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Cardinal Ratzinger
Discovers America
John Rao,
Ph.D.
REMNANT
COLUMNIST, New York
Cardinal Ratzinger has discovered America. Troubled
by the total secularization of European life—reflected, most recently, in the
battles over European unification and the continental chorus of criticism
accompanying Professor Rocco Buttiglione’s
reiteration of the Church’s teaching on homosexuality—the cardinal now suggests
that the United States
may perhaps offer the better model of Church-State relations for a desacralized world. According to a November 25, 2004,
report on Zenit.com, the Cardinal, responding to the secularization of Europe, made the following comments on Vatican Radio:
I think that from many
points of view the American model is the better one. Europe
has remained bogged down. People who did not want to belong to a state church,
went to the United States and intentionally constituted a state that does not
impose a church and which simply is not perceived as religiously neutral, but
as a space within which religions can move and also enjoy organizational
freedom without being simply relegated to the private sphere… One can undoubtedly
learn from the United States [and this] process by which the state makes room
for religion, which is not imposed, but which, thanks to the state, lives,
exists and has a public creative force. It certainly is a positive way.
This, of course, was the position of the Americanists
of the 1890’s, who argued that things spiritual thrived in the United States
to a degree that Europeans, passive and obedient to their manipulative
governments, could never match. Cardinal Ratzinger
has apparently arrived at a similar judgment in typical contemporary Catholic
fashion: much later than everybody else, and naively uncritical.
It seems to be the fate of the post-conciliar
Church to take up the banner of erroneous causes just as their poisons are
beginning to become somewhat clearer to the rest of the outside world. I hope
that His Eminence has been misquoted. If not, I pray that a deeper study of the
system in the United States will reveal to him just how much the so-called
religious character of America is, at best, heretical, and, at worst, a
“spiritualized” secularism emerging from errors inherent in Protestant thought.
One still hears the argument that the threat of Americanism was
exaggerated at the time of Leo XIII’s encyclicals
against it, and that, in any case, it disappeared shortly thereafter. Certainly
many people in Rome as well as the United States
wanted to make believe this was the case, using the Modernist crisis, and
undoubted American loyalty to the Papacy throughout it, as proof positive of
the country’s orthodoxy. But the crises warned against by St. Pius X’s
pontificate precisely involve the sort of philosophical, theological, and
exegetical issues that Americanism sweeps aside as a horrendous waste of time
and energy. Modernism’s intellectual character stood in the way of the Yankee
pragmatism that simply wanted “to get the job done” without worrying about
anything as fruitlessly divisive as unpaid thought. It was part and parcel of
all that pretentious European cultural hoo-ha responsible for the Old World’s ideologies, revolutions, wars, and bad
plumbing. Americans could recite the Creed and memorize catechisms better and
in larger numbers than anywhere else. Confident in their orthodoxy and the
Catholic-friendly character of their political and social system, they could
“move on” to devote themselves to the practical realities of daily life.
Criticisms of what the “practical life” might actually mean in the long run
could be disregarded as unpatriotic, communist, and useless for short or
long-term fund raising.
America,
with Catholic Americans in lock-step, thus marched forward to nurture what St.
Cyril of Alexandria
called “dypsychia”: a two-spirited existence. On
the one hand, it loudly proclaimed outward commitment to
many traditional doctrines and “moral values” making it look spiritually
healthy. On the other, it allowed “the practical life”, to which it was really
devoted, to be defined by whatever the strongest and most successful men
considered to be most important, silencing discussion of the gross
contradiction by laughing such fruitless intellectual quibbles out of the
parlors of a polite, common-sense guided society. It marched this approach into
Europe in 1945, ironically linking up with one
strain of Modernism that itself encouraged Catholic abandonment to the
direction of anti-intellectual “vital energies” and “mystique”. Vitalism and
Americanism in tandem then gave us Vatican II which, concerned only with
“getting the practical pastoral job done”, has destroyed Catholic doctrine
infinitely more effectively than any mere straightforward heretic like Arius could have done. Under the less parochial sounding
name of Pluralism, it is the very force which Cardinal Ratzinger
is criticizing inside the European Union, and which is now spreading
high-minded “moral values”, “freedom”, and “democracy” around the globe through
the work of well-paid mercenaries and five hundred pound bombs.
If, heaven forbid, Cardinal Ratzinger
honestly believes that true religion prospers under our system better than
under any other, he is urging upon Catholics that spiritual and intellectual
euthanasia which Americanism-Vitalism-Pluralism
infallibly guarantees. The fate of many conservative Catholic enthusiasts for
this false God, in their response to the war in Iraq, should be one among an
endless number of warnings to him. No one is more publicly committed to
orthodoxy than they are. No one praises the name and authority of the Pope more
than they do. And yet never have I heard so many sophistic arguments reducing
to total emptiness both profound Catholic teachings regarding the innocence of
human life, as well as the value of the intellect in understanding how to apply
those teachings to practical circumstances, as I have heard coming from their
circles.
May God save His Eminence from adulation of a system that waves
the flag of moral righteousness and then tells us that we are simply not
permitted to use our faith and reason to recognize a wicked, fraudulent war for
the anti-Catholic disaster that it is; an evil that a number of Catholics are
some day legitimately going to have to apologize for having helped to
justify. May God save His Eminence from a religiosity which will eventually
line “fundamentalist” Catholic “terrorists” against the wall along with other
“divisive” enemies of the system who cannot live or die under a regime of dypsychia.
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