Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Bad News for Liberals

(Reprinted from the issue of April 28, 2005)

The election of the former Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI has not, you may have noticed, delighted liberal (read: dissident) Catholics. One nun in these parts has announced that she is “devastated” by his election, for he himself put the kibosh on her mission to “gay and lesbian Catholics.”

Others of her ilk, in Europe and America, have already expressed their deep forebodings about the new Holy Father, to whom they have been hostile for many years.

So what else is new? Did anyone expect the liberals to fall on their knees in thanks for anyone the College of Cardinals could possibly choose? Gratitude, especially to the Church, is not the liberal mode.

I watched the funeral of John Paul II on a television over a hospital bed, and I was overwhelmed with both grief at our loss and joy at the stupendous outpouring of love he inspired around the world. The entire Visible Church was united in an expression of gratitude that we had had such an endearing, uplifting, and faithful servant of Christ for so many years.

I found myself weeping at the very thought of him for days; I’m in tears as I write these words. It was not only the man himself, great as he was, it was also, even more, the grandeur of the faith that was so much in evidence in his funeral rites, which, as it happened, were so eloquently led by his friend Cardinal Ratzinger.

That same morning I was wheeled down to a lab for pulmonary tests, which were done by a Filipino named Eliseo, who turned out to be a devout Catholic. We agreed on the depth of our shared loss, and Eliseo told me that before leaving for work at 4 a.m., he had set his television to tape the funeral.

I felt not the least anxiety about who the new Pope might be. It was clear that the cardinals were going to select a Catholic, even if we had no inkling of who he might be. Cardinal Ratzinger was one of the few I knew anything about, but I feared he might be too much of a lightning rod to be elected; I expected someone unfamiliar to me, as in the past.

Whoever was chosen, I was confident that he would disappoint the liberals, maybe outrage them. An advocate of married or female priests (and other progressive “reforms”) wasn’t in the cards.

Over the next few days, however, The New York Times and The Washington Post ran daily front-page articles on the discontents of American Catholics, in the obvious hope of nudging the cardinals to elect an “acceptable” candidate. Both papers are driven by the vain hope that the Catholic Church will revolve around a few malcontents in the West.

But what became clear, in spite of this liberal spin, is that even most American Catholics love their Church as it is and oppose any radical change.

True, we are now accustomed to hearing the malcontents say they “disagree” with “the Pope’s positions” on this and that, as if a Pope were a sort of dictator who could arbitrarily change the party line at his whim, much as American judges change the meaning of the U.S. Constitution to suit today’s liberal agenda.

This political conception of the papacy, encouraged by media “experts” like Andrew Greeley and Richard McBrien, refuses to acknowledge that the Church’s “positions” are immutable truths and ancient traditions that will continue to withstand the ephemeral fashions of the age. (McBrien, once head of the theology department at Notre Dame, has said he is “open” to the idea that Christ was married.)

“Change,” for liberals, doesn’t mean natural development, which has always been part of the life of the Church, but violent ruptures with the past, repudiations, and even self-contradictions.

One radio pundit says the election of Benedict XVI means the Church has “moved sharply to the right,” but this too is an illusion. The Church doesn’t “move” that way, of course. Moving rightward would be just another kind of capitulation to fashion. It’s typical of our times that the mere reiteration of Catholic truth, unaltered for centuries, should be construed as a political gesture.

Just days before his election, Cardinal Ratzinger spoke of the Church’s need to resist fashions such as “tyrannical relativisms”; one pundit cited this as proof that he wasn’t “running” for the papacy! The idea that the College of Cardinals are pols in a smoke-filled room dies hard.

Many conservative eulogies to John Paul made no mention of the chief fact about him: his fidelity to Jesus Christ. They praised him on merely political grounds, for his opposition to Communism, likening him to Ronald Reagan, as if there could be no higher compliment to a Pope. But John Paul was also a very un-Reaganite critic of Western capitalism, materialism, and militarism, seeing in these things a “culture of death.”

To understand Catholicism in merely political terms is not to understand it at all. But we live in an era that is obsessed with politics, in which the things that are Caesar’s are thought to include our very souls.
 
Thank You

I’d like to express my gratitude to The Wanderer and to all of you who were kind enough to send your prayers and good wishes during my recent illness. Some were even thoughtful enough to have Masses said for my recovery. I can never thank you enough.

My affliction was a severe infection, related to diabetes, that required foot surgery. By God’s mercy I escaped amputation this time, but I must keep a severe regimen from now on.

I’m attached to a machine that drains my ankle and for the next few weeks will severely impede my efforts to do flamenco dancing.

But I’ve had no pain, and the worst part of this business has been a persistent grogginess and inability to concentrate. I spent only nine days in the hospital, where I received the best of care; but when I got home I found myself unable to write, and — horrors! — missed doing several of my regular columns.

I hope the above will attest that my sanity has now partly returned; but if not, I pray my dear readers to make allowances. By next week, the doctor assures me, I should be lucid again.


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Joseph Sobran