Posted on 12/12/2004 8:54:32 AM PST by Land of the Irish
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.
Not as funny as modernists posing as Catholics.
You have managed to make a post this is at war with itself - at once populist and elitist. Well done.
"that is at war with itself"
That's American as apple pie. You should see me do a triple lindy.
Yet more of John Rao's anti-American drivel...
What? A mere proposition, no argument?
Sure. That'll work.
In my opinion [it] is a self-evident theme for this 'elite' historian -a theme well received by many liberals.
I'm asking you to step up to the plate. If you have a case to argue, then argue it from principle. I don't need directions to the library. I need you to flesh our your one-liner.
Now what's an anti-American, why does Rao qualify, and why is that bad. Or is it. Just lay it out. Personally, I don't give a rip what popular opinion is. To hell with that.
Just give me the truth. You have some truth to dish up, dish it up in your own words. If not, then vacate.
lmao -my opinion does not require your approval, neither does my presence. get over it.
There you have it, he knows he lost the argument. Now who is using the Michael Moore playbook?
Liberal democrat rule of debate #1 - when unable to put together a coherent argument - call your opponent a racist.
Well the fact is slavery was nearly abolished in Europe under the ancien regime it was the Protestants that brought it back in vogue and your personal saint Thomas Jefferson, along with nearly every other signer of the Constitution was a slave owner. So let's no go there.
So is this what is taught in your diocese? Complete disdain and disgust at the glorious history of the Catholic Church? I expect this type of nonsense from Protestants and athiests. I've always viewed the assertion of tradionalists that VII inagurated a new religion with scepticism, but you have shown me I may have been mistaken. Your complete disdain for the Church is inexplicable - you sound like Martin Luther. The Church is your Mother, quit slapping her around.
OH NO, NOT ANTI-AMERICAN!
In the religion of Civic Americanism this is the only heresy.
The scary thing is the more it's used the more it resembles the polemics of every totalitarian state against dissenters. Are we a threat to your "revolution"? Perhaps the neo-cons would like to open up "re-education" camps for the likes of us. Do you know where this particular strain of nationalism started?
Anglican England - Henry VII, Elizabeth I - who promted the idea of English identity to ensure loyalty to their heresy and oppression. Catholic priests were disembowled in the public square because of their allegiance "to a foreign power", Catholics were persecuted and discriminated against, Church property confiscated and given to supporters of the crown's hereasy. St. Thomas More was executed for his refusal to endorse it. This is the history you are not told.
At most you may be a threat to some isolated gene pool.
I do so to demonstrate the blatant hypocrisy of the neo-con posters here that were probably on a message board somewhere a few months ago arguing with democrats about this very issue - now they try to use the democrat argument.
For me it demonstrates there is no significant difference between democrats and republicans.
No. You provide support for your dumb quip.
"You have managed to make a post this is at war with itself - at once populist and elitist. Well done."
You noticed that, did you?
"If you do, according to you, you are participating in material sin."
You really have had bad formation, especially in moral theology, haven't you?
You are right. Your errors are a proximate occasion of sin. However, someone needs to combat them; especially coming from an ordained cleric of the Church.
Interesting so you hold a heretical definition of freedom as well? You need to study Libertas or since you believe popes prior to JP II are a joke , try Veritas Splendor.
I suppose John the Baptist was an anti-Semite as well.
I don't disdain the history of the Church.
External trappings have nothing to do with the essence of Christ's message. The accretions of royalty, IMO, have no place in a Church which follows a God-Man whose only head covering in His Life was a crown of thorns.
You don't accept the idea that we are members of a Servant Church, not a Church that seeks to lord it over those who are not clerics.
Do you wear buckled shoes and powdered wigs?
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