National Post
December 18, 2010
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/12/18/conrad-black-for-catholics-2010-was-a-year-of-perseverance/
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| Pope Benedict XVI |
As the year comes to an end, it is hard now to remember the hysteria generated by the tawdry and often appalling scandal of clerical abuse of young men in the Roman Catholic Church, between February and July. The New York Times appeared to be offering free visits to New York with city tours of all boroughs, capped by five-course dinners in five-star restaurants for anyone who could recall an indiscreet clerical hand on the knee from decades before.
I repeat that it is a grievous problem, and there were many disgusting and shameful incidents. But this does not alter or diminish the fidelity, dedication and self-discipline of the 99% of Roman Catholic religious personnel who have served through living memory, throughout the world, with unblemished devotion; nor blight the education and care they gave to an approximately equal percentage of the scores of millions of children confided to them.
All bad news for the Roman Catholic Church brings that Church's enemies swarming out like hornets whose nest has just been squirted with a garden hose. These include the litigators, the editorial mudslingers, the deep, thick, serried ranks of militant skepticism, to whom Rome is a Satanic bumble bee that infests the brave, aging secular world of utilitarian progress and the methodical human march toward a plenitude of knowledge. Earlier this year, they thought they saw the end, at last, of Rome's ghastly, tenebrous, saturnine magisterium that defies all laws of nature and reason by not simply crashing to the ground as the endlessly proclaimed laws of rational aerodynamics require. They were, as always, mistaken.
The long-promised ecclesiastical fall of Rome was to be celebrated, like a spectacular crash at the great Farnborough Air Show, by the fiasco of Pope Benedict's madly insouciant visit to Godless Britain to beatify the already Venerable Doctor John Henry Cardinal Newman in September. The allegedly dogmatic Pope supposedly combined all the dislikes of the British caricaturist, commentator and pub bore: Germanic, authoritarian, sophistical, pompous, superstitious and curial. In the first half of 2010, the Pope was reviled as complicit in the crimes of hiding the molestations, and even as an ex-Nazi and a ruthless dogmatist.
And yet in Britain, Benedict was seen as intellectually courageous, the quietly spoken wise man.
He was apologetic for the Church's failings, solicitous of its victims, indomitable in the championship of Christian faith and reverently admiring of Newman, a quintessential Englishman and one of the intellectual giants and greatest English prose stylists of the 19th century. The Pope did not put a Prada-clad foot wrong. Leftist pundits who had predicted huge outpourings of hostility were completely silenced, as the Pope came and went in an ambiance of reciprocated good will in which all, including Queen Elizabeth, the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury joined.
Benedict was finally recognized as a Nazi resister whose cousin was liquidated because of a mental defect, and who deserted the German Army; and as a great scholar devoted to the reconciliation of faith and reason, who has been decisive and effective and unsung in combating child abuse in the Church for 30 years and had largely eliminated it before it was fanned into a conflagration this year. (It was like Edward VII's visit to Paris in 1903, when he arrived to shouts of "perfidious Albion" and left a week later to choruses of "Long live the King!") Benedict appealed to the strong British appreciation of the underdog, the undemonstrative man of principle.
By July, much attention had already turned to the more imminent catastrophe presented by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and breathless predictions of Rome's collapse gave way to secular requiems for the world's shrimp-fishing industry and any recreational future for the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the United States. Of course, this too was a serious problem, but it too was addressed and has subsided. We have not been well-served in the last year by the media's frequent addiction to the apocalyptic. Such alarm is rarely justified, and it passed quickly in this case too.
As the year ends, Pope Benedict's qualities are again demonstrated by the pope's refusal to tolerate the ordination of bishops by China's puppet Catholic Patriotic Association, the People's Republic's enactment of Napoleon's famous dictum that "The people must have their religion and the state must control it." China antedates the Roman Catholic Church, but Communist China does not, and this usurpation, like all its precedents in Church history, will be a complete failure.
The Church's enemies forgot that it does not have adherents because of its personnel, but as an ark of faith. The atheists, though often articulate and courageous and knowledgeable, and heavy-laden with the ammunition provided by the fatuity and hypocrisy of much Christian history, can never deal with the insuperable evidence of spiritual forces, miracles and any ecclesiastical concept of grace. Nor can they surmount the challenge of man's inability to grasp the infinite, the absence of an end and beginning of space or time. In these vast areas, notions of the supernatural and the deity will always circulate, no matter how great dissent may be.
No one, and certainly not a rag-tag of sacerdotal perverts, will displace Rome from its 2,000 year primacy in this sphere. In both sacred and profane matters, the world and its institutions are racked by the consequences of human failings, but they have what life and its primary modes of organization must have to go on. This is the trite but salutary lesson of 2010, and isn't a bad Christmas message.
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