Killing Pope Ratzinger

The title of this blog article, “Killing Pope Ratzinger”, is to provide a kind of a sequel to my earlier piece, “Killing Pope Francis”. First Things journal has wanted to be rid of “Pope Francis” almost from the beginning.

Of course, Triablogue readers have known that Bergoglio (“Pope Francis”) would be “Opposing Ratzinger” from a blog article of that same title early in the papacy.

Joseph Ratzinger, the former (and perhaps “emeritus”) “Pope Benedict” is in the news right now.

“First Things”, in an article entitled “Benedict in Silence”, is lamenting that the former Prefect for “John Paul the Great” did not speak out doctrinally on the conflicts over the “interpretation” of “Amoris Laetitia” (and other Bergoglioan papal initiatives):

Betting on Dead Papal Politics

Which pope’s agenda will win? 

One of the things about having to maintain an “unbroken succession” of popes is that you know that there is always going to be a “next guy” to come around. And you can entertain the hope that the “next guy” won’t be as bad as “this guy” has been. (I’m recalling an early “Pope Francis”-era interview with Cardinal Timothy Dolan talking about “this guy” – the new “Pope Francis”).

In his article “Burying Benedict”, First Things “Literary Editor” Matthew Schmitz seems to have that very hope – that the “next guy” or some subsequent “guy” will be a better pope than “Pope Francis”. A “guy” with a better “interpretation”. He makes the bold claim that indeed, it won’t be the “Francis” agenda “Burying Benedict”, but “Benedict” will in effect be “burying the Francis agenda”.

Which will ultimately survive?

Killing Pope Francis

“Killing Pope Francis” (or at least, killing his agenda) is the unstated theme in a similarly named article in First Things, the self-annointed America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life, “Burying Benedict”. Of course, in today’s terror-soaked world, no one in his right mind would suggest killing a pope in public. Or would they? But now, Matthew Schmitz, “literary editor of First Things”, is certainly implying that “Pope Francis” wants to kill off “Pope Benedict”. Or at least to kill off his agenda:

Though Benedict is still living, Francis is trying to bury him. Upon his election in 2013, Francis began to pursue an agenda that Joseph Ratzinger had opposed throughout his career. A stress on the pastoral over against the doctrinal, a promotion of diverse disciplinary and doctrinal approaches in local churches, the opening of communion to the divorced and remarried—all these proposals were weighed and rejected by Ratzinger more than ten years ago in a heated debate with Walter Kasper. For better or worse, Francis now seeks to reverse Ratzinger.

Or kill him and bury him.

This article reminded me of something that Jason Engwer first posted some years ago. It was bad news being a pope in the 900’s. Eamon Duffy, writing in his History of the Popes, “Saints and Sinners”, describes one of the most sordid periods in papal history:

Deprived of the support of empire (of Charlemagne), the papacy became the possession of the great Roman families, a ticket to local dominance for which men were prepared to rape, murder and steal. A third of the popes elected between 872 and 1012 died in suspicious circumstances – John VII (872–82) bludgeoned to death by his own entourage, Stephen VI (896–7) strangled, Leo V (903) murdered by his successor Sergius III (904–11), John X (914–28) suffocated, Stephen VIII horribly mutilated, a fate shared by the Greek antipope John XVI (997–8) who, unfortunately for him, did not die from the removal of his eyes, nose, lips, tongue, and hands (Saints and Sinners, Second Edition, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, © 1997, 2001, and likely others, pg 104).

At least the succession remained unbroken. The world needs a “Successor of Peter” to be a visible sign of unity in the church.

And Schmitz is now noticing that same theme – yes, popes are in the habit of killing off other popes – and Schmitz himself seems to want to kill off Bergoglio the Kasper fan (and by extension, the evil thug Hans Küng, of whom Kasper is a student). He does not say that outright, but the intention is there.

By the way, this opposition between Bergoglio and Ratzinger is something that I detailed in the blog article I entitled “Bergoglio’s Gig, Part 3: Opposing Ratzinger”. Yours truly was saying just four days after Bergoglio was named pope that he was “Opposing Ratzinger” and supporting Kasper. It has taken Schmitz some four years to get up to speed.

I, at least, did not posit that one pope would be killing another one.

Regarding Duffy, I have an older version, and so if you have or purchase a newer version, the pagination may be different. Duffy has continued to update the work as new popes come and go. Perhaps if Schmitz gets his way, Duffy will have to update yet again.

Carl Trueman Plays the Sanctimonious Fool

I’m sorry if this sounds uncharitable, I really am. However, it’s so sad to me when a seminary professor at a leading Reformed seminary – and one who’s a celebrity to boot – gets things wrong like this. He says in a recent First Things blog article:

I am not a Roman Catholic and not a huge fan of much Roman Catholic theology. But I had long thought that, when it came to social teaching and hard-headed moral thinking, the Roman Catholic Church was light years ahead of most Protestants in both sophistication and precision. That no longer seems to be the case.

I wonder if he has really been following along, or if he just picked the thing up in a vacuum and responded sanctimoniously. The problem is, Trueman in this very article demonstrates that he hasn’t got a good grasp on what Roman Catholicism really teaches in this case, about marriage, nor has he identified what they’re talking about when they talk about “adultery”. In most cases, “Roman Catholic moral thinking” is far more sanctimony than it is “sophisticated” or “precise”.

Earlier in the article, he writes:

Last week I stumbled across the document issued recently by the Roman Catholic bishops of Malta. It is an attempt to establish “criteria” for “applying” the now-infamous Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia…

Paragraph 9 of the Maltese bishops’ document is one for the ages: We are told of “complex situations” that might make it “humanly impossible” to avoid illicit sex. I wonder what those situations might be?

“Illicit sex” in this case, in the real world (not a conservative Roman Catholic view) is simply sex between a legally married couple. Traditional, conservative Roman Catholics view these documents as discussing the fate of a Roman Catholic couple, married according to Rome’s “sacramental marriage”, who hasn’t gone through their Annulment process, who gets divorced and civilly re-married.

Tammany on the Tiber: Enhancing the Allure of Celebrity through “Sainthood”

Tammany Hall was (in)famously the political machine in New York City in which for decades the political “bosses” ran an efficient and corrupt political machine based on patronage and graft. According to Wikipedia, Tammany “depended for its power on government contracts, jobs, patronage, corruption, and ultimately the ability of its leaders to swing the popular vote.”

Now Maureen Mullarkey now has compared the Vatican to Tammany Hall (HT: Paul Bassett) in its recent rush to name popes as “Saints” (Pope John XXIII and John Paul II recently canonized, and now rumblings that Pope Paul IV, the “contraception” pope is headed down that path as well).

It’s a system that can vote for its own infallibility AND its own celebrity. And the celebrity of a Saint Al Capone. Of course, it’s a system that also hides its own incompetence and its leftist agenda behind flashy headlines as well:

Catholics—popes among them—are no less subject than anyone else to the lure of the star system and its crafted emphasis on personality.

It took no time at all for Francis to degrade into a celebrity. And like any politically astute showman, he takes to the camera for carefully designed photo-ops. (Posing with an anti-fracking T-Shirt in November, he conferred on activist filmmakers the kind of endorsement we expect from Yoko Ono and Matt Damon.) Media-conscious symbolic gestures are mirrored in an airy, imprecise rhetoric that is a receptacle for whatever meaning the public drops into it.

Francis clearly likes the elusive phrase “economy of exclusion.” He has used it before. Imprecise, it is a phrase for rent to fixers and mongers of any stripe. This time he served it to Ban Ki-Moon and visiting attachés of that grand sepulcher on the East River. But what do the words signify? Are they a gloved jab at the crony capitalism disabling his native Argentina? Do they aim at an American president who obligates an unborn generation to insurmountable debts not of its making? Was Francis making veiled reference to the debased status of imperiled Christians in Syria? Or, perhaps, to Islamo-leftism and the price of totalitarian theocracy? Might the phrase have sideways, metaphoric application to Vatican recognition of a Palestinian state that refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist?

None of these. Uttered in concert with an autocratic injunction for “legitimate redistribution” of wealth, our pope was lending his office to apostles of the same tired, ideological hostility toward the market that ends in economic slavery under the guise of social justice. Papal messianism, bolstered by lack of competence in economics, is the road to a familiar hell, however finely paved with lovely intention.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/mullarkey/2014/05/tammany-on-the-tiber

Hope for Carl Trueman: “When chess beats lingerie models”

Carl Trueman has recently lamented the rise of pornography in our culture, but perhaps we’ve reached a moment of common grace in which the vacuous nature of it is admitted not to be able to satisfy the deeper intellectual needs of male audiences around the world.

It appears as if the current World Chess Championship (between champion Viswanathan Anand of India and Magnus Carlsen of Norway) is garnering higher viewership on the GQ site than is a photo spread featuring Victoria’s Secret models.

Fully 700,000 viewers tuned in when NRK started up its live broadcasts during the weekend, reported media website Kampanje. Even though the games going on in Chennai, India begin mid-morning in Norway (10:30am local time), NRK is claiming strong viewership in a country of just 5 million people….

India has seen massive coverage itself in all media outlets as expected, but going beyond the plain game summaries….

Still, the story that stood out far beyond any other, was reported by GQ Magazine. GQ is a specialized magazine for men’s fashion and style, and recently published a massive photoshoot of 100 models in Victoria Secrets lingerie….

That it was massively popular is no surprise, but what was a surprise, as tweeted by GQ itself, was that this story was losing out to another story posted the same day. You guessed it: the world chess championship….

I am glad to see that a real confessional Presbyterian has finally joined the discussion at First Things. Perhaps that is an admission that their Friday regular is not a real Protestant? That, too, would be a common grace.

The Conservative Roman Catholic “Yuck” Factor

Finally, the “leadership” in the Roman Catholic Church is being called to account, and it’s none-too-soon:

The media responses to the final order to disclose all the files of predator priests and descriptions of the 10-year saga that preceded the court's decision on Jan. 31 do not come close to telling the full story of the nightmare that led up to that day. The last major act, Archbishop Jose Gomez’s meaningless censure of Mahony and Mahony’s whining retort on his blog, is all about them and not about the real core of this almost incredible decade of events. At the heart of it all are the victims of Los Angeles priests, several hundred men and women. Yet the legal battle that went on and on not only overlooked them but continued to heap pain on their already scarred souls. … The real cost of his hat was in people.

There were 508 victim/survivors as plaintiffs in the cases that eventually were settled in 2007 for $660 million. They had been put through agony during the months and years they were manipulated, lied to and revictimized before any of them went to court. Then the first phase of the nightmare began…

The weight of the news is just too oppressive to bear for some conservative Roman Catholics, who, finally, again, are perceiving a “yuck” factor associated with all of this, and it’s being brought to light amid stories of this current papal resignation and upcoming conclave.

For example, uber-Catholic-convert and First Things editor is Staying Home from the Conclave, and recommending that other tainted Cardinals do the same:

I wish some of the other Cardinals would give up the privileges of their office and refrain from attending the conclave. Cardinal Mahony offers a good example. The most generous thing we can say for his work as archbishop of Los Angeles is that it involved egregious errors of judgment. I’d like to be charitable, but I’m inclined to think much worse. The same holds for Cardinal Danneels of Belgium.

Cardinal O’Brien isn’t the only precedent. Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation was historic, and it was not prompted by any accusations of misdeeds and misconduct.

Still, if the underlings are tainted, shouldn’t the boss be held accountable? Not in the wonder-world of Roman Catholicism. Reno again:

… it would be a good witness for our age if a few of the Church’s princes accepted the fact that the best service they could provide to the Church is to acknowledge the damage they’ve done by staying home….

Meanwhile, the conservative Roman Catholic LifeSite News “details” a Huge homosexual underground in the Church. Not that not that that’s something we didn’t know about before. But that conservative Roman Catholics are bringing it up now points again to that “yuck” factor.

Of course, they are stuck with it now – it’s been enshrined into dogma. Note how the Catechism of the Catholic Church has given practicing homosexuals in the priesthood (and higher) a license to practice, practice, practice, while only gradually approaching the “Christian perfection” of “chastity”, to which they are called:

Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.

See also: “Dung in their faces”: “All the dignity which ye pretend shall be abolished”.