Der Pope Miester

As a non-Catholic I hardly feel qualified to comment on the selection of a new Pope. Unless you were comatose yesterday, you no doubt heard that Cardinal Ratzinger was selected to become Pope Benedict XVI. I was fully prepared to let others run with this ball as I find the whole process interesting, but not something that seemed as relevant to my life as it is to other's.

Then the left responded, and the relevance became clear; have these vulgar fools no shame? In the past twenty four hours the world has been treated to a display of hate, so palpable and shrill that it's outrage is exceeded only by it's predictability. This is what the left has been reduced to in our world. A ratty collection of moral relativists and libertines utterly bereft of any intellectual thought.

I am not unaware that some readers will find this an outrageous statement, but I make it unapologetically. Look at your movement. The selection of this new Pope, a man of great intellect and accomplishment who had to live in and fight against evil during his lifetime, has been greeted by the leftists in the most outrageous and hateful way.

"God's Rottweiller", "God's Enforcer", "Leader of The Division That Brought Us The Crusades" are just a few of the crude monikers with which the left has greeted God's servant. This from the people that claim to be against hate speech. To bad for the Pope he that he isn't an African pagan, because then he would qualify for all the protections of the benevolent left.

More instructive are the underlying complaints the left has used to justify their hate. He is "intolerant" of homosexuality, viewing it to be a sin. He doesn't believe in condom use, is against abortion and sacraments for those that promote it. All this, the left claims, will return us to the dark ages.

We could examine each of these objections individually, and it might be wise to do so if they had any real credibility when it came to discussing faith and the meaning of life. Sadly, it is pointless to do so because a church cannot and should not bend to the whims of an inherently imperfect people. The church's role is not to follow popular opinion so that the masses are comforted by their faith, but instead it is to set moral principles and absolutes by which it's followers are expected to conduct their lives, and in doing so find truth, fulfillment, and ultimately comfort. This is why forgiveness is such an important tenant of Christianity. Moral absolutes exist, we are to follow them, and when we fail, salvation remains available to those of us who repent.

Somehow in our modern times we have decided that the role of faith is one that is akin to the nursery school nanny. We recognize that we are fallible and know that as imperfect beings we will fall short in our quest for a moral life. Instead of correcting us when we proceed down a wayward path, we have decided that the church should allow us to continue on our wayward direction and pat us on the head when we error, saying "it's alright nobody is perfect".

An excellent example of this phenomenon has to do with the condom issue. The left reliably blames the aids epidemic in Africa on the church's refusal to support condom usage. This is shallow and idiotic. Aids is out of control in Africa not because of a lack of condoms, but rather because of a lack of moral guidance that has led to the wide spread practices of men preying on young girls, multiple sex partners, and infected men knowingly having sex with virgins to "cure" themselves of their affliction.

Instead of teaching these people that it is these very practices that are killing them, the left would prefer that we realize the brown skinned rabble is incapable of understanding moral guidance, and therefore should be patted on the head and given free condoms. It is this patronizing approach, founded in an underlying bigotry that the left refuses to recognize, that has led to the continued enslavement of Africans to dictatorships, disease and ignorance. It is time the left began to answer for this horror.

This is not to say that the right, the Christian right, or the church for that matter are faultless. Certainly they are. The Christian right is often correctly viewed as intolerant of non-believers, and attempting to legislate it's views on society overall. This is generally a small segment of society however, and their influence is ironically magnified by the megaphone of the left's outrage. Similarly the Catholic church which is responsible for more charity, education and relief work than virtually any other organization in the world, has had it's own well publicized scandal's over it's 2000 year history. We can all agree that these groups are guilty of imperfection. The outrage!

These are human institutions that attempt to find truth and build faith in our society, but as human institutions are fallible. Why is it that the forgiveness and understanding, indeed the left's much talked about but highly rationed tolerance are not available to these folks? The only answer is that the left's true agenda is to unhinge or society from it's moral underpinnings.

We have been told by the left that we are not to "judge" others. That each individual is responsible for his own moral code and that there are no absolutes in life. Eliminating a higher moral authority from our lives is the first step in the broader goal of substituting government as the final arbiter of control, and we know how the left loves the government. Once moral authority is gone, the left can then begin to legislate control of our lives. It is no mistake, that the first step the communists took in consolidating power was to shut down the churches. Similarly, the first step to their downfall was the election of the last pope.

This is not to say the left is evil and wishes the enslavement of all of us to their grand communist scheme. It's just that they believe they know better. Listen to them in the coming days, they truly think their morality is superior to that of the men of God. Their argument is not just with the Catholic church, it is also with Christian fundamentalists, Jews, and any other faith that demands morality from it's followers. Listen, and then ask yourself, why is the left's hatred reserved for these folks.