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archived: 15 - 21 May, 2005 Back Next UPDATED: May 17, 2005 UNHOLY ALLIANCE Pope Benedict XVI represents the most aggressively political pope of modern times. Prior to his meteoric ascent to the papacy, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger ordered American voters to repudiate the opponent of George Bush on pain of excommunication. More. In 2004, Cardinal Ratzinger threatened to excommunicate John Kerry for supporting women’s rights to abortion. Last June, George Bush visited Rome ostensibly for an audience with Pope John Paul II. During the papal audience, the president is presumed to have asked the pope for divine intervention into what - at the time - seemed like an extremely difficult election for the Republican president. At that point in the campaign, John Kerry, a Roman Catholic, was actually ahead of George Bush in the polls. Today, one year later, we do not know whether Bush met with Ratzinger during his visit to the Vatican last year, however, that seems like an extremely strong possibility. In fact, it is virtual certainty. Whether the president’s papal audience at the Vatican was arranged by the White House specifically for him to meet both Ratzinger and John Paul II in order to solicit their support for his campaign for the presidency, we can only surmise. The handwriting is on the walls, and the circumstances clearly suggest that the Bush White House and the Vatican have been working together hand-in-glove – Rove and Ratzinger - to prevent women from obtaining access to abortion from the early days of Bush’s presidency. Upon the death of John Paul II, George W. Bush, his father and Bill Clinton represented America at the Vatican funeral. The former presidents were photographed while all three of them were simultaneously leaning on the casket of the dead pope, hands clasped, eyes closed, lips moving and engaged in prayer. This was a riveting tableau of the political exploitation of the papacy and vice versa, a symbiotic relationship whereby the one feeds off the energy of the other. The three presidents present a stark contrast in their spiritual lives. George W. Bush is an evangelical Christian of the Billy Graham and Bible Belt school of fundamentalism. George H. W. Bush is a devotee of both, Billy Graham and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose ministry he endorsed at a massive rally in Central America that was witnessed by more than 10,000 of his fellow Moonies in 1993. Bill Clinton is a Southern Baptist who has been the target of the wrath of the evangelical fundamentalists throughout America, but who has a more moderate and traditional form of religious faith. At the Vatican funeral of the pope, the radicalization of the politics of the papacy was only getting started. At the coronation of the new pope, we were treated to the spectacle of yet another major American politician grovelling for political credibility at the feet of the pope. Seated on his papal throne, Benedict XVI received his honoured guests who approached his throne, knelt down on their knees and kissed his ring. Representing America, Jeb Bush swiftly approached the papal throne, knelt down on his knees and kissed the pope’s ring. Then he raised his head and began speaking earnestly and swiftly to the freshly coronated pope. While nobody was able to record what transpired between the two men, we do know the following events will unfold in the none-too-distant future. Pope Benedict XVI will visit the United States, where he will arrive in New York to address the General Assembly of the United Nations. At the UN, he will deliver what will amount to a papal homily that will call for the curtailment of women’s rights, the containment of Islam and the enforcement of new levels of discipline for anyone on earth who dares to advocate family planning, the use of condoms or any other means of ‘artificial’ birth control. From the marble dais at the UN, the pope will fly to the White House, where he will be greeted like a head of state, which he is, for he is the crowned monarch of the Vatican. There will be a photo opportunity with the President, and the pope will then be dispatched to the red states where he will address a multitude of Hispanic, Latino, Cuban and Mexican American voters. In that political address, Benedict XVI will lash out at every Catholic who might countenance family planning, birth control or the use of condoms. The pope will threaten to excommunicate any Catholics who commit the sin of birth control in any form. He will then excoriate every political leader – and every political party – that condones family planning, birth control or women’s rights in any form whatsoever. The pope’s message will be designed to foment fear and hatred among America’s Catholics for women’s rights and its primary political support group, the Democratic Party. Worse. The pope will advocate the excommunication of all Catholics who vote Democratic. He will do this by reiterating the contents of the letter he signed last year that had such a decisive impact on the 2004 presidential vote, because it threw approximately 6% of the Catholic vote to Bush, more than enough to make the difference in New Mexico and Ohio. Josef Ratzinger grew up as the son of a small town policeman in Nazi Germany. During the era dominated by the Third Reich, discipline was strictly enforced at every level of society. Society was organized around a cluster of precepts. Husbands assumed the traditional masculine role of superiority and became the autocratic rulers of their entire families, making them ‘Die Fuhrer’ of the household. The role of women was tightly defined around the traditional constellation of feminine labours as subservient help-mates to their husbands whose lives were devoted to three fundamental assignments: kinder, kirche and kuche, (children, church and kitchen.) The son of a policeman in the Third Reich would necessarily have been the recipient of a great deal of parental pressure, involving unusually high levels of strict psychological discipline punctuated by copious lashings of corporal punishment meted out by both of his parents. The unique interfamilial dynamics of a police state family in the Third Reich had a deep and profound impact on the young Ratzinger. With a model father and mother, Ratzinger was shaped and moulded by powerful psychological forces that produced the peculiar psychosexual characteristics that led him to the ostensibly celibate Catholic priesthood. Being a Roman Catholic in the Third Reich, he would have been obsessed with the church, its hierarchies, its authority, its uniquely papal infallibility from a very early age. These experiences ripened him for what was to come next. From that stern upbringing drenched in discipline at home, school and church, Ratzinger brought a great deal of psychological baggage with him when he joined the Hitler Youth. As a matter of course, all of the members of the Hitler Youth were indoctrinated in the tenets of Nazism: Aryanism, racial hatred, eugenics, the over-arching sovereignty of the state and its extension, the church, in every dimension of society and the absolute obeisance and personal devotion to the totalitarian autocracy stemming from the dictator-in-chief, the Father of their nation, Adolf Hitler, Die Fuhrer. Due to Ratzinger’s age, he observed the rise of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli to the papacy in 1939. Cardinal Pacelli had been instrumental in Hitler’s rise to power by swiftly and easily signing the concordat between Hitler and the Vatican, which provided massive political support for the Enabling Act that gave Hitler the extraordinary powers of a dictator. As Pope Pius XII, Pacelli has been criticized for acquiescing to the Holocaust that led to the deaths of six million Jews. With a role model like Pacelli as Pope Pius XII to re-enforce the Hitlerian lessons of his parents and his Fuhrer, Ratzinger had no qualms about the Hitler Youth. As a member of the Hitler Youth, Josef Ratzinger’s training included: marching (the goose-step); bayonet drill (thrusting into mannequins); grenade throwing and pistol shooting. Every member of the Hitler Youth was presented with a Nazi dagger. At every level, the Hitlerian indoctrination of Josef Ratzinger was a purely anti-intellectual form of psychological programming. Athleticism was stressed, and every theme resonated with the concept of Aryans as the Master Race on a grand mission to exterminate the racial bacillus of inferiors: Non-Aryans, the disabled, homosexuals and Gypsies. In the latter stages of the war, Josef Ratzinger became a soldier in the Wehrmacht, and he fought to defend the Fatherland. In the aftermath of the war, he sought a haven. As soon as possible, Ratzinger entered the Roman Catholic Church which provided him with a top heavy, organizational structure headed by an infallible Pope that was strikingly similar to the configuration of the Third Reich which had been headed by one Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. It must be said, that Ratzinger developed his intellect. Over the course of time, he has become the primary intellectual defender of the most starkly reactionary papacy in the entire history of the Roman Catholic Church. Ratzinger believes that the Church of Rome is under siege. In his mind, the most menacing danger for the future of the church does not come from the secularization of society, a process that has devastated its ranks in modern Europe. Ratzinger believes that the principal dangers for the church stem from the rapid growth of both Islam and Buddhism. Josef Ratzinger hates the Buddha, and he loathes the Prophet Muhammad. Realizing that he holds those enemies of his faith uppermost in his mind, we should always view his papacy through the lens of political intelligence. He is – without any question whatsoever – the most hyper-political pope since the year zero of the common era. That he is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, dedicated to the unification of the Roman Catholic Church with the evangelical megachurch phenomenon that is sweeping America comes as no surprise. He is the most predatory masculine opponent to the rights of women in the world today. As Cardinal, Josef Ratzinger personally coordinated the covering up of thousands of cases of child sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests. His handling of the rapidly mushrooming number of cases of priestly child sexual abuse led directly to Ratzinger becoming the frontrunner for the papacy. When the College of Cardinals convened in Conclave, experts predicted that they would cast over 50 ballots during a fifteen day period before selecting a new pope. After only three or four ballots on the second day of the Conclave, Ratzinger emerged as the new pope to the surprise and the shock of the world. His strict obedience to traditional dogma and his willingness to deflect the deeply damaging scandal of child sexual abuse recommended him highly to the Cardinals. Ratzinger’s policy for the sex crisis is to cover up these cases of priestly paedophilia by holding top-secret star-chamber proceedings to prevent the public from learning about the extent or the depravity of the sexual abuse of thousands of innocent children by Catholic priests. The financial burden of this crisis is huge. The Vatican has already paid out over one billion dollars, and experts estimate that it may eventually cost the Vatican over five billion dollars in fines, settlements and hush-money. In America alone, more than 4,450 Roman Catholic priests are known to have sexually assaulted child parishioners. The vast majority of the cases reported to date involved the sexual violation of altar boys by the priests they served. Cases of priestly sexual abuse of nuns seem relatively uncommon, but this category of sex crime could yet emerge to become a huge burden of scandal for the Vatican in the relatively near future. What is not known at this time is the extent of involvement of the federal government in general and the Department of Justice led by ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft in particular in the handling of the national Catholic priest child sexual abuse scandals. At this time, we do not have access to documents pertaining to federal investigations or advice on this case, a situation which seems strange on the face of it due to its magnitude. We do not know whether there was any communication between the office of Ashcroft and Cardinal Bernard Law, whose public disgrace led to the globalisation of the child sex abuse scandal. From Boston, the plague of child abuse spread like an anaesthetic. The darkening stain of priestly paedophilia spread across America. Its tentacles grasped outward into Central and Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Why was there no federal dimension to the investigation of this global phenomenon? With over 4,000 Catholic priests incriminated as child sexual molesters in America alone, why did the Attorney General fail to order an FBI investigation? Instead, the highest ranking woman in the FBI, Kathleen McChesney, was allowed to resign her position to take up a new post with the Catholic Church. A new office was created for ex-FBI Agent McChesney, the Office of Child and Youth Protection, which consisted of her office and support staff with an annual budget of one million dollars. Their goal, according to ex-Agent McChesney was, “No more cases.” Quite. This acquiescence to the proselytizing of an FBI agent has cleanly covered up the federal involvement in the national and international dimensions of this deeply troubling case. Why was this cover up allowed to happen in Bush’s America? Perhaps, the events described above that took place in 2004 contain a kernel of a clue. The Vatican supports the Bush White House, and that political support is and has been reciprocated. In effect, the Bush White House may have used its massive influence throughout the globe to encourage the far flung members of the College of Cardinals to back Ratzinger, as the bulwark against the tide of the sex abuse scandal. At this point in time, major news organizations are now filing FOIA requests and making enquiries at the White House to determine the scope and depth of the political relationship between the Bush White House and the Vatican. Now that there is a new Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, a Hispanic American who is a Roman Catholic, will there be any further federal involvement in the investigation of priestly child sexual abuse or not? In his inaugural address Attorney General Gonzalez pledged to prosecute obscenity, much like his evangelical predecessor he is strongly opposed to pornography, but he has not uttered one syllable in public about the sexual molestation, abuse and rape of thousands of American children by Catholic priests. Why not? As a Roman Catholic, one would presume that Alberto Gonzalez would be keen to see the eradication and the exorcism of the scandal now hanging over the Vatican like the sword of Damocles. His silence speaks volumes. In selecting Josef Ratzinger, the Cardinals have chosen to close their ranks around a body of traditional dogma in opposition to women’s rights and family planning that has driven millions of people away from the Roman Catholic Church. In selecting Ratzinger as pope, the Cardinals were clearly stating that they are no longer interested in the growth of the church, but they are deeply concerned about its very existence. The single most dangerous factor in its survival is the global scandal of the largely unpunished sex crimes of tens of thousands of Catholic priests. Josef Ratzinger, a psychologically damaged youth straight out of the sternest upbringing of the Nazi era, has joined forces with neoconservatives in the Republican Party by pledging himself to be the most stalwartly political pope in the known universe. This unholy alliance is now moving to consolidate its grasp on power by enforcing its dogma on Roman Catholic citizens in the United States and throughout the third world. Now is the hour, for all people of faith to join together with reformist Catholics to defend their human rights, their civil rights and their natural freedom against the tyranny of reactionary religious and political dogma. Those Roman Catholics who want to reform their church are now in the forefront of the battle for the rights of humanity. They deserve every ounce of support that we can give them. Sources
The Boston
Globe: Spotlight investigation – Abuse in the Catholic Church
Top FBI woman to battle
Church abuse
New Attorney General Vows
To Prosecute Obscenity
Hitler Youth Dagger __________________ Since 1968, Michael Carmichael has been a professional political consultant. Beginning as a Student Coordinator for Robert F. Kennedy, he has worked in five US presidential campaigns as well as over 100 major American political campaigns for federal and state offices. In 1985, he founded The Oxford Centre for Public Affairs in the United Kingdom. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global public affairs organization based in the United Kingdom. He has appeared as a public affairs expert on the BBC, European Business News, NPR and many European television broadcasts examining American politics and culture. In addition to his column for The Political Junkies, he is a regular contributor to the Moving Planet weblog. See: www.planetarymovement.org and http://planetmove.blogspot.com/
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
