After Pope Benedict’s Resignation, NY Times Unleashes Record Hate

I’d like to look at the piece in the New York Times by non-overly-religious religion writer Rachel Donadio, referenced and linked-to by DP in the above article.

 

Trying to get out a Memo to the cadres with talking-points that might be developed, Donadio goes for the idea that by resigning, Benedict has profoundly weakened the ‘divine’ and ‘infallible’ authority of the Papacy (so, I guess, a Pope might now have to be as dependent upon daily opinion polls and the NYT editorial page as any American big-league politician). Donadio is not unhappy about this. Not hardly.

 

Might this all not “undermine the authority of the Church’s teaching”? (with most of which Donadio seems quite unhappy).

 

Despite the fact that even she admits that Canon Law actually has legal justification for a papal retirement in place, she gamely seeks out whomever can be quoted as saying that the whole thing is “confusion” and that “the implications of Benedict’s act remain unclear”. Be of good hope all ye who want to see the Pope and Cardinals made to parade like overdressed donkeys in dunce-caps and recite their abject failures in front of the ruthless and Correct Red Guards of today! Preferably, I imagine, in St. Peter’s Square.

 

Benedict has transformed “an office with an aura of divinity into something far more human”, she says. When God has rather clearly established and sustained your Office, then – yes – I guess you can say there is some rub-off that produces an “aura of divinity”, but the emphasis is on the aura, not on the divinity. This has not been emphasis prevalent among the Abuse-niks, for whom the Pope has to be ‘divine’ because the priest who ‘works for’ the Pope has to be sorta ‘divine’ because that’s the only way to explain with a straight face how thousands of instances of abuse (plus the invisible ‘9’ cases for every one reported case) took place for so long and yet nobody but nobody among all the relevant adults noticed anything.

 

One Professor Pennington is brought forward to address the somewhat sophomorically-posed question: how can you be infallible one day and fallible the next? The answer to that was clear long before Vatican 2: the Pope is only infallible when defining matters of faith and dogma in the formal ex cathedra setting and in no other way (I clearly recall as a Catholic grade-schooler working my way through that formula after one of the Sisters put it up on the board). And on top of that, the ex cathedra status has its own requirements having to do with the cooperation of other ranking prelates. Clearly then, once Benedict is retired the elements necessary for ‘infallibility’ will not be in place. It’s the process – not the individual – that achieves infallibility.

 

But Pennington knows enough to dance with those what brung him, and struggles manfully to make a mountain worthy of the New York Times out of a molehill (also characteristic of the Times).  What’s his status? What’s his title? What are his powers (can no longer leap tall buildings in a single bound?)? These questions, too, seem sophomoric even to a Catholic grade-schooler from back in the day: Benedict retains the fullness of priesthood and the ‘powers’ that go with it. And maybe can get your parking tickets taken care of in Vatican City – maybe. The power resides in the Petrine Office, not the individual.

 

Diarmaid MacCullough also does a turn here. I have discussed his thousand-page history of Christianity before: he very much wants the Roman Catholic Church to lighten-up and loosen-up; yet all the examples of Christian groups that have done just that are ‘historical’ (i.e., the groups have ceased to exist or the groups got blended into other groups and lost identity and cohesion). He never does seem to notice the problems in his basic framing of the matter.

 

We can have a Queen Mother, opines MacCullough, but can we have a Pope Father? Cute, but sophomoric. You can have a Dowager Empress – just as, in Maggie Smith’s superbly-limned character, you can have a Dowager Countess of Grantham: she doesn’t run the estate but she’s great dinner company and always has some worthwhile thoughts. Donadio is eager to opine that “the very idea of a retired pope meant that the title has lost some of its luster”.  Well, actually, she writes that “some say” that. Perhaps some furniture wax or car wax can restore the shine. And how much “luster” may we presume the Papacy, in the Times’ estimation, to have in the first place?

 

Pennington suddenly reappears: even though a ranking canon-lawyer has explained rather clearly how infallibility works, Pennington (a professor of ecclesiastical and legal history at Catholic University of America) still dutifully whines that he can’t see how anybody can be infallible one day and fallible the next. The idea that the infallibility doesn’t inhere in the individual seems beyond him. How did he get through Catholic grade-school?

 

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, opines that “the pope is not like sort of a God-king who goes on to the very end”. Well duh. The Petrine Office is the key here, not the individual. Nor has Williams’s own Anglicanism fared well of late, having embraced MacCullough’s vision of embracing the loosey-goosey and trusting in your God or your personal pet-rock that it will all work out OK in the end.

 

Donadio is looking for reinforcement from all these gentle-puffs: if a Pope through retirement becomes ‘relative’ (as opposed to ‘absolute’) then the doctrines he implemented become equally ‘relative’. And thus – I imagine she’s going-for here – then ‘doctrine’ becomes ‘relative’ and maybe plastic and more like play-dough. This would bring the Church – in the Times’ vision – into the great sandbox of modernistic Western civilization, where everybody is playing with the play-dough and making nicey shapes … the Church could get its own pail and shovel in the corner of the sandbox currently inhabited by MacCullough and Williams and Pennington and the games can go on from there.

 

Also, by stepping into the sandbox, the Church will finally get a decent grade from the Times in the Plays Well With Others category.

 

Somehow the Church got through Celestine V’s retirement so I can’t see the cause for brouhaha.

I came across the following post regarding the Sophomoric Times and its anti-Catholic obsession on the website of a more reputable newspaper. I was unaware of this and can't vouch for its validity, but, judging by the poster's other comments, I would imagine there is some credence to this:

"The actual abuse by a few homosexual liberal priests was during the 1960s and the 1980s. The reason it was blown up into a "scandal" by newspapers such as the New York Times and Boston Globe (both owned by the Sulzberger family) during the 2000s was because the Vatican refused to support the Zionist Iraq War.

Presenting all priests as pedophiles was the revenge, while not focusing on the higher percentage of abuses in any other institution in society. After WWII, Jews and their allies, liberal WASPs, have been working frantically to finish off the Catholic Church and at local level, Catholic culture, as their last great enemy in the West (just like they view Islam in the East). So anything goes, when it comes to propaganda, whether it’s about abortion, marriage, etc.

The case with Jimmy Savile and the BBC/NHS shows how, if people wanted to, they could manufacture a supposedly all encompassing scandal which portrays all people involved with nursing or all media people as pedophiles and memes could be imparted into popular discourse where "BBC" and "pedophile" are always mentioned together… but there has to be a political impetus."

Uh boy, here we go, again. IL Papa will likely have to defend against claims of being the warden at Treblinka as he is wheeled/guided out of the Vatican Palace-

http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/paper-reveals-skeletons-in-benedicts-closet/?cat_orig=faith