Are You Telling Me that the New Pope is Catholic?

There's something almost satisfying about the predictable reaction by liberals and secularists to the elevation of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy. I'm especially amused by non-Catholics, or post-Christian WASPs and their imitators, who are shocked -- shocked! -- that the Cardinals would have the unmitigated gall to elect a Roman Catholic priest to be pope! The scandal! The outrage! Next thing you know, some yahoo's going to suggest that the Queen must be royal, the President an American, and the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention a Southerner who happens to be a Baptist.

I was in a conclave of sorts myself yesterday at the Heritage Foundation, although we didn't set anything on fire, so I couldn't follow the news except on my laptop. But this morning's papers and Net sites are filled with words that try, feebly, to capture the weeping and gnashing of teeth among those for whom the only truth is that there is no truth, the only certainty that they are always right.

And of course, that's the crux of the problem. Dogmatic anti-dogmatism, with no intended irony, reigns throughout the Western intellectual class. Many journalists and commentators, pale imitators of their intellectual betters, adopt the pose and prose of the professors and foist it onto the rest of us. Or at least, they used to do that, until the advent of the alternative media, which they despise for obvious reasons.

So we get Morton Kondracke, by all accounts a decent man, lamenting Benedict's adherence to church doctrine. But Mort's whining is basically harmless, or at least rendered in such a way as to evoke sorrow rather than anger. On the other end of the scale, we see Andrew Sullivan performing his role as America's official Tormented Soul, a part that has won him a new (and deserved) appellation from Steve Bainbridge.

But, as Joe Knippenberg says:

[W]e’ll hear from a parade of liberal Catholics telling us how this choice will simply grease the skids for the Catholic Church in Western Europe and North America. That, indeed, was the substance of the NPR report I endured [as he drove home from work]. Liberal German Catholic after liberal German Catholic told the reporter how alienated they were from the current Church and how the only way to bring the back into the fold was for the Church to embrace modernity in all of its aspects--ordaining female priests, permitting contraception (at least, if not more), and accepting differences in sexual orientation. In other words, if the Church becomes indistinguishable from the secular world around it, lapsed Catholics will unlapse, so to speak. That this has not been the experience of the mainline Protestant churches that have been on the cutting edges of modernism will not cross the minds of the reporters who predict further doom for the Roman Catholic Church as a result of the election of Pope Benedict XVI.

Indeed, it will not, and for a variety of reasons. Too many who comment on religion do so with as little knowledge, and far less passion, than a baseball fan such as myself can muster when discussing America's pastime. No one has ever contacted me for commentary on Bobby Cox's pitching rotation or Charlie Manuel's chances with the Phillies. The fact that they never will is neither surprising nor unjust, but with religion, and especially such a high profile office as the post-JP II papacy, we'll get years of arm-chair analysis from people possessed of neither knowledge about, nor sympathy for, religion in general, and Catholicism in particular.

So bring them on, one after the other, to exclaim the wonder of it all. Not of creation, mind you, and still less of revelation. Not of history or theology or the life of the mind, well lived. Certainly not of spirituality rooted (that is, radically centered) in tradition, reason, revelation, and mystery. No, they'll exclaim the wonder that, in our day and age, seemingly intelligent and educated men could stand so strongly against the New New Thing, the latest morphing of one tired old cliché into the next, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. And when, in a hundred or a thousand years, the doctrines that fly over their heads today are still expressed, sometimes in new words, sometimes in old, the successors to our contemporary unschooled nihilists will still harp about those who fearlessly know the truth, proclaim it, and live its lessons. And they'll be just a baffled and outraged by what they see in their day as their boring ancestors are in our own.

Update: Kenneth Tanner hails the closure of one lousy food joint. You knew the inspectors would get a belly full sooner or later.

Update II: To read the complaints from a few predictable sources -- the Anglican bishop of Oxford, the Anglican Archbishop Tutu, and the anti-Catholic priest Hans Kung, see this story in Thursday's Daily Telegraph.

Update III: Here is a good run-down (some facts, some speculation) of what went on in the papal conclave.

Update IV: Another fine post at Mere Comments is by James Kushiner, an Eastern Orthodox Christian.