More thoughts on the next pope, from Howard Sutherland

Since Mr. Sutherland misses VFR’s still inactive comments feature, I’ve put his below e-mail into Verdana 10 font to make it look like a comment.

Thank you for linking to the 2003 thread, which was excellent. See what we are all missing by having the VFR soap box shut down? Mr. Girin’s handicapping of the papabili would provoke some vigorous on-line debate. For what it is worth, and still holding the reservations I expressed about him in 2003, I think Mr. Girin is right to say that Cardinal Ratzinger is the best traditionalists can hope for from this conclave. That, admittedly, is based on limited knowledge of the cardinals. As I think you mentioned, the Remnant’s Michael Matt and Christopher Ferrara are posting traditionalist bulletins from Rome on the newspaper’s site. Ferrara comments that if the balloting lasts longer than two days (as it now has), the modernists will have succeeded in defeating a Ratzinger candidacy. We’ll probably never know. One of the worst of Paul VI’s novelties was disfranchising cardinals over 80. Catholics are commanded to believe that the Holy Ghost will safeguard the Church and we will not be led into ultimate error, and so we do. Steve Sailer, writing recently about the debased state of post-modern Britons, quoted Adam Smith’s observation that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. Perhaps the Holy Ghost means to let us see how much ruin there is in the Church.

As for Cardinal Ratzinger, as we said in 2003, he was a modernist peritus at Vatican II, more influential than Karol Wojtyla because he advised influential and avant garde German cardinals. Wojtyla had to settle for the then-provincial Poles. I have some guarded hopes for Ratzinger now, though. He is 40 years older than he was at Vatican II, and he has been the guardian of doctrine for the last 24 years. No-one, not even the late Pope, has been more confronted with the doctrinal and liturgical crises modernism has visited on the Church. He might be ready to bring the Church closer to her traditions. Lately he has sounded that way. For what it may be worth, Ratzinger has been the master of ceremonies of the Pope’s death and funeral and of the opening of the conclave. As far as I can see, the form and the substance has been traditional (as much as anyone can reasonably expect of the post-V2 Church) and Latin (thank God). Perhaps this augurs well.

I had been hoping for a stealth Italian traditionalist, and I thought Scola, the Patriarch of Venice, might be the man—especially given his unusual willingness to look Islam in the face. Mr. Girin cautions us to be wary of him, however. I wish Cardinal Biffi of Bologna were among the papabili; he has been forthright about the right of Italians to have an Italian Italy, and actually said that if Italy is going to have immigration, she should encourage Christian immigration. I am wary of Lustiger—not because he is a Jewish convert (I’m a convert too), although if he winds up Pope I may start agreeing with those who say the Jews run everything (joke). He is a modernist and seems untroubled by the Moslem invasion of France—the Archbishop of Paris should be at the forefront of defending France as France; for whatever reason, Lustiger has no interest in that fight. I am not sure about Arinze. While he has been righteously strong on the life and family issues that most conservatives think are all that matters in Catholicism, so far he has not made strong use of his position (since 2002) overseeing worship and liturgy to curb liturgical laxity and excess—things traditionalists think are at the heart of the Church’s crisis. As for mounting a defense of the cultural integrity of Western Christendom, it is probably unreasonable to expect that of a black African.

We’ll see whom we get. Whoever he is, Christians everywhere—not just Catholics—should pray for him as his job will be crushing. He faces the external threat of Islam, the internal threats of indifference and unbelief and the internal/external threat of aggressive secular liberalism. We must pray that he can recognize the Faith’s enemies and understands how to fight them. The Papacy is no job for a spiritual pacifist. Better a Leo XIV or Pius XIII than a John XXIV, Paul VII or John Paul III!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 19, 2005 09:50 AM | Send