Astonishing attack then lavish praise for the Pope Extracts from two articles about Pope Benedict XVI. While one is unstinting in its bitterness, the other is lavish in its praise. Posted on April 20, 2012, 3:54 PM
Ireland: Wednesday, April 18. Written by Patsy McGarry: TOMORROW is the seventh anniversary of the election of Pope Benedict XVI on April 19th, 2005. The scenes on St Peter’s Square that afternoon illustrated what this divisive figure has meant for his church. Middle-aged and older people were crestfallen. A man sat at one of the great fountains in the square and wept openly. Around him danced seminarians from the North American College. Well-scrubbed and in cassocks, they could not contain their glee. “Benedicto, Benedicto, Benedicto,” they shouted. “It’s a regular party,” a seminarian from Pittsburg told this reporter. For them, the election of John Paul II’s enforcer as pope represented the final defeat of that liberal Catholicism ushered in following Vatican II which they and their mentors see as at the root of all that is wrong in the church today. The rigid certainties enforced by the new pope had so much more appeal for them than the porous, inclusive Catholicism of the previous generation. Pope Benedict’s views were well-known, as were his attitudes to dissent. As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger helped to force closed many windows thrown open by Pope John XXIII and Vatican II. For instance, where ecumenism was concerned and in his infamous Dominus Iesus document of 2000, he dismissed all reformed churches as not churches “in the proper sense”. They were merely “ecclesial communities”. All other faiths were “gravely deficient”. In 1997, he described Buddhism as an “auto-erotic spirituality”. Hinduism was based on a concept of reincarnation resembling “a continuous circle of hell”. Source: The Irish Times Friday April 20. Written by John Waters: THIS WEEK, Pope Benedict XVI turned 85; yesterday marked the start of the eighth year of his pontificate, the most extraordinary and brilliant of recent times. In Ireland this statement reads as unexpected, “counter-intuitive” – perhaps even perverse. This arises, however, not because of objective circumstances, but because of those who stand between the pope and his people. In other societies, Pope Benedict has shown himself to be adept at reaching out to the educated generations of young people seeking to overcome the lassitude invoked in them by a globalised culture selling sensation and freedom but not the peace they crave. Elsewhere, the initial prejudices which greeted this pope’s election in 2005 have long evaporated; here – doggedly maintained by a determined cadre of embittered media ideologues standing between the people and the light – they remain. Were it not such a serious matter, it might become increasingly comical to observe the illogicality of Irish media positions towards the Catholic Church. Although there are no more than three or four print journalists working in our media who are other than relentlessly hostile to the very idea of Catholicism (I can think only of one radio presenter and no one on television), the only content of media coverage is an incessant clamouring for “reform”. Pope Benedict makes written and spoken contributions on almost a daily basis about matters as diverse as the condition of modernity, the meaning of eternity, the conundrum of reason, and the quality of beauty, and yet we are only enabled to hear what he says when this is deemed to provide an appropriate – selective – backdrop for discussion of the favourite topics of media apparatchiks and their pet contributors. Source: The Irish Time Pope Benedict XVI , Astonishing Attack , Lavish Praise ,The Pope http://www.ucanindia.in/news/astonishing-attack-then-lavish-praise-for-the-pope/17586/daily
