National Catholic Reporter Online's February 10 issue includes a story about the reaction of media and some Catholics to Benedict XVI's headline-grabbing encyclical Deus Caritas Est.
Perhaps the most intriguing reaction to Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, is the generally positive response of liberal Catholics who were the most apprehensive about the election to the papacy of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, long known as the church’s doctrinal watchdog.
I have to wonder, what's intriguing about it? After reading the encyclical I wasn't surprised that certain Catholics and media would be quite pleased with what he didn't say. Ian Fisher at the New York Times raved (in an Op-Ed quite effectively rebutted by Carl Olson) that Benedict didn't mention abortion, homosexuality, contraception or divorce. The most intriguing part of this to me is how little sense of history or perspective the media seems to have.
Granted, Benedict didn't mention any of those issues. But neither did John Paul II for a good long while in his encyclicals. He used the word love or some variation over 300 times and wrote about 92000 words before mentioning one of those issues--abortion--and even then it wasn't even his own words but merely quoting from the Second Vatican Council. None of this means that John Paul II was not a strong advocate of traditional teachings, or that he shied away from controversy.
The story continues with praise from a laundry list of Church dissenters including former priest Paul Collins, Andrew Sullivan, and Hans Kung.
Collins interprets the encyclical as a sign that "This will be a modest and more traditional papacy. Just what Catholicism needs, really.” "This" of course is only "what Catholicism needs" because Benedict is orthodox and Collins is a dissenter.
Andrew Sullivan said the encyclical was "not as extreme or as repressive as Benedict’s well-earned reputation. It is a sign, one hopes, of a papacy that can change and grow and concentrate on the central truths, not peripheral obsessions." What Mr Sullivan calls "peripheral obsessions," John Paul II called "Gospel."
Swiss theologian Fr Hans Kung, with whom Benedict has a long history, said the Catholics should be happy that DCE is “not a manifesto of cultural pessimism or restrictive sexual morality.”
The article goes on to say that such reactions "have largely been paralleled in the global press," listing articles from French, German, and Austrian papers among others.
At this point, I'm rolling my eyes. None of this is intriguing to me. But then the article got good, when it said, "The chorus of praise was not, however, universal." Apparently Benedict didn't quite satisfy the wishes of the liberals in the Church. Even liberals who praised the encyclical did so with reservations.
Kung "said that the pope had failed to mention the charity the church should show toward loving couples who use contraception" among others.
If the Holy Father doesn't have to come out and say that the Church loves couples who use Natural Family Planning, then he shouldn't have to come out and say the Church loves couples who use contraception. For one thing, contraception is essentially condoned by default in a majority of parishes in the United States and the world because priests don't educate their parishioners about it or they educate wrongly. If anything, it's the NFP couples who need to be stood up for and supported in the modern Church, because they are a lot fewer and farther between.
Christian Weisner, spokesman for the liberal Catholic group “We Are Church,” said he hopes the Holy Father's emphasis on love will make him more open to opposing views. Quoth Weisner: "Loving your neighbors also means loving critical theologians. He also has to apply these ideas within the church itself.”
For one thing, it's not the "church itself." It's the Church herself. Secondly, Weisner here commits the fundamental mistake of dissenters in uniting persons with their ideologies. It is widely believed among such dissenters that disagreeing with someone, a dissenter at any rate, and going to some lengths to correct the person or discipline him if he will not be, is equivalent to dehumanizing the person as such. Therefore, to tell a dissenter that he is wrong is to be irredeemably uncharitable. It is this confusion which dissenters and secularists rely upon to in turn dehumanize the historical figure of Ratzinger (saying he was God's Rottweiler and the like).
But it just doesn't hold water. If a person holds an incorrect understanding of reality, then the nature and command of love is to correct the person (cf Galatians 6:1), not just to let him fester in error. It is people like Benedict, and John Paul II before him, who have a strong appreciation for God's love and who emphasize it, and who yet realize the importance of orthodoxy (right teaching) and orthopraxy (right living), that expose the dichotomy between God's love and God's laws for what it is: a lie from the devil.
Christian charity and moral conviction then turn out to be two sides of the same coin, the coin called holiness. God is the teacher in both, and he chose Benedict to lead the class. One wonders if the dissenters will ever really come to grips with that.
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