His whole career has consisted of an ecumenical reaching out to everyone, softening Christian doctrine to make it sound almost like generic niceness rather than something particular and specific. Yet now he turns around and says he wants the EU, a totally secular organization based on the reduction of nations and cultures to economically administered units, the enforcement of egalitarian PC through bureaucratic rule, and openness to mass non-Western immigration, to call itself Christian. Truly, truly, what planet is this man on?

Certainly not ours. I think he’s lost it completely. The situation in Britain is cuase for real worry. In about fifty years Muslims will outnumber members of the Church of England. This is partly the result of both Catholic and Anglican liberal ecumenism. Now the C of E has a new Archbishop intent on making nice with the “peace loving” Muslims, not to mention further eroding traditional Anglicansim in favour of left wing New Ageism, and of course he’s very enthusiastic about allowing sodomites into the Church. I see all of this happening in my own Lutheran Church as well. The world is going to hell in a handbasket my friends.

I left the Catholic church 8 months ago because I realized what the Pope was teaching and doing as well as over doctrinal differences. I had been a Unitarian-Univeralist for over 13 years and returned to church of my upbringing in error for only 3 years before I left. I have rejected all those things and today I am an indept. Baptist and Christian. Im sorry but I knew it was time to leave the Catholic church when the Pope started using the same language of the Humanist Manifesto and the Theosophists I had agreed with years earlier.

This is a good article on this topic:
www.diakrisis.org/Trojan.htm

The Pope is teaching Univeralism. Things have gotten so bad that I have read in newer Catholic documents that “even the seeds of the Word” exsist in other religions. I encountered much of the New Age in my old Catholic church.

Christ is the only way, truth and salvation. The Pope is watering down the Christian gospel horribly.

It seems to me the Pope loves Christ and the Church, and on some level finds it hard to believe that anyone could reject them except through some misconception or artificial barrier. So get rid of all stumbling blocks, broaden the narrow gate, and everyone will come in because they will see the splendor of truth and won’t be able to resist it. Something of the sort seems to be the idea.

Mr. Kalb’s understanding parallels my own pretty well. I would add that I think the Pope sees the broadening of the narrow gate as a duty in response to Vatican II. Vatican II resolved no doctrinal issues (translation: proclaimed nothing infallibly that was not already so proclaimed) and yet it has all of this ecumenical (read: liberal, vague, contradictory) language in it that carries “pastoral” weight. So being obedient means doing all of these “ecumenical” things.

Of course Cardinal Wojytla has a tremendous personal investment in Vatican II as well, and again Mr. Kalb has him pegged. The notion seems to be that the barriers between most people and the Faith are not substantive, but rather are just related to language and the trappings of culture. The end result is that the Vatican is constantly trying to articulate traditional Catholicism using modern language and from the view of the individual (phenomenalism).

This doesn’t satisfy anyone in the long run. It alienates traditional Catholics like Victoria to the point of apostasy. It feels like a bait and switch to liberals who thought the Church was coming over to them, when in fact it is the same old story in that they have to come to the Church. I think it is only a matter of time before the “spirit of Vatican II” is swept away on the same winds that took away the second council of Constantinople.

Matt’s comment produces hope that the whole mess might actually be rejected, like so many other disastrous modern experiments. I can see protesters in St. Peter’s Square, carrying huge banners that say: “Forty years on the road to nowhere”!

Some time ago Mr. Auster published an article on the Pope as a philosopher of neoconservatism. In a sense I think the Pope is almost exactly the opposite of that.

Neoconservatism attempts to maintain the external policy trappings of traditional conservatism but is really liberal at its core (that is, when pushed to the wall it reveals its liberalism). When the liberalism at its core bubbles to the surface traditional conservatives are outraged.

Mainstream postconciliar Catholicism is traditional at its core (that is, when pushed to the wall on doctrine) and liberal in its external policies. When its doctrinal intransigence bubbles to the surface liberals are outraged.

I think both movements are transitory, since the incoherence of internal/external alignment is wildly unstable; and traditional Catholicism is producing new priests, nuns, and other vocations at a far greater per capita rate than the novus ordo.

Matt is on to something here, but I don’t think his insight takes away from the specifically neoconservative dimension of the Pope’s message that I discussed in that article. We’ll have to think further about how to reconcile the two descriptions.

Meanwhile, for anyone who’s interested, here’s the address:
http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/000640.html

I agree that the view isn’t fully fleshed out at this point and there is validity in both critiques. Maybe there are two species of neocon: the deontically liberal in conservative skin, and the deontically conservative in liberal skin? Anyway this is an area worthy of more thought.

Mr. Kalb wrote:

“It seems to me the Pope loves Christ and the Church, and on some level finds it hard to believe that anyone could reject them except through some misconception or artificial barrier. So get rid of all stumbling blocks, broaden the narrow gate, and everyone will come in because they will see the splendor of truth and won’t be able to resist it.”

In other words, the Pope, the man who was supposedly seasoned in the hardest school of hard knocks by living under Nazi rule for six years and under Communist rule for thirty years after that, the man who is supposedly one of the twentieth century’s experts on the nature of evil, is, in fact, a naive liberal. That is, he thinks all men are basically good and reasonable, and that there is no disagreement that cannot be settled through a little negotiation and compromise. The only thing that keeps men from embracing Christ and the Church are some minor misunderstandings and suspicions, which can be cleared away by tolerance and accommodationism. And if the other side still shows resistance to one’s blandishments or even a complete lack of reciprocity, that only goes to show that further accommodation is called for.

Is John Paul the Neville Chamberlain of Rome? The spired mosques that continue to rise in the Eternal City would seem to suggest that the answer is yes.

I see that at different points in this discussion I have variously made an analogy between the present Papacy and Soviet Communism, I have described the Pope as a philosophical neoconservative, and I’ve suggested that he is an appeasing liberal. Either I’m wildly contradicting myself, or the Pope is even more Catholic than any of us had realized.

It is possible that sin is at the root of the Pope’s views on immigration. Perhaps it is pride, which could be generated from several things. He is 100% certain that Christ will never let the Church die. The Catholic Church has been around for over 2,000 years. There are over a billion Catholics. Rome has been the unchallenged center for many centuries. The fall of Constantinople to Islam is only a vague thought in the mind of the membership. The Pope was a major force in the fall of the seemingly invincible Soviet Empire and communism. He might feel invincible.

It is also possible the Pope has a sound basis for his view, which I have not taken the time to investigate.

It is possible the Pope has already accepted the idea that the Church membership and leadership, because of decades of sin, might one day again be required to go through terrible tribulation at the hands of nonbelievers, who might again turn out to be Islamic. His faith in the everlasting nature of the Church is possibly giving him great courage, which many others and I suspect is grave error. The Pope must be aware of the growth of Islam in Europe.

Advanced age, disease, and what certainly are side-effects of the heavy doses of very strong medication he surely takes, have made the Pope no longer the man he was. I assume all his speeches now are written for him by his handlers and speech writers without any significant input from him. (I don’t know the proper name for a pope’s handlers — I think I’ve seen them referred to on this VFR forum as “the Vatican curia” — the Vatican Court.) I would say — and here, I sincerely hope I am not offending any Catholics, and I remind people that I am Catholic — I would say that the Pope’s mind is gone, as far as any ability for abstract or nuanced reasoning or judgement goes, and his mind is not going to come back: the final, irreversible chapter opened some time ago, and what we are witnessing is but the shell of the former man. I would say there is a source of leftish influence among the members of the Papal Court, whence emanates this lefty-sounding claptrap which never would’ve passed muster with this Pope when he still had his wits. My money says this stuff is not the Pope talking — he is already gone, and is not coming back — but is the voice of his Court.

On a different topic:

Mr. Murgos wrote, “The fall of Constantinople to Islam is only a vague thought in the mind of [Catholic Christians].”

I’ll say here a thing which I generally keep to myself, because its utterance leads to all sorts of unpleasant implicit ramifications: it is that I very much dislike the fact that Constantinople fell to Islam. I deeply respect Islam. But the way I feel about that one historical detail makes me dream from time to time about the question whether or not there is any conceivable way to undo that extremely unfortunate historical event, restoring not only that city to Europe and Christianity where it rightly belongs, but also the westernmost portion of what is now Turkey, which in antiquity was part of (ancient) Greece and ought, in my judgement, to be part of Greece today (the whole strip of Turkey which borders the Mediterranean, together with the offshore islands along that coast).

Horrible thoughts, I know.

“The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea,
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free,”

So wrote George Gordon, Lord Byron, the great English poet, who spent his personal fortune during the first decades of the 1800s financing the Greek forces who were fighting against Turkey for the independence of their ancient country.

Greece finally won its independence from Turkey … but not all of it did. When I consider the city of Constantinople, and also the westernmost margin of Turkey which was part of ancient Greece, I say, with Lord Byron,

“I dreamed that Greece might still be free.”

“Horrible thoughts, I know.” — Unadorned

Why? I happen to think that your totally right. Constantinople is OUR city, part of the Christian European heritage, and should be restored as such. For that matter all of Europe should be free of the Islamic presence. But then I don’t have your respect for Islam in the first place. I have always viewed it as a satanic false religion, and the primary vehicle of the Beast in it’s war against Christ.

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