the Middle East, where he will try to mend fences with Jews and Muslims. The second explores new strategies aimed at hardening the Church’s stance on Freemasonry, more specifically the official branding of Catholics who join Masonic lodges as heretics guilty of a mortal sin.
As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctirne of the Faith, then pope-in-training, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger earned a reputation as a hard-line enforcer of Catholic doctrinal absolutism. After heaping syrupy praise on René Descartes, the 17th century French rationalist philosopher, Ratzinger abruptly suspended his homage by condemning Descartes and forbidding Catholics to read his books “on pain of sin.” He condemned Liberation Theology, the oxygen-rich ministry that redefines and, for the poor and voiceless, enlivens an otherwise stolid Roman Catholicism, and he punished its disciples with public humiliations, swift and irrevocable defrocking, and summary excommunications. He also excoriated and suppressed neo-liberal theologians and delivered hostile orations against abortion, homo-sexuality and the ordination of women to the priesthood.
When Benedict ascended to the Papacy his election was halfheartedly welcomed by some Jewish groups (one of them the right-wing and very accommodating Anti-Defamation League, which is more interested in ingratiating itself with the Vatican than in rehashing history). He received a more tepid welcome from world Jewry which hoped that Benedict would “continue along the path of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II in supporting the State of Israel and committing to an uncompromising fight against anti-Semitism.”
Critics accuse Benedict's papacy of being insensitive towards Judaism. They cite the expanding use of the Tridentine Mass, which calls for the conversion of Jews to Christianity, and denounce the reinstatement of four excommunicated bishops, all members of the Society of St. Pius X, a traditionalist and virulently anti-Semitic Catholic organization. One of these bishops is American Richard Williamson, an outspoken Holocaust denier who struggled to issue a skewed apology but did not recant his position on the well documented event.
Pope Benedict's dealings with Islam -- 1.2 billion-strong and growing at about three percent per year -- remain, at best, strained. On September 12, 2006 the pontiff delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany, where he had served as professor of theology. Entitled “Faith, Reason and the University -- Memories and Reflections,” the lecture received critical attention from political and religious authorities. Muslim politicians and religious leaders recoiled at his pompous insensitivity and protested against what they perceived to be inflammatory rhetoric and an odious mischaracterization of Islam. They were especially offended by the following statement:
“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
The pope said nothing about the Crusades, the “Holy” Inquisition and the “Conquest” of the Americas, which, in addition to fattening the Church’s bulging treasury, were waged to spread Christianity … by the sword.
Other pontifical gaffes would follow, all dramatic evidence of a Church woefully out of touch with reality, to say nothing of how prone it is to tinker with history. On his first visit overseas, Benedict told a gathering of Latin American bishops in Brazil that preaching Jesus and his gospel did not intrude upon or corrupt pre-Columbian cultures. This callous falsehood triggered a storm of indignation, prompting the Vatican to issue a hasty but unconvincing “clarification,” not a Mea Culpa. Instead of expressing regret for the evils of colonialism and forced conversions, the clarification indemnified the modern Church by disingenuously claiming that it in no way condones the excesses of the past.
When Benedict was elected pope, one of his first and perhaps most surprising supporters was PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). PETA expediently or naïvely portrays Jesus as a vegetarian, which he may have been when he was not eating fish, but in whose honor the ritual of Holy Communion turns his followers into cannibals. The pontiff’s passion for traditional papal garb, especially gold-embroidered ermine-trimmed vestments, once a royal entitlement, prompted animal lovers everywhere to ask Benedict to live up to his words and give fur a rest. No one knows for sure whether such mundane petition had any effect on papal prerogative.
Distancing himself yet again from actuality, bent on taking the Church back to its darkest days, Benedict, on his first trip to Africa, a continent where at least 25 million people are infected with HIV, told the gathered masses that condoms are not only useless in the prevention of AIDS but that they may actually aggravate the problem. The “cruel epidemic,” he insisted, should be tackled through “fidelity and abstention.” Reckless faith, or depraved cynicism still prevents the pope from grasping the enormity of his counsel. Pro-life -- the protoplasmic kind -- but indifferent to the dignity of man, his outrageous directive condemns millions to an early, agonizing death.
Tired, facing a busy schedule, Montvert surrenders to fitful, dream-haunted sleep. In the morning he will be speaking about the great Kandinsky, one of the most important innovators in modern art. The painter’s abstract, obsessively geometric, brightly colored canvases of incredible sensorial richness coalesce and break apart in a kaleidoscope of Montvert’s own nightmare-induced creation. Further along in the dream, he enters the Bauhaus, the legendary German art and architecture school from which so many modernists would emerge. Suddenly, the edifice crumbles around him, as it did figuratively in 1933 when the Nazis, fearing the “un-German” (Jewish) influence of social liberals and the impact of “degenerate art” on the pristine Teutonic psyche, shut its doors for the remainder of the war.
This is no longer Joseph Goebbels’ domain but Montvert has yet to feel at ease in Germany. His discomfort is visceral. Germans may have collectively expiated the sins of their fathers but there is something about their country that he finds troubling -- the language, clipped, guttural, brusque, imperious -- the frosty aloofness, the uniforms, the mannerisms, the formalistic infatuation with “discipline” and “order,” the reemergence of Nazi cells, the transparent nostalgia for the Third Reich’s brief but intoxicating rapture. All hark back to a time, not so very long ago, when Germans enthusiastically goose-stepped to Hitler’s drumbeat. Even in his sleep, Montvert can’t wait to clear off.
Albeniz, an insomniac, walks home as Madrid’s other self, iridescent and roguish, comes to life in the late evening hours. Lost in thought, brooding over Jan van den Haag’s baffling letter, he turns to another time when darkness reigned, when blindness to man’s inhumanity and deafness to reason were self-inflicted attitudes, not congenital infirmities. Somewhere in the distance church bells strike eleven.
“We have learned nothing,” he says to himself as he unlocks his apartment door and retires for the night.
Night in the Middle Ages is neither longer nor shorter than it’s ever been but it’s infinitely darker, filled with impenetrable shadows, and few venture into the sulfurous chasm for there, under a thick mantle of ignorance, superstition and aberrant beliefs, dwell in untold numbers the loathsome incarnations of man’s most hideous fears. Fear of the unknown. Fear of change. Fear of observable truth. Fear of witches, demons, ravenous incubi and insatiable succubi. Fear of temptation. Fear of God’s pitiless tribunal. Fear of Hades and Satan. Fear of sin and eternal damnation.
As day slowly blanches away the blackness, only the sky dares to brighten. The monstrous visions that populate night retreat for a while but they do not vanish. They return at a time of their own choosing. Day scatters the gloom but it sheds no light. It’s just an optical illusion, a
