Post by 1949 on Apr 27, 2005 19:48:06 GMT -5
The bigot pope, “moral relativism” and Maoist morality
25 April 2005. A World to Win News Service. Joseph Ratzinger, the new Pope Benedict XVI, claims to be a beacon of morality in a world that sorely needs it. We agree with the need for a morality, but not his.
In a homily (sermon) he gave at a mass for the cardinals at the conclave where they gathered to elect a new pope – a kind of campaign speech addressed to his fellow church fathers, it seems – he warned, “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognise anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” He contrasted this with “being an adult, which means having a faith,” and grumbled, “Having a clear faith according to the church’s creed is today often labelled fundamentalism.” Some commentators have said that this statement on the eve of Benedict’s coronation is a key to understanding his conception of his mission.
What is the “certain” morality he counterposes to relativism? He is known for his vicious opposition to divorce, birth control and abortion. The subjugation for women this leads to in practical matters is matched by the new Pope’s insistence that women can never become men’s equals in religious matters, as priests. He no less violently opposes legal rights for same-sex marriage partners. In short, a central pillar of his so-called moral thought is the subjugation of women and the preservation of the traditional patriarchal family.
Ratzinger is also notorious for religious intolerance. When John Paul II first became pope, he made Ratzinger the “enforcer of orthodoxy” as one journalist wrote. During the decades when Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church organisation that conducted the Inquisition, he carried out a modern inquisition to crush schools of Catholic thought like Liberation Theology that were opposed to the institutional church’s whole-hearted service to the rulers of this world. Many religious people were disturbed when he publicly belittled all other creeds, even other Christian faiths. In an infamous edict on the “primacy” of the Catholic church, he proclaimed that of all religions, only Roman Catholicism holds the truth in its hands. Yet the defence of Christian religious fundamentalism in his homily was taken as an expression of brotherly solidarity by the predominantly Protestant religious fundamentalists in the US. Their leader George W. Bush hailed his appointment.
Many people have noted Ratzinger’s particularly blatant bigotry against Islam and Moslems. He holds that Turkey should not be allowed to become a member of the European Union because historically its population has been mainly Moslem. What gives Europe its defining identity is Christianity, he said. This is an especially ugly argument from a man who was a member of the Hitler Youth, not only because the Nazi programme included the genocide of those who did not share this identity, but also because like the Nazis, his definition of the essence of nations and peoples locates these in the mystical sphere of beliefs and links this with the will of the supernatural. His condemnation of multiculturalism as “an abandonment and disavowal of what is our own” is all the more reactionary in this light.
His defenders claim that most German teenage boys were forced to become Hitler Youth members, and cite, as evidence of his unwillingness, that his family listened to British short wave news broadcasts (if this is the best they can come up with, we can assume that there was nothing else). He had to get a certificate of attendance to Hitler Youth meetings, they say, to get a needed reduction in school tuition. That may be so, but his attitude was the opposite of Sophie and Hans Scholl and their friends, German Catholic students not much older than he was, who did resist and organised others to do so as well, putting not only their schooling but their lives at risk.
Instead of judging Ratzinger for the sins of his youth, we can look at his post-war priestly career in the service of a ruling class that for the most part was made up of the same men who had brought the Nazis to power. West Germany’s economy recovered, he said, “thanks to political leaders who had strong Christian roots.” Never one to keep out of earthly affairs, he was widely known as a strong supporter of the Christian Democrats and especially Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Why, then, does a man who has been at the centre of power all his life complain about the “dictatorship of moral relativism”? Moral relativism is the idea that there is no objectively correct morality, or in other words, that everyone’s morals are equal. We Maoists are not moral relativists, but before entering into that, it has to be said that this talk about “the dictatorship of moral relativism” is, to use a polite word, ridiculous. Everyone knows that Catholics and other Christians are not in any way being singled out for victimisation in the Western countries, nor is there any danger of that. When the Church authorities try to pretend otherwise, we should ask what they really want. Ratzinger has been able to practice his beliefs fully all his life. When he complains that his beliefs are suffering under a “dictatorship”, he means that he and those like him are not sufficiently free to dictate their morality to others – that even the limited freedoms in family and sexual matters most Western countries grudgingly conceded after the social upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s are an abomination and must be reversed.
This is a man who hates what he calls “ideological secularism” – the separation of church and state, which he calls “total profanity”. What the pope objects to is that his morality is not sufficiently enforced by the prevailing political rule in the West, that it is not part of capitalist dictatorship in the official way it was during medieval times, the epoch of feudal monarchism that preceded the triumph of capitalism.
What kind of morality is this man really offering? A morality rooted in the blind worship of the most backward religious traditions, on obscurantism and the promotion of ignorance – a morality that humanity has struggled to throw off for centuries, especially during the Enlightenment, and over which it is still fighting a life and death struggle today.
25 April 2005. A World to Win News Service. Joseph Ratzinger, the new Pope Benedict XVI, claims to be a beacon of morality in a world that sorely needs it. We agree with the need for a morality, but not his.
In a homily (sermon) he gave at a mass for the cardinals at the conclave where they gathered to elect a new pope – a kind of campaign speech addressed to his fellow church fathers, it seems – he warned, “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognise anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” He contrasted this with “being an adult, which means having a faith,” and grumbled, “Having a clear faith according to the church’s creed is today often labelled fundamentalism.” Some commentators have said that this statement on the eve of Benedict’s coronation is a key to understanding his conception of his mission.
What is the “certain” morality he counterposes to relativism? He is known for his vicious opposition to divorce, birth control and abortion. The subjugation for women this leads to in practical matters is matched by the new Pope’s insistence that women can never become men’s equals in religious matters, as priests. He no less violently opposes legal rights for same-sex marriage partners. In short, a central pillar of his so-called moral thought is the subjugation of women and the preservation of the traditional patriarchal family.
Ratzinger is also notorious for religious intolerance. When John Paul II first became pope, he made Ratzinger the “enforcer of orthodoxy” as one journalist wrote. During the decades when Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church organisation that conducted the Inquisition, he carried out a modern inquisition to crush schools of Catholic thought like Liberation Theology that were opposed to the institutional church’s whole-hearted service to the rulers of this world. Many religious people were disturbed when he publicly belittled all other creeds, even other Christian faiths. In an infamous edict on the “primacy” of the Catholic church, he proclaimed that of all religions, only Roman Catholicism holds the truth in its hands. Yet the defence of Christian religious fundamentalism in his homily was taken as an expression of brotherly solidarity by the predominantly Protestant religious fundamentalists in the US. Their leader George W. Bush hailed his appointment.
Many people have noted Ratzinger’s particularly blatant bigotry against Islam and Moslems. He holds that Turkey should not be allowed to become a member of the European Union because historically its population has been mainly Moslem. What gives Europe its defining identity is Christianity, he said. This is an especially ugly argument from a man who was a member of the Hitler Youth, not only because the Nazi programme included the genocide of those who did not share this identity, but also because like the Nazis, his definition of the essence of nations and peoples locates these in the mystical sphere of beliefs and links this with the will of the supernatural. His condemnation of multiculturalism as “an abandonment and disavowal of what is our own” is all the more reactionary in this light.
His defenders claim that most German teenage boys were forced to become Hitler Youth members, and cite, as evidence of his unwillingness, that his family listened to British short wave news broadcasts (if this is the best they can come up with, we can assume that there was nothing else). He had to get a certificate of attendance to Hitler Youth meetings, they say, to get a needed reduction in school tuition. That may be so, but his attitude was the opposite of Sophie and Hans Scholl and their friends, German Catholic students not much older than he was, who did resist and organised others to do so as well, putting not only their schooling but their lives at risk.
Instead of judging Ratzinger for the sins of his youth, we can look at his post-war priestly career in the service of a ruling class that for the most part was made up of the same men who had brought the Nazis to power. West Germany’s economy recovered, he said, “thanks to political leaders who had strong Christian roots.” Never one to keep out of earthly affairs, he was widely known as a strong supporter of the Christian Democrats and especially Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Why, then, does a man who has been at the centre of power all his life complain about the “dictatorship of moral relativism”? Moral relativism is the idea that there is no objectively correct morality, or in other words, that everyone’s morals are equal. We Maoists are not moral relativists, but before entering into that, it has to be said that this talk about “the dictatorship of moral relativism” is, to use a polite word, ridiculous. Everyone knows that Catholics and other Christians are not in any way being singled out for victimisation in the Western countries, nor is there any danger of that. When the Church authorities try to pretend otherwise, we should ask what they really want. Ratzinger has been able to practice his beliefs fully all his life. When he complains that his beliefs are suffering under a “dictatorship”, he means that he and those like him are not sufficiently free to dictate their morality to others – that even the limited freedoms in family and sexual matters most Western countries grudgingly conceded after the social upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s are an abomination and must be reversed.
This is a man who hates what he calls “ideological secularism” – the separation of church and state, which he calls “total profanity”. What the pope objects to is that his morality is not sufficiently enforced by the prevailing political rule in the West, that it is not part of capitalist dictatorship in the official way it was during medieval times, the epoch of feudal monarchism that preceded the triumph of capitalism.
What kind of morality is this man really offering? A morality rooted in the blind worship of the most backward religious traditions, on obscurantism and the promotion of ignorance – a morality that humanity has struggled to throw off for centuries, especially during the Enlightenment, and over which it is still fighting a life and death struggle today.