Joe Sobran on the Left vs. Pope Benedict XVI

Sobran nails it, as he does most of the time.


The election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI comes as a shock to the liberal Catholics of Europe and America. For them the great papacy of John Paul II was a long ordeal, and Ratzinger, the uncompromising defender of Catholic orthodoxy, was a chief reason.

It had become customary for liberals to say they “disagreed” with John Paul’s “positions,” as if those were mere arbitrary personal opinions of the man himself rather than immutable truths upheld by the Church. On this view, a pope is a sort of dictator who may change the party line at his whim. If he doesn’t change it in keeping with the fashions of the age, he seems incomprehensibly stubborn.

But the Pope is chiefly a custodian, whose principal duty is to preserve the ancient faith we have inherited. It isn’t up to him to edit that faith to suit his taste or anyone else’s. In Catholicism, novelty is not a virtue. It usually signifies corruption, not improvement.

To the liberal mind, progress consists not in gradual development, but in dramatic breaks with the past, typified by the U.S. Supreme Court’s use of the U.S. Constitution — a “living document” — to foist sudden changes on an entire polity. Old laws (in America, there is no such thing as the ancient) are abruptly declared unconstitutional. To be disruptive is to be “progressive.”


And, oh, by the way, you think you know what the Second Vatican Council was, but you don't.


Until the 1960s, this outlook was alien to the Catholic Church. But the Second Vatican Council, summoned by Pope John XXIII, introduced the most sudden changes in liturgy and discipline in Catholic history. Liberals rejoiced, willfully mistaking these for changes, or at least the promise of change, in Catholic doctrine itself. The “spirit of Vatican II” became the equivalent of the American judiciary’s “living document” — allegedly authorizing unlimited change, including dissent from the most basic Catholic teachings. The supposed liberal “spirit” of the Council contradicted the orthodox letter of what the Council had actually said.