On top of Tuesday’s Drudge Report at one point appeared two
reports. “Human Clone Experiment ‘Repeated Successfully,’” said
one. “Vatican Official Slams Handling of Saddam,” said the other.
The proximity of the reports effectively captured the fecklessness
of the post-Vatican II Church: As countries hurtle toward an
increasingly demented moral culture, Church officials are
squandering their moral authority on liberal causes beyond
parody.
Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican’s Justice and Peace
department, makes Howard Dean look circumspect. Martino, described
remarkably as a “diplomat,” thought it appropriate this week to
nitpick America’s treatment of Hussein. “I felt pity to see this
man destroyed, (the military) looking at his teeth as if he were a
cow. They could have spared us these pictures,” he said. “Seeing
him like this, a man in his tragedy, despite all the heavy blame he
bears, I have compassion for him.”
At the very moment secular society needs the moral wisdom of the
Church, Martino exposes it to mockery. All so that he can indulge
his customary bashing of the U.S. He frequently makes wild comments
about America. During the war, he accused it of a “crime against
peace,” allowing himself inflammatory rhetoric American officials
would never dream of using about him. What makes this even more
obnoxious is that his position on war isn’t even remotely orthodox.
He is committing the Church to a pacifist position Augustine and
Thomas Aquinas would regard as rank heresy.
Asked directly earlier this year — can any war be just? —
Martino said no. So much for the just war teaching. This
of course sows immense confusion amongst the faithful. Does the
Church dispel it? No, they let the confusion-maker sow even more of
it. Martino’s perverse solicitude for a savage dictator makes the
Vatican look as frivolous as the ACLU.
Liberal Church officials — who didn’t make a peep when Terri
Schiavo’s cloddish husband tried to dehydrate her to death — will
now speak up for Hussein’s right to life. The same pacifism that
leads Church officials to forbid war against a mass murderer will
forbid the death penalty against him. In its official documents
Church officials can’t quite bring themselves to oppose war or the
death penalty outright. But nevertheless they portray a pacifist
position their predecessors would consider heretical as a
“development” of teaching. They deform Catholic teaching and call
it development. And it is one — a development of Catholicism into
modern liberalism.
The opposition to war and the death penalty is not coming from a
more acute understanding of Church teaching but from a culture of
modern liberalism hostile to it that has long grown inside the
Church.
In another moment beyond parody this week at the Vatican, Church
officials, panting after the modern liberal world, invited a
Hip-hop singer to perform at their Christmas festival, only to see
their oh-so enlightened rapprochement with modern pop culture blow
up in their faces when Lauryn Hill lectured them on moral
responsibility. The Hip-hop performer even used a word most
Catholics haven’t heard from a Catholic pulpit for decades—
“repent.” Lauryn Hill isn’t exactly Catherine of Siena, but Church
historians may find it notable that 21st century bishops were the
subjects of moral lectures from rap performers. Hill basically
called the bishops whitened sepulchers, “I did not come here to
celebrate the birth of Christ with you but to ask you why you are
not in mourning for his death inside the place,” she said. “God has
been a witness to the corruption of his leadership, to the
exploitation and abuses…Therefore you must repent, repent.”
Hill, then, according to Variety magazine, performed such
songs as “Damnable Heresies.”
It was a public relations embarrassment Renato Martino must have
wanted to preempt.
