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Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Ratzinger selected as new pope; promises to end “reign of tolerance”

VATICAN CITY, April 19—Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany Tuesday as the new pope to succeed John Paul II, reaching an early agreement on the second day of voting.

He took the name of Benedict XVI.

A cardinal from Chile, Jorge Medina Estevez, the Senior Cardinal Deacon, made the announcement before thousands of cheering spectators.

The balloting followed a day of stately ritual. Ratzinger delivered a hard-hitting sermon at a pre-conclave Mass attended by the cardinals. A close associate of John Paul and the dean of the College of Cardinals, Ratzinger launched a passionate defense of strict orthodoxy.

“To have a clear faith according to the church’s creed is today often labeled fundamentalism,” he told the cardinals and the congregation packed into St. Peter’s Basilica. “While relativism, letting ourselves be carried away by any wind of doctrine, appears as the only appropriate attitude for the today’s times. A dictatorship of relativism is established that recognizes nothing definite and leaves only one’s own ego and one’s own desires as the final measure.”

Ratzinger’s speech expounded one side of an argument that framed the conclave of the College of Cardinals. Opponents say that Ratzinger and other Vatican-based prelates are stifling Catholic debate on religious and ethical subjects.

“Stifling debate is not necessarily a bad thing,” said one source close to the new Pope.  “It invigorated the Church during the Counter-Reformation, and it could really revitalize us now.  Today’s young people, especially, are looking for a Church that will not give in to the dictatorship of relativism, but will remind them, by means of both spiritual and corporeal discipline, that the Holy Father knows best.  We’re expecting a stampede to the youth groups.”

Church historian Thomas A. Becket pointed out that Cardinal Ratzinger took the name Benedict not as a reference to Benedict XV, whose Papal Peace proposal of 1917 sought to end the First World War, but to Benedict XII, the fourteenth-century Pope who, as Bishop Jacques Fournier of Pamiers, “pursued a rigorous witch hunt for heretics, which won him plaudits from the Vatican.”

“We take that as a hopeful sign of a new era of restoration,” said Becket.  “And as a long-overdue warning to today’s witches and heretics that their days in the Church are numbered.  John Paul II was rigorous in matters of doctrine, it’s true, but you’ll notice—if you check the records—that we’ve had remarkably few burnings and excommunications over the past 27 years.  Well, now it’s no more Mr. Nice Supreme Pontiff.  Benedict XVI is in the house, and it’s time for people to wake up and smell the boiling oil.”

Posted by Michael on 04/19 at 11:58 AM
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