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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)

Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison.

The world has indeed lost a great man. May the next pope be more like him rather than his successor.

Considering his right-hand man was able to credibly threaten a coup last week, that seems rather likely.

links? Seems like something worth discussing here.

https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2022/12/cardinals-block-appointment-of-heiner.html Note that source is translating a German article and, in a Church news context, is biased but not conspiratorial. The CDF head is the top theologian in the Catholic Church and de facto generally considered the #2, although the secretary of state technically has a higher position in the org chart. The current CDF head is Cardinal Ladaria, a Jesuit who is considered moderately liberal; the proposed replacement that Cardinal Muller was able to veto is among the most progressive prelates in the Church and there were rumours prior to the proposed appointment that it would cause a schism if followed through on(although none I can link right now).

Cardinal Muller was Benedict XVI's right hand man towards the end of his reign. He is, per the link, possessing the loyalty of enough Cardinals to credibly threaten Pope Francis into changing his mind(which more or less means he was committed to a coup; there is pretty much nothing else he can do to an absolute monarch), which is... significant given that these are all old men with graduate degrees, and thus a population that is not given to Trump-like drama.

The TDLR is that regardless of the precise nature of the opposition(at least an attempted coup would be a prerequisite to a schism, and a schism would be a postrequisite to a coup attempt), it seems fairly clear that Pope Francis lacks effective control of the church hierarchy and is vulnerable to hierarchs who are opposed to his agenda*. Cardinal Muller is the leader of this group and, although the article doesn't say this explicitly, he is on record as implying that Pope Francis is in imminent danger of losing his office through heresy. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cdl-muller-pope-would-automatically-lose-his-office-if-he-became-a-heretic/

*Most but not all of these cardinals have turned hard to the right during recent years, but a few of them have not, and in any case they were pretty much all considered moderates under BXVI and it is their positions that have changed, not the overton window.