A Catholic Liberation Theologist On Cardinal Ratzinger

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
April 25, 2005
A Liberation Theologist on Ratzinger
Pope of Fear and Centralized Power?
By LEONARDO BOFF

If his style of governing the Church were to centralize it, as previously, there is a risk that the Church will be identified with the Pope. If, in the face of a plural world, the basic attitude is purely and simply to affirm orthodoxy, openly opposing cultural pluralist tendencies, the Church runs the risk of identifying Rome with the world, thus becoming a redoubt of conservatism and of Christian intellectual mediocrity.

If centralization prevails, it will restrict the creativity of the local churches that need freedom to articulate to the masses of the suffering faithful, faith with justice and social mission with liberation, without which evangelization is alienation. The exodus of the faithful to other denominations will worsen. This situation is characteristic of all the Third World where more than half of all the Catholic of the world are found.

If the attitude of confrontation with modernity and post-modernity prevails, I foresee disastrous consequences for the future of the Church. Traditionalist as he is, Benedict XVI must know that this strategy profoundly wears down the Church. In the past, he deprived the liberation movements of the oppressed the cooperation of Christians who could have offered Christian values to the emerging social relations, leaving them instead alienated and immature. The Church herself arrived always late for everything, even to the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights. A Church that returns to models of the past becomes immobile, like a fossil. Accommodating, she does not fulfill her mission of educating Christians for the new times. Instead, she clericalizes, leaving them immature in matters of faith, if not childish, popish flatterers, of whom there are so many these days.

Ending ecumenism is to affirm, as the document Dominus Iesus, by Cardinal Ratzinger, says, that only the Catholic Church is the Church of Christ and that the others are not Churches, but only have ecclesial elements. It is also to say to other religions that they have valid elements, but that their followers run a grave risk of perdition because they are outside the Catholic Church, the only true religion. This is not to dialogue but to insult. Cordiality is used to facilitate conversion. That is deceitful and undignified.

Leonardo Boff is a liberation theologist living in Brazil

http://www.counterpunch.org/boff04252005.html

[Rich Hunt]

1. this is a good article

...and I'm not a particular fan of Counterpunch.

I'm sure it will fly over many people's heads, however.

[Itsthetruth]

2. Another Good Article On The Pope

Well, I don't agree with every article I read in CounterPunch either but they do publish some very good ones that you can't find anywhere else.

Here's a link to another article written by a progressive Roman Catholic that I thought was even better.

http://www.counterpunch.org/quigley04212005.html