Pope Dag Hammarskjold

What a downer. Easter is the happiest day of the Christian year, commemorating the resurrection and eternal life of Jesus Christ, in which Jesus invited all men to participate and so to transcend death themselves: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.” (John 8:51.) And what did Jesus say to his disciples on the night before he was crucified? “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full…. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart by troubled, neither let it be afraid.” (John 15:11, 14:27.) So, speaking to the great crowd in St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday, what does the pope unload on his listeners? A litany of the innumerable and mostly intractable troubles in the world. But troubles you have always with you.

That Benedict would turn the day of God’s triumph over the material world into an occasion to immerse Catholics and others in the endless and insoluble discouragements of the material world, bemoaning the usual laundry list of wars, conflicts, poverty, famine, disease, and hate, strengthens the impression one sometimes has that the post-Vatican II Catholic Church is, in large part, the UN with robes and incense.

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Tom S. writes:

I’m not a Catholic, and so I suppose that it’s none of my business, but has there been a world leader who has come to power in the last twenty years who has been a bigger disappointment than Benedict? Say what you will about Bush, he never pretended to be anything other than what he was, Clinton was exactly the kind of President we had every reason to expect he’d be, and if the second half of JPII’s papacy was a bad exercise in third-worldism, the first half was inspiring, with his “Be not Afraid” in the face of Communist tanks in Poland, and his undercutting of “Liberation Theology” in Latin America. But Benedict has just been a disaster from the word go. His backpedaling on Islam was absurd, his trip to Turkey an embarrassment, and his recent comments on Africa are worse than fatuous—they are not only untrue, they threaten to undercut those few brave African reformers who are finally starting to question the “Blame Colonialism” explanation for African poverty and dysfunction, and reinforce the “conventional wisdom” that will doom Africans to permanent poverty. I was often critical of the previous occupant of the Vatican, but John Paul II at least opened high, and if he “grew” in office, well, he wasn’t the first. If I were a Catholic, I’d be very sad right now. They had a right to expect better. Of course, as many of your Catholic correspondents have pointed out, Protestants “leaders” aren’t exactly covering themselves with glory right now, either.

LA replies:

Tom S. has stated it well. Indeed the sense of disappointment could not be greater—or more surprising. The only silver lining is that this is further grist for our busy traditionalist mill, further proof of the utter liberal dominance of the modern world, of the magnetic pull that liberalism exercises on even the most conservative-seeming figures.

This is why I say that true conservatism or traditionalism requires being grounded on explicitly non-liberal, anti-liberal principles. Without such grounding, the drift toward liberalism is inevitable.

LA continues:

I want to clarify this further. It’s not enough merely to have traditionalist or non-liberal beliefs. What is needed is that those traditionalist beliefs be understood as being the opposite of the prevailing liberal beliefs. A person must understand: “Liberalism is over there. My beliefs are not liberalism, my beliefs are over here.” Lots of people—for example Benedict—have genuinely traditionalist beliefs, but because they fail to distinguish the first principles that distinguish liberal beliefs from conservative beliefs, they inchoately mix them all up together, and ultimately get pulled toward liberalism. How else, except through such a failure to grasp the distinctions between first principle, could the pope in his Regensburg address have declared with such eloquent clarity that Islam is not based on the harmony of reason and faith, but on the pure assertion of the will of an unknowable god, and then have turned around on a dime and treated Islam as the brother faith of Christianity?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 09, 2007 12:13 AM | Send