Every time I think Papa Ratzi can’t put his slippered foot in his mouth again, he goes right out and proves me wrong.
He’s not even done screwing up with that bit about reinstating the Holocaust-denying bishop, when he’s managed to make George W. Bush look like a management genius by appointing a new bishop for the Diocese of New Orleans who publicly declared Hurricane Katrina “divine retribution” on the city and believes that the Harry Potter books “spread Satanism”.
There are really a couple of things about all of these blunders and insults that I have to say are disturbing. The biggest one is that despite all the pretty new wallpaper and paint that the Catholic Church tried to cover itself with in the form of Vatican II, it’s becoming more and more obvious that the church is still filled with powerful people who think it’s 1509 instead of 2009. The Jew-baiting alone is jaw-droppingly awful, but the degree to which the Pope has been going out of his way to bring previously-marginalized loonies back into the fold speaks volumes about the direction of their church. And that doesn’t even take into account the systemic child molestation and other abuses that have defined the church in the last couple of decades…on top of centuries of evil.
The other thing is covered pretty nicely in this Daily Beast article by Carl Bernstein (yes THAT Carl Bernstein), Bernstein points out that from a theological and administrative standpoint, Pope Benedict isn’t really all that different than his predecessor, the universally-loved John Paul II. Indeed, Ratzi was JPII’s consigiliere and Number One Enforcer, and a lot of the positions take publicly by the previous Pope were authored by Ratzinger. It’s just that Karol Wotyla was really “one of the people” as a priest and as a church official in Poland, and his ability to humanize the rarefied throne of the Catholic Church overshadowed and even moderated his conservative bent. Benedict, being truer to the aristocratic mien of European Catholic hierarchy, utterly fails on the charisma front. But what that really implies is that John Paul II was basically selling snake oil by peddling his own cult of personality to disguise a church riddled with corruption, hatred, and evil. We’re only getting to see it because Ratzi’s the George W. Bush of popes, while JPII was like Ronald Reagan.
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Here in Austria, traditionally a pretty Catholic country, people are standing in line to leave the Church.