The pope calls the West an oppressor civilization

Here is the headline and first paragraph of a story from Reuters:

Pope says rich nations “plundered” Third World
By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters)—Rich countries bent on power and profit have mercilessly “plundered and sacked” Africa and other poor regions and exported to them the “cynicism of a world without God,” Pope Benedict writes in his first book.

Did the pope do what Reuters represents him as doing—engage in the standard leftist attack on the West? Note that the only quoted words conveying the main idea in Reuters’ first sentence are “plundered and sacked,” which naturally the leftist Reuters runs with for all it is worth. The phrase, “Rich countries bent on power and profit,” is Reuters’, not the pope’s. We will not know what Benedict actually said until the entire passage is published. However, given the spiritual and cultural crisis in which Europe is now plunged, in which its contempt for itself over its supposed past evils has placed its very will to survive in doubt, it was, at best, unhelpful of the pope, who supposedly seeks a restoration of European spiritual life and confidence, to indulge in such damning and sweeping language right out of the leftist playbook.

Is there a single person in high position in the contemporary West who can be counted on not to betray the West? No, because the West today is liberal, and liberalism means self-betrayal.

—end of initial entry—

Correction: Reuters did not quote the pope out of context, and his comments are even worse than I thought. In posting this entry last night, I missed the passage in the Reuters article that provided the full sentence and context in which “plundered and sacked” appeared. In it, the pope calls on Europe to be the Good Samaritan to a “plundered and sacked” Africa. That implies that some other party did the plundering and sacking, which would seem to remove the indictment from Europe. But then the pope writes: “We see how our lifestyle, the history that involved us, has stripped them naked and continues to strip them naked.” So, according to Benedict, Europe itself is the plunderer and sacker, as well as the hoped-for Good Samaritan. The West is responsible for all the failures and troubles of nonwhite and non-Western peoples, and the West owes an eternal debt to help them out of the troubles that the West has caused them. In reality, of course, the debt can never be paid, because there is nothing that white Western people can ever do that will raise Muslim and black societies to the civilizational level of the West. Yet we must keep attempting to do so, even as, the pope writes, we must “[welcome] in their traditions all that is precious and great.”

Thus this “conservative,” “pro-Western” pope propagates the standard leftist picture of the eternally guilty white West—the West which is required simultaneously to raise up Third-Worlders from the depths into which we have supposedly plunged them, and to welcome and celebrate the cultures that are actually responsible for the Third-Worlders’ backwardness. It’s the total left-liberal mind-scam, which commands us to embark on fantastically ambitious projects to transform the Third World, even while it bends us out of shape and crushes us under the burden of our unappeasable guilt.

Here is the relevant text from the Reuters article:

In the 400-page book, called “Jesus of Nazareth,” the Pope offers a modern application of Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, who stopped to help a man who had been robbed by thieves when others, including a priest, had not.

“The current relevance of the parable is obvious,” the Pope writes.

“If we apply it to the dimensions of globalised society today, we see how the populations of Africa have been plundered and sacked and this concerns us intimately,” the Pope says in his book, which comes out on April 16, his 80th birthday.

He drew a link between the lifestyle of people in the developed world and the dire conditions of people in Africa.

“We see how our lifestyle, the history that involved us, has stripped them naked and continues to strip them naked,” he writes.

The German Pope, who has condemned the effects of colonialism before, said rich countries had also hurt poor countries spiritually by belittling or trying to wipe out their own cultural and spiritual traditions.

“Instead of giving them God, the God close to us in Christ, and welcoming in their traditions all that is precious and great … we have brought them the cynicism of a world without God, where only power and profit count…,” he writes.

The Pope says his comments were valid for other regions apart from Africa.

In what could be seen as a strong self-criticism of the Roman Catholic Church, whose missionary activities often went hand-in-glove with colonialism, the Pope writes:

“We destroyed (their) moral criteria to the point that corruption and a lust for power devoid of scruples have become obvious.”

Karen writes from England:

The Pope writes:

“We see how our lifestyle, the history that involved us, has stripped them naked and continues to strip them naked…. Instead of giving them God, the God close to us in Christ, and welcoming in their traditions all that is precious and great … we have brought them the cynicism of a world without God, where only power and profit count… We destroyed (their) moral criteria to the point that corruption and a lust for power devoid of scruples have become obvious.”

What utter nonsense!!

Before the British Empire brought civilisation and Christianity to Africa and much of the rest of the Third World, these places were barbaric hell holes where “power devoid of scruples” was the order of the day. Since colonialism collapsed and these countries gained their independence, we might add that they have returned to their pre-colonial states of barbarity, lawlessness and savagery. Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Ghana all prove the point. Colonisation was a brief interlude of quasi civilisation.

“Strip them naked?”—the trading routes which were opened up because of the Empire brought unprecedented opportunities to colonised countries. Since the countries gained independence, the majority have declined economically to a precarious situation. India which is now experiencing rapid economic growth is doing so because of Western investment.

“Giving them God”?—most countries rejected God. The Hindus of India did not want to know, the Moslems and Buddhists did not want to know.

“in their traditions, all that is precious and great”?—what in Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism is precious and great??

The Pope is referring to the Protestant world of the Dutch, British and American Empires when he makes such remarks. It is a typical RC technique of rallying the Third World and the poorer RC and Orthodox countries against the more successful Protestant North. Apart from being venomous, it is historically ignorant.

LA replies:

I know that some Catholic readers of VFR feel that Karen’s comments criticizing the pope and the Church exceed the bounds of civil debate. Or perhaps it’s just the sometimes confrontational tone of her comments that they feel goes too far, rather than the content. I have sometimes edited out the parts of Karen’s comments that I felt went too far. I have no wish that anyone who shares VFR’s basic outlook should feel seriously offended by any discussion here. I want to have a debate that is both vigorous and civilized. But given the pope’s extraordinary adoption of classic anti-West, anti-colonial leftist discourse, what is there for traditionalist conservative Catholics to say in defense of it? Isn’t Karen’s indignation justified?

Also, some may feel that it is inappropriate to engage in such a discussion during Holy Week. But VFR, like any other blog or newspaper or magazine, responds to what comes over the transom. We didn’t ask for the pope to publish a book this week damning the West as an oppressor civilization. If he wanted to avoid the kind of controversy his book has set off here, he could have published his book at some other time … or written a different book.

Jake F. writes:

I wish I could say that Karen is stepping over the line with her latest rant. I can’t. She’s not talking about historical or doctrinal issues that she knows little about; she’s reacting to the quoted words of a sitting Pope.

I can hope that, in context, his words are less problematic, but that hope is slender indeed. After his retraction of his statements of Regensburg—a retraction that didn’t just note that some Muslims are good people, but that actually honored Islam as such—these current statements can only demoralize me more.

Just as you fight for a sickly West, I will fight for a sickly Roman Catholicism. But there are times when you look at how long and hard the road ahead is and quaver.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 04, 2007 08:58 PM | Send