The
appointment of the new pope, Joseph Ratzinger, guarantees that
that mental shackle will be cinched up a notch-or-two, and the
papal caravan that’s winding back to the dark-ages will
steadily gain in momentum. Wherever we look, the institutions
that protect secular democracy are being uprooted from their moorings
and tossed on the slag-heap. A right-wing ideologue, like Pope
Benedict XVI, just puts the finishing touches on a global system
that’s already dominated by Islamic fanatics, Jewish settler-extremists
and Christian fundamentalists all brandishing the same cudgel
of intolerance and all eager to force “infidels” to
conform to their twisted doctrine.
Ratzinger
is a particularly aggressive form of this modern-day sarcoma.
His inflexible views should merge seamlessly with the chauvinism
of Bush, Sharon and al Zarqawi. During his tenure at the Vatican
he personally spearheaded the effort to elevate the Nazi-collaborating
Pious XII to sainthood and led the charge to publicly humiliate
candidates (like John Kerry) whose views on abortion and birth
control were not consistent with his own. (by threatening to bar
them from the sacraments) He also “publicly praised the
fascist movement in the Church known as Opus Dei and supported
the canonization of Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei,
an open fascist who served in the government of Spain’s
dictator Franco, and who publicly praised Hitler.” (quote
from Rabbi Michael Lerner.)
Ratzinger’s
critics have dubbed him “God’s rottweiller”;
a sobriquet that captures his combative and polarizing style.
He’s lived up to that title by taking the most stridently
conservative positions on nearly every social issue. He summarized
the women’s liberation movement by saying that “women
should “follow the roles inscribed by her biology”;
a comment that suggests women that should accept their traditional
function as domesticated breeding-machines. It’s the same
as saying that, “A woman’s place is in the home.”
Not much changes in Rome in 2000 years.
On
homosexuality, Ratzinger’s views are even more odious. He
is quoted as saying that gays are inherently disposed “to
intrinsic moral evil” and that their rights can be “legitimately
limited”.
“Intrinsic moral evil”?
What
unbelievable gall. This is the type of statement we would expect
from a gay-bashing, white-supremacist, not the pope. No wonder
America’s right-wing punditocracy is all a-twitter over
his appointment; they know they’ve got a friend in Rome
who shares their same world view. (And, by the way, it was an
appointment. Despite the universal belief that some form of democratic
process took place, the reality is that “John Paul appointed
all but 2 of the men who elected the new pope” (al Jazeera)
That’s as close to a sure thing as an Ohio optical scanner.)
Ratzinger,
however, has been much more guarded in his opinions about pedophile
priests. Perhaps, that has something to do with the various cover-ups
that were arranged under his authority, like evacuating the serial-criminal
Cardinal Law from the Boston diocese. Ratzinger was apparently
involved in arranging a sinecure for Law in Rome to save the Boston
Cardinal from facing felony charges at home.
In
another story recently run by Reuters, “New Pope shelved
sex abuse claim”, Alistair Bell shows that Ratzinger was
directly involved in “deliberately shelving a probe into
(sex abuse) claims for 6 years.” The allegations were filed
with Ratzinger’s office at the Vatican and claim that 9
former members of the Legion of Christ were sexually abused by
the order’s founder, Marcial Maciel.
By
now, we all know the drill. Once the claims are filed, the church
elders go into lockdown-mode and hide behind a wall of denial.
What a joke; the same characters who feel free to wag their fingers
at homosexuals and scold struggling parishioners about the sinfulness
of birth control, sweep their own criminal activities under the
Vatican doormat. The hypocrisy would make a Pharisee wince.
Ratzinger’s
intolerance stretches well beyond homosexuals and women. In 1997
he said that Europeans were attracted to Buddhism for its “autoerotic
spirituality” that offers “transcendence without imposing
concrete obligations”. He has been equally dismissive of
Hinduism saying that it offers “false hope” and condemns
its adherents to a “morally cruel” concept of reincarnation
that resembles “a continuous circle of hell”.
Similarly,
Ratzinger laid out his belief that Catholicism is superior to
other forms of Christianity in his theological treatise “Dominus
Jesus” (Jesus is Lord”) The document angered many
Protestants by its declaration that the real message of Christ,
“subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the Successor
of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him”. Skeptical
Protestants took this to mean that the Catholic Church did not
consider their churches as true.
As
the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (which
was originally called the Office of the Inquisition) Ratzinger
led the crusade to silence or remove dissenters, visionaries and
progressives. The office served as the papal “thought police”;
rooting out the liberals and bringing them into line with Catholic
doctrine. Ratzinger’s aptitude for this new task won him
the appellation “Cardinal Enforcer”, the high-priest
of Catholic orthodoxy. In just a few short years he managed to
stamp out “liberation theology”; (the fusing of Christianity
with activism) crushing the aspirations of desperately impoverished
people in their struggle for social justice.
To
his credit, Ratzinger was a strong critic of the war in Iraq saying
that the invasion “had no moral justification” and
that the concept of “preventive war does not appear in the
Catechism of the Catholic Church.”
Nevertheless,
we can only guess what his feelings may be about the broad-based,
national liberation movement (“the insurgency”) that
has sprouted up in reaction to the illegal occupation of Iraq.
Also,
how will the new pope regard the nascent resistance movement in
Haiti, where the democratically elected Aristide was removed in
a coup organized by the United States? Judging by Ratzinger’s
efforts to crush Latin American liberation theology, we can expect
that the pope will condemn these indigenous movements aimed at
reclaiming their country through force of arms. Ratzinger won’t
be delivering any “fatwas” from Rome, nor has concept
of “jihad” caught on in Vatican City. Instead, we
can expect the plaintive appeals for “peace and justice”
accompanied by tacit support to the powers that be. Traditional
Church doctrine offers no relief for the struggles and suffering
of the common man; just the “pie-in-the-sky” promise
of an easier life in the netherworld. That won’t change
under Ratzinger.