The truth about Dogma and Pope Benedict

or What Father Greeley, Hans Kung, and Sister Chittister don’t want you to know!

This is a blog article by Patrick which eloquently states the obvious and is well worth the read.

An excerpt:

Many, not all, of the people (Catholics and non-Catholics) who are worried or disappointed about the election of Cardinal Ratzinger are so because they had hoped that the next Pope would change some area of Catholic dogma. Let me tell you a secret: Catholic dogma (as opposed to disciplines*) will not change, regardless of who is Pope. All the Cardinals are such because they believe wholeheartedly that the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit to reveal certain eternal truths about God and humanity. The Church cannot decide these matters as She sees fit.

Concrete example: If the issue of contraception had been tackled under Pope Bl. John XXIII rather than Pope Paul VI, guess what? The teaching would be just the same as Humanae Vitae. The encyclical would have been worded differently; perhaps because of that, and because of John XXIII’s better public persona and portrayals, it might have been better received, and we would not see such great dissent in America and Western Europe. But John would have had to reach the same conclusion as Paul, because of the underlying truth of the matter.

But you say, “That can’t be right! John XXIII was a progressive, so of course he would have decided it differently than that conservative Pope Paul VI!” Okay, follow me here. Why is John XXIII portrayed as a progressive and Paul VI conservative? Because the act deemed most important of John’s papacy (the opening of Vatican II) made American progressives happy, and the act deemed most important of Paul’s papacy (Humanae Vitae) made the American conservatives happy (or is it more accurate to say, it made the American progressives angry?). Fidelity to the Church doesn’t fit neatly into the current left or right; it combines the preferential option for the poor with the defense of unborn human life, to cite two examples.

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