TheAgitator.com
Pope Stuff
Friday, April 22nd, 2005The more I read about Pope Benedict XVI, the more he troubles me. I have no problem with the doctrinaire conservatism. First, I’m not Catholic, so it doesn’t much concern me. But more fundamentally, I’ve never understood why people join the Catholic church knowing full well what they’ll be getting, then complain that the church won’t change to fit their beliefs. If you don’t agree with the Vatican on fundamental issues, then you probably reconsider the whole “being a Catholic” thing.
I’m also not all that concerned about the pope’s alleged involvement with the Hitler Youth. As I understand, everyone in Germany under a certain age was required to sign up, and Pope Benedict was appropriately critical of Nazi Germany when push came to shove.
The first thing that does bother me is that then-Cardinal Ratzinger was the church’s point-man on the sex abuse scandals. And while he denounced the abuse with justifiably harsh rhetoric, it’s hard to get around just how easy the Vatican let off abusive priests, and how long it let the abuses go on to begin with. And there’s simply no excuse for the fact that Cardinal Law — poster boy for the way bishops shifted abusive priests from parish to parish and generally swept the whole scandal under the rug — was scurried off from Boston to Rome, where he was given a plush apartment, a promotion, and the honor of presiding over one of Pope John Paul II’s memorial services.
The other troubling thing about this pope is that he seems to be openly hostile toward free trade and globalization. The church has always held the precarious position of both advocating for the poor and opposing the kind of unfettered trade that would go the furthest toward helping them escape poverty.
Pope Benedict’s defenders do him no favors. A singularly silly piece in National Review this week by Daniel P. Moloney argues that spirtuality is incompatible, or at least at odds with, prosperity. Here’s the punchline:
In this regard, the consumerism and relativism of the West can be just as dangerous as the totalitarianism of the East: It’s just as easy to forget about God while dancing to an iPod as while marching in a Hitler Youth rally. There’s a difference, to be sure, but hardly anyone would contest the observation that in elite Western society, as in totalitarian Germany, the moral vocabulary has been purged of the idea of sin.
Of course, lots of people put God on their iPods. They could just as easily fill it with the pap, pop, and secular music people like Moloney find so corrosive, too. But the iPod itself is pretty much benign on the point of spirituality. It can be filled with stuff that reinforces it, or stuff that subverts it. A Hitler Youth rally, on the other hand, is probably wholly incompatible with Catholic faith, under any circumstances.
The same can be said about Moloney’s larger, just-as-ridiculous point. Like the iPod, Western society, even at its most secular, is moot on spirituality. You’re free to be devout. You’re free to be agnostic. No one has “purged the moral vocabulary” of anything. America is the most prosperous nation in the world. And it’s also one of the most devout. Religion is everywhere in America. To my knowledge, no churches have been persecuted in Western society for generations. No priests or pastors have been arrested for practicing faith. Yes, there are still lots of us who choose not to practice religion. So what? The idea that there are parts of American culture that are devoid of religion somehow makes us as Godless and faithless as the totalitarian regimes of the last century is so absurd, it’s hardly worth taking seriously.
Except that if the new pope takes such notions seriously, there could be devestating consequences. The Catholic Church has an enormous presence and considerable influence in the developing world. It would be a tragic mistake if that influence were used to halt or slow emerging economies’ climb to prosperity out of misplaced fears that prosperity and faith can’t live in harmony.
