Just a quick note on the whole Pope/Irish/Media thing..

It might be worthwhile to point out to those people who are claiming that Benedict's papacy is being "marred" by the sexual abuse scandal, that he is the one who is cleaning up the mess left by others. He is, in fact, taking the rap for someone else who failed to deal with it in the past.

The abuse cases all date to a previous papacy, and it only appears to be happening now because he's finally dealing with it openly. As a certain other high-level Vatican official manifestly failed to do, even while it spent decades brewing away under his nose.

Church of Traitors II

Finished reading the Wynn article on the train last night. It holds the key to the Great Riddle of Ted Kennedy's Funeral. It was not Cardinal Sean, or any American bishop who started the Catholic Church's ongoing... ah... flirtation with the left.

During that first, brief trip [to the Eastern Bloc countries], the shrewd Vatican diplomat [Casaroli] was more impressed by the weakness of the Communist sustem than its strength. The very fact that those governments found it necessary to deal with the Holy See was a sign of their internal weakness. Casaroli compared those regimes to a great oak tree with a powerful trunk and covered with green leaves, giving the extermal appearance of health and strength, but completely rotten inside.

"I sensed that the whole system was decaying and heading for collapse. They had failed to capture the imagination of their youth, they had failed completely to create the new 'Socialist Man'. And the erosion of the system was accelerating as a new, disaffected generation of young people grew up."

Ok, so, why "deal" with it? Why not work against it? Why not give that rotten tree a shove and see if it goes down any quicker?

Later, Wynn, who is himself totally uncritical of Casaroli or his policies, relates that Casaroli was worried, after the death of Paul VI, that his successor would not want to continue his work. This was to prove a well- founded fear. JPII, for all his failings, had no time for appeasement of communists.

Casaroli continues,

"We were not trying to overthrow Communist regimes, we were trying to negotiate with them and to find a way of living with them. We had hope because we knew the Soviet system was weakening and tiring internally. What we did not know was how long it would last and what form its collapse would take, whether peaceful or bloody. But we knew its collapse was inevitable. Now, given that fact, the question naturally arose as to why we should negotiate with tehm at all, why not sit back and wait for the collapse, supporting the underground Church and continuing to resist?

"We opted for negotiations, because we didn't know how long those regimes would last, and in the meantime we had a moral obligation to insure that the Church had priests, that the faithful could receive the Eucharist and go to Confession. If we lost the hierarchical institution, we would lose the Church..."

Now, this is interesting, because I have known some priests who were underground in Soviet bloc countries and their stories are illustrative. Had the Vatican supported their efforts, would the Faith have died or flourished? Would the Church have been "lost" as Casaroli said? Hard to say at this distance in time.

But from what I have been told, the Church was flourishing. And one of my informants was a Slovak priest who was ordained secretly in Czechoslovakia, one of the countries that Casaroli described as a "hardline" state in which the Church would have "died out" without his "careful step-by-step diplomacy".

The difference, perhaps between men like Casaroli in the Vatican and the men actually baptising and marrying and saying Mass in secret in these countries was that the latter knew and accepted the possibility of martyrdom. It seems that Casaroli and his popes rejected that possibility utterly and were more interested in creating comforts, a typical Novusordoist goal.

But it seemed that there were limits even to Casaroli's capacities for dhimmitude. At one point there was a negotiation with Tito's Yugoslavia in which the Church was being told to admit that priests had taken part in "right wing terrorist" activities during the war.

Casaroli said, "Naturally most Church leaders in Croatia were totally against putting this item into the agreement. They said it would be an admission of guilt by the Church," and Paul's Secretary of State agreed with them. But the pope, having suggested some ambiguous wording, insisted the deal be struck. Casaroli relates, "I was deeply saddened when I signed that agreement," so maybe he's just in Purgatory.

The end to the Mindszenty and Beran stories is pretty dismal.

Wynn says that Casaroli "succeeded in negotiating the release of Mindszenty and Beran and bringing them to Rome...

Neither of whom, you will recall, had the slightest desire to be 'released' because they knew it would mean exile and that the Vatican would cease resisting the regime and put communist-approved replacements in their sees.

Unfortunately, he recalls, "they were both rather bitter at having to leave their countries, and both felt they had been betrayed."

They aren't the only ones.

It took eight years to persuade Mindszenty to leave Budapest, and only after the Vatican promised the Hungarians that the cardinal would remain in Rome and would not speak out publicly against their regime.

Mindszenty, of course, would have no part in this kind of deal and once out of Budapest, he visited Rome long enough to tell Paul exactly what he thought and removed to Vienna where he spent the remainder of his life writing against what had been done. Or, as Wynn puts it, "he spoke out loud and clear writing anti-Communist articles and publishing his memoirs (in which, of course, he savagely attacked the Hungarian regime)."

But in the end, the pope dug that knife right in.

"Pope Paul felt it was unacceptably damaging to the Church in Hungary not to have a Primate on the scene," Casaroli told me with a bit of sadness in his voice. "And so he had to relieve Mindszenty of his titles and appoint someone in his place."

Beran suffered a similar fate and he never complained of betrayal by the Vatican, though he said that the Czech government had lied to him, telling him that he had the right to return.

Despite the "bitterness" of the two prelates, Casaroli went on to greater triumphs in his ongoing negotiations with the Devil regimes, culminating, as Wynn puts it, in the "big moment" when "none other than the President of the Supreme Soviet, Nikolai Pogorny, called on Pope Paul, the highest Soviet official ever to visit the Vatican up to that time."

Indeed a triumph.

Wynn and Casaroli both admitted, despite such high points in the history of the Church's relations with states, that there was "a price to pay" for their series of compromises and concessions. He notes,

One important, and little publicized concession the Vatican made was to agree not to attack publicly the Communist regimes with which Casaroli was negotiating. As he defended the policy to me:

"We were obliged to accept certain 'rules of the game' imposed on us by the demands of diplomacy. If we were to negotiate meaninfully, we had to be constant. We couldn't make agreements with those regimes one day and insult them the next."

Well, naturally.

These compromises and agreements, also naturally, led to the Vatican allowing communist regimes to decide who were and were not acceptable candidates for their sees.

As well, Wynn refers to a 1966 agreement with Yugoslavia in which the Church agreed to muzzle its clergy, ushering in, perhaps, our own times when it seems the policy of the Church to ensure that priests never declaim against any of the evils of the New GramsciistCommunism that has since then taken over the world (oddly enough, quite in keeping with the predictions made by Our Lady at Fatima).

I know that this kind of negotiation continues in the Church around the world. It is common knowledge,for example, that the reason no Canadian priest ever talks about contraception was out of a deal struck by the Cardinal Archbishop of Toronto with Pierre Trudeau who wanted to abolish laws against it. (And divorce, and homosexual activity, and abortion, but who's counting?)

The Cardinal was promised government-supported Catholic schools in exchange. A neat deal for the government, it turned out, since these schools could then be controled directly with threats of loss of funding should they become to overtly Christian.

"Was it worthwhile?" Casaroli asked rhetorically after citing these compromises. "It's hard to say."

Cardinal Rog weighs in

Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, who worked with Kennedy in an unsuccessful effort to achieve comprehensive immigration reform in 2007, said "the voiceless, the powerless and the most needy of our citizens have lost a great champion" with the senator's death.

If we explain it s l o w l y e n o u g h

maybe they will understand.

(What? It could happen)

L'Osservatore Romano just couldn't help itself, I guess:

Crediting Kennedy with being "constantly on the front line in battles over such matters as the protection of immigrants, arms control, the minimum wage," it adds that "but he also unfortunately took positions favorable to abortion."

The article does not mention that, in addition, the senator supported deadly embryonic stem cell research, "homosexual marriage," and the the funding of contraceptive distribution programs, all positions anathema to the Catholic Church.

Are you paying very close attention? Concentrating? Got that voice recorder running so you can review later?

OK, here we go:

Theologically speaking, the one characteristic that unites all the issues you mention, like arms control, minimum wage, immigration and "civil rights" (the black movement for those not accustomed to US journalese) is that these are all issues on which Catholics can disagree in good conscience. The Catholic Church does not rule on how Catholics must respond to them.

In addition, the solutions to poverty, immigration, taxation, wages, crime and "civil rights" offered by the left are not the same as the teaching of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

We get, for example, to say that the US winning the arms race against the Soviets was a categorically Good Thing.

We get to say that a Big Brother government imposing minimum wages, price controls and tax burdens on businesses is actually really bad for the economy and therefore bad for "The Poor" (TM).

We get to say that the death penalty is a good thing and that too many immigrants coming in from cultures that are radically different from that of the receiving country does great harm.

We get to say that the best way to get people out of poverty is to refuse to give them welfare.

We get to say that the Americans made a huge mistake in pulling out of Saigon and not pushing forward into North Korea in order to contain the red threat from the East.

We get to say that black people (and Indians) would be better off if we stopped telling them how hard done by they are and giving them welfare.

These are all perfectly legitimate opinions to be held by Catholics, supported by Catholic teahing.

Now, here's a quiz for you: what is the one defining characteristic of the other issues mentioned (and not mentioned) by L'Osservatore Romano (the Pope's Paper), which Ted "unfortunately" supported?

I'll give you a minute to think about it.

Oh, and one more point for L'Osservatore Romano, strictly about journalistic integrity: when you want to maintain a facade of objectivity, might be a good idea not to refer to Senator Edward Kennedy as "Ted". Mkay?

And speaking of speaking ill of the dead...

Binky again:

One aspect of his political past that has received scant attention is his hatred of Ronald Reagan. How much did he hate that Republican president? Enough to give information, advice, and to make visits to the USSR to help them oppose Reagan and his conservative agenda. Like so many shameful aspects of the Cold War, the memory-hole has kept his reputation rather more spotless than it deserves.

At best, he might be pardoned this crime as a useful idiot– but it seems that he was rather more than that, in cooperating with the KGB and Soviet Regime to undermine the democracy of his own country, by seeking to undermine and weaken the duly elected president, according to the overwhelming popular vote of Americans.

The Left is supremely skilled at forgetting, changing, or misrepresenting its own ugly history, support of tyrants and death-dealing regimes, and disloyalty and treason to its own side, whether for utopian or political reasons.

Pop Catholicism

Arturo is thinking again.

The man ought to stop that. It hurts. I know.

In conversation with others, I have found myself coining the term “pop Catholicism”. Well, I didn’t exactly coin the term, but I think it is a good working one. First of all, “pop Catholicism” invokes commercialist and individualist tendencies; the superficiality of a technicolor dream. It is consumerist, it wears its Catholicism on the sleeve as a “personal choice”. It also transcends the dichotomy of right and left; EWTN and America Magazine are both consumeristic from a social persective. “Pop Catholicism” is felt banners, Catholic rock music, apologetics CD’s and radio, along with other kitsch that is associated with modern culture. It is Catholicism for a non-Catholic, post-industrial, and postmodern society. It is the synthesis of many tendencies from formerly Catholic societies and their grafting onto a non-Catholic, inorganic context.

The only comment I have is that I keep getting invited by a facebook person to join a group he started and is very keen on, "John Paul II the Great is a saint. 1 Million person will say yes he is."

Mmmpphhh...mmpph...

Nnnnngggg...

No thanks. I'm good.

And do I want to attend the "International Symposium On John Paull II" later this month in Rome? Oddly enough, even though I will be in Rome at the time...no. I don't.

I want points, in fact, I demand points, for not telling him what I think.

(No one ever counts the things I don't say.)

"The illuminating light of social systems will renew, in a certain way, the Church's experience of mystery."

I was discussing with someone the other day the difference in style between JPII and Pope Ratzinger. I've been reading a little Ratzi and I have to say, it's a joy. The clarity, the forthright assertions of universal truths, the fearlessness, the intellectual honesty...

mmm...

People, even his Australian media detractors, are saying about Benedict that he has the knack for putting complex things into language that people can understand.

My friend was telling me how much trouble he used to have with John Paul's encyclicals. He thought they must be terribly profound because so obscure, and that he was the one to blame for not getting them. Has anyone thought that maybe they simply weren't really all that profound? I am reminded of that very amusing online toy, one that I haven't played with for a long time, the Random JPII Speech Generator. Go ahead, take a few clicks. No one is watching.

The refreshing mysterion of universal spiritual resources will modernize all hope for celebration.

The immense enthusiasm of peace will inspire worldwide mysterious depths of the human person.

The illuminating light of social systems will renew, in a certain way, the Church's experience of mystery.

The intelligent radiance of the United Nations will enlighten modern man's experience of mystery.

Yeah. That's the stuff.