Pope Benedict XVI is in the middle of a blockbuster world tour, playing all the great
stadiums. He could turn out to be bigger than the Beatles.
And by all accounts the pontiff is knocking it out of the park. He certainly impressed one ex-Texas Rangers
manager, who in his own inimitable style found himself
awestruck.
This was an interesting choice of word by POTUS. But moron that later.
For many heathens of the pagan variety, the Global Domination tour provides a chance to get to know the new Pope a little better. But rock concerts being what they are, even from the mosh-pit it is hard to glean more than he seems like a nice man who speaks good English, albeit with a heavy Cherman accent.
As a service to loyal readers of the protestant and other minority faiths, BabbelOn devoutly presents:
7 things you didn’t know about the Pope
1. He is a king maker
One reason why Bush II was so enthusiastic in the rose garden might have been that the Pope was responsible for him living in the White House in the first place.
Far
fetched? After a visit from POTUS before the US Presidential election in 2004, the Pope issued an edict that pro-abortion politicians and those who vote for them should be denied communion. BabbelOn would have liked to have been in the pew behind John Kerry the Sunday that that was read from the pulpit.
2. He once wore a brown shirt
Here are a few selected highlights of Benedict XVI’s journey to the big chair, courtesy of his fan club web-
site:
1927: Josef Ratzinger is born on April 16, Holy Saturday, in Germany, and is baptised the same day.
1943: Ratzinger, along with the rest of his seminary class, is drafted into the Flak [anti-aircraft corps].
1944: Having reached military age, Ratzinger is released from the Flak and returns home, only to be drafted into labor detail under the infamous Austrian Legion (“fanatical ideologues who tyrannized us without respite”).
1944: Ratzinger undergoes basic training with the German infantry. Due to illness he finds himself exempt from most of the rigors of military duty.
1945: As the Allied front draws closer, Ratzinger deserts the army and heads home to Traunstein. When the Americans finally arrive at his village, they choose to establish their headquarters in the Ratzinger house. Josef is identified as a German soldier and incarcerated in a POW camp.
1951: Ratzinger is ordained into the priesthood.
1966: Ratzinger takes a second chair in dogmatic theology at the University of Tübingen.
1968: A wave of student uprisings sweeps across Europe, and Marxism quickly becomes the dominant intellectual system at Tübingen, indoctrinating not only his students but many of the faculty as well. Witnessing the subordination of religion to Marxist political ideology, Ratzinger observes:
- There was an instrumentalization by ideologies that were tyrannical, brutal, and cruel. That experience made it clear to me that the abuse of faith had to be resisted
1981 Ratzinger accepts Pope John Paul II’s invitation to take over as Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
2005 Cardinal Ratzinger is elected Bishop of Rome, and takes the name Benedict XVI.
One interesting detail missing from the biography is that, in 1941, like all good Bavarian boys, Joe had a stint in the Hitler
Youth. It would be unfair of BabbelOn to draw any
negative conclusions from this. After all, no-one is
infallible.
3. He was in a Monty Python sketch
The other bit of flavour omitted by his fanzine is that the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” was formerly known as the Holy Inquisition. As Prefect, Josef was the Senior Inquisitor.
According to the Oxford Dictionary of Popes (an essential volume for all serious Pope-watchers), in this post he was “responsible for disciplining a number of important theologians, for issuing two documents heavily criticising ”liberation theology” and, in 2000, for Dominus Jesus, which insisted on the superiority of Christianity, and specifically Roman Catholicism, over other world faiths”.
Liberation theology, as BabbelOn understands it, is either a Christian social justice movement begun in Latin America or Marxist theory dressed up as religion. Either way, the Prefect wasn’t having any of it.
One of the important theologians who was ‘disciplined’ was Matthew Fox. Not the actor best known for his work on
Lost. This
theologian best know for his work on liberation theology, among other heresies.
And you would want to discipline a priest who says things like this:
I think the primary problem is anthropocentrism. When we put religion in the context of creation we learn a little humility; we see that there’s no such thing as a Buddhist ocean, or a Roman Catholic rainforest, or an Anglican river, or a Lutheran cornfield or a Baptist moon.
The second problem with religion is that it’s about religion and not about spirituality. It’s that whole thing of pointing to the moon and confusing the finger with the moon.
When Christianity was healthy, it didn’t stomp on paganism, it embraced it. A good example is Chartres Cathedral which is built right on top of the cathedral to the Goddess of Grain. At that time the church was not stomping on other religions, it was embracing them … Pagan comes from the word `paganis’ with means a person who lives in the country. A heathen is a person who lives on the heath.
Christian Fundamentalism is an oxymoron, it’s contradictory. Jesus was about giving to the poor and he was about driving out fear. He wasn’t about raising millions of dollars for theme-parks and so on, or about giving religious legitimization to fascist clerical movements. I do not believe that fascism and Jesus’ message are compatible, unlike the present Vatican who wants to canonize this fascist, Josemaria Escriva.
4. He canonised a fascist
BabbelOn reminds readers that Josemaria Escriva was the founder of a little religious outfit known as Opus Dei. Depending on which infallible web-site one fishes in, Opus Dei is either a harmless Catholic Rotary Club or a misogynist cult full of flagellating albinos.
However, calling Escriva a fascist sounds a bit strong to BabbelOn’s ears. Surely it is possible that at least one of General Franco’s close friends wasn’t a fascist?
Franco buddy or not, the Pope Formerly Known As Joe was apparently an Escriva fan and he was duly canonised. And, as St Josemaria, he has granted many favours, as can be seen from the testimonials on his
web-site.
No miracle is too small for St Josemaria, as this testimonial shows:
This morning I was coming back into my house, but when I put the key in the lock it stuck, and I couldn’t open the door. This has happened before, and some of the times I’ve had to call a locksmith. I decided to pray to Saint Josemaría and try again. It opened without any difficulty.
Thank you, Father.
Spain, 2 March 2006
TPFKAJ cannot have been happy that, not two years after Escriva’s elevation to sainthood, Dan Brown went to town on Opus Dei and the Da Vinci Code sold millions of copies. And, in actual fact, the Vatican wasn’t
happy.
It is difficult to tell whether the Church was more upset about Opus Dei priests being portrayed as psychopaths or the idea that millions of readers/watchers could be seduced by paganism and mystical spirituality. BabbelOn suspects that Mel Gibson probably didn’t enjoy the movie either. He prefers your old-fashioned Catholicism. The one where the Jews are to blame for
everything and the body count is in the hundreds.
Enough flagellation. Back to the heretical views of the non-Lost Fox:
I would say that spirituality is much more interesting than science because it’s always new. The fact is, awe happens. It happens all the time, not just to individuals but to groups of people and especially, to children.
It even happens to POTUS, and not always in a ball-park.
I think that the Vatican is in a deep crisis of faith which they should be praying for. They don’t trust theologians, they don’t trust women, they don’t trust gays and they don’t trust nature. The rest of us who do and who are looking for answers should just get on with the work.
So there you have it. Shocking. Heretical. The last thing the Vatican needs is to encourage a broader church, one that actual human beings might want to come to on a regular basis. One that looks beyond the old, narrow, misogynist, tedious, dualistic, didactic, anthropomorphic and patriarchal.
5. He promotes religious tolerance
After disciplining Fox (a yellow card, the red card being excommunication) and moving up to the big chair, the Pope has had to curb his natural liberalism and in the interests of global peace just speak his mind.
“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
Well, if the Muslims can’t handle a sword being called a bloodied sword, well then they should just stop following Muhammad. It’s not as if Christianity ever pursued it’s aims with a bit of violence.
Those pesky Latin Americans (again) were also less than gracious hosts when, while visiting Brazil in May 2007, Joe “sparked controversy by saying that native populations had been ’silently longing’ for the Christian faith brought to South America by colonizers.” The Pope continued, stating that the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.”
That well-known Marxist, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez demanded an apology, and an indigenous organization in Ecuador issued a response which stated that “representatives of the Catholic Church of those times, with honorable exceptions, were accomplices, deceivers and beneficiaries of one of the most horrific genocides of all humanity.” Ungrateful, country-living wretches. They should thank their lucky stars they weren’t silently longing for the Muslim faith.
6. He personally took charge of the priest sex-abuse scandal
In 2001, TPFKAJ took responsibility for the Vatican’s transparent and expeditious treatment of sexual abuse by priests. There is no way BabbelOn is going to touch this one (as the bishop should have said to the choir boy).
7. He’s not catholic
Catholic? Yes, of course. But “catholic”?
“broad or wide-ranging in tastes, interests, or the like; having sympathies with all; broad-minded; liberal.”
BabbelOn, revelling in a bit of grammatical chicanery, stands up in the back of the church, knocking over a pile of bibles, and cries “No!”
Antipodean heath-dwellers wishing to express their paganism will have the opportunity to worship Pope Benedict XVI up close and personal in
July.
