NOW THAT HE HAS DIED there is a need to come to a real recognition that Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI was, administratively and intellectually a disastrous clericalist Vatican enforcer as the chief apparatchik under John Paul II and a pastoral disaster as Pope. I answered some of the right-wing political praise of him at one of the putrid Bishop Barron's media sites that he was the most anti-pastoral Pope in living memory. I was unable to come up with one I thought was worse going back well into the 19th century. And that includes such as Pius X and XI.
His stated intention of driving away Catholics who didn't agree with his narrow, rigid theological program, wanting a smaller "purer" Catholic Church was one of the few things he actually accomplished. The Catholic Church he filtered out was hardly pure, he had a way of keeping the crap and getting rid of the good. I don't think that, much as those who praised his theology might want it, you can segregate his life of action from his abstract thinking. I think the very abstraction of his theology was part of what made him such a disaster in pastoral terms.
In the Portland (Maine) dioceses, which I know best, he appointed a truly awful bishop who closed down the excellent diocesan newspaper in favor of a bland waste of ink on paper, shut down parishes, "consolidating" them into remote buildings that, at least in the cases I know of, remote from the population they allegedly served and, in many cases, hardly counted as parishes at all.
He closed the very active, very fully attended AND FULLY PAID OFF church here and sold the property. I think it is because it served, largely, a blue-collar population instead of a more affluent coastal population. He denied he did it to pay off the victims of child rapist priests, I doubt anyone believed him for a second. The result is that Catholics in my town who want to attend mass regularly have to go to a neighboring parish, in another diocese where the priest isn't officially authorized to serve them and the one who is supposed to wouldn't know most of them from Adam or Eve. I think one of the reasons Benedict wanted to drive away Catholics was that it was his solution to the acute shortage of priests, an alternative to opening up power to those who are called to be married.
That bishop was later sent by Benedict to a larger diocese in Buffalo New York from which he was forced to resign when his role in the cover up of priest pedophiles, even his reinstating them to active ministry, became undeniable. There are those who claim that started even before his appointment to Portland. His criminality finally caught up with him and he was forced to resign under Good Pope Francis. In the mean time what he wrecked has certainly not be restored and won't be during any of our lifetimes.
I will say that what of Joseph Ratzingers' early theology I've read is interesting, though he shares the limits of the far better theologian Karl Rahner, that he was never willing to test established Catholic orthodoxy in a way that mattered, even when the knots of reasoning that forced are . . . forced. While such theologians may come up with some interesting ideas about a number of things, there is a forced orthodoxy that makes those ideas less convincing than they may have been. The theologians attacked under Ratzinger (Benedict) who I have read, especially Hans Kung, are generally more convincing. Though it reportedly upset him at the time, when Karl Rahner, in response to Kung's critique of the doctrine of papal infallibility said he was doing "liberal Protestant" theology instead of Catholic theology, I think it was something of an unintended complement.
Most Catholics never read theology. Benedict's theology is far from what is most important about his career, it will be him being the henchman of JPII and JP's cult of personality. And JPII's re-centralization of power, the appointment of often corrupt and far too often incompetent. even corrupt yes-men as bishops . And his own hypocritical and tragic papacy which, even as he attempted to correct some of the worst aspects of the papacy he served, especially JPII's horrific malfeasance in regard to priest child-rapists, he was too cowardly to either challenge or dismiss even some of the most corrupt Vatican criminals, clerical godfathers, many of them and their acolytes practitioners of the very sexual taboos that obsessed Benedict when it came to consenting, competent adults instead of involuntary victims. From what I've read, there really was a hypocritical, closeted active gay clergy faction in both the JPII and Benedict XVI papacies as the leaked documents indicated.
One of the things I read this past week said Benedict as well as JPII had an absurdly elevated and lofty concept of the Catholic priesthood. In my experience of priests, the good and the bad, you have to be willfully blind to hold such an unrealistic view of the priesthood. Maybe I can thank my parish having a really awful priest while I was a teenager to thank for making that clear to me. That is something that is too common among Catholics, especially priests and is something that is bound to come when all power is ultimately held by a clique of unmarried men who are ordained, a body which, in its effective majority, will always hold itself as superior. The evidence against that is as overwhelming as the evidence for it is absent. I have come to basically distrust any clergy which is solely unmarried and of one gender. While there are good Catholic priests, the institution, itself, is rotten.
His most responsible act after JPII brought him to the Vatican was his decision to resign as Pope and even that he did in a damaging and half-assed way. With the help of his physically beautiful Secretary Georg Gänswein (Gorgeous Georg) who Benedict was widely suspected of being in love with, he became a tool of the anti-Francis, overtly fascist opposition to the current Pope. If it hadn't happened over so many years, so publicly, I might have suspected it was not something he consciously went along with. He was not mentally incompetent and he was not isolated. He could have stopped it at any time. That reached a new depth when the aspiring Pius XIII, Cardinal Sarah, claimed a book he published to counter a key reform being contemplated by Pope Francis ordaining or reinstating married men to be allowed to serve as priests in ill served regions was co-written by the "Pope-Emeritus," something that Benedict denied. Francis was forced by that stunt to remove Gänswein from his job in the Vatican (which he should never have had) which even Benedict understood was proof that Francis knew he couldn't trust him.
As you can see, I'm not a great big fan of Benedict XVI, he did more to disillusion me with Catholicism than just about anyone other than John Paul II. And, believe me, there were many before him, perhaps starting in my early childhood with that other infamous operator and center of a self-created personality cult, Cardinal Spellman . I don't trust clergy who become the center of celebrity cults. The best ones don't.
But I am a Catholic, officially I'm still counted as a member of the Catholic church, one of the estimated billion Catholics world-wide. And as John Dominic Crossan, the heretical ex-priest said, to say he wasn't a Catholic made about as much sense as to say he wasn't Irish. But I was never the kind of Catholic that the fans of the past two popes and such right-wing thugs as Raymond Burke and Robert Barron would approve.
When I first went online, for a number of years, I was very reluctant to discuss religion and was forced to do so primarily to criticize such people as I do above, on the other hand, and those who were enthusiastic about the atheism fad of the 00's.
But as I learned more about why democracy was failing, as I understood that secular, liberal democracy is doomed by its materialistic ideological foundations, as I learned that equality, not some ill defined notion of "freedom" was the actual and only secure basis of democracy (freedom is equally AND RESPONSIBLY held or it is not free), I came to understand that even more basic to that was a specific RELIGIOUS foundation which had to be taken as surpassing any alleged scientific, rational, sociological, psychological or other ineffective and, ultimately, self-destructive framing of egalitarian democracy.
In arguing with both the right wing religio-fascists and the secular materialist-atheist true believers in scientism, I came to understand that in the only place where such phenomena can be seen in nature, in human history, egalitarian democracy was intrinsically a development of Christian culture.
I will also point out that in so far as "Christendom" has not been egalitarian and democratic, it has failed to be, in any way, worthy of the term "Christian." That accounts for the majority of the history of "Christianity" with political power or de facto political influence. That rarity is no more discrediting of Christianity than the rarity and fragility of egalitarian democracy discredits it.
I came to be convinced that it may well be possible for egalitarian democracy to develop under other religious framings which held human equality as in intrinsic part of reality. I can think of a number which have the necessary prerequisite beliefs or which could develop those. But it is a fact that in the United States, in Europe, the basic foundational ideas for egalitarian democracy are a product of the egalitarianism of the Golden Rule and other Scriptural statements which are its equivalent, in both the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. I have, through a large number of posts, traced that history going back to the earliest theologians, especially Gregory of Nyssa and even Paul and have traced the folly of the attempts by the secular left to establish and sustain them on the basis of scientism, secularism and atheism. I believe that other religious traditions have the potential to develop egalitarian democracy, I believe even more so that materialism, atheism is inevitably destructive of it.
I have especially shown that modernism has been a constant threat to egalitarian democracy. Modernism is far more likely to produce what I call gangster government if pushed to its ideological ends. I think the Catho-fascist condemnation of modernism is very ironic.
Right now, especially thinking of the things I've been writing about recently, the Scriptural basis of oppression and discrimination against the minority group I belong to, LGBTQ+ People, the double-standard and vile hetero-sexual injustice behind the very folk-tales that are cited in favor of that discrimination, blatant evil and injustice which has escaped moral discernment by Jewish and Christian, etc. theologians and clergy for millennia, the continued injustices of the Catholic and other churches, I wonder if maybe God sent us the neo-atheists and a period of the failure of faith - a sort of Christian destruction of the Temple and exile - as a means of Christians and Jews and others, finally junking false lessons such as derived from the tales of Lot, the Levite who gave his concubine over to die by rape mob, the clear lack of understanding of moral and necessary same-sex sex degeneracy presented as morally, the subjugation of women, and a myriad of other things as a necessary correction of Christianity.
I wonder if this might be God using godlessness to force us to choose the good in the Jewish and Christian traditions and to admit and renounce the bad in it. I might, given time, find precedent in the Hebrew Prophets, maybe even in the very difficult and troubling letters of Paul.
That isn't an idea I've worked and developed far but it is where my thinking is now, now that Benedict is finally removed as a focus of Catho-fascists rallying and organization. I have read some of his apologists say that Benedict XVI was as confused and troubled by the American anti-Francis use of himself as he seemed to be whenever he faced right wing creeps. One of his worst traits was his cowardice when he was faced with right-wing thugs and gangsters such as are still a majority in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and a number of Catholic billionaires here.
It was noted by one of those he got fired from an editorship under him that he never acted decisively against the far right, even those who were clearly engaged in evil in the way that he never failed to do to even those who were moderately dissident in matters of theological abstraction. I think that might be as good a real life model of what I'm thinking of as anything. I used to say John Paul II was a good example of why it was a mistake to make someone with a theater background pope, I think Benedict might be a good example of why it might not be the best idea to put someone who spent the best part of their careers as an academic theologian in charge. He was a bad Vatican power wielder, both as Cardinal and Pope, as much as others might want him remembered for his academic theology, that's not what was real about his career.
I hope God is merciful to him. I say that because Francis has made reminding people of the virtue of mercy the center of his papacy. I didn't feel moved to say it of any of the Vatican insiders any time during the papacies of JPII and Benedict XVI. If being a good pastor is valued more than a media-created or billionaire astro-turf cult of personality, Francis will be more fondly regarded than either of his two predecessors. He's had a positive influence on me, something that neither of them had. That's what I think about it.
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