The Pope Is Too Human For this World - Italian Op Ed

There is a great op-ed in the Italian Tempi. The Ratzinger Forum has translated it for us.

A Pope 'too human' for a world too accustomed to pillaging other people's lives
Editorial by LUIGI AMICONE

While stray dogs tore apart a child and it was immediately made by the media that it would have been un-Christian to kill the attack dogs, a gentle and affectionate Pope is called a lost dog.

And the world sits back contentedly, in a society of self-determination which defines itself best by its use of a piece of rubber, that claims the right to use human embryos as a commodity, and to kill babies in the womb.

A Jewish philosopher once noted that evil has no depth, only the good has; that evil is just a sort of mold that spreads over the surface of the earth to the detriment of its inhabitants. To break into someone else's property, rob the owner and then fence this off to the public and traffic in emotion has become the sign of the cynicism to which we have become accustomed.

There is an added measure of zeal when one robs the cathedral of faith, and the Pope is treated like a merchant, the Church like a sinister Kremlin. In the most recent case, it is not just the robber and the customer for whom he fences that are in close-quarters fight with religion.

Men in high political office. international institutions and the media's well-oiled scandal machine collaborated to scream out the protests of those who hold the levers of power in this world.

En route to Africa, the Pope tells newsmen a couple of scientific facts - that will make him infamous as the man who refuses to bless the condom interests of the multinationals, even as the chief of Harvard's anti-AIDS research group would tell the media, "I am a liberal, and it is hard for me to admit it, but the Pope is right!" .

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister of Spain announces a 'humanitarian shipment' of condoms as a gift to Africa. A French minister or two would demand a 'retraction' from the Pope, and so would two ministers from Germany.

Great Britain and the United States deplore the Pope's statements. And China is silent [China has become almost its own private preserve for the extraction of raw materials). Benedict is 'all too human', the media thinks.

He left Rome for Africa as someone considered 'alone' and 'isolated'. Partly because he was not afraid to say in public that the Vatican had committed some errors in recent events. "Alone' because he had to {re-)explain the meaning and the limitations of having lifted the excommunication of four Lefebvrians as individuals, not as an institution.

But 'alone' of course, because only he is the Successor of Peter today, who must be obedient to the words of the Lord, "Confirm your brothers in the faith". 'Alone', according to the post-Conciliar progressivists, with his passe ideas - because they wish to abrogate the primacy of Peter and would like nothing better than a Vatican-III attended by clones of Obama [with the 'minds of clerks', Vittorio Messori called them).

They think the Pope has been emarginated on the famous path of 'Christians on the road', namely, all those who conform to the individualistic, sentimental, and disaffected worldly mentality, who can only object to the thinking of a Holy Father who is affectionate and rational.

And now, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, president of the Italian bishops conference, is more or less spearheading a gentle counter-offensive. He told us, among so many important things, something that our readers should savor like honey: "Use your intelligence (and) education" to 'give reason to the hope that is in us', as St. Peter exhorted.

And to learn to live and die, not as victims of climate change, but as protagonists and sentinels of human realities, in a world that manufactures deliriums of superheroicity, opinions, commonplaces, and pure and simple stupidities with which men today are subjugated as in earlier times, if not worse, than oxen once subjected to yokes.