"Benedict's Tragedy and Israel's"

Spengler, sometimes over the top, sometimes cynical, is in his game here.

I have not commented yet on Pope Benedict XVI's lifting of four excommunications. I saw them as pastoral matters with political fall-out, not political matters. Of course, I actually believe that the Church is more than political thing. The news media does not believe in the Church's transcendence, so its response was quite predictable. I wish more than a few commentators could distinguish between being allowed to take communion (John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi) and being endorsed in all one's behavior. As I know from many of my Protestant friends, it upsets many people that any religious body claims to have such authority, and they will protest whenever it is used or threatened.

An excerpt from Spengler:

'The "traditionalist" enemies of Vatican II whom the Pope hoped to reconcile stem from a dark corner of European politics, as George Weigel reported in a January 26 Newsweek column [2]. Weigel notes, "[Archbishop] Lefebvre was also a man formed by the bitter hatreds that defined the battle lines in French society and culture from the French Revolution to the Vichy regime. Thus his deepest animosities at the council were reserved for another of Vatican Council II's reforms: the council's declaration that 'the human person has a right to religious freedom', which implied that coercive state power ought not be put behind the truth-claims of the Catholic Church or any other religious body."

'That is the lost world of "throne and altar" conservatism, the arrangement whereby the Vatican in effect delegated power to the Catholic dynasties of Europe. The term "traditionalist" is entirely misleading, however. France emerged as the dominant European power at the end of the terrible Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, and overthrew Europe's ancient political order, founded on a universal Christian Empire and a universal Catholic Church. In response, the Vatican reluctantly ceded authority to Catholic monarchs, as Professor Russell Hittinger of the University of Tulsa has shown [3]. Inevitably, this concession by the Vatican led to nationalist churches, what Hittinger has called "the churches of earthly power" [4]. The Vatican's response to 1648 contributed to Europe's descent into nationalism and world war.

'Because Archbishop Lefebvre had the Apostolic authority to create other bishops, his four schismatic followers to whom Benedict offered communion in the Church (but not episcopal function) remain bishops, under Canon law. The small Lefebvrist movement is a schism, a wound in the Church that the pontiff must attempt to heal. It complicates matters that Benedict XVI agrees with the Lefebvrists that Vatican II was wrong to remove the Latin mass in favor of a vernacular liturgy. As a universal language spoken by no particular people, Latin embodies the universalism of the Church. By allowing any congregation to return to the Latin mass, Benedict has offered a remedy.

'Even though the Lefebvrist association repudiated Bishop Williamson's anti-Semitism, it is no accident that a paranoid anti-Semite would turn up in their ranks rather than in the Catholic mainstream. Throne-and-altar conservatism embodied some profoundly unpleasant elements, including clergy who supported the pro-German Vichy regime in France, as well as some who supported Adolf Hitler.'

As for me, I am a JPII Catholic. He embodies the Church as I see it, want to be received by it, and want to participate in it.