Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Benedict XVI

Andrew Sullivan here quotes the following:

"How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking… The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4, 14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching', looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." - Pope Benedict XVI, yesterday.


Sullivan doesn't greet this new Pope with welcome arms. In fact, he says the choice of this pope is " a full-scale attack on the reformist wing of the church. The swiftness of the decision and the polarizing nature of this selection foretell a coming civil war within Catholicism. The space for dissidence, previously tiny, is now extinct. And the attack on individual political freedom is just beginning." Well, gee, maybe the reformast wing is a "full-scale" attack on the Catholic church. I don't understand the sentiments of those who wish to "save" the Catholic church by changing it. If you change it, it is something different. Sullivan should go find himself a church that allows women priests and homosexual behavior if that is what he wants. I find it amazing that people expect the church to have the moral compass of a sail at sea.