The Pope continues to defy the cramped ideological templates of the Land Where There Are Only Two Sides to Every Question. John Allen writes about the conservative-and-liberal-talking-head-asplodey remarks of the pontiff:
Pope Benedict XVI today delivered his annual address to diplomats accredited to the Vatican, which is the premier occasion for popes to lay out their geopolitical agenda. In terms of issues, Benedict identified three priorities: defense of the family, religious freedom, and protection of the environment.
From the get-go, the list is reminder that the social and political concerns of the Catholic church, and of this pope, don’t fit neatly into any ideological formation. Anyone paying even a modest amount of attention, however, should already know that.
What’s more interesting about this morning’s speech is the intriguing hint it offers that the politics of the “culture wars” are being subtly, but surely, redefined.
In the context of the family, Benedict XVI struck the usual notes: marriage as a union between a man and a woman, abortion as a threat to the “future of humanity.” If things hold to form, that language will be cheered by social conservatives in the West and either ignored or excoriated by liberals.
The twist came when the pontiff identified two developments in the past year he sees as especially encouraging:
•An October decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union banning the commercial patenting of embryonic stem cells.
•A resolution adopted in the same month by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe condemning prenatal selection on the basis of sex.The fascinating point is that in both cases, political support in Europe for these moves came from the left, not the right. The legal complaint which led to the Court of Justice ban on patenting embryos was brought by the German branch of Greenpeace, while the parliamentary resolution on prenatal selection was introduced by a Swiss Socialist and feminist named Doris Stump.
In other words, Benedict XVI used his showcase political speech to applaud breakthroughs achieved by Greenpeace and the Socialists.
How fun! The Faith routinely does this sort of stuff to our neat little systems of order.
Hmm. Probably best to cancel the Holy Father’s apocryphal, upcoming appearances on Hannity and The O’Reilly Factor, I’m thinking.
Cue Michael Voris….
I read most of Chesterton’s CONVERSION on the plane yesterday and I am struck by how much this fits his argument for the reality of the Church. . . . Both/and, not either/or.
But didn’t he wear GREEN for a Mass once where he was talking to ENVIRONMENTALISTS?! See?
Wait, what’s a “liturgical season”?
Oh man, do I remember that! Then he wore red on some other day. More communist sympathies!
Just goes to show that there are round hole and square holes, but neither one of them fit a God-shaped object that is the Church.
Dang my fast typing!!! That would be “round *holes*”!
Grrr! :-/
Or as I would title it: It’s Good to be Part of the Universal Church.
Exactly, Babs. A Church that does not think in terms of left/right, liberal/conservative, but only asks, “What is true?”
Why wouldn’t he praise those decisions wherever they came from? I doubt that the European right was displeased with either. Those were not “leftist” decisions. Benedict wasn’t praising a liberal or leftist policy decision but one that corresponded with Christian beliefs. Same goes for decisions or policies emanating from the other side of the political spectrum that reflect Catholic principles.
There is a broad spectrum in what constitutes the Left, more so in Europe than anywhere else…least of all in the United States. It was around before Marx and except for the time when the Soviet Union was ascendant could get along without Marx. It could be vaguely reformist, Christian (as in Enlgand — original Anglo-Catholics were all “socialists”) as well as utopian, collectivist, classist. (Much of utopianism was dropped out of the equation in the last decades of Soviet power anyway.) Really, political categories in Europe have almost no equivalent in the United States. You can be the poster child for the free market state like F. von Hayek and still opine that there should be universal health care and state-mandated pensions. We are stuck, as Mark Shea says, with only two sides to every question.
QFE @ Arnold.
Even a stopped-clock can be right twice a day. Good for the socialists and the greens! Now, if they would start being consistent with their ethics in a non-Marxist fashion, there would be even more to praise.
God bless,
Tele
It seems to me this is not much more than a condemnation of the narrow minded blindness of the American left, because even the post-God European left can recognize a limit to commodifying human life and to the unfettered abortion license. Meanwhile American social conservatives (especially the ones Karlson hates on) praised both these developments immediately months ago, and much-castigated Republicans are the only ones here introducing laws against sex-selection abortion (Trent Franks) and embryo-protection issues, while the American left has blocked all such efforts, and leftist Catholics if they pay any attention to those issues simply use them with other prolife efforts to call prolife Catholics life-fetishists and to make excuses for the Democrats’ evil views on the same. i’m not holding my breath for Catholics United, or John Allen’s employer, to make Trent Franks’ bill a top 2012 priority.
Right. Nothing to do with the narrow-minded hysterical provincialism of the American right that freaks out at the mere mention of socialists or environmentalists. The problem is always and only with Them. Never us.
“Meanwhile American social conservatives (especially the ones Karlson hates on) praised both these developments immediately months ago,”
Exactly.
Has the American left commented?
Who is it I hate? All I said was cue Michael Voris (because he constantly talks about the evil commies and ecologists and how the USCCB is messed up because of its environmentalism which comes from commies).
Seriously, I’m not even “the left.” So why am I brought up like this? False witness is never good.
In Rome–the Occupy crowd tries to occupy the Vatican–because of it’s “wealth”.
http://www.sfexaminer.com/news/2012/01/italian-police-protesters-clash-st-peters-sq#ixzz1jTDNgQwh
i’m not claiming perfection, but you need better examples to make this point. The socialist and green connections behind these two European prolife developments, on embryonic stem cells and sex selection abortion, have not been a stumbling block in the way of the American prolife community deciding to embrace them wholeheartedly. The prolife connection behind these socialist and green efforts makes them absolutely taboo to the American left, and does not even slightly serve to help the American Catholic left join these causes.