pope neocon condemns rot in the virile body

Well, I’ve been busy tracking the life and opinions of my spiritual leader, Pope Adolf Benedict. It seems that we have something of a neo-conservative pope. There’s a common evolution, for a start.

Cardinal Ratzinger's conservative, traditionalist views were intensified by his experiences during the liberal 1960s.

In 1966 he took a chair in dogmatic theology at the University of Tuebingen.

However, he was appalled at the prevalence of Marxism among his students. One incident in particular at Tuebingen, in which student protesters disrupted one of his lectures, seems to have particularly upset him.

And here’s Michael Kinsley on the neoconservative progression:

When the word first surfaced in the 1970s, its sting was in calling people conservatives five or 10 minutes before they were prepared to admit it. The core group had famously been Trotskyists at City College in the 1930s. In the 1950s and 1960s they were anti-communist liberals and supporters of the Vietnam War. The antiwar movement and the '60s counterculture alienated them.

From the general to the particular. On homosexuality:

In 1986, Ratzinger issued his notorious "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," stating of homosexuality that "the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder." Also in the letter, after deploring anti-gay violence, Ratzinger justified it: "[W]hen civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase." His sympathy for violent reactions recalls the phrase in Leviticus 20:13, "their blood shall be on their own heads." In the same letter, Ratzinger called gay rights advocacy a threat to the family.

This seems to be very similar to the neocon opposition to homosexuality expressed on natural law grounds. See here.

It may hark back further, perhaps to the Pope’s time as an apparently unwilling flak helper with the luftwaffe during World War II. German military regulations condemned homosexuality as a “moral rot in the body of the armed forces”, which certainly has some similarities to the cultural conservative case against homosexuality in society at large.

Compare also attitudes to the kind of “music” “enjoyed” by “young people”. Neoconservative philosopher Allan Bloom:

At this point Bloom takes off on a most wrathful denunciation of rock music. “Rock,” he says, “has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire—not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored.” The real issue here with Bloom is that rock “ruins the imagination of young people and makes it difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education.”

Ratzi:

"Rock", on the other hand, is the expression of the elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a sometimes cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship.

But Ratzi baby, the kids just wanna dance!

There’s a certain affinity too in Pope Mentalist’s condemnations of secularism and the Straussian contention that religion is good for society because it keeps the rabble in line - Athens for the elite, Jerusalem for the masses, as the saying goes. Though I don’t think Ratzi’s got much time for Athens, either. However, it should be said that Pope Ben the Berserk also doesn’t have much time for war.

Comments

[Chris Brooke]

If you go to Andrew Sullivan's blog, find the link he's posted to the 1988 essay he wrote in The New Republic on Ratzinger's theology.

It's a nice reminder of how he was a much better essayist than he is a blogger, but it's also an accessible and well-informed account of Ratzinger's particular variety of German Augustinianism, from which I learned quite a bit half an hour ago; and I suspect one of its claims is probably right: that we don't learn too much about Ratzinger by trying to get to him by way of what he thinks about political issues; we have to take the theology seriously, and somewhat on its own terms.

[jamie]

Yeah, I think I get it. As it was put to me by the Christian brothers: ask and you shall receive, don't ask and you won't receive. However:

"The very same theology that could describe
the mystery of God, His
unknowability, His radical gift of grace,
could be used to justify the lack of any
trust in the work of the Church below,
and the necessity to maintain absolute
conformity to the mysterious dictates received
from above."

Now that's fine when you're enforcing mysterious dictates as interpreted by others, but it creates a vaccuum when you have to do the interpreting yourself. I suspect that what fills it will be interpreteations frirendly to authoritarian practice, very hard in practical terms to distinguish from aggressive right wing politics.