The Long View

Release the Flying Monkeys!

The media martyrdom of Benedict XVI should not be conflated with the investigative reporting of the early years of this decade into the abuse of minors in many Catholic dioceses. The mistake is understandable, of course, and in a column entitled The Catholic Church's Catastrophe we see Peggy Noonan making it:

In both the U.S. and Europe, the scandal was dug up and made famous by the press. This has aroused resentment among church leaders, who this week accused journalists of spreading "gossip," of going into "attack mode" and showing "bias."

But this is not true, or to the degree it is true, it is irrelevant. All sorts of people have all sorts of motives, but the fact is that the press—the journalistic establishment in the U.S. and Europe—has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on this issue. Let me repeat that: The press has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on the scandals because it exposed the story and made the church face it. The press forced the church to admit, confront and attempt to redress what had happened. The press forced them to confess. The press forced the church to change the old regime and begin to come to terms with the abusers. The church shouldn't be saying j'accuse but thank you.

We may note in passing that the chronology here is not quite right. The abuses were distributed along a roughly normal curve with its median in the 1970s. By 1990 the clerical recruiting and personnel practices that had made the scandal possible had been corrected, so that reports of later incidents became rare. The system was to some degree self-correcting. The media explosion of the early 21st century did serve to ensure that the administrative malefactors in the diocesan bureaucracies suffered some part of the humiliation they so richly deserve.

Benedict XVI's case is quite otherwise. No one has made a plausible case that he facilitated the abusers. The recent exposes in the New York Times don't even go to much trouble to try. The point is simply to put the key terms "Benedict," "Ratzinger," "pedophile," "abuse," and "cover-up" into close proximity to each other in as many paragraphs as possible and in as many news outlets as possible. We are not dealing here with journalism, not even with bad journalism. What we are looking at is branding. The process is not different in principle from priming the public to associate a certain breakfast cereal with a famous athlete, so that every time they see the athlete they will be reminded of the cereal. What we are looking at is a transcontinental effort to render the Bishop of Rome connotatively toxic. This will make it unnecessary to argue against anything that Catholic authorities say, either in their own defense in this matter or on any other subject. One need not refute the punchline to an off-color joke.

If you find this project not just discouraging but uncanny, you are not alone in feeling that someone has released the flying monkeys. This mood has driven David Goldman at First Things to neologism, as we see in his blog note, Cultural Obamalypse: the Attack on the Pope:

The Obamalyptic mood in the White House seems to have infected the cultural left generally. Thirty-year-old news is dragged daily into the headlines to make it appear that some dreadful truth has been dragged out of the Vatican vaults, demonstrating Pope Benedict XVI's culpability in child abuse. It is hard to avoid the impression that the nihilists have a sense of empowerment as never before.

There’s something ugly in the air. The two central institutions of the West are the Throne of St. Peter and the Oval Office. That is not an exaggeration, for the Catholic model in Europe and the American model are the two modes of life that the West has developed...Nihilists around the world are in a triumphant mood and believe that it is time to mop up the remnants of their enemies everywhere.

The fact that the author of these words appears to hold the president in regrettably light esteem need not detain us. There is merit in the intuition that dark forces are moving in for the kill, perhaps geopolitically and certainly with regard to the Catholic Church.

One way or another, the pontificate of Benedict XVI marks the end of the post-Vatican II era. This is not because he is a reactionary seeking to undo the work of the Second Vatican Council. Quite the opposite: in some respects he is the first pope to try to implement what the Council actually intended. Vatican II was an attempt, not altogether unsuccessful, to allow the Church to assimilate the great goods that Western modernity had created since the French Revolution, just as the Church had absorbed the good things of every age through which it had passed. At the Council, the Church made peace with democracy and freedom of conscience and accepted them as necessary features of the good society. It re-embraced humane reason to an extent not seen since the High Middle Ages. It broke free of the last shreds of association with crepuscular monarchists to a vision of the world as an ecumenical whole.

In the first half of the 1960s, modernity was still friendly, or at least tolerant. At almost the last possible moment, the Catholic Church made its own the best that modernity had to offer.

In the early 21st century, modernity has entered a state of accelerating decay. Democracy is increasingly a venerable anachronism to the West's elites, like a titular monarch with no practical influence on governance. Conservatism, which at one time was hospitable at least to the the preservation of folk-Catholicism, has become a libertarian acid that rejects the very concept of the public good. The Church is now the last major institution that defends reason in the broad sense, as well as of many other things that had been the stuff of mere sanity sixty years earlier. In its capacity as the memory of Western Civilization, the Church's existence has become year-by-year more irksome to a variety of late modern actors. The Church's own episode of indiscipline in the last quarter of the 20th century left potent weapons of invective to hand. The wonder is that it took so long to bring them to bear.

The flying monkeys will not have the last word, of course. The enterprise of subversion has its limits. I have in this space more than once linked Benedict's reforms to the proposal for a genuinely post-modern future that Hermann Hesse outlined in The Glass Bead Game. You can read the principal discussion here.

That resolution, should it occur, is still a bit of a way off. Metahistory does not appeal to everybody; moreover, history no more has the last word than do the flying monkeys. Let me end with this reading I head at the Mass for Holy Thursday:

Revelation 1:8
(New International Version)

"I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God,
"who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty."

This requires a bit of exegesis, to put it mildly. On the whole, though, I would say that the New York Times has bitten off more than it can chew.