Tuesday, August 27, 2013

More ironies: what do Obama and Ratzinger have in common?

They have both opposed devoted adherents to tradition:

Obama and his administration regard traditional Americans -- Tea Party zealots -- as a threat and have listed them among potential terrorist threats.

Cardinal Ratzinger, at least at one time, regarded Catholic traditionalists as a threat to be resisted.

In The Principles of Catholic Theology (Ger. 1982, Eng. 1987), Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:
Was the Council a wrong road that we must now retrace if we are to save the Church? The voices of those who say that it is are becoming louder and their followers more numerous. Among the more obvious phenomena of the last years must be counted the increasing number of integralist [traditionalist] groups in which the desire for piety, for the sense of the mystery, is finding satisfaction. We must be on our guard against minimizing these movements. Without a doubt, they represent a sectarian zealotry that is the antithesis of Catholicity. We can not resist them too firmly.
[Hat tip to LS]

5 comments:

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

As one who born into the Catholic Church prior to V2, I was loved by my Father, Pope XII, but after he died, the Trustees selected John 23rd as me new Father and it was he who first began to ignore me but when the Gelaro-wearers of the next Trustee-Conclave completely shunned the Holy Ghost and chose the monster, Montini, as my new Daddy, well, suh, that is when I began to experience what it was like to live as the red-headed step child as my new Dad began cleaning-out the Triumphant Treasury of Tradition and while he was selling the Tiara, praising the UN, and letting sodomies have free reign inside the Apostolic Palace, the Effete Ephod-wearing Ecumenist was Blivet-Baptising me, whacking in the face me with his dreary dung while telling me that it represented a restoration of the pure faith and worship of the Early Church that would keep our enemies from feeling excluded from salvation.

And while the great enemy of John Courtney Murray, Msgr. Fenton, said that to be an Integrist was to be a Catholic in all of its fullness, my new Fathers treat me -and all other progeny of the pre-V2 Mother - with enmity and suspicion because we remember what dear old Mom and dear old Dad were really like and we have the photo albums and collections of the love letters they wrote to us to prove it even though Bishop Emeritus Ratzinger said those letters have no authority anymore.

JFM said...

Thought Experiment. Take Ratzinger's POCT, and write down in numerically sequenced complete sentences all the principles of Catholic theology you there find clearly and unequivocally stated as true and important. Does the Gospel clearly emerge?

Sheldon said...

What a depressing comparison! When the Panzer Kardinal was elected, he was widely assumed to be "staunchly conservative." The modernists were appalled. The secular liberals grumbled. Everyone suspected the worst.

But it turns out that despite all his "staunch conservatism" (opposition to abortion, the "hermeneutic of rupture," etc.), and despite his gestures of good will towards "traditionalists" (personal celebration of the TLM as a Cardinal), he could not bring himself to shake his early fundamental commitment to the modernist Cardinal Frings faction of the Council and its own hermeneutic of rupture with the Syllabus of Errors.

Anonymous said...

Very well put IANS
Most people who were alive at the time remember where they were when they first heard that President Kennedy had been shot. I number among those people. That was an event that changed the country forever. Likewise but more importantly I remember where I was when I learned that the Holy Father Pius XII died. I was 15 years old and was in class I had just walked to the front of the room to hand in an assignment and was turning around to go back to my desk when the announcement was made on the intercom. That event changed the Church forever. The memory is so vivid because he not only loved us though he met but a few of us but we loved him. I had no idea what the Church was in for post Pius XII.

In my now somewhat long life I can compare only the feeling of the loss of my paternal grandmother to the loss of His Holiness Pius XII. I miss them both even today.

Donna

Anonymous said...

I suspect his opinion changed as he saw the bitter fruits of the hermeneutic of rupture emerging.

Dave