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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Goodbye to one of the last great men of Christian Europe, an apostle of being to a nihilistic world, and one of the few contemporaneous people I look to as a genuine example for my life. I am sad that he is no longer with us, but more sad for us than for him. For as the pagans recognized, "all who have duly purified themselves by philosophy...pass to still more beautiful abodes which it is not easy to describe, nor have we now time enough." (Plato, Phaedo)

I'm not sure if this needs a statement of culture-war relevance, but Benedict XVI is the closest person I can think of in our age to really living out the west's classical paradigm of an excellent human life: to be a wise, cultured, orthodox Christian gentleman. The value of this paradigm will likely be discussed and debated within the coming days.

In truth--one thing is certain: there exists a night into whose solitude no voice reaches; there is a door through which we can only walk alone--the door of death. In the last analysis all the fear in the world is fear of this loneliness. From this point of view, it is possible to understand why the Old Testament has only one word for hell and death, the world sheol; it regards them as ultimately identical. Death is absolute loneliness. But the loneliness into which love can no longer advance is--hell.

This brings us back to our starting point, the article of the Creed that speaks of the descent into hell. This article thus asserts that Christ strode through the gate of our final loneliness, that in his Passion he went down into the abyss of our abandonment. Where no voice can reach us any longer, there is he. Hell is thereby overcome, or, to be more accurate, death, which was previously hell, is hell no longer. Neither is the same any longer because there is life in the midst of death, because love dwells in it. Now only deliberate self-enclosure is hell or, as the Bible calls it, the second death (Rev 20:14, for example). But death is no longer the path into icy solitude; the gates of sheol have been opened.

(Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity)

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.

We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth.

(Ratzinger, homily, Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontifice, 18 April 2005)

I was expecting this news, since he was old and since Francis asked for prayers for him over Christmas, but it's still sad. Benedict was 'my' pope in a way, he was most congenial to my own way of thinking. I liked that he tried to bring back old practices and traditions in liturgy and everyday piety, but it was probably too late for a real revival. Francis is not my sort of pope, though I very much do not mean by that that he is not the pope or is an antipope or anything of the sort.

I more or less came to maturity under John Paul II but I never quite was the same sort of fan of his as many were, he was slightly too rockstar for me 😀 I liked Paul VI (I was a child under his reign) even though he gets a lot of blame from all sides and is regarded as too weak (both in not pushing the 60s progressive agenda by one side, and in standing up to the 60s progressive agenda by the other). Yet he produced Humanae Vitae in a complete reversal of the expectations at the time.

Eternal rest to the soul of Benedict XVI.

And since Francis is now elderly and in poor health himself (he's been in a wheelchair at the recent services), naturally there will be talk of potential papabili for a next conclave sometime in the near future - Francis is now 86, time to start planning. Even maybe for Francis to emulate Benedict and step down while still alive but in increasingly bad health. God knows.

Pope Francis is increasingly isolated at the top, so it’s unlikely that he’ll step down(he is much more poorly regarded by the hierarchy than Benedict was at the time of his resignation).

As for papabile, given Müller’s increasing activism I suspect the general appetite among a potential conclave would be for a diplomatic figure acceptable to the conservatives, which points to Turkson or Erdö.

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