January 8, 2023

Last week, Pope Benedict XVI was laid to rest.  The world media were forced to cover the event, barely containing the vitriol they always had for the man.

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Why was such a kindly and humble scholar always the subject of such scorn?  Most of it, I think, was that worldly commentators so hated his predecessor, but St. John Paul II’s charisma simply washed over everyone, like a tidal wave.  So they took it out on his successor.

There is also a lot of academic jealousy by insiders. The Church has many saints, but only 37 are named Doctor of the Church, and none was born in the last two centuries.  Benedict will likely receive this greatest honor, though not for decades, the process understandably taking a long time.

The attacks on Benedict by the secular press began long before his papacy but boiled over with the 2006 Regensburg lecture, where he delved into some of the ideas behind Islam and whether, for example, Sura 2.256 was abrogated, paving the way for conversion by the sword.  The Islamic world, egged on by the secular media, was outraged, proclaiming itself a religion of peace and reason.  Muslims then killed many Middle Eastern Christians to prove their point.

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After that, Benedict understood that being pope was a different sort of job.  As cardinals, Ratzinger (Benedict) and Wojtyla (John Paul II) were the great Catholic theologians of the second half of the 20th century.  They derailed the plan to make Vatican II a clean break with the previous 2,000 years and push Catholicism into the irrelevance where most Mainline Protestants now find themselves.  They also foiled the nonsense of Liberation Theology.

If you have the time, take a look at Benedict’s thoughts on the continuity of Church teaching in Vatican II.  He also explains the importance of the American form of democracy (as opposed to Marxist drivel).  It’s almost never talked about today, but Vatican II settled what had been a debate for hundreds of years in the Church on the viability of secular democracies.  At the council, Thomism and natural law shone through in the historic article Dignitatis Humanae.

As the trusted partner in the Vatican of John Paul II, Benedict won some hard battles of recent times.  The problems of sex abuse and cover-up were brewing for decades in many churches and many institutions; just ask the Boy Scouts.

 But as a cardinal and then pope, Benedict made great progress in ending this scourge.  In America, for example, there are few modern examples of priest abuse.  They date to decades previous, before lawsuits forced the bishops here to finally adopt a get-tough policy, which Benedict encouraged.  The only complaint against him on this count dates to a trivial matter, about a meeting in 1980, where he was told next to nothing about a priest who was undergoing unstated treatment.

If anything, the remaining problems on sex abuse in the Church revolve around the top, with very political bishops who are smart enough not to be easily caught, like the disgraced Theodore McCarrick, ally of Pelosi and Biden and a key figure in the election of Pope Francis.

When Pope Benedict stepped down, the fear was that Francis would adopt every terrible idea of the last 50 years as Church policy, from redefining marriage to unrestricted abortion.  Instead, he has been unable or unwilling to change much.  I suspect that the unrelenting suppression of the Latin Mass is a product of frustration over his general impotence.  So we get a steady diet of virtue-signaling, which is good enough for Francis’s many fans in the secular media but will be forgotten after his papacy.