John Allen, Jr. of The National Catholic Reporter has a great article on Pope Benedict. He writes for a notoriously liberal publication, but he is a consummate professional, a real journalist, and his take is without a doubt the best I've read:
Perhaps the best explanation on that score came from [Cardinal] George.
“In 1978, when Karol Wojtyla was elected as Pope John Paul II, the primary challenge to the church came from the East, in the form of Soviet Communism,” George said. “Today the most difficult challenges come from the West, and Benedict XVI is a man who comes from the West, who understands the history and the culture of the West.”
Ratzinger’s clarion call to resist a Western “dictatorship of relativism” could be likened to John Paul II’s struggle against the Marxist dictatorships of Eastern Europe. If resistance to the Soviets was the defining feature of at least the early stages of the Wojtyla papacy, perhaps resistance to relativism will be the lodestar of Ratzinger’s.
“There was a fault line in the Soviet empire that brought it down, that the concern for social justice was corrupted by the suppression of freedom,” George said. “In the West, there’s also a fault line between concern for personal freedom and the abandonment of objective truth.” George said that both contradictions “are not sustainable in the long run.”
Going into the conclave, many cardinals told NCR that they had identified secular culture, especially the relativistic and post-Christian culture that often dominates Western Europe, as a source of special concern. In that context, many obviously thought that Ratzinger was the man with the right life experience and intellectual and cultural preparation to take on the challenge.
Read all of it here: Not a Transitional Pope: Benedict May Be a Surprise
Some 26 years ago, when the conclave elected a relatively unknown Pole to sit on the chair of St Peter, the world took it as a "sign" from the Catholic Church to defy the communism, which was then ravaging
Poland and much of Eastern Europe. No one could be so blind to see what this Polish Pope brought about in his native land and in Eastern Europe.
If we are to believe that there is a "political agenda" in each conclave, what, then, should we expect to see the 115 cardinals, the largest in number, the most diverse in their origins, who had such an unanimity (after only three rounds of vote, practically 24 hours after the door of the Sixtine chapel was locked), electing a most known German cardinal, hated by the secular press?
Europe has become, according to many, one of the most "Godless" corner in the world. The relativism and the laicisme of many western European countries have reached such a point that the faithful of the Catholic
Church are being persecuted, verbally, if not physically. With the muslim invasion in western Europe, we are not far from the decline, similar to that of the Roman Empire some 1500 years ago. So if a Polish Pope could bring down the most diabolic communism, could we legitmately hope that a Pope from a too secularised Europe will successfully triumph over the moral relativism, the militant laicism?
Will this be a message to European leaders who are working tirelessly to remove the Christianity from the European Constitution? Will European anarchists, free-masons, et al see Ratzinger as a threat just
the same way that Polish communism and the Soviet saw Wojtyla as a threat to them 26 years ago?
In Europe, and most certainly in many parts of the world, we are entering another "dark age" of the neo-barbarianism. The Christian heritage and patrimony is being destroyed. The sons of St Benedict were saving the classic culture by their "ora et labora." Is Ratzinger paying hommage to the great patriarch of Europe? Let's pray for him.
Ubi est Petrus, ibi est Ecclesia.
Posted by: numquamsatis | Apr 23, 2005 at 08:11 AM