The Pope and His Pharisaical Attackers

The very secularists and libertine Catholics who wanted the aberrant sexual revolution to enter the Church in the 1960s and 1970s now hold Pope Benedict XVI responsible for its lingering effects. This takes considerable gall, but that has never stopped them before.

Moreover, what moral authority and “credibility” do they bring to the issue of protecting children, exactly? These are the same people who favor the abortion of unborn children. They favor the high-brow child abuse of turning children over to homosexual couples at gay adoption agencies. They think it enlightened to bring Planned Parenthood representatives into elementary schools. They celebrate on Main Street gay-pride parades that include the North American Man/Boy Love Association.

The moral authority of these Church-hating ideologues is nil. We are witnessing the repulsively absurd spectacle of a culture drenched in depravity lecturing the Vicar of Christ on moral responsibility. One doesn’t even have to agree with every action or inaction of Benedict’s ecclesiastical career to see that these attacks on him have been appallingly stupid, glib, and Pharisaical.

Liberal pundits call for the resignation of the Pope with about as much consideration as they order a latte. The press interprets the Pope’s recent comment that faith leads one “toward the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion” as a response to these calls. It probably wasn’t, but if it was, he is right. This is just the petty punditry of petty people who preside over a culture increasingly defined by the corruption of children.

Pope Benedict has taken serious steps to address the abuse scandal in the Church. What steps have a degenerate liberal elite taken to protect children in society at large? The feverish drive to silence and smear the Pope—from the New York Times to pundits like Andrew Sullivan and Maureen Dowd to editorialists at the National Catholic Reporter—is not about the protection of children but the imposition of liberal ideology on the Church. Period.

Their real objection to Benedict is not that he has done too little to reform the priesthood but that he has done too much. It was the New York Times and the National Catholic Reporter that pounced on him for issuing, in his first year as pope, a ban on the ordination of homosexuals. It was the National Catholic Reporter that ran pieces casting the “zero-tolerance” policy as heartless and draconian to wayward priests.

These are not reformers of a permissive priesthood but proponents of one.