Pope Coddles Neanderthals

This event concerning the Pope and SSPX is a lot more serious than I'd thought when it first appeared. I've heard political pundits remark on a new story that it is taking on a life that was not to be expected, or that a story grows day by day, as more and more information is stuffed into filings by more and more reporters. Headlines start using larger fonts. A buzz begins, one heard round the world. I've surfed, in a very tiny way, extremely superficial, and am surprised at the intensity of the reporting and the depth of the opinion columns.

• Spiegel on-line: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,605945,00.html. Germany is outraged, particularly German bishops.
  
• www.chiesa: http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/214368?eng=y. Sandro Magister, "Double Disaster at the Vatican: Of Governance, and of Communication" Excellent, as usual.
  
• The Tablet: , "A gaffe too far." http://www.thetablet.co.uk/ Because of a strike this issue is free to all. If ever you wanted to see an entire issue, now is the time.
  
• Catholica AU, "...we point you to the veritable avalanche of material flooding the media and cyberspace at the moment in the wake of Pope Benedict's enormous gaffe in inviting back the SSPX bishops." http://www.catholica.com.au/. Kaiser met Brian Coyne, its editor, on his trip to Australia last year. A fine magazine.
  
• America, http://www.americamagazine.org/. No main articles, some blog comments.
  
• Commonweal, http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/sommaire.php3. Same, but some blogging at dotCommonweal, http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/
  
• National Catholic Reporter, NCR, http://ncronline3.org/drupal/. Likewise. John Allen is warming up, I guess. More on the Legionnaires than on SSPX.
  
• American Newspapers, New York Times, etc, quite a few articles, not much op-ed yet.
  

Seems to me that Europe, Australia are the sources of the heavy-hitting news reports and editorial opinions. USA, which I thought would jump on the bandwagon with glee, seems embarrassed about the Pope and SSPX and prefers digging into the Legionnaires and its founder, particularly his close friendship with Pope John Paul II.

Some are calling for the Pope to resign. Others are laughing at the bumbling way The Enforcer of the CDF is stumbling around, now that he has all the power of the papacy itself. Nobody seems to feel sorry for Benedict XVI, as some do for George W. Bush, merely an incompetent in a job way over his head. Most seem to be treating Benedict XVI as one who's getting what he deserves, sort of a Dick Cheney, a mean and nasty ideologue still mouthing off after destroying the American way of proceeding. Could be easier, maybe, being Dean of a Dicastery rather than rummaging in the wardrobe closets of papal primacy.

Anyway, it's a big crisis for The Roman Church. Excommunication, whether imposed on a Fr. Roy Bourgeois, a saintly prophet for peace, or lifted off a Williamson, a throwback hater of Jews and denier of the Holocaust, could be the focal point where all the emotions against Rome come to rest. Papal primacy, Absolute Power, Roma locuta causa finita, I Am The Pope, may be nearing the end of their thousand year reign of running a church through decretal and discipline, encyclical and excommunication.

There is a huge amount of emotion in the world over the arrogance of Rome and its Vatican: anger and humiliation and frustration and disillusionment, sheer rage over sexual abuse of children, treatment of women, disregard of common courtesy, and those snapping cracks of whiplash discipline. Focused on one Pope, they burn in the sun's rays through the magnifying glass of autocratic authority of Rome as the absolute corruption of absolute power.

Some call it hypocrisy, what Pope and Curia do in reigning. Others call it madness. Many think it is a bumbling stumbling, what do I do now, of old silly men who dress and walk, think and talk as if they were still on parade in the Middle Ages. These hierarchs, particularly the Pope, look perplexed that their rings are not being kissed, that they are being ignored, treated as if they were museum pieces out of an ancient past. It's sort of like our taking the kids to visit the Plymouth Plantation, where life as it was in 1630 is on display. The Roman Court is an amusement park?

Except it is the Catholic Church, involves Jesus Christ, came down from the Apostles, is based on the New Testament. It's even bigger than that when we think that a carpenter's son and a small band of twelve out of Palestine started what turned out to be the basic culture of the West, when joined to Greek and Latin culture, and that it then grew into the Christian West, whose missionaries and armies went forth to spread The Good News, all over the entire planet. Europe became the known world. It thought.

This crisis is not just about a tiny city-state called The Vatican, nor an eternal city known as Rome, not even about the oldest continuous hierarchical religious enterprise designated The Holy Roman Catholic Church. It is about Christianity, which is actually bigger than Catholicism or Italy. It could well be about Western civilization itself. How many of us even think about Eastern civilization? The Orient. The East, both Far and Middle. Japan. China. India. The islands of Indonesia, the Philippines. The continent of Australia. Do we consider Africa as Western? Do we think of South America as American? Are they?

Do we even think about nations, separate, individual countries by name any more, or do we talk areas and regions without boundaries? Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, the Southern Hemisphere, Asia. The world is bigger than The Vatican. It's even bigger than America.

I just went on-line to look at a map of the world and printed it out. On the left, Canada, USA, South America. On the right: Great Britain, Europe, Africa, and then a monstrous expanse of space for Russia, China, Middle East, India, Asia, Australia. The right side took up much more space than the left side of the paper. The line I drew, like Alexander VI dividing the then "new" world between Portugal and Spain, right down the middle of the Atlantic, looked as puny as the tight yet wrinkled fist holding the worn-out pencil. I put two dots on the paper: one for Manchester, NH, the other for Rome, held the paper up above my head, stared at it, and burst out laughing.

I, me, one old man out of 6,706,993,152 souls all over that piece of paper, sitting at a computer in an insignificant mill town of a tiny American state is so wrought up over a walled enclave within the city of Rome and how another man one year older, dressed in white, is coddling a bunch of Neanderthals, who insist that their way of proceeding is the only way to save the world. I knew the meaning of "ludicrous" as "utterly ridiculous because of being absurd. "

And I prayed for the Church and the Society of Jesus, as usual. This time I added "for the world."

I wondered what I'd have for breakfast, and where we'd take our grandchildren today. It's Saturday. No school.