The Underlying Motive

Why we must regard most criticism of the Pope, no matter what the issue, with the deepest of skepticism; this from a Lutheran, no less:

Neither apostates within Holy Christendom nor naked unbelievers outside her borders will ever forgive Ratzinger for the grave breach of secularist, pluralist etiquette involved in the first volume of his Jesus of Nazareth. It goes without saying (and around the Holy Week of each year the several forms of mainstream media say it loudly, often, and emphatically) that Jesus was an ordinary man, a wacko apocalyptist, or a failed political revolutionary. Stones must fly and clubs be brandished against a learned man fully familiar with all the “Jesus of history” literature from Reimarus to the present, who winsomely draws on believing scholarship of all confessions to offer a calm and cogent argument that the real, actual Jesus is the one who meets us in the Gospel record. Where the North American liberal intelligentsia can offer no refutation, they spit contempt. And a Western Europe sunk in a new heathenism and undergoing Islamic takeover can only howl at this attempt to arrest its suicidal downward slide.

From "The Dictatorship of Relativism Strikes Back—and Goes Nuclear," by John Stephenson in Logia: a Journal of Lutheran Theology, and well worth reading in its entirety.

UPDATE: Archbishop Dolan of New York takes on the New York Times (again) and its pernicious attempt tarring the Holy Father with covering up for a loathsome priest, now dead, who decades ago sexually abused numerous adolescents at a school for the deaf. Dolan points out the appalling lapses in the Times' reporting, and suggests, reasonably, it "gives every indication of being part of a well-oiled campaign against Pope Benedict." Yes it does, and for the reason given above.

(Thanks to William Tighe)