In 1999, I was writing about the archdiocese of San Francisco as
editor of a reviled publication called San Francisco
Faith. Basically my mission was to draw attention to the sewer
of phony, scandal-ridden Catholicism that flowed through the Bay
Area in the quixotic hope of spurring orthodox reforms in its
parishes. Consequently, I almost never got a civil call back from
the archdiocesan press officials who considered me a tiresome
bottom-feeder. That is, until Joseph Ratzinger came to San
Francisco for a visit. Suddenly, the archdiocese was frantically
calling me — they placed multiple calls to me the day after he
arrived — to see if I would attend a press conference the
archdiocese was holding for him at St. Patrick’s Seminary.
It was an amusing and puzzling turn of events: Why the frantic
invitation? Did the San Francisco archdiocese need a warm body who
wouldn’t hurl insulting questions at him? Were chancery officials
scrambling to build a little Potemkin village to show John Paul
II’s doctrinal chief the care with which they reached out to
traditional Catholics?
I never figured it out, but I went to the press conference as a
suddenly respectable journalist, and found myself in a near-empty
room with Ratzinger and some glaring bishops. Maybe two or three
other reporters were also there. What I mainly recall was the stark
contrast between a serene Cardinal Ratzinger and the dismal,
shifty-eyed bishops surrounding him (Ratzinger was using San
Francisco’s seminary as a meeting spot to hold talks with bishops
from North America and the Pacific region).
He projected an aura of self-possession, peacefulness and a
quality bordering on good-humored bemusement, made more noticeable
by the aspect of humorless desperation on the faces of American
bishops who were soon to be exposed by the abuse scandal. I was
permitted to ask a question of Cardinal Ratzinger, which I used to
complain about the bishops’ accommodation of pro-abortion Catholic
public figures. Was supporting abortion a grave, communion-denying
sin or not? I asked. Daniel Pilarczyk, the bishop of Cincinnati,
sitting near Ratzinger, looked ready to beat me up. Ratzinger
responded that if the Catholic public figure acts with knowledge
and consent his “collaboration with abortion is a grave sin.”
During that visit to San Francisco, Ratzinger also gave a speech
on the very theme he used to begin the papal conclave — the
secularist dictatorship that arises when God is no longer the
measure of all things and man’s ego becomes the measure of morality
and culture. The wording of the theme was slightly different.
Before the conclave he used the phrase, the “dictatorship of
relativism.” In San Francisco, he spoke of the “dictatorship of
appearances” and described skepticism and relativism as prisons,
chaining man’s mind to fictions and his will to soul-destroying
sin.
Now Pope Benedict XVI, Ratzinger, using such potent phrases,
will prove a devastating foe to a misnamed Enlightenment culture
that has long eyed the Church as the only institution left to
neutralize through “liberal reforms.” The power of his election can
be measured in the escalating hysteria in the wake of it: like
clockwork, the elite’s fake love and interest in the Church after
John Paul II’s death has reverted to real hate now they know it’s
hopeless to try and steer it. One thing animates the hate: the new
pope’s unwillingness to substitute the ever-changing tenets of
modern liberalism for the timeless teachings of Jesus Christ.
In every age but particularly in modern times a worldly elite,
full of self-love and non serviam subjectivism, clangs the
gates of hell against the Church, demanding that the Church serve
the false philosophies and desires of sinful men instead of the
changeless will of Jesus Christ. But the gates of hell have not
prevailed. Ratzinger made enemies, inside and outside the Church,
because as doctrinal head of it he was determined to vindicate the
Church’s authoritative account of reality which recognizes God’s
intellect and will, not man’s, as the source of all truth. He saw
that submission to the world’s philosophy would mean taking
Catholicism out of Catholicism, reducing it to Christianity without
Christ that serves neither God nor man as it spirals into
paralyzing doubt.
History will move out along the line Pope Benedict XVI has
already marked: Will God be the measure of morality and culture, or
will the desires of men be? The culture wars to come turn on this
question. We have already seen the consequences of the
“dictatorship of relativism”: not civilization but barbarism as
humans discover that once they reject the authority of God —
ignoring his intentions for the human nature he designed and the
established order he created — they soon find themselves living
under the pitiless and arbitrary authority of men who see no
restraining truths above them.
Pope Benedict XVI, as did his namesakes, faces a dark age of
Western paganism that now goes by the name of modern liberalism,
and he will use a lucid orthodoxy to drive out its many
shadows.
