There are articles about how Benedict XVI dropped the ball recently with the lifting of excommunication of the Holocaust denying “bishop" Williamson along with other suspect anti-Semite “bishops" from the rogue catholic SSPX (Society of Saint Pius X) cult.
With a big chunk of cult followers, close to five hundred priests and close to three hundred seminarians worldwide, the Vatican did a power grab and would not let viable economic assets (priests/foot soldiers) slip out of its grasps.
With the finesse of elephants in tutus doing a ballet, the Vatican bureaucrats lifted the excommunication of these rogue “bishops” after doing little more than a Google search as a background check before their readmission to holy mother church. (Parents, hide your children!)
The facts of Williamson’s vehement anti-Semitism were evident for anybody who wanted to research the matter.
No doubt Cardinal Giovanni Re signed off on this lifting of the ban as a favor to retiring Cardinal Hoyos, 79, and the big guy Joe Ratzinger, 81. Cardinal Hoyos was cleaning the paperwork off his desk and Cardinal Re’s conscience conveniently slipped into the closet again.
This recent body slap to the face of worldwide Jewry and the human race as inheritors of the legacy of the crimes of WWII was in my opinion done by these two sometimes unrelated, disconnected bodies of power - the papacy and the Vatican bureauacracy.
The general corporate culture of the Vatican seems to be anti-female, anti-sexual, anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, anti anything that has to deal with cultural diversity or the diversity of individuals in life.
The topic of Cultural Sensitivity Issues comes clumsily to the forefront of the present Vatican Bureaucratic corporate culture so comfortably rooted in the nineteenth and or the ninth century of the common era.
The bureaucracy, the Vatican, is a bunch of religious clerics who have spent their life in the Catholics bubble - family, catholic school, seminary, parish duties, bureaucratic duties and have not necessarily had any real life experience, say as in openly practiced sexual matters like the laity. If they have a problem they consult canon law or Playboy. It is all somehow in a book.
The pope, who in his youth as a Hitler Youth, (forced to do that against his will) and as a member of the Wehrmacht (also forced to do that against his will) has had pretty much the same rule book life as the rest of the Vatican, no life, bureaucracy.
The problem here I think is that the Vatican Bureaucracy has had a free ride for decades on the back of John Paul the Great who was a conscripted laborer in Poland (forced to do that against his will) who also gave occasional but dangerous consent to underground activities in his district.
Other than that, John Paul the Great had a little more street experience in his youth. As a pope, he did a lot of cross reference checking before anything with his signature hit the street.
There is this rule book mentality in Benedict’s background. The German people in their language, civil attitude and civil obedience do not use the subjunctive tense much in their language. You will do this. You are the Catholic. Words like would, could, should, and might only rarely soften the German language.
So too the whole Victorian age, so uptight about everything especially sex, was a rule book society. Prince Albert brought that rule book mentality with him from Germany to his new bride and adopted country. He, and or the literate upper crust of society, wrote, rewrote the rule book(s) for Victoria’s country and worldwide realm.
Aside from that, the lack of individual empathy, insight, touching, or feeling of other cultures and religions is evident as an inept pope passes the paperwork through lazy bureaucratic shits like Cardinal Hoyos and Cardinal Re.
What can I say? The Vatican seems at times to be a failed corporate culture with a failed CEO residing over an inept bureaucracy. And these guys in power are all over seventy. Shuffleboard anyone?
Cultural Sensitivity Issues 101 is yet to be taught in Catholic seminaries?
One can hope. Maybe after Vatican III.
