By Araminta Wordsworth
National Post
September 23, 2011
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/09/23/german-homecoming-no-love-in-for-the-pope/
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| The Pope Mobile carries Pope Benedict XVI to a vespers ceremony in Etzelsbach during Benedict's four-day official visit to his homeland |
Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Pope Benedict’s visit to his native Germany was never likely to be a love-in.
The Vatican’s continuing failure to do anything effective about child sex abuse by its priests remains a dreadful wound. Catholics have been deserting the pews in droves as the drip-drip of revelations about pedophile clerics seems endless, from the United States to Belgium, from Ireland to Germany.
The Pope was criticized in 2009 for lifting the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a maverick British bishop who questioned the Holocaust. Many Catholics in Germany, as well as in Austria and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, are frustrated with the Vatican’s resistance to change, including clerical celibacy and the ordination of women.
In addition, Benedict has chosen to venture into mostly Protestant and atheist regions in the ex-communist east where indifference can be guaranteed. This is, after all, the county that produced Martin Luther and set off the Reformation.
On cue, protesters in Berlin, some dressed as condoms and nuns, rallied against Benedict’s views on issues ranging from gay rights to the pedophile priest scandals. They were joined by some of the left-wing deputies who boycotted his speech to the Bundestag.
For the most part, however, Germans were underwhelmed. As a report on The Local website — which provides German news in English — notes,
Excited at first by the prospect of having a pope hail from Bavaria, Germans have since cooled considerably to the man formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger in the wake of a massive child abuse scandal at Catholic institutions in Germany.
A Forsa polling group survey showed only 4% of Germans said the visit was very important to them, 10% said it was rather important, 31% said it was not really important to them, while 55% said it was not important at all.
Typical of those interviewed by the website was Ingrid Strasbourg, 64, retired engineer:
“I don’t have anything against [the visit]. There are also huge ceremonies and to-dos when presidents and others come. [The Pope] is also a representative for the people. It should be allowed. But it’s not important that he’s German. The nationality doesn’t matter. I liked the Polish pope better.”
Meanwhile, the Church is on the ropes. A record 181,000 German Catholics officially left last year, mainly over disgust at the Vatican’s handling of child sex abuse by clergy. Or as contributors to the Spiegel Online website put it,
The Pope and his fellow Germans are not on good terms. The romance that existed in 2005 has vanished, leaving the hopes and the expectations of the day unfulfilled. The euphoria of the early years was a misunderstanding …
Ratzinger did not become the kindly, benign old prince of the church and bridge builder (“Pontifex maximus”) they had wanted him to be. On the contrary, he proved to be more conservative than the Germans wanted to believe at first. He has never grown out of his former role of head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Instead of opening up in his faith, he withdrew into his fortress and became even more obstinate.
His Church is erecting new walls because it’s what Benedict wants.
Swiss theologian Hans Kung goes even further, drawing parallels between the Pope and the Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
In the past, the Roman system was compared with the communist system, one in which one person had all the say. Today I wonder if we are not perhaps in a phase of “Putinization” of the Catholic Church. Of course I don’t want to compare the Holy Father, as a person, with the unholy Russian statesman. But there are many structural and political similarities. Putin also inherited a legacy of democratic reforms. But he did everything he could to reverse them. In the Church, we had the Council, which initiated renewal and ecumenical understanding. Even pessimists couldn’t have imagined that such setbacks were possible after that. The Polish pope’s restoration policy, beginning in the 1980s, made it possible for the like-minded head of the highly secretive Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, once known as the Congregation of the Roman & Universal Inquisition — and it’s still an inquisition, despite its new name — to be elected pope.
But Malte Lehming of Der Tagesspiegel believes the attitudes of leftwing Germans toward Catholicism are no different from right-wing populist bigotry against Islam.
The reasons behind this have been expressed in various publications. The pope is the “head of the only explicitly anti-democratic state in Europe”; the Vatican “cooperated closely with German and Italian fascists” in the past; the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Ratzinger headed for many years, is “the successor of the Inquisition, which in the Middle Ages was responsible for the persecution of witches”; and the position of the Catholic Church is anti-sex, anti-woman and homophobic while its stance on condom use in the era of AIDS is “criminal.”
No, when it comes to rabble-rousing, there’s really no difference here at all. German leftists stir up fears about Catholicism in almost the exact same way that right-wing populists do against Islam …
Criticizing religion is fine, but damning Catholicism while at the same time denouncing critics of Islam reeks of hypocrisy.
compiled by Araminta Wordsworth awordsworth@nationalpost.com
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