The Love Pope

The lefties in the press, having set up their memes, are now shocked and horrified as Ratzi, like John Paul before him, openly defies their categorizations...

Could it be "part of a vast, rightwing Opus Dei conspiracy, one to set expectations so low that when his first encyclical was released giving us love, love, love everyone is perplexed"?

Hey, everyone said he was evil, and a Nazi and Hitler and everything...

What gives with all the love stuff? This must be a trick.

I have to say I burst out laughing when I read the New York Times headline: "Benedict's First Encyclical Shuns Strictures of Orthodoxy"

because, of course, if you're the New York Times, the entire doctrine and dogma, discipline and sacraments, art and history of the Roman Catholic Church is about contraception, abortion and gays. If the New York Times says that the Church's "strictures of Orthodoxy" are about the Big Three Topics, it must be so...

Now we have a Times columnist getting a clue. Do these people read nothing but each other's editorials?

So, we've never come across St. John of the Cross hey? Never heard of Teresa or Therese?

There's something here the crossed my mind. Perhaps Ratzi didn't like being the prefect of the CDF, a job that was far from using his talents to the full. A guy like Ratzinger, someone whose love of God needs to pour out of him in words, having only his piano to express it, cast by the whole world as the heavy, the Church's bad cop. Maybe he likes being pope better because he can tell us all the stuff he has been saving up and have the world's biggest pulpit to do it from.

Passionate Prose is a Real Revelation
By Ruth Gledhill
Times UK

I STARTED reading Deus Caritas Est expecting to be disappointed, chastised and generally laid low. An encyclical on love from a right-wing pope could only contain more damning condemnations of our materialistic, westernised society, more evocations of the “intrinsic evil” of contraception, married priests, homosexuality. It would surely continue the Church’s grand tradition of contempt for the erotic, a tradition that ensures a guilty hangover in any Roman Catholic who dares to indulge in lovemaking for any reason other than the primary one of reproduction. How wonderful it is to be proven wrong.

The first half of the encyclical, the part on eros written by the new Pope himself, is a startling revelation, almost akin to reading one of George’s Herbert’s poems on love and God, or C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves. The language itself verges at times on the erotic.