Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Benedict’s Doctrine

(Reprinted from the issue of May 5, 2005)

“German Cardinal Is Chosen as Pope,” said the banner headline in The New York Times — then a subhead added, “In a Celebrating Crowd, Some Show Concern Over His Doctrine.” Naturally the Paper of Record zoomed in on those concerned “some,” quoting only two people in the huge crowd, both of whom were distressed that the “divisive” Cardinal Ratzinger had been put in charge of the Church of Rome. The long lead story quoted nobody in the crowd who was pleased with the selection.

How “his” doctrine differs from that of the Church was left unclear. The reader was left with the impression that Benedict XVI belongs to a fringe cult that rejects the beliefs shared by ordinary Catholics. For merely reaffirming orthodox Catholicism, he is being labeled “hard-line,” “right-wing,” and “literalist.” One critic describes Benedict’s attitude as “my way or the highway.” The same might be said of Jesus Christ. “No man comes to the Father but by me” doesn’t exactly invite dialogue and dissent, does it?

But on the whole, the secularist media seem to be resigned to the election of a Catholic to the papacy. True, Time magazine solicited the comments of Hans Küng, who said that talking to Ratzinger was like chatting with the “head of the KGB”; but then Time has been sweet on Küng since the Sixties, the time of the Death of God, when Teilhard de Chardin was also hot stuff.

Taking the news of a Catholic Pope harder were such reliable malcontent Catholics as Andrew Sullivan and Anna Quindlen. Sullivan, of course, is the whiny homosexual who quit attending Mass last year in protest against the Church’s refusal to legitimize sodomy; he now complains about the new Pope’s “circular dogmatism.” Miss Quindlen, as usual, complains that the Pope is out of step with our times, especially about the role of women.

What these people want is a result-ordered Catholicism, akin to the result-ordered jurisprudence of the liberal American judiciary. “We want gay marriage and female priests, and we want them now,” they demand, regardless of how incongruous these things are with Catholic teaching and Tradition. If judges can make the U.S. Constitution mean that abortion is a right, why can’t the Pope make the Apostles’ Creed mean anything he wants?

That’s the whole trouble. The liberal thinks in terms not of truths, but of wants. And he is indignant that the Pope and the Church don’t seem to want what he wants: In his mind, his desires constitute imperatives for everyone. He can understand a rejection of his desires only as a matter of ill will. Hence his petulant indignation when he doesn’t get his way. “Well, if that’s the way you’re going to be about it, I’m not attending Mass anymore. So there!”

I wonder if these people know how they sound to faithful Catholics. It’s almost incomprehensible to me that someone should deny the entire moral order because the Church won’t indulge his special temptation. It’s not that we don’t pity the homosexual; we do, as we pity the pedophile, the drug addict, or anyone else who suffers from temptations most of us are mercifully spared.

But the moral order is objective, after all, and it can’t be denied just because our desires clash with it. Why is this so hard to understand? Not long ago we would have found it comical, in a grim way, for sexual perverts to assume the moral high ground vis-à-vis the Church. Today it’s considered bigotry to speak of “perversion” at all.

Though most Catholics wish our new Holy Father well, it’s quite possible that Benedict XVI will turn out to be an ineffective Pope. He wouldn’t be the first one; and he himself has said he feels inadequate to the great demands of the papacy. He is more keenly aware of the chances of failure than we are.

But it’s a little early to judge his papacy one way or the other. If he fails, it will be because he has failed by Catholic standards. And people like Sullivan and Quindlen are judging him, and all but condemning him, by alien standards — if you can call them standards at all.
 
Authoritative Commentary?

Fidelity to Christ and to Catholic teaching and Tradition matter no more to malcontent Catholics than to the secularist liberals they so much resemble. In fact we are forced to wonder if there is any real difference. How would we know that Sullivan and Quindlen were Catholics at all if they didn’t preface their attacks on the Church with insistent assertions that they are members? Would they be paid to write assaults on the Church if they didn’t identify themselves as Catholics?

The liberal press doesn’t publish much anti-Catholic invective by non-Catholics; it pays professed Catholics to write the stuff, and many professed Catholics seem to make a good living at it.

One prominent theologian, a priest, is said to be living with a woman; but when the media want authoritative commentary on the Church, he puts on the Roman collar and delivers the goods, deploring the Church’s “negative attitude toward human sexuality.”

On the other hand, nobody makes a living defending the Church in the major media.
 
Not an Option

So why don’t the malcontents just leave the Church? The question is a fair one, but it’s also naive. You can’t very well subvert the Church from outside; and their aim is not to reform the Church, but to undermine her. That is the effect all their “reforms” would have.

For the malcontents, leaving the Church to the orthodox is not an option. They don’t want to join the Episcopal Church, which has adopted nearly all their recommendations. They want to reduce the Catholic Church to the same sorry condition while remaining Catholics in good standing; in other words, they want the Catholic Church as she is now, always has been, and always will be, to cease to exist. When she is no more than an empty shell of herself, they will finally be content.

It isn’t going to happen, ever, and with the election of Benedict XVI they now know it certainly won’t happen in the near future. After the Second Vatican Council they thought victory was at hand; even Paul VI’s condemnation of contraception, much as they hated it, gave them a popular issue to rally around. The sexual revolution, and the Church’s “negative” attitude toward it, has become their great cause.

Sullivan, who calls himself “pro-life,” touts the idea that artificial birth control is the answer to abortion. All we have to do is give up the principle of chastity. Now what reasonable person could object to that?


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Joseph Sobran