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Thursday, January 26, 2006

A Columnist Has a Real Revelation about B 16's Encyclical

Perhaps we were all duped. Perhaps Joseph Ratzinger's time as Grand Inquisitor of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith was really a set up. "A set up for what?", you naively ask. To which I patiently reply, "Must I explain the obvious to you? A set up for an easier go of things once he ascended the papal throne, of course".

Perhaps all the negative press about Cardinal Ratzinger as the Panzerkardinal and the Cardinal Archbishop of Crackdown was part of a vast, rightwing Opus Dei conspiracy, one to set expectations so low that when his first encyclical was released giving us love, love, love everyone is perplexed. How can Pope Ratzinger write about God's love? This must be a trick. Or possibly he has changed. The office has changed him. That's it. He has become The Love Pope.

Clintonesque? More like the plot for the next Dan Brown novel. Even satirically outlining such a notion risks fueling speculation of the world of pundits. The fact is, my wild theory probably would go a long way toward explaining in certain commentators' minds why we got what we got in Deus Caritas Est. Consider Ruth Gledhill of the Timesonline, who writes:

I started reading Deus Caritas Est expecting to be disappointed, chastised and generally laid low. An encyclical on love from a right-wing pope could only contain more damning condemnations of our materialistic, westernised society, more evocations of the “intrinsic evil” of contraception, married priests, homosexuality. It would surely continue the Church’s grand tradition of contempt for the erotic, a tradition that ensures a guilty hangover in any Roman Catholic who dares to indulge in lovemaking for any reason other than the primary one of reproduction. How wonderful it is to be proven wrong.

Here is the rest: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2010463,00.html.

Please don't misunderstand. I am nothing if not pleased with Ruth Gledhill's surprise. It is always good to see bigotry and prejudice destroyed--or at least diminished. More helpful still would be for commentator Gledhill to get biblical and pause (selah) to consider how it is that her expectations could have been so far off the mark (hamartia) to begin with and whether, perhaps, it isn't really Benedict XVI's fault that they were.

Posted by Mark Brumley on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 02:36 PM | Permalink

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