Recalling Cokie's "The Pope Against the People"

(Hat tip: Rich Leonardi at Ten Reasons)

In all the coverage of Pope Benedict's 1-year anniversary last week, I had forgotten about this little diatribe from 1 year ago by the nominally "Catholic" Cokie Roberts:

The new pope, Benedict XVI, faces a problem common to many secular leaders. Can he impose a rigid worldview on unwilling followers?

The Roman Catholic Church has never pretended to be a democracy. But it is not immune from the laws of human nature, either, so the question is still valid. Will the faithful accept a pope who stands in stern opposition to the most powerful forces sweeping the world today?

From the purple fingers of Baghdad to the orange scarves of Kiev, people are demanding a greater say in how they live their lives. Yet the cardinals in Rome turned in exactly the opposite direction, picking a pontiff who favors centralized authority and doctrinal obedience while condemning even the smallest whisper of dissent.

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict was Pope John Paul's enforcer of discipline. Now he will have total control over church offices, appointments and pronouncements. But he won't be able to control the laity, the people who fill the pews and collection plates every Sunday.

Start with the priests. The numbers are plummeting, particularly in the developed world. Even major Catholic institutions like Georgetown University, where many of our relatives studied, are now headed by laypeople.

To many progressive Catholics, one obvious answer to this problem is ordaining women and married men. The elevation of Ratzinger not only closes off those options, it closes off even the discussion of them. But the reality of the problem won't go away. The seminaries and pulpits could get even emptier.

The new pope's disdainful attitude toward women hardly ends with the issue of vocations. He has been a fierce foe of feminism in all its forms, saying that women were becoming "adversaries" of men, and blaming them for the rising divorce rate while letting men who abandon or abuse their wives completely off the hook.

Ratzinger has taken particular aim at feminist nuns, some of whom voiced true distress at his elevation to pontiff. Cokie attended Sacred Heart schools for 12 years and dedicated her latest book to that order because of the powerful impact those nuns had on her life. But there are hardly any American nuns left--women in this country won't give their lives to an institution that treats them as second-class citizens.

So while many Catholics of our generation benefited greatly from the nuns who taught them, churchmen like the new pope make it increasingly likely that the next generation of Catholic school children--and the many non-Catholics who attend church schools--will never know a nun.

As a cardinal, Benedict had a particularly dismal record on the issue of relations with other religions. And as a mixed religious couple--Cokie is Catholic, Steve is Jewish--who respect and embrace each other's traditions, we find this element of his theology particularly disturbing.

The new pope was behind documents that attacked the religious pluralism celebrated in this country, and banned German Catholics from sharing communion with Lutherans. He has described Europe as a Christian continent and condemned attempts by Turkey, a Muslim nation, to join the European community.

His words won't stop Muslims from living and working in Europe, but they could exacerbate tensions at a time when many churchmen want to reach out to the Islamic world, not push it away.

Behind these doctrinal issues is the matter of church governance. Benedict stands for total loyalty to Vatican authority. One example: he instructed U.S. bishops to deny communion to Catholic politicians, like Sen. John Kerry, who do not share the church's condemnation of abortion and homosexuality. Another: as a cardinal, the pope purged the Rev. Charles Curran from the faculty at Catholic University because Curran refused to retract his dissenting views on sexuality.

But the new pope doesn't just oppose dissent, which he equates with "infidelity." He condemns the basic concept of individuality, the defining core of modern philosophy and social thought. In a remarkable homily on the eve of the conclave that made him pope, Cardinal Ratzinger declared: "A dictatorship of relativism is being built that recognizes nothing as definite, and which leaves as the ultimate measure one's ego and desires."

We agree strongly that the value and virtue of religion is to advance basic principles of right and wrong. But it is profoundly misguided to condemn the free expression of individual thought and action as serving only "ego and desires."

Free expression is central to the highest aspirations of the human spirit. Can a pope who does not understand that effectively guide the world's largest religion?

My Comments:
I wonder if Cokie has changed her assessment of the Holy Father 1 year into his pontificate. For that matter, I wonder why she even bothers to call herself Catholic.

NOTE: Cokie's mother, Lindy Boggs, was President Clinton's Ambassador to the Vatican from 1997 to 2001.