destroyed the achievements of late-19th century European civilization and culture. Rather, it has been a self-destruction through whackulently embraced Deconstruction.

Khrushchev did not bury the West. Rather, the West buried itself – and, in a hell-hot irony – it was precisely the collapse of the Soviet State that lured the U.S. into its most virulent frenzy of self-deconstruction (those years burbled by feministicals to be the flowering of their success under the benevolent aegis of Billary).

The Church has watched this as she once watched Rome herself slide down into the 500s.

You can imagine, then, why frenzied American criticism, liberal and progressive or fundamentalist, doesn’t make as much impression upon her as the American organizers would like. As National Nanny State – worshipping the fatuous frakkulence of ‘total individual autonomy’ – or as National Security State – worshipping the national government as a god (if only Bush had a horse to make a Senator!) … the Church has seen this sort of thing before. Been there, seen that.

Atheism – the presumption either that there is no God or that there are many gods (which is really a form of the old paganism) – is just a flicker of distracting energy on the surface of a dying thing.

This, I think, is a profound reality with which most Americans have not yet come to grips. But it is truly the key operative dynamic of history in Our time and for the forseeable future.

What resources – philosophical, theological, maturational – America and Americans possess to deal with this reality … now THAT is an interesting question.

But the Church, I would say, will draw on 2000 years of experience and on a Resource that is not dependent on the material world … and, if I were a betting person, will help shape whatever comes after Us.

NOTES

*One article reports as an outrage the following: there are in the UK priests who have been convicted of some form of child sexual-abuse and served at least one year in prison and who are still carried on their diocesan rolls and listed in the comprehensive directory of priests. And this despite “recommendations” made by the sentencing judges that the convict be “laicized”.

A couple of thoughts. First of all, in this day and age it doesn’t take a lot to get charged or even convicted of sexually abusing a child (which, let me say, is NOT to imply that some of those convicted did not commit outrageous, genitally or otherwise seriously invasive acts with children). And if you were to draw a one-year sentence on such a conviction, that would seem extremely low, opening up the very real possibility that the conviction was for a relatively low-grade act.

Second, you can be an ordained priest and yet not practicing ministry and still be carried on the official rolls. You can even be barred by your bishop from any public ministry and still be carried on the rolls, although to all appearances you would be living as a ‘lay person’.

Third, it is then quite possible that a bishop took pity on a priest – perhaps of advanced years – who is released from prison and at this late stage in life, especially given the specific nature of priestly training and the job market in all the Western countries nowadays. And thus the bishop might decide that the Church still owed him some modest support, and carries him on the rolls to ensure health insurance or a stipend to see him through his remaining years.

This, to the professional advocacies, is gall and wormwood and – perhaps taking a page from Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” – provides yet another opportunity to keep the flames fanned: they want the priest – who has now not only lost his life’s occupation but also any possibility of livelihood AND has completed (and physically survived) a prison sentence – to be cast into the outer darkness.

This is rather a bit too much of a muchness. And it is not a judge’s place to be ‘recommending’ religious disciplinary action to the Church. The State’s legal process has been carried through, a sentence imposed and completed, and that’s as far as the State’s writ runs.

I imagine that if the offender-priest had been ‘defrocked’ the established advocacies would then declare their ‘outrage’ that he is still allowed to receive the sacraments and hasn’t been excommunicated (the Church punishment of being completely thrown out of the Church, which can be imposed upon any Catholic if the bishop sees fit). That gambit would fit rather well with Alinsky’s pointers on technique: always keep the issue on the front burner no matter how much you have to change your agenda to do so.

I would also point out that the technicalities of the statutes as most are written do not conform to the formal and official psychiatric manuals’ diagnoses: a ‘pedophile’ is compulsively attracted to prepubescents, whereas it is quite possibly that a number of these convicted priests were actually found guilty of an offense in regard to an adolescent or at least someone under the age of majority (usually 16 or 18).

**On a sailing ship, the keel serves to reach down deep into the water and stabilize the hull as it responds to the pressure exerted by the sails’ catching the wind and tends to heel over to one side or another; the rudder steers the moving ship. The sails high up on their masts and yards are designed for the opposite – or, better, complementary - purpose of catching the wind and harnessing its power to create movement. Both forces are necessary and complementary: the keel and rudder control motion while the sails provide it.

***And as I so often say, how then can you run an actual Navy of ships in the current Correct post-modern era?