NOBODY Expects the Spanish Inquisition . . Hungover Papal Ramblings

Of course, the Red Sox won the last World Series . . .  and so I let myself let my guard down a little bit when the Papal Conclave locked its doors Monday morning.  I guess being a Recovering Catholic is more like being a recovering alcoholic than I would really like to admit.  I guess somewhere in witch school they forgot to teach me the spell for banishing latent Catholicism. And today I have one hell of a hangover, reading that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has become Pope Benedict XVI.
In many ways Ratzinger is the polar opposite of the martyred Archbiship Oscar Romero.  Romero spent most of his career as a quiet, bookish man, and was appointed head of the Church in El Salvador because everyone thought he would be a quiet caretaker -- but his encounters with the world, with poverty, and with violence, radicalized him, propelling him to become a voice for the poor.  After a brief period as a teenage Nazi, Ratzinger, on the other hand, began his career as a liberal theologian, a student of the legendary Karl Rahner -- but his encounters with student radicals scared him into becoming a neoconservative.

I recently began reading Penny Lernoux's People of God, the book she finished shortly before her death ( for those not familiar with her work, she was the National Catholic Reporter's Latin American correspondent in the 1980's) and tonight I took a look at what she had to say about Cardinal Ratzinger.  In addition to being Pope John Paul II's closest advisor, Ratzinger served as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the remnant of the old Inquisition.  He strongly reasserted the Congregation's power, coming down especially hard on liberation theology and the priests and handful of bishops that supported the movement in its early years.  Lernoux wrote:

"An energetic man despite his frail appearance, Ratzinger began cracking the whip immediately upon taking office.  Cases that had become stuck in the Congregation bureaucracy were speeded up, a new code of canon law was promulgated, and the word went out to priests, nuns, and bishops that they had better toe the line.  A stickler for details, Ratzinger insisted on legalistic rituals in which every 't' had to be crossed and every 'i' dotted.  Although some cases involved relatively straightforward questions of church doctrine, others were so tenuous that the only apparent motivation for disciplinary action was the rebellious attitude of the victim."

His opposition to liberation theology, however, went beyond his reflexive defense of church doctrine, and actually revealed deep-seated racism and classism.   According to Lernoux:

"Ratzinger thought poor Latin Americans stupid and easily misled. To him, what the church needed were competent academics to tell people what to do, not 'popularized' liberation theology in base communities incapable of 'discernment' or 'critical judgement.'  The Latin American poor were actually better off with their old religious fatalism.  'The defense of orthodoxy,' explained the cardinal, 'was really the defense of the poor, saving them the pain and illusions which contain no realistic prospect of even material liberation.'"

And so we have a church slouching even further to the right, headed by a man who also thought that Pope John Paul II was too tolerant of Muslims and too concerned about earthly concepts of peace and justice.  A pope whose ideology fits perfect with that of today's Empire . . .

There go the last of my illusions.

If Jesus came to Cardinal Ratzinger's church he would be excommunicated.