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Articles > Status
Ecclesiae July 2005: "Lieber Bruder Joseph, Beloved Benedict"
Status Ecclesiae
July 2005
“Lieber Bruder Joseph, Beloved Benedict”
- by John Mallon, Contributing Editor, Inside the Vatican
Everyone in the Church who loved John Paul
II and what he stood for also loves Joseph Ratzinger. For
them (us) the news of Cardinal Ratzinger’s being elected
Pope Benedict XVI was almost too good to be true, bringing
tears of joy and relief and gratitude to God.
When John Paul II came onto the scene we did not know him,
but in short order we fell in love with him. But Benedict
XVI has been our friend for a long time. For Catholics who
love the teachings of our Church, the people who ridiculed
us for our beliefs in our parishes, theology departments and
chaplaincies also ridiculed him. They called him the same
names they called us. He is one of us—our champion and
defender.
Even when our bishops dismissed our concerns, we knew Cardinal
Ratzinger was on our side. We always knew John Paul was on
our side, but the steady calm of Cardinal Ratzinger gave us
hope that the truth would win.
And now he is Peter.
Pope Paul VI said in a famous remark that the “smoke
of Satan” had entered the Church. It is widely believed
that Paul was referring to the hijacking of the Second Vatican
Council that took place in the years following in the name
of unbridled “experimentation.”
On the day before he was elected Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger
said we were “moving towards a dictatorship of relativism.”
Reflecting on this, it is clear that the Church in the West,
especially in North America and Europe, has been under a “tyranny
of liberalism.” This may seem like an oxymoron, but
George Orwell’s book Animal Farm showed how easily the
“oppressed” (or those who imagine themselves to
be oppressed) can become the oppressors.
In the West, dissident theologians and their followers have
had ugly flirtations with ideologies at odds with the Church
to the point of idolatry, replacing Scripture, Tradition and
the Magisterium with Marxism, feminism and liberalism as their
moral reference points. This has indeed resulted in a “dictatorship
of relativism,” because the compass of ideology has
no true north.
Try this experiment: The next time someone says, “The
Church has to allow women’s ordination, contraception,”
etc. ask them, “Says who?”
Seriously and respectfully, try to pin down the authority
to which they refer that says Church teaching must change.
Find out who, for them, is the authority that stands above
Christ. Christ very clearly passed his authority to Peter
and his successors and promised to protect it from error in
faith and morals.
Ask them from whom they take their cues when they reject
the teaching authority of the Church. When they reject the
authority of Christ through Peter, to whom do they pledge
their allegiance? From whom do they take their orders? To
whom do they owe their obedience? To whom or to what do they
bend the knee?
If they can answer without getting flustered and insulting
you, if they have thought that far into it, you have identified
their god, their object of idolatry.
The smoke of dissent in the Church has indeed been oppressive,
seeking to silence and stifle orthodox voices and control
who gets into the seminaries, theology faculties and diocesan
staffs.
Stories of bitter, icy, feminist nuns interrogating prospective
Catholic school teachers and potential seminary candidates
for their views on women’s ordination are legion. The
effect in the schools has been that two generations went uncatechized
because of ideologues chasing fad theologies (like liberation
theology) in the big religious education and pastoral institutes
instead of studying catechetics.
The effect in the seminaries has been to screen out good
candidates and then cry to the news media that women’s
ordination is “necessary” due to “lack of
vocations.”
Practically everything dissenters have falsely accused Cardinal
Ratzinger of doing to famous dissident theologians over the
years, they have been doing to the people of God and orthodox
Church professionals on the local level.
In fact, this is still happening where a “cult of experts”
is imposing questionable sex education programs in Catholic
schools against the objections of conscientious parents who
cite Church teachings on parents being the primary educators
of their children, especially on such delicate matters.
The rush to “appear do be doing something” after
the 2002 sex abuse crisis has overruled concern about whether
what is being done is wise.
This will ultimately leave the Church in a worse, not better,
situation. The same reliance on “experts” which
brought us the sex abuse crisis is still in play at the insistence
of heterodox bureaucrats, who still seem to be able to bully
and intimidate local ordinaries into going along, ignoring
the cries of parents.
While the sex abuse crisis transcends the usual heterodox/
orthodox divisions in the Church, there can be little doubt
that the bullying tactics used by dissidents against bishops
to make them retreat into silence about wrongdoing, led them
into a habitual pattern of inaction which exploded in their
faces with the sex abuse crisis.
The mission of the Church has been stalled and stifled on
the local level by these antics, so much so that faithful
Catholics simply turned to John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger
as their pastors, teachers and spiritual fathers, feeling
more at home with the Vatican than with their local parishes.
Catholics who have lost confidence in their local pastors
and bishops turn to the Vatican for nourishment, teaching
and preaching.
This, in turn, has led to an extraordinary sense of global
community and solidarity among the persecuted orthodox, especially
the youth. This is clearly evident in the phenomenon of World
Youth Days. This sense of shared faith, strengthened by having
to defend their faith at home, has formed bonds of friendship
and unity which transcend language and culture by shared friendship
with Jesus and the shared experience of the hostility of heterodox
ideology which rings false in their hearts.
They see through the constant calumny by the dissident establishment
directed at the Vatican hierarchy as “cold, distant
patriarchs” interested only in “power” and
“position” who don’t listen to the “people.”
One smile from John Paul II demolished that myth. In truth,
the only “dialogue” being stifled is that of the
orthodox faithful when they object to abuses in their parishes.
Those faithful who cite the Pope and the Magisterium to their
dissident clergy, nuns and theology professors are contemptuously
regarded as cranks and troublemakers and most absurdly of
all as being “divisive” for asking that their
parish (or theology department or religious education department)
think with the Church.
This abusive behavior toward the faithful, so often in the
name of “the spirit of Vatican II,” has resulted
in driving some Catholics into schism in the form of traditionalist
groups which reject the Second Vatican Council altogether.
Wisely, John Paul II instituted the availability of the Tridentine
Mass by an indult as a way to provide a home within the Church
for these spiritual refugees driven from their own parishes.
But through all this, Joseph Ratzinger has been our hero,
our beloved brother and teacher. He has endured the same insults
and abuse that we have. And now he is our Holy Father. His
election does indeed represent “a year of favor from
the Lord and a day of vindication by our God” as the
Scripture readings prophetically proclaimed at the Mass for
the Election of the Roman Pontiff.
With Benedict’s election this Scripture was doubly
fulfilled in our midst, as God spoke to His people knowing
full well what He had planned for the following day. Our dear
brother Joseph is now our beloved Benedict.
Viva il Papa!
John Mallon is a Contributing Editor to Inside the Vatican
magazine. He also has regular columns on the websites Catholic.Org
and TheFactIs.Org.
An archive of Mr. Mallon's work also appears here: http://www.petersvoice.com/mallon/index.html.
You can reach Mr. Mallon at johnmallon@insidethevatican.com.
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