Catholics & Republicans: Circling Wagons Around The Base

Be ready for further foaming, of an even more rabid nature, as two institutions confronted w/ impending slides into irrelevance & doom try to stand athwart history & its dialectic screeching "Stop, damnit, for the love of my non-existent gawd, stop!!" All should be familiar w/ the Republican "We weren't right wing enough! We lost the base!" etc., etc. chant, tempered here & there by the slightly less-ideological & more rational, "Maybe we should have an appeal to more than old white Christian male high school drop-outs who'll be dead in ten yrs.," elements of the party. (Both of them.)

And all should be aware we'll be hearing more of the same, for some time. "George Bush was no conservative, he was a spendthrift, big government type." "If not for Sarah Palin we would've really lost! The at least six un-flattering adjectives media lied Obama into office," & probably more than once its sub-text: "AmeriKKKans are so stupid they don't deserve our glorious rule," ad nauseum.

The other institution is that globe-girdling enterprise of repression, guilt, self-loathing & general Whore of Babylonatry, the Roman Catholic Church. There aren't as many pasty-white patoots in the pews as there used to be, so the Pope is going for quality of delusion, not quantity of the deluded.

Very high on Benedict's list of concerns is the defense -- perhaps the saving -- of Catholic Christianity on the European continent. Benedict knows only too painfully that Catholic loyalties in most countries are far weaker than they were 40 years ago, whether measured by mass attendance or vocations. Meanwhile, once-faithful countries like Spain seem happy passing very liberal laws on abortion and gay marriage -- both of which Benedict opposes strenuously. If there is a solution to this great fall from grace, he has suggested, it is to be found in the small and very faithful Catholic societies -- including the so-called new ecclesial orders. If we can no longer count on heavy majorities of Spaniards or French people going to mass, Benedict reasoned, the Catholic future depends on dedicated minorities who will act like a leaven to raise the whole mass.

Good luck, Joey Ratz. You've been doing a good job so far improving the standing of the Church. And we can expect more, it seems.

The sect's eccentricity went further than simply holding quirky or reactionary views. Lefebvre and his immediate circle reacted radically and fundamentally to the Vatican's 1960s reformism. Theirs was not simply suspicion of modern decadence, but rather a fundamental belief in the evil forces subverting the modern world -- which included the Jews. Pope Benedict erred in seeing the Lefebvrists as simple traditionalists or reactionaries whose views slotted into the right wing of the acceptable European political spectrum. Some, at least, were far more extreme, and the Vatican's attempted embrace of them will probably cause lasting damage both inside the church, and in relations with other faiths.

The Pope may not have too sharp an ear for the acceptable political spectrum, having been a Junior Nazi & all. And how could he have imagined that these simple, traditionalist reactionaries would have simple, traditional, reactionary views? It's not as if the Holy Father is infallible or anything.