Reply #73: Twisting people's words sounds unprincipled. [View All]

[kenny blankenship]

It is very unprincipled actually.
So you are judging his past actions by his present views? The same conduct 60 years ago has different moral content depending the individual's views today?

Not at all. AS I SAID: I AM NOT INTERESTED IN HIS ACTIONS 60 YEARS AGO. They do not seem outstandingly bad or good and that was 60 years ago when he was a minor and under compulsion, it could easily be argued. (However, there remains an inevitably large degree of uncertainty about EXACTLY what he did then. It WAS 60 years ago and people don't always remember accurately or tell the truth.) What he thinks now does not change the moral character of what he did (or what of it we know about) then.

What I am interested in is how that experience shaped him and how he is likely to speak and act and pontificate in the future. Someone with a Nazi past who is known as an authoritarian and arch-conservative, as Ratzinger is, IS WORRISOME. Someone on the other hand who experienced the same things that Ratzinger did, but who unlike Ratzinger had subsequently developed into a passionate defender of individual conscience, a protector of intellectual searchers and seekers, and an advocate of the rights and welfare of society's forgotten and exploited would put to rest all misgivings I have about his early brush with Fascism. The development of contrary sets of views (authoritarian and traditionalist versus liberal and democratic) speaks to two different ways of incorporating the experience of oppression and the evolution of different personalities, not to a different set of moral scorings for behavior lost in the past. Some people will take from an experience like his a deep aversion to unchecked hierarchical power and a suspicion of elites as well as an aversion to the tyrannies of tradition and orthodoxy. The Nazis were after all just as violently repressive towards intellectual freedom in the name of traditional Germanic wholesomeness, and repressive towards liberalizing forces in politics and economics too, in the name of their pals in the military and industry, as they were towards their chosen racial scapegoats the Jews.
BTW: the Church in Germany could have chosen to stand up to Hitler before his rise to dictatorial powers, as the Center Party was largely a southern, Catholic political party. But in exchange for a pledge not to touch Church lands or wealth, the Center Party voted for Hitler's Enabling Act giving him emergency power which he would never be stripped of until his death and the near total destruction of the country. The first victims of that craven moral cowardice would be the political leadership of the trade unions, the socialist advocates of fairer economic and political conditions and of intellectual freedoms. There would be millions more of course, and soon.

One would hope that knowing about all that, and having lived the consequences of that extremely poor choice, would have made Ratzinger or another young man like him a passionate opponent of unquestionable hierarchies, of intellectual suppression, and of the tyranny of tribal traditions--but in his case it has not. (I suppose he could argue that they didn't know what Hitler would do. I would argue that this ignorance is where he should have started to question all of the assumptions and values that led to their choice) As a powerful prelate, Ratzinger has clubbed the most searching minds of Catholic scholarship into silence, he has been a driving force in the reimposition of unquestionable hierarchical authority, and has sought to make Catholicism a synonym for freaky sexual hypocrisy and bigoted intolerance. And most recently he was very instrumental in returning to power the closest thing to a Fascist dictator we've ever known in the United States.

President Bush treated his final visit with Pope John Paul II in Vatican City on June 4, 2004, as a campaign stop. After enduring a public rebuke from the pope about the Iraq war, Bush lobbied Vatican officials to help him win the election. "Not all the American bishops are with me," he complained, according to the National Catholic Reporter. He pleaded with the Vatican to pressure the bishops to step up their activism against abortion and gay marriage in the states during the campaign season.

About a week later, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a letter to the U.S. bishops, pronouncing that those Catholics who were pro-choice on abortion were committing a "grave sin" and must be denied Communion. He pointedly mentioned "the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws" -- an obvious reference to John Kerry, the Democratic candidate and a Roman Catholic. If such a Catholic politician sought Communion, Ratzinger wrote, priests must be ordered to "refuse to distribute it." Any Catholic who voted for this "Catholic politician," he continued, "would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion." During the closing weeks of the campaign, a pastoral letter was read from pulpits in Catholic churches repeating the ominous suggestion of excommunication. Voting for the Democrat was nothing less than consorting with the forces of Satan, collaboration with "evil."

In 2004 Bush increased his margin of Catholic support by 6 points from the 2000 election, rising from 46 to 52 percent. Without this shift, Kerry would have had a popular majority of a million votes. Three states -- Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico -- moved into Bush's column on the votes of the Catholic "faithful." Even with his atmospherics of terrorism and Sept. 11, Bush required the benediction of the Holy See as his saving grace. The key to his kingdom was turned by Cardinal Ratzinger.

It is a worrisome thing to see this man rise to the Papacy.