Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Our Status as A Free People

The News: England's Home Secretary has put forth a proposal to have the private sector manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone's calls, emails, texts and internet use 24/7. The proposal's proponents said that it included "tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses." (But not to safeguard privacy.)

The Note in the News: Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said the proposed database would be "an unimaginable hell-house of personal private information," he said. "It would be a complete readout of every citizen's life in the most intimate and demeaning detail. No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls." McDonald added:
"The tendency of the state to seek ever more powers of surveillance over its citizens may be driven by protective zeal. But the notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile. We must avoid surrendering our freedom as autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make judgments that are compatible with our status as free people."

The Woodchip Gazette wishes its readers the courage to stand for a Free and Autonomous New Year.


©WCG, 2008

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Saturday, May 31, 2008

Four Postcards from Mexico - Postal Cuarto



The following afternoon, Saturday, we were scheduled to travel up the foothills of Ixtlazihuatl, for dinner with the Hinojosas, friends of Lara’s at San Isidro Labrador. “They’re very amable,” she said, “buena gente, but... conservative.” “Ya me imaginaba” I said. I had met one of their sons, Eduardo, several years back and we formed an instant liking for one another based on our shared feeling for Benito Juarez, Mexico’s great Liberal Liberator whom Eduardo called a paricidio, corrupto, ingrato, apóstata y traidor. Needless to say, Juarez is something of a fault-line in Mexican political history.

“And don’t go talking about ‘indians’,” Lara mock-admonished me. Juarez was a full blooded Zapotec Indian, so that playing from a politically correct deck of cards, a person who despised him is supposedly a white racist who deprecates “los indios” -- the currently correct term for which is “indigenas” But, life is never that simple. When, during that lunch several years back, I made reference to “the Indians,” Eduardo had another outburst. “Se les llama indígenas!” “Ya, ya.” I replied, “but “Indians” is a perfectly fine word...even Las Casas (their great protector) referred to the natives as ‘indians’.” As far as I was concerned it all depended on how the word was used. Eduardo would not be convinced and after a cascade of contrary explanations concluded with “my skin may be white, but my heart is brown!” Now, five years later, Lara and I looked at one another, put hand to heart, finger to air and simultaneously broke out laughing... “pero my corazón es moreno” Nevertheless, I promised to speak only of ‘los indigenas’. ”


Everything about San Isidro bespoke privilege; not luxury, but the well-being one enjoys when fate has been kind. Impeccably maintained, the house rests on rolling green slopes overlooking the entire valley. Mt. Ixtlazihuatl forms an impressive backdrop, the visual equivalent on this grey-sky day of a Bach fugue.

We arrived late, because another fire had broken out and Lara had to do her round ups. Don Hector Hinojosa a tall, portly man, in open shirt and suspenders, had waited the time with a copa or two and greeted us amiably at the gate.

Lara was nervous, still worrying about the fire. “Mira mi querida,” Don Hector said at once authoritative and gentle, “come inside, ya, and relax. You’ve done what you can do, so now let it take care of itself.” “Bienvenido a su casa,” he said to me, as he draped his arm over my shoulder and led me inside.


Clean and comfortable, the hacienda was far from grand. By size and privacy of style it was more of a rancho, not that anyone in their right mind would turn their nose up at it on that account. Don Hector’s wife, Eugenia, came out from the kitchen and after introductions and greetings we stood around chatting while a delayed dinner was got together.

Standing there in the living room, I noticed a large polished wood and glass display case which contained an exquisite meter long model of a turn of the century steamer. Don Hector saw my interest and walked me over to it.

“This was sent to Don Porfirio, in the days before the internet.” I looked at him quizzically. “Well today,” he explained, “they would simply send some imagenes en PDF, but in those days.....” “

Ah, yes, I see your point... Well it’s quite beautiful.”

"Yes, the shipbuilders in Bremerhaven were hoping to sell it to the Mexican Government. Desgraciadamente, the model never made it to Mexico (City) and Don Porfirio never saw it.”

"The Revolution?"

"Yes."

"Ah."

It didn’t take a shipbuilder to figure out my next question, and so Don Hector went on to explain, how for near 50 years, the model languished in a crate at the warehouse in Veracruz. When as an young engineer he went to work for the port city, his boss was clearing out the warehouse and gave it to him as a wedding present.

“Very nice gift,” I said. Don Hector thought so too.

La comida was ready and we made our way into the comedor. Don Hector sat at the head of the table with his wife at his left. He pulled out a lacquered placard of sorts and read from one of several printed prayers on the board. “... make us mindful to seek sustenance for our souls as we gratefully receive this sustenance for our bodies....” We all crossed ourselves, before passing around the serving dishes of a very comida familiar of white bread, salad, rolled tacos, beans and several varieties of soft drinks.

Our table talk was inconsequential except for a brief political interlude in which the topic of NAFTA came up when I remarked that the tortillas appeared to made of white corn. Most NorteAmericanos, were taught to think of NAFTA as friendly neighbors trading sugar for flour over the fence. To the extent that they think otherwise now, it is in terms of “jobs lost overseas.” What they do not realize, even now, is that NAFTA was simply a protocol for economic conquest, connived at with Quislings in the Mexican Government.

Under its terms, Mexico was prohibited from providing agricultural price supports to its own farmers, whereas no such prohibition applied to the United States. As a result, large corporate agribusiness, simply flooded the Mexican market with cheap industrial yellow corn, underselling Mexican growers who traditionally had grown a high percentage of white corn, which is now virtually non-existent. Also virtually non-existent are thousands of small and medium Mexican farms, whose campesinos, fled economically devastated villages and illegally migrated up north “seeking to take advantage of our way of life.” As the New York Times put it sanctimoniously, NAFTA has “ shaken up Mexican farming — mostly for the better” The Times went on to instruct that “ Mexico needs investment to increase yields and move out of corn and into more lucrative crops” while and the Mexican Government “ will also need to help more rural Mexicans find jobs outside agriculture.”

It was hardly surprising that once the Mexican peasantry was destroyed, large U.S. Agric-Corps would buy up huge tracts of land, and convert them into food factories, worked by Mexican campesinos, at last freed from their feudal bondage. The only difference between these holdings and the villainous pre-revolutionary corporate haciendas is that Cargill, Arthur Daniel Midland and Tyson dispense with manorial facades.

“No,” came the reply, “this corn is grown locally.” “That’s nice to know,” I said before going on to say in a classic Freudian slip, “it’s terrible what el Tratado, has done to los indios”. Eduardo choked and Lara kicked me under the table.

“You oppose the present government?” one of Eduardo’s younger brothers asked, as he fed some pablum into his infant’s mouth. “Of course he does,” Eduardo said emphatically, “if people do not like the present regime es porque aman a la patria.”

Don Hector smiled and made an irrelevant comment, the effect of which was to put the table talk back on track of the ordinary and happy. Two of Don Hector’s other sons popped in with their wives, children and infants, and after everyone standing up and getting introduced and making some smaller talk, popped out again.

As we sat around the table drinking coffee, Don Hector told his wife to bring out the foto albums of their honeymoon. Soon we were looking at browning colour pictures from the early sixties that showed newly weds and friends at some country grove pic nic and then the couple alone, standing next to a wrought iron park bench on the flagstone pathway in front of the cathedral at Aguascalientes, a slim young man in sweater-vest and slacks with his young wife, in a plain cotton dress with a sweater draped over her shoulders and looking new to the role of señora.

I was taken back and taken aback. I recognized the scene as I had been through Aguascalientes in those very years when returning home by bus or train during school vacations.. But I had forgotten how relatively deserted Mexico was in those days. The whole country had only 60 millions, up 20 million from a decade before. Still, the country was a ways from being awash with people and at el tiempo de la comida, and at other times, the streets of provincial cities would be well nigh deserted.

The only other person in the photo was an Indian woman in the near background, making her way up to the cathedral on her knees, as Sr. and Sra. Hinojosa stood smiling and facing away toward the camera. They were not ignoring the woman in any despective way. No doubt they had seen her, the way one sees people praying in church, the way one sees balloon vendors, or couples on a park bench. The woman on her knees was simply going about her prayer-business, and it was no one else’s business to gawk or fuss. I held the photo as long as I politely could. One doesn’t see much of that either... in the new Mexico.

“...we had a wonderful spiritual advisor up there, right my darling?”

“yes,” Doña Eugenia nodded, “he was a wonderful being...”

“... but they wouldn’t let him leave his diocese, even though we begged the bishop...”

“Spiritual advisor...” it was said in the way one would speak about the gardener, or cook. People walked on their knees, people had spiritual guides, while others, apostates and parricides, made revolution; it was all quite usual.

Don Hector led me over to a mueble on which stood a thicket of photos. One by one he showed me pictures of his sons, who stood with their arms around their wives or holding an infant; all except for one young who stood alone by some flowers in a garden dressed in a brown Franciscan habit... "Does he continue in his vocation?" I asked. “No, he left. He wanted to get married.” Then Don Hector added, “I don’t ask about my sons’ lives. Solo quiero que sean felices and that they know that whenever they want, for whatever reason, they can come to me.”

At that point, Eduardo came over, and said, “Let me show your around.” We walked outside and he started showing me the grounds, his stables, his collections of bridles, the orchards, and a big dry pond. “It was wonderful, when it was filled with water,” he said, “we used to eat Sunday lunch out here, and we kids swung from a rope from that tree over there..”

“What happened?” I asked “Los campesinos needed the mountain run off for their fields.” he said this with resignation but without bitterness. It was inconceivable to deprive people of water they needed to survive. So that was that; everything passes.

With or with-out a pond, it was a very beautiful spot, and I told Eduardo that he was lucky. He knew it. Still, I asked, had he ever travelled abroad? He replied, somewhat off-handedly, that perhaps someday he would go to Europe. He would like to visit the Louvre and the Prado. Had he ever thought of going to the United States, I asked. “Para que?” Came the terse reply, “For what?” My mind ran through a quick stack of postcards: the Empire State, Maine fishing village, Grand Tetons, Golden Gate. He waited until he could see by my look that I had answered the question for him, whereupon he tacked on the inevitable conclusion: "No me tiene ningun interés."

Nor apparently for anyone else I was meeting. It’s not that they are unawares of the United States... the din from north of the border is inescapable. It’s rather that, at best, they think the U.S. is tiresome.

A part of me wanted, to say that the United States is not all Hollywood trash, bad manners, rapacious exploitation, and neocon monsters; that interesting things are being done and there are good people here too. But the look in their eyes answers, “So what?” And yes, “So what?” -- It’s not as if there aren’t good and interesting people elsewhere. In fact, at all times, under all regimes, there have been good people doing interesting things. Why should the U.S. think that its “good and interesting people” make it exceptional or provide a saving exception? The fact is that for the past 50 years the U.S. has brought depredation and destruction the world over. People in the U.S. are oblivious to this precisely because we have benefitted from this program of plunder. Not elsewhere. So, there are good people in the U.S. too. So what? People shrug and go about their business.

Of course not all Mexicans feel this way. Especially among the middle and upper middle classes in Mexico City there are large segments of people whose habits and expectations in life are entirely americanized. And of course, there are millions who have been sucked up into le standard by those disgorging cloacas of globalized consumer culture. All this is as true in Mexico as it is in China, France or Argentina. But in the provinces and even more in the pueblos ... it is otherwise. They are not anti-American... it is more lethally indifferent than that.

Many of these campesinos are the same people I meet in the United States. “So, how do you like it here,” I ask. “Pues ya sabe...no?” Comes the defeasing reply. They don’t have to explain. They don’t like the “here” en el norte They think it’s cold, unfeeling, uptight, ungracious, un-everything. So why are they here? “Pues, ya sabe ...no?” They don’t have to explain that either. Life in Mexico, loved as it is, is “muy dificil” if not outright impossible and downright pinche

But not for the Hinojosas. “Yes,” I replied to Eduardo. “why leave at all?” Just then a herd of sheep came barrelling down upon us.


It finally came time for us to take our leave. Back at the doorway, Don Hector put his arm around my shoulder and shook my hand. It had been, a pleasure; aqui tiene su casa; come back whenever you wish. I told him he had a lovely house, that I would make it a point to come back soon. “Not too soon,” he laughed

After hugging Lara, and making arrangements to “conectar” again in the coming week. Eduardo walked us to the truck for the bump back down to San Pablo. As we made our way through the darkened car-paths and alleys, I thought of Don Hector’s amiable greeting, his boat, his honeymoon pictures, his children, his placard with table prayers and his “... spiritual advisor...” “What are they, I wondered... Opus? Legionarios de Cristo? “ It didn’t matter. Don Hector had welcomed me to his ranch, let me know what he believed, showed me the fruits of his life and told me he was happy.

Next morning, I was up at the crack of dawn. Lara drove me to the bus station at San Martín for the trip back over the mountain passes into the Valley of Mexico. The sun was bright and the sky was clear. There were as yet no cars on the road and the countryside was bathed in Sunday morning tranquility as we sped past chocolate coloured fields, small villages, church spires with fading paper pennants hanging from the bell-tower, mounds of village garbage being scavenged by dogs and, then, deep phalanxes of pine trees pointing upward at 9000 feet.

How many times I have travelled this mountain road between the two great valleys of the Mexican altiplano, joining the short span of my life to a train voyagers through centuries past. They used to call it El Paso de Cortez. but even before him it was journeyed by Aztec warriors and, before them by, merchant traders from Teotihuacan heading south with obsidian for jade. As we sped down the maguey covered slopes into Mexico City, in the emollient morning sun, I was filled with a rooted and abiding sense of familiarity

It being Sunday, the air in Mexico City was breathable. Being early, there was little traffic, and from the window of the bus, I could see that the el gobierno had planted playgrounds, trees and parks along either side of the road. Early morning joggers and exercisers were out doing their motions. I was glad at least that through the interminable stretches of barrio on either side, there was at least this scrubby green belt people could use, early enough, to get out in the still fresh air.

Back at TAPO, I dragged my rolling duffel over to the dispatch cab booth. Sitio cabs are supposed to be safer than free roaming street cabs, although a modicum of sense would alert one to the dubiousness of this proposition in a country where the police themselves have been caught in theft, drug and, now, kidnap rings. Still, a hope and prayer seemed better than a prayer alone.

The access to the airport is always under construction and, as the cab wound its way through unfamiliar streets, I wondered if there was anything I could say that would not disclose that I was completely lost and totally at his mercy. “Very sunny, morning, eh?” “Si señor, hace mucho sol” he replied non-commitally. At last, some hangars appeared in view and I relaxed, tipping him handsomely as he unloaded my bags.

Mexico was never this way. This fear hangs over the city like a moral smog far worse than the 75 tons of dessicated feces that supposedly float about in the air. No one cared all that much when it was only the filthy rich and the filthy politicians who had to run about with guarda-espaladas, but as society becomes more and more economically polarized anyone above zero can be considered “filthy rich” by those who have nothing. With typical ingenuity some bands engage in “virtual kidnapping” -- a kind of blackmail based on a telephone call which pretends to have kidnapped a loved one whose personal data have been stolen and whose habits were previously observed. I doubt people will be able to put up with it much longer.

I had worried that, getting struck in some horrible traffic or highway snafu, I would miss my plane; but, as things turned out, I had arrived four hours early and thus had plenty of time to sit around and contemplate the brutal surroundings of the newly remodelled airport.

Thinking to have a good breakfast before a long day, I got a table at a chain restaurant called FLAPS, and ordered the “specialty of the day” -- a ranch style steak breakfast. What was special about it was that the steak was quite rotten. Equally special was the manager’s refusal to admit it. I was annoyed and disgusted but not surprised. It has always been the case -- notwithstanding the Department of Public Health -- that the worst places to eat at in Mexico are not the “dirty” open air street stands but the “tourist safe” eateries like Sanborns, Dennys, and now Flaps.

Leaving the steak and no tip on the table, I decided to get security over with once and for all, and went to lie back in one of the waiting rooms where I closed my eyes and let my mind drift back to the plains and slopes of Puebla and to how far Lara had come, in the six years, since she first inherited the property. I was glad she had opted not to turn San Pablo into a spa for the pampered.

“They are always, reminding me of my mother,” she had said, “tu mamá fue tan buenísma persona...” I could hear it in my mind. “Ah, la señora Irma, was such a fine person. When she found out that the children in the school had no books, she took it upon herself to speak to the Governor himself...” The obvious and necessary response to such “recollections” would be to ask if the books were still in use. “Ayyy, señora, pues fijase que.....” So perhaps it was the villagers’ memory of my cousin’s mother that had pushed her along. In all events and alongside the ongoing struggle to rehabilitate San Pablo Lara had become, as she said, “del pueblo”.

The call for my flight sounded over the loudspeaker and I was soon enough being propelled antiseptically through the skies back to the United States.Upon landing we lost ourselves in the jumble of baggage carousels and immigration lines, snaking through the maze of ropes. As I stood in line inching along, I noticed the brushed steel logo of Homeland Security lit tastefully and sharply by recessed lighting. Empires are all equally ostentatious. I also noticed small black spheres discretely dispersed along the moldings. Thinking of Winston, I blanded my mind of any grousing thoughts.

At last my turn came. I stepped up from the yellow line to the immigration counter and handed the ICE officer my passport.

“Looks like you’ve had a long day,” he said. as he pecked the keyboard
“Actually longer, I started at six by bus.”
“Are you bringing anything back? he asked as he looked at the screen
“Nah, just a couple of nic nacs”

He handed me back my passport

“Well...welcome home.”
“Thanks; it’s good to be back.”


©WCG, 2008

Friday, May 30, 2008

Four Postcards from Mexico - Postal Tercero


On the way back from Los Vientos, we got lost and we ended up driving into the neighboring state of Tlaxacala before doubling back, the very long way, to Puebla and San Martin, arriving home late at night. The following day we slept in late and did not do much of anything.

As Lara, Stefo and I sat in the kitchen having a late morning coffee, Lara asked me what I thought of the association proposal. Upon retiring from politics, Gustavo had purchased an hacienda which he wanted to convert into a hotel histórico. The genre started to popularize itself in the Sixties, about the same time that French chateaux were being converted to exclusive retreats. The hacienda hotels aimed at a somewhat broader base of lodger but the appeal was essentially the same: a taste of luxury with a hint of forbidden elitism. From his presentation, I gathered that Gustavo wanted to popularize the genre even further. Phrases like “historical tours” and “railway connections” cropped up during his presentation.

Stefo said that it seemed to him Gustavo couldn’t get any financing from the government going hat in hand himself, so he wanted to put together an “association.” I asked Lara if she wanted to convert San Pablo into a spa or if she thought the association goals could be expanded to cover agricultural needs like irrigation and seed money.

Lara wasn’t sure but did not like the idea of turning San Pablo into a resort. “Don Hector, with whom we are going to have dinner on Saturday, refuses to have anything to do with it,” she said.” I asked her why. Because, she replied, once an hacienda is declared a patrimonio cultural, one can’t do anything without bureaucrat approval. Two of the hacendados had been in favor of the idea, and two others were skeptical.


The day was slipping by quickly and so I asked Lara to give me a ride back down to San Martín where I could take the bus to Puebla to buy some souvenir talavera for some friends back home. From the Puebla “TAPO” I took a cab to the center of town and arranged with driver to pick me up in two hours. As it turned out, I got my shopping done in 15 minutes and had time to kill; so I walked around the city centre.

About 15 or so years ago, everyone made off for the new malls being built on the outskirts of the city, and the zocalo was left desolate and decaying, What had once been a place of congregated liveliness had become sullen and seedy. I was delighted to see that things had reversed course, that the zocalo and in fact the whole city center had recovered and even surpassed its former vibrancy, as buildings were repaired, renovated and given new uses



I walked around the town taking random videos and pictures. As I stood in front of the cathedral I noticed a bright coloured patch of stone at the crest of the facade. I zoomed in and to my astonishment the coat of arms of the Spanish Crown filled my sights. During the terrible war of Independence, the people had chiselled and smashed virtually every royal and aristocratic coat of arms, so that none are to be seen on any of the country’s ancient buildings. Evidently, someone in Puebla had decided to rectify matters as part of the city’s renovation and as I walked about I detected a number of additional replaced coats of arms.

The taxi driver never reappeared as arranged, and as it was getting dark, I hailed another cab and returned to the bus station and back to San Pablo

When I got back, Lara was in a state because a fire had broken out further up the mountain. It had been a dry season, and she was concerned since the government does virtually nothing to fight the fires. We got into Lara’s truck and drove around the paved and unpaved roads through the maze of hills and pueblos trying to find one of her crew-leaders while at the same time trying to get in touch with her foreman, Juanito, on the celular.

We had planned a leisurely supper and the day before, Epimenio, her “estate carpenter” -- it seems far too fancy a title -- had promised that his wife would prepare us a real -- not canned -- mole and, at my request, fried plantains with rice. As we pulled up to his adobe house, with its rough hewn wood slat fence and ambling chickens, Epimenio and one of his little boys or girls came out and after seeing it was us, went back inside and emerged with an assortment of differently colored plastic bowls and containers which I put between my feet and held on my lap.

Oiga, Epimenio, Lara asked, no has visto a Juanito por ahí...? No... he hadn’t seen him recently.... the last he saw... Lara explained the urgency and told him to tell Juanito to get in touch with her as soon as possible

At this altitude on the skirts of Ixtlazihuatl there is no need for topes, although occasionally for a few meters, one hits a smooth spot. As we bumped around this warren of pathways, ambling dogs, small plots, and half finished and half decayed huts and houses, I knew that to the inhabitants of this patch of Puebla, it all had a structure and logic unknown to outsiders and not visible on any Google Earth. Somehow that made me happy.


Lara pulled up to Pablito’s house, just as Juanito came on the line. Espera un segundo, she said putting the celular in her lap and leaning over me as Pablo came running up to my side of the truck and as I balanced supper. Mira, Pablito.... Pablo looked up toward the white smoke on the mountain. He knew what was coming. With a pained look on his face he hunched his shoulders and held up his hands,

Ayyyy señora, fíjase.... “ he had just this very moment, killed his pig and he simply had to dress it... Si no fuera por eso.... but his hands were, if not tied, covered with pig fat.

Of course Lara understood perfectly, leaving the matter with a request that he at least see if he could send two of the local muchachos up the hill. “Si, si...” He would do his best.

Oiga Juanito... estas ahi?

Juanito is a young good humored man going on 30 who has worked with Lara for the past six or so years. He has his own ranchito where his family lives and where he keeps several milking cows. Although Lara pays him for his work, the relationship goes beyond “working for”. When Lara first arrived at San Pedro, she knew virtually nothing of country life -- at least nothing over and beyond the coddled, vacations of childhood. “I couldn’t have done it with out him,” she said. “He’s completely trustworthy and indispensable.”

Mexico -- at least old Mexico -- is full of these relationships borne of mutual respect within positions of inequality. To be sure, the relationship has a material basis; Juanito would not work for someone who couldn’t pay him just as my cousin is not throwing money at vagabonds. But that does not mean they are connected simply by exchange values. The material is the working context for something more personal and, in this case work had made them friends.

The semblance of a working party was at last put together, and Juanito and Stefo led a crew up the mountain side to beat out the fire while Lara and I (still not acclimatized to the altitude) sat in the kitchen, drank some wine and watched the supper get cold.

At length, about 9.30 when supper was quite cold, Lara and I decided we might as well eat although by then the chicken itself might just as well have come out of a can.


Finally, about an hour later, Stefo and Juanito came tramping into the kitchen covered with sweat and dust. A frightened zorillo had taken a bite into Juanito’s thumb, which he had wrapped up in some dirty strip of cloth. Lara insisted he clean and bandage it, and as they went off, I poured Esteban some wine and started re-reheating supper. When Juanito and Lara came back, we all sat down to the second half of dinner and talked into the night. The fire had been contained.

Next morning, Juanito arrived with a thumb that was quite swollen. No se preocupe... no es nada he said with an así es smile. Como que 'no' ? Lara wouldn't hear of it and took him to the doctor.


©WCG, 2008

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Thursday, May 29, 2008

Four Postcards from Mexico - Postal Segundo



The comida was to be held at hacienda Los Vientos at the other end of the state, and so the following day, at mid morning we set off to cross the expansive, soil rich, plains of Puebla, lush and green under the clear skies and bright blue celestial dome of the alti-plano.

It was almost a three hour drive through a vast expanse of tree-dotted plains ringed by mountains in the distance and yielding their crops under a bright clear sky. As warm air blew through the pik op we chatted idly about this and that over noise of the engine and the buffeting wind. Driving through a small town, we passed a roadside display of colorfully painted clay pigs. Somewhat beyond that we passed a small rocky hill-mound on top of which stood a white-washed votive niche and a cross. "Have you read Diarios de Motocicleta?," I asked Lara. No, she hadn't. I went on to tell her of a story related by el Ché

"....so he and Alberto were riding the bus through the high mountain villages of Bolivia, when they came to the crest of the mountain at the top of which stood a big pile of rocks and a white-washed cross. Half the Indians in the bus cross themselves, the other half spit. ..."

Lara gave me a look.

"...pues sí, eso también se preguntaba Che-- what gives? Well, as it turns out, before the Spanish came, the Indians had this custom of taking a stone with them whenever they climbed or crossed a mountain. When they got to the top, they'd cast down their stone and their cares and leave them behind. The friars forbade the practice and erected crosses over the piles of stones. So now, some Indians cross themselves while others, for want of a stone, spit."

Stefo and Lara let out gleeful, laughs. Lara loved the idea and said she was going to put up a pile of stones on the ridge above San Pablo.

Arriving at last, we turned into the confines of Los Vientos one could immediately see that the hacienda had seen better days. The huge safe, accountant’s desks and barred cashier’s window in the hacienda office, now preserved as a museum display, indisputably pointed to a villainous pre-revolutionary past. Thanks to the propaganda of a faction and the visual rhetoric of Mexican muralists haciendas have been tagged with images of haughty Spaniards in the saddle sneering at despairing Indians hunched over under their masters’ spurs. Such propaganda was false because it blamed the facade not the realities.

During the 19th century some of the great industrial haciendas were simply corporate enterprises dressed up as grand manors. They were oppressive and destructive of community life not because they were “haciendas” but because they were corporations. They did not draw from and sustain but simply leeched and suppressed...and often on a gigantic scale.

By the looks of it, Los Vientos had not been one of these 300,000 acre mega haciendas; but it had been large. Now, a little short of 100 years later, Los Vientos is a profitable but much smaller broccoli farm hiring a fraction of the workers it used to have on the payroll.

Still, remnants of a greater past glory remained, among them, a handsome chapel all but conjoined to century tall tree that shaded the resting places of gentry past.


Miguel, the haciendas' tall, slim, middle-aged scion greeted us at the door with an air of fatigued remove. He led us up to the first floor balcony where the other hacendados were already seated around a table drinking “escoch,” rum, beer, or sherry and enjoying hors d’oeuvres of chips, cheese cubes, and olives. They were dressed in waist jackets, open collar shirts, slacks or jeans and dusty boots. Despite the grandness of the structure, the tenor of the affair was much more in the manner of la pequeña burguesía than the aristocratic pretensions of the Limantours, Escandons and Creels and other great names of the pre-revolutionary Porfirian oligarchy.

As I sipped my jerez, Miguel’s mother, a neatly dressed, somewhat bony woman in her 6o’s sat down next to me. Some moments later, she lifted up the hors d’oeuvre platter. Se le ofrece un queso? she asked as she held the cheese in front of me. “Oh, no, no thank you very much.” I replied. “Ah,” she said, looking suddenly chagrined. Several minutes passed, and she again lifted the platter and held it before me. “Por favor, no se le ofrece un antojito?” I chuckled politely, “You’re very kind, but no, thank you very much.” “Ah,” she said, looking even more chagrined than before, as she put the platter down in what was almost a gesture of despair.

I figuratively slapped my forehead and berated my stupidity. Too damn long in Gringolandia. In Mexico, in just the reverse of the United States, it is an insult to refuse any offer of hospitality. I might as well have told the poor woman that her cheese wasn’t good enough for me. I back-pedalled as best I could. Mumbling something about “en dieta...” I reached for a slice of jicama and thanked her for her offer. She eyed me suspiciously.

As we mingled around before dinner, my cousin remarked that Doña Rosaura, had asked her why I spoke so “strangely”... “What does she mean strange.? ... Never mind; did you explain? ” “Yes.” “What did she say?” “Pues , ‘Ah’.” Yes, I had been living among the savages up north. That explained everything.


When just about everyone had arrived, we proceeded to the dining room - a small rectangular room adjoining the kitchen, furnished with an assortment of chairs, stained-wood sideboards from the turn of the 19th century with collected bright ceramics and plastic nic-nacs from the 20th (including a Donald Duck), miscellaneous prints of imaginary squires hunting equally imaginary fawns and the obligatory Last Supper by Da Vinci hanging directly under a strip of flourescent lighting.

As Miguel and one of the mozos brought us our courses, the other hacendados talked about drainage ditches and milking cows, the rain this year and similar matters of concern and interest to the agricultural set. Doña Rosaura discretely eyed me from her end of the table. As it turns out, I was hungry and the food was nothing I didn’t like anyways even if, as my cousin later said, she must have gotten the mole sauce out of a can.

En familia Mexicans will eat mole or beans by tearing off a piece of tortilla, and rolling it into a scooping spoon. It is not considered gauche but rather a sign that you've enjoyed your food. As I scooped Doña Rosaura palpably relaxed.

When they brought the coffee and desert, the talk turned from drainage ditches and cows to the proposed association, the advantages of which were explained by Gustavo Ovando, the proponent of the idea; but not before first intoning obligatory and florid encomiums of gratitude to our hosts for the magnificent “reception,” and “delectable” food, after which Gustavo went on to note and commend everyone for anything he could think of -- all not without light jokes, judiciously interspersed amidst the laudations.

Such after-dinner effusions are universal. But in Mexico, they retain an antique flavor that could come straight out of the Iliad or a scene from Henry V, where gentle provenance and valiant deeds are duly remembered and praised in turn. Some of my Spanish acquaintances tell me that they get a kick out of Latin American archaicisms and regret the clipped, functionality of modern Iberian Spanish. In this respect Mexico is still in its own time warp. As I sat there enjoying the roll of rococco flattery that spilled from our speaker’s lips, my cousin leaned over and whispered, “He was in la politica.” “Se nota” I said


After the meeting broke up, we all milled about chatting and wandering through the restored rooms which did recapture the ambience of the waning days of the Porfirian epoch.

At length some of us wandered over the dusty expanse that had, in those bygone days been a vast pond, toward the chapel. The streamers hanging on the outside, and some flowers on the altar inside, indicated that it was still in at least occasional use.

There was a large, statute stood in the central niche behind the altar. Someone remarked that Doña Rosaura had said it was Michael the Archangel. “No, I don’t think so,” I said, “look at the dragon at his feet. It’s obviously St. George.” The person I was speaking to, ran over to Doña Rosaura and said, “Dice él que es San Jorge.” “Eh?” She came over. “You say it’s St. George?” “Yes, look at the dragon.” A moment of doubt flickered in her eyes, before she rejoined emphatically. “Pero como? Look at the wings...” Q.E.D. “But what about the dragon?” I said feebly. Another archangel blew his trumpet. “That’s not a dragon! It’s the devil.” The matter settled, she gave me a broad smile and walked away.


Eventually, before taking our departures, we all drove over to a hillock to get a commanding view of the valley. A large rustic wooden cross hung with paper streamers stood almost hidden amidst the grey pines. As I wondered if I should spit, Gustavo came over, lead me to the edge of the hill and explained that by those mountains at the far end of the valley, they had recently uncovered the remains of an Olmec metropolis of an estimated 100,000 souls. 500 BC “The Olmecs, this far west?" I asked.” “Yes, imaginese...” Mexico hoards it secrets and there is so much we still don’t know about the time-aliens that once lived here.

As we milled about, one Luis B, who had arrived late, took me aside and asked if Lara was of the same Manrique-Villas as were connected to the Villa-Carrascos. “Yes, yes...” His eyes brightened up and he ran over to Lara to announce that his "grandfather era pistolero for Don Maximiliano!"


©WCG, 2008

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Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Four Postcards from Mexico - Postal Primero


Over the years, the descent into Mexico City has gotten progressively more appalling as the sky has gone from “hazy” to light grey to tan to, now, dark brown. The question passes from, “How do people live in that?” to “How am I going to survive in that?” It is hard to believe that this great mountain-ringed valley once had the most crystalline skies in the hemisphere. So hard in fact, that the extermination of beauty leaves one numb.

Numb, because the problem is intractable. To wish for clean air is to wish for the whole megalopolis of 25 million to be wiped off the surface of the Earth and the valley returned to ocelotl and coyotl.

Although it was indifferent to the burgeoning problem for many years, the Government has undertaken fairly aggressive steps to clean up the air. Five years ago, Mexican traffic presented the típico spectacle of sleek limousines sharing the jam with vintage trucks, banged up buses and junkyards on wheels spewing either black diesel fumes or burning oil or both. No more. Almost all vehicles were new, green and smogged. And yet the air was worse.

The problem is that there are too many people and hence too many cars. There comes a threshold where no measures will affect the absolute amount of pollutants spewed into the air. The Government instituted an alternate driving day program; but, predictably enough, this backfired People simply got two cars with alternate plates. Not just the limousine set, but anyone who could.

Why do I hear that tart yankee voice? “Well...if people (i.e. those people) are going to.....” blah blah blah.

But have they taken public transportation in el de efe ? (as the federal district is called). It’s not just that the swarms of micro-buses clogging traffic are jammed to overflow, so too the sleek, clean modern metro cars. There are just too many people trying to get to too many places at once ...and doing the things that all people do.

Several years back Univision reported that the D.F. Department of Public Health was proposing to outlaw that most Mexican of enterprises, the open air sale of food. It turns out that 75 tons of “desiccated feces” falls on the city every day, and the Department determined that these micro-pollutants contaminated the open air carnitas, jicama slices, chicharron and tamales. The vendors are still there, so the Department must have figured out that if shit was falling on the food it was also penetrating lungs.

The problem is not just exhaust, but deforestation due to the metastasizing slums, and dust due to the drying up of the pathetic remains of lake Texcoco. The D.F. government has one of the most aggressive tree planting programs in the world, but the poor trees can’t keep up.

As the plane touched down, I took one last gulp of clean refrigerated air before venturing into the soup.


Valle de México (1845) when ocelotl ruled

Mexican bureaucrats have a long tradition of being slow, sullen and biting. This is part of a larger tradition of pinchismo which could perhaps be described as the art of using incredibly small things to screw you over in a major way. And so just as I sucked air before disembarking, I took a deep breath before stepping up to the immigration desk. “They’ll figure out something,” I pre-groused to myself.

The line monitor pointed to booth number five for Mexican Nationals. He didn’t look too bad.

“Buenas tardes,” he said.
“Buenas tardes.”
“Su pasaporte por favor”
“Si,como no.”

Flip Flip Flip Stamp Stamp Staple
“Bienvenido” He told me to be sure to return the insert on my leaving the country
“Gracias”

Well I’ll be damned......

From that point on, it was easy sailing; and it is always surprising, in a pleasant way, how easy urban sailing can be in a place that is, or at least can be, a total disaster. Everything in the city is stressed to the limits -- air, water, sewage, space, deliveries, utilities, services -- and yet sometimes one cuts through it all like a knife through butter. I am sure it is this way in order to increase the Mexican conviction that life is utterly arbitrary and that only the Blessed Virgin is reliable.

In short order, over the new “second deck” of the cross-town freeway, I was hurtled from air port to the upscale residential section of El Pedregal. Except in the older parts of town where there used to be a townhouse tradition, almost everyone in Mexico from middle class on up lives behind some sort of fence. In the Pedregal, they live behind stone walls. The reason for this was that -- as the name might give way -- the development was built in an area that abounded in rock. In all events the result is a cold and foreboding maze of streets curving around between facing phalanxes of stone walls and solid wooden or metal gates.

I was deposited in front of one such wooden gate and rang the bell, as the cab driver waited. I rang again, as he waited some more “Look,” I said, “I’m sure they’re just slow, you can go.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, yes, of course.” “Seguro?” “Sí Sí, hombre, vayase ya, no se preocupe.”

I rang again, but there was still no answer. It was the maid’s day off and my hosts had said they would be at home all day. Still, I was an hour or so early from my estimated time of arrival, and they may have stepped out briefly. So I sat down, on my two-tone pastel-coloured rolling duffel and waited,. the very picture of a mature gringo preppy in loafers, slacks, pink shirt and (loosened) school tie.

After a while I began to worry, as clouds (darker shades of brown) were forming. I should probably call R. to see what’s up, I thought. But I had no phone and, as might be imagined, the Pedregal is not the kind of place to have public phones. The expected protocol in the Pedregal is that just as you drive up, the wooden or metal gate is silently opened by an attendant and swiftly closes again, as your car disappears into the walled interior with a faint swoosh of the tires, like water closing over the fins of a shark.

Just then, just that happened several doors down; but unlike most of the residences that house also had a guard booth. Aha! I walked over and asked the guard, who no doubt had noticed me sitting on my duffel, if I could borrow his phone. Ah... he was very sorry, señor, but he didn’t have a phone. Really? Yes, really, imagine that. He had a closed circuit tv, a radio, a funky radio, but no phone. Such is life. I went back to sitting on my duffle.

The idea of lugging my duffel and shoulder pack a mile down hill to the busy streets outside the development was not anything I was looking forward to. Just then, a young man, of about 30, in jeans and sneakers came around the corner walking a happy sniffing lab. Ah! The Blackberry Generation. He’ll have a phone for sure. I got up, and walked in his direction “Oiga, perdón.... but you wouldn’t happen to have a phone I could use for a moment, I’m waiting...”

I didn’t get any further. The man froze with a look of sheer terror in his eyes. He shook his head violently, sharply called his dog and turned back in the direction from which he had come. As he sped-walked away I saw the phone on his belt.

Sitting behind his plate glass, the guard in the booth had seen it all, even if he had that studied Mexican look of not having noticed a thing. I walked over, and said, “You saw that, right?” “.. uhseh. .” he replied. “Tienen miedo” he added in a voice which spoke the disdain of those who have been “despected” all their lives. “They’re afraid.” “De que?” “Pues de los secuestros,” he said surprised to have to repeat the obvious. “Kidnappings? Here? in the Pedregal?” “Por todas partes.” he said dragging out the “todas”. If a 30 year old male... If in the Pedregal...

I was instantly infected with fear.

I went back to the gate and repeatedly bellowed out the name of my host -- Annnnah!!! -- who shortly afterwards came down and opened the gate. “I don’t think the bell works....” she said.


I did not stay any longer than necessary in Mexico City, and two days later was on the bus over the mountains to Puebla, to visit my cousin, Lara, at her hacienda in the foothills beneath mount Ixtlazihuátl.

TAPO -- that’s what they call the new centralized bus station for autobuses heading to the south and eastern part of the country. It used to be that each bus company had its own terminal, and most of these were squalid affairs, even if the buses -- at least los de primera -- weren’t so bad. The terminals were jammed with people trying to get into and out of buses at the same time; and the streets around the terminal were a congestion of newsstands, macaroon vendors, fruit vendors, lottery ticket vendors and children or old people sitting on twine wrapped bultos as flies swarmed over the juices and droppings that littered the sidewalks.


No more. TAPO is the true Pantheon of Buses, its immense dome covering a reflective marble floor on the circumference of which were arrayed the various bus companies’ brightly logo’d ticket niches. Marcus Agrippa would have been proud.

There were plenty of guards.

The mens’ room, however, was inconveniently located on a mezzanine portion of the circumference, which meant that one had to lug whatever he was lugging up a flight of stairs. To keep the bathroom “safe” they had installed a coin operated turnstiles made of rotating inter-spaced metal bars which would slice you into 20 pieces if they were sharp. Whoever designed this marvel intended you to leave your bags outside the bathroom where they could be stolen, or to trap and your luggage like a pig in a poke between the bars in the quarter turn allowed. Squeezing, grunting and grimacing, I got into and out of the bathroom vowing to feed the clown who designed this safety feature into a true human gin if I ever got my hands on him. Back on the shiny main floor marble disc, I headed over to the departure gate where, after being “wanded” by more security personnel, I boarded the bus.

A result of the old anti-system was that the first half hour of the trip anywhere was spent hissing and grinding through city streets. The result of the new integrated TAPO system is that the first half hour of the trip out of the city is spent hissing and grinding along the congested southern exit-way. But just when one is about to give up hope of ever getting past the interminable urban detritus, the city stops and the bus is speeding up swooping curves into the pristine, pine covered mountains that separate el Valle de Mexico from the Plains of Puebla.

Puebla de los Angeles was the third city the Spanish founded after landing ashore at Veracruz in 1519. Not only was it a necessary stop between Mexico City and Veracruz, more importantly it was a key juncture in Spain’s trade route that ran from the Philippines to Acapulco through Puebla to Veracruz and over the Main to Seville. Testimony to Puebla’s privileged position in this global trade is reflected in its towering cathedral, one of the most stunning examples of Ibero American baroque.

The abundance of red-clay in the region gave rise to brick making. Since, at the time Puebla was founded, Spain still controlled Holland, Delft dies and techniques were imported and gave birth to Puebla’s talavera industry.

I did not go all the way to Puebla, but got off the bus 20 minutes sooner at San Martín Texmelucan, a scruffy, rural town that looks like a collection of old style bus stations. Twenty minutes later, my cousin and her husband, Stefo, arrived in their rattling Ford pik op. Holaaaaaaaaa!! Hugs and protestations.

Bienvenido a Topelandia. she said, I laughed. Topes are Mexican speed bumps -- originally made out of grapefruit sized metal spheres, now usually just corrugated concrete. Topes are ubiquitous and last visit, during a spine crunching moment of exasperation, I renamed the country. Actually, if I recall, I renamed it Pinche Topelandia

San Felipe

After stopping off at the butcher’s to buy some pork chops, and at the tortilleria for fresh tortillas we bumped our way upland, back in the direction of Ixtlazihuatlpast San Felipe and San Pablo del Rio to the hacienda.

As haciendas go, the buildings at San Pablo are on the small side, and might almost be classed as a rancho were it not for the 400 hectares surrounding it. There are books on the matter, with titles like La Morfología de la Hacienda en México, and needless to say the question is not left to a simple answer. The long and short of it, in my opinion, is that an hacienda is a socio-economic organism that both draws from and sustains the community around it. A ranch on the other hand is a strictly private enterprise


Whatever its classification, during a long period of absence and illness, San Pablo fell into disrepair and was sharecropped out. Upon inheriting the property, my cousin set about to restore it, physically and as an economic organism. It is slow going and has taken an immense amount of work, “pero ya soy pueblerina” she said, meaning she had left the city and city life and city-being behind.

After showing me the parts that had been remodelled, including of course, the chapel, we sat down to a late dinner.

“Tomorrow we have to go to a working comida of hacendados over at hacienda Los Vientos.” she said with a glint in her eye.
“A what?”
She teased me some more, “They want to discuss forming an association...”

I gave her a you-must-be-kidding look. Warranted or not, centuries of conflict have left their mark and the thought of hacendados meeting to form an “association” inevitably conjured up images of counter-revolution,

N’ombre,” she said ‘fessing up, no lo creas, it’s just a meeting to see how best to deal with government bureaucracies.
“That’s what they always say...”
“Besides, they say they’ve fixed it up and its very pretty. Will you come?”
Claro ...”

Sitting around after dinner, Lara brought up a mutual cousin with whom, “frankly,” she was quite annoyed. Apparently, cousin had favorably reviewed a book in which it was said (in so many words) that her grandfather Maximiliano had been something of a caudillo/gangster type. “Ah, yes...” I said, “I think I saw that.” “Pero como?” She had talked to aunt so-and-so over in Tlaxcala who had assured her it was all calumny, puras calumnias... How could he write such a thing?” “But he didn’t; it was the book he was reviewing that did.” “But he should have disputed (desmentido) the allegations!”

I thought of the genre oil painting of Maximiliano as a young army officer, in formal blue tunic with burgundy piping, standing slim and straight with his hand on the library table. And then of the table photograph of Don Maximiliano, in his 40’s, face at once smooth and chiseled, a little broader, but still erect in a tight fitting charro jacket with its silver buckles and striped silk cravat, holding the flat rimmed, cloth hat of a jinete, what the Spanish call a sombrero cordobés . I wondered if I would have enjoyed meeting him.

I tried to mollify Lara. “Well... those rumours have been around for some time. Besides it was after the Revolution, and things were still unsettled.” I thought it best not to mention that at least half of Puebla took rumour for fact, and not to put too fine a point on “after.” “Well cousin could go to the devil, as far as she was concerned.


©WCG, 2008

Monday, April 7, 2008

God's Dachshund, Part IV - Facing A New Dark Age


Dixeunt Pontificati

Although the mainstream press gives relatively little coverage to the pope in any substantive way, Benedict is something of a cult object in the Net Press and Blogosphere. Whereas his predecessor drew throngs of illiterates, Benedict seems to draw a multitude from those of us who think we have something to say.

Reading the disparate opinions of the pontificati it is hard to believe that they are talking about the same man. Benedict has been excoriated at once as a pro-gay, pantheist and as a “polarizing,” homophobic, “theo-con” leading a “papal caravan winding back to the Dark Ages”.

Criticism from the Left comes mostly from outside the Church and from those who have little knowledge of or interest in the Church’s historical and doctrinal development. In utilitarian fashion these external critics regard the Church as simply a political agency which they praise or criticise in accordance as it promotes their own social or political agendas. Invariably, the utilitarians are short on gratitude when the Church helps out and long on vitriol when it doesn’t.

Just as often, the vitriol becomes inflamed from other motives, as when Ratzinger is accused of being a “theological anti-semite” (London Times Apr. 18, 2005) and a Nazi. These calumnies are usually tied into rote accusations against the Church as an active collaborator with the Nazi regime.

Such virulence betrays a malign animus feeding off an historical ignorance that is oblivious to Bismarck's anti-Catholic kulturkampf, the notorious kanzelparagraf and the Nazi threat to “coordinate” the Church into the State apparatus. It ignores the Catholic Center opposition to Nazism, and the fact that the most visible resistance to the regime came from the White Rose, a Catholic inspired student resistance whose martyred members resisted precisely because they had been in the Hitler Youth, the Labor Corps and Wehrmacht and saw, through the “fog of empty phrases,” the “unspeakable crimes” being committed.

Young Ratzinger’s family was in the center-progressive Catholic tradition. His great uncle, George Ratzinger, (1844-1899) had been a priest, economist, social reformer, and politician who saw the gospel and Catholic social teaching as a means of empowering the poor. There can be little doubt, the Ratzingers took to heart Pius XI’s anathema against Nazi ideology as anti-Christian, racial idolatry. If the teenage Ratzinger “joined” the Hitler Youth, it was because it was by then obligatory and if he manned an anti-aircraft battalion it was because the Allies were committing the war crime of terror bombing civilians.

Benedict’s own writings are so far removed from “theological anti-semitism” as to make one wonder just exactly what sordid agenda the Times was pursuing.

“Christian faith has retained the core of Israel's faith, while at the same time giving it new depth and breadth.” (Deus Caritas Est, § 1)
Just as heatedly but less viciously Benedict has been excoriated from conservatives within the Church as a crypto progressive who solidly supported the liberal errors of John Paul II concerning “religious liberty, counciliar ecumenism, collegiality, unity of the Church, and feminism” and who now appoints pro-gay cardinals to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, invites rabbis to his installation, and makes overtures to Infidels while seeking to “establish a pan-religion where all men, believers or not, are brought together into a single universal church.”

Says one conservative voice,

“Finally, let me remind you, ... that it was Cardinal Ratzinger who worked tirelessly for suppression of the Fatima message.... [and] even went so far as to suggest that the vision of Hell Our Lady showed the children on July 13 might have been the active imagination of children...”
To which a Catholic liberal rejoins,

“One of the joys of reading Ratzinger is spotting how often he subtly tiptoes away from John Paul's obsessions: it would be surprising if we were to hear any more about Fatima during this pontificate, and there will be no more talk of Mary as "Co-Redemptrix" of humanity.”
Casting into the outer heap those calumnies which are the deformed progeny of ignorance and resentment, the principle difference between the liberals critics outside the Church and conservatives within is that the former focus on social issues while being ignorant of theological ones, whereas the latter obsess on liturgy, doctrine and personal morality while being indifferent to socio-economic inequities.

Nevertheless, through this fog of epithets and accusations, the more serious question remains: who is Benedict and what does he stand for?

Whether Benedict is a “liberal” or a “conservative” or perhaps something else, is not a question of labels but of understanding the tasks facing his papacy and the intended direction of his ministry. As I shall attempt to explain, Benedict is a radical reactionary who is girding the Church to confront a new dark age.

This characterization rejects the “conservative” and “liberal” labels as trivial and largely irrelevant to what Benedict is about. While he is not indifferent to the concerns of these factions and while he has engaged in some subtle and not so subtle re-positionings to accommodate them, his focus goes beyond their immediate objects of desire.

Benedict is not happy with condition of Church and is even less sanguine about the direction of humankind has taken. He sees the Church as being an agent for a fundamental re-civilizing of humanity and, to gird the Church for this missionary task, he has to effect a theological consensus between liberals and conservatives within the Church.

Similarly, Benedict’s outreach to the Muslim world was more than a diplomatic attempt to make peace with our supposed “enemies”. While it was that, it was also a call to non-Christian religions to collaborate with the Church in fashioning a common religious and spiritual response to the pathological secularism Benedict feels is threatening to consume mankind.

What specifically is the nature of this world-saving mission and what are the parameters of the consensus? In other words, what is the Church’s historical role today and what is that role’s theological basis?

To answer that question and to understand the nature of Benedict’s reactionary radicalism it is necessary, howsoever inadequately, to provide some gross sketch of the Church’s historical and theological development over the past two millennia.

--o0o--

The Three Ages of the Church


With respect to that ongoing “conversation” that constitutes the historical tradition of the Church we can begin by saying, as a matter of convenience, that there are three churches within the Catholic identity: the Medieval church, the Tridentine church and the Vatican II church. Each of these churches represented a more or less distinct and cohesive ecclesiastical response to a world-historical phenomenon.

Civitate Dei

In popular imagination the Medieval Church is conjured up as some witches’ brew of funereal sounding chant, joyless superstition, persecution and torture. This image flows from a misconception of the Middle Ages itself. Without doubt, the Middle Ages was a time of tremendous upheaval and rustification of life; but contrary to the orthodoxy of Voltairian Canards, they were not a time of darkness and stagnation. On the contrary, spanning roughly from the fourth century to the 15th, the Middle Ages were a time of great ideological ferment and cultural innovation. It was the Roman Empire that had stagnated becoming at once culturally moribund and politically oppressive. The Middle Ages although born in violence, disorganization and economic disruption also brought freedom and an attempt to approach life with new (and improved) values.

The early Church Fathers certainly saw it that way. In Augustine’s view, the Empire had served as a “vessel” for the spread of the Gospel. It had united East and West in prosperity and peace and Christianity had spread through its networks of roads and dioceses. Now the rotten husk was falling away as the flower of a new and higher consciousness emerged. Augustine’s vision of a new City of God was not the voice of darkness and despair but of hope and enlightenment.


This vision was not a day-dream but a call to mission. The Church well understood that, oppressive and sterile as the pagan world had become, it still stood for civilization -- for cities, for bureaucracies, for merchants. The collapse of this structure required a new structure in its place. The Church understood as well that whether the onslaughting germanic tribes were Christian or not, they needed to be civis-lized; i.e. brought into the structure of a larger, ordered social life. The Church could take over public administration, it could preserve and transmit elements of classical culture but amid the demographic maelstrom and economic collapse it had to recreate the image of society. It did so, in great measure, by living in the present its hope for the “city” to come. Spe salvi .

There were three salient characteristics of the Medieval church. The first was its great diversity of customs and liturgies under the aegis of a universal (“katolicos”) City of God. This cultural diversity was the necessary result of both immigration flows and the re-localization of social life. It represented an improvement; for the Empire, like all monolithic states, had imposed an “official” culture on the homogenized mediteranean world. Today we admire the ruins of arches and arenas in stretching from Toledo to Tunis to Turkey, but even as early as the waning days of the Republic, Cicero had sighed in despair, “Everywhere is Rome.” And everywhere the Roman Mall. The “international style” in stone was a reflection of the “international style” in everything else, at least for the Romanized “international middle class.” There were manuals on everything from what to say on such and such an occasion to what to “know” at cocktail parties. But, in fact, there had hardly been an innovation in anything in 300 years, which was itself 300 years removed from the cultural glories of Periclean Athens. The classical world had become the proverbial white-washed sepulchre. The relocalization of life brought forth an explosion of released creativity full of color and humor, from Byzantine mosaics, to Visigothic tableaux (above) to naked monkeys on capitals of columns to gargoyles, tapestries and stained glass. There was nothing dark about it.

The second salient characteristic of the Medieval Church was a profound and, in the end excessive, reverence for language (“the word”) which, to medieval eyes, had a near magical power to bring order to chaos, to still violence and to resolve conflict. Our ingratitude to the Middle Ages is astonishing. It is to them that we owe our constructs of classical logic, of the seven liberal arts, of legal due process, of propertied relations and perhaps most fundamentally, of the dualism between the “ideal” and the material. While all of these ideas had roots in Greek philosophy, the Middle Ages erected new edifices on old cornerstones, and these new structures are still the girders of our consciousness today. The Middle Ages fused Celto-Germanic notions and Judeo-Babylonian lore into Greek rationalism. Sometimes, a phallic monkey on a pole was the better result of the day, but through trial and error, the Middle Ages was our becoming.


This is not to say that the Middle Age was what it was not. It was a period of transmutation in which there were pockets of grotesque violence and abysmal ignorance. But it was also a time of practical invention and ideological synthesis. Although it never found how to make gold from lead, it gave us the wheelbarrow, the stirrup, the horse-collar and horseshoes, the rudder, compass, astrolabe, sundial, mechanical clock, spinning wheel, windmills and spectacles, to say nothing of stronger and improved plows -- practical things which were indispensable steps toward our modern technological empiricism.

The Imperial Foot

Last but not least, medieval man contemplated the Crucifix and this perhaps was the greatest contribution of the Middle Ages. Let no one laugh. The Romans thought nothing -- absolutely nothing -- of crucifying 30,000 Iberians or 70,000 Spartacists. For all his cruelties and barbarisms, medieval man never forgot that precisely because God had become the lowest of the low and had suffered the torture of the damned, every man, the least and the dirtiest of these, had a god redeemed dignity. A Caesar would never stoop to wash the feet of beggars. Voltaire could sneer all he wont, but the idea of inherent human dignity was not a gift of the Enlightenment.


If the Middle Ages is properly reassessed as a time of actual and real progress, this was due in great and substantial measure to the efforts of the Church -- of church men and women -- who guided, instructed and gave shape to this new civilization and whose last great thinkers, such as Vittoria and Suarez, brought us up to the line of the Renaissance and the modern world -- that Novus Organum which was breached in violence and gave rise to the Tridentine church.

Trent

The Tridentine Church, in which I include the imperial papal monarchy immediately preceding the Reformation and continuing on up to the World War (II) was almost the very the opposite of the Medieval Church. The social upheaval wrought by the Protestant insurrection was almost as cataclysmic as the Germanic invasions of the Fifth Century. The death and destruction that attended the Reformation wars certainly rivaled that of the Norman and Hunnish furies. Faced with this new historical crisis, the Church retreated behind the ramparts.


Protestantism based itself on a “return” to “the Bible” from and on the basis of which divines cobbled their theologies-- every man his own best Euclid. The misbegotten idea was that there was some blessed begin-state known as the Original Christian, the closer to which one got, the closer one got to Jesus. The Catholic Church could never espouse such a belief because it could never disavow her Sacred Tradition -- that is, that part of Revelation which is revealed through the ongoing life and learning of the whole faithful; that part of God’s Plan that had brought about the destruction of Rome and inspired the building of a new city. To claim otherwise would be to deny that God was present (and up to something) in the here and now.

But while not denying tradition, the Church sought rationalise it -- to delineate proper deductions, relationships between the parts, and lines of authority. The Council(s) of Trent promoted liturgical uniformity, rationalism, a certain staid gloominess passing for spirituality, and a gradual if never complete judaicising of hellenic traditions. This esprit de geometrie turned religious life into a collection of canons, indictions and prescriptions commonly, if somewhat inaccurately, referred to as the Syllabus.

In subtle ways the Church become protestantized even as she sought to immunize herself from the infection. Tridentine rationalism reflected an assumed opposition (non existent in the feudal world) between “reason” and “faith.” Trent managed the unique gymnastic of distrusting reason and doubting faith at the same time. Not surprisingly, the Council's teachings are as uplifting and inspiring as a penal code. The ultimate result was a kind of aesthetic sterility. It is equally unsurprising that intellectual vitality passed to the Great Secularists like Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Marx. And it is hardly surprising that after a brilliant dying flare in the Renaissance, Church art slowly decayed into embarrassing kitsch.

Politics was soon to follow. In the wake of the Enlightenment, the Napoleonic Wars and an emergent liberal nationalism, the Church which had once taken over governance from Rome was reduced to a mere social organization within the new secular state, although from place to place was supported in order to prop up the State.

It was in reaction to the formulaicness of the “Syllabus” that Vatican II took place. However, in order to put that great Council into proper context it is necessary to digress again and to briefly touch upon the crisis that confronted humanity upon the demise of burgertum at the close of the 19th century.

(Great Mobilizations)

In the run-up to the Franco-Prussian War the Prussian Court and General Staff fretted that the envisioned casualty rate would be so great as to trigger a revolution on the home front. All through the century casualty rates had been increasing, not simply in absolute numbers but, more frighteningly, in the rapidity of the carnage. In the event, the casualties of the war were severe amounting to about 50,000 soldiers in five weeks of war. But there was no revolution. The Mass Society had been born.

The rise of the mass state and the ensuing great slaughters made it evident that the Church could not continue on in simply in the safety of the Tridentine Canons. It needed to reach out, speak to and galvanize the masses, especially since those very same masses were being galvanized by the likes of Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler.


It was Cardinal Pacelli, later Pius XII, who first recognized that, in this new world of mass mobilizations, the Church was not a player unless she too could gather up her sheep. Given that the Church was still a monarchy whose Vicar was bound by protocols, Cardinal Pacelli became the first peripatetic and charismatic “pre-Pope” travelling the globe in and drawing huge crowds at mass rallies from Argentina (below, 1934) to Germany. The Church had once again become a player.

But what hand to play? The difficulty was that the Church’s social doctrine, Rerum Novarum (1891), had essentially been co-opted or was itself a copy of social democratic, state-socialist and fascist programs. Aside from irredentist Communists in the east and diehard Liberal capitalists in the U.S., everyone accepted the propositions of regulated economy, class cooperation, and guarantees of social welfare. As a result, the “counter-mobilization” while it served to protect Church prerogatives did little to provide a particularly Christian vision for the masses themselves, apart from “moral renewal” and a subjective spiritual focus.


Following the disaster of the World War (II), it was clear that the Church had failed in the mobilization game. Pius XII died in despair, saying shortly before his death that mankind had fashioned a tombstone over itself that it did not have the strength to remove.

Vatican II

His successor, Pope John XXIII, did not share that pessimism. While he understood that the Church had arrived at a deadlock, “We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.” On what is said to have been a sudden inspiration, he called for a Second Vatican Council.


The essentially practical intent of John XXIII was to bring greater openness and aggiornamento (updating) to the Church. By this, he most definitely did not mean doctrinal reform. The issue in his mind was rather a pastoral objective to more effectively bring doctrinal vitality to the people and the people into more active participation in the Church.

“Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that fully conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy.”
But the very language of aggiornamento -- implied doctrinal widening. Indeed, in his opening address, John XXIII, cribbed from liberal theologians and asserted that,

“Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which, by men's own efforts and even beyond their very expectations, are directed toward the fulfillment of God's superior and inscrutable designs.”
And not just “us” Catholics. In Lumen Gentium, John wrote that “many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside [the Church’s] visible confines." To which the next logical question was: How far out?

Pretty far, although with less than felicitous results. To regain the spontaneity and diversity of the medieval church, Vatican II substituted a formula of spontaneity which of course was a contradiction in terms. The result was typical of the cultural mindset of the Sixties: ignorance passing off as relevance, vulgarity passing off as spontaneity. While many Catholics might have welcomed an easing up on Tridentine formulas, they were equally appalled by the banality into which the liturgy was reduced.

At the same time, the many social activists came to look upon the Church as an agent for social change morphing organized charity, into political activism, and this again into “revolution”. The Church can certainly not be suffered to claim that is “removed” from active politics, and when such claims are made it is usually by the hierarchy in “support-the-State” mode. But the difficulty with the way the political question arose in the Sixties was that there was no coherence in what the Church’s position was or should be. The Church Political became a mobilization of individuals and groups wrapping themselves in the church’s mantel. While that ad hoc lay initiative has never been prohibited it has always been problematic.

In large measure, this activism was as harmless as it was trivial; particularly in the bourgeois West where the activism related to issues which, when they were not outrightly self-indulgent, were “ameliorative” rather than fundamental.

Latin American Liberation Theology was quite another matter. By interpreting the special option for the poor (“The poor shall inherit the Earth”) as implicating revolutionary action, the Liberationists appeared to be opening the door - if not explicitly calling for -- violence and class violence against fellow Catholics.

However, although Liberation Theology was propounded in the Sixties it had little to do with Vatican II. It was rather an outgrowth of the millenarian experience and traditions of the Church in Hispanic America, where elements within the Church (usually one or another monastic order) had always been active in founding parallel utopian societies and instigating revolutions. This movement and the theology on which it is based are a separate and peculiarly hemispheric phenomenon outside the broad outlines being drawn here.

As for the heady days Vatican II, it did not take long for there to be a morning after. From both left and right there was a recognition by 1978 that Vatican II had been a failure. The proof was the fruit (or lack of it). Participation far from increasing began to shrink. Likewise the orders and the priesthood fell off attracting novices. The “liturgical reforms” were such a disaster that the services in a Calvinist conventicle were more inspiring the average mass of twanging guitars or embarrassed parishioners croaking out simplistic hymns. Aggiornamento became equated with “relevance” which was simply a by-word for whatever any person subjectively felt was “important” to him or her -- all of which in the end, was simply another outbreak of Protestantism.

It is hardly surprising that faced with what can only be seen as a crisis, the conservative and liberal voices were at odds. Conservatives: We told you so. Bring back the Syllabus and the Tridentine Mass. Liberals:: You didn’t go far enough. No aggiornamento without gay marriage and women priests. If this seems utterly trite and superficial, one can only say that, alas, it is.

The crisis was masked for 25 years by the crowd-drawing hysterics of John Paul II. Impressive as these events were, the true strength of the Church does not derive from Roman spectacles. Pope Benedict put the best possible spin on Vatican II’s failure, saying that good seed is “slow in developing.” Forty years on and one might as well give up watering a stick.

It was in this sorry state that the Church entered into the Third Millennium and the keys to the kingdom were handed to Joseph Ratzinger.

Grotesquely inadequate as this thumbnail summary of two millennia of church history may be, it provides a necessary historical spectrum for measuring Benedict’s position and direction.

People who deride Ratzinger as a “conservative” fail to understand that he was a protegé and later the protector, of liberal theologians behind Vatican-II. Those who excoriate him as a pantheistic liberal fail to grasp how radically reactionary he is.

Benedict’s place and role within the context of Church history and issues is fraught with ambiguities and perhaps contradiction. On one point, the conservatives are correct: there is no reason to think that Benedict desires to revert to the Syllabus. Benedict’s rehabilitation of the “Latin” mass was less a ploy to bring back the Tridentine Church than it was a recognition that the liturgical reforms of Vatican II had proved to be a colossal flop. In the end, it simply made no sense to “outlaw” a form of liturgy which the Church had used for five hundred years and which still gratified many. Benedict certainly wants to reincorporate these “traditionalists” into the Church, but he has no intention of reinstating a tridentine conservatism.

On the other side, the liberals are wrong to assert that Benedict has “rejected” Vatican II. He has sought to restrain what he considers meanderings into wholesale relativism, but there is no reason to doubt his own protestations that he continues to accept the Council’s two cardinal aims of revitalization and aggiornamento. The real question is: what does oggi really demand? The answer to this question is the key to understanding what Benedict is about.

In my view, Benedict is driven by the conviction that today we stand at the abyss of a new Dark Age and aggiornamento requires the Church to respond to the crisis as it did 1700 years past. This should not be mistakenly thought of as call to “return” to the Medieval Church. Such an “originalist” intent, aside from being un-catholic, would be patently absurd. Instead, Benedict wants to rekindle the socio-moral missionary fervor that animated the Sixth Century Benedictine monks at the dawn of a Brave New World.


Ora et Laboro

That mission looked backward and forward at the same time. The Benedictine monks stood with their backs to an old world order that for all its degeneracy and corruption was still the repository of learning, commerce and civilized life They faced uncouth barbarians who so admired Rome that they wanted to posses all she had. For all that, their undisciplined energy had the potential to revitalize a civilization that was spent. The Benedictine motto Ora et Laboro -- Work and Pray -- summarized the task. One could pithily say that the old world needed to be taught the value of work and the new, the necessity for prayer. If the Barbarians needed to be taught that indulgence wasn’t everything, the Romans needed to be taught that work was not “what slaves did” but was a noble in itself -- a value which Benedict says which was “inherited from Judaism.”

Although the Benedictines did in fact venture forth into the bogs and forests of Germany “converting” the heathen to both “work” and “prayer” they are symbolic of what the Church as whole did at this time. Benedict’s encyclicals and remarks repeatedly allude to the role of the mendicant and monastic orders in shaping Christian civilization by living the Christian life.

Benedict emphatically rejects conceiving of faith as a retreat into the subjective monastery of one. Spe Salvi is clear that faith is social and cannot be experienced in isolation. For Benedict, the monastic orders are paradigms of faith both with respect to the communal life within their walls and their life with the communities outside them. With this paradigm in mind, one could say, the Benedict conceives of faith as a special kind of political action that Catholics must be prepared and willing to live out today the hope for tomorrow.

But before the Church can meet this task, it must regain its own coherence. For Catholics faith has always been a question of “what must we believe” not “what do I have a right to believe.” Thus for Benedict the question is not whether to let loose Christian activists, but rather to define what Christian activism is. As much as bridging past and future and connecting East and West, Benedict has to reunite liberals and conservatives within the Church itself. If that fault line is not sealed, the Church will schism at the first difficulty.

Characterizing Benedict as a conservative or liberal overlooks the synthesizing role he has undertaken and must play. In a sense, he has been preparing for this synthesis all of his life because what I have described as the Medieval and Vatican II churches represent the two poles of modern Catholic theology and Joseph Ratzinger intimately collaborated with both the “modernist” theologian Karl Rahner and the “medievalist” theologian Hans Uhr Von Balthasar. Benedict’s encyclicals and remarks have thus far operated at two levels. First as a kind of homily on how the life of Christian love and faith are lived, and second, interwoven with the homily, as a con-synthesis of these two theological perspectives.

Here and Now

Karl Rahner was perhaps the most impactive 20th century Catholic theologian as his writings, provided the original basis for much of Vatican II. Rahner was a Jesuit and, at the outset, a Thomist. His theological point of departure was St. Ignatius’ dictum that God was to be found in all things; and thus, in Rahner’s view, God was to be found even in an atheist’s denial of God.

This conclusion was somewhat the inverse of the Muslim view that God was so transcendent he could command idolatry. But whereas Ibn Hazn had held that such a command would prove how God was beyond everything, Rahner moved in the other direction. The task, he wrote, was not to stand dumb before His Beyondness but to understand how the infinite and transcendental could interface with the finite and actual; i.e. , what it meant to say that God became Man.

Rahner took the view that God’s offer of salvation was his self-communicating acceptance of salvation. According to him, God’s “self-communication” meant,

“that we must say of man here and now that he participates in God’s being; that he has been given the divine Spirit who fathoms the depths of God; that he is already God’s son here and now.”
Put in somewhat Hegelian terms, our existence is God’s contemplating (and actualizing) himself through us as a medium.

In the Rahnerian view, the joys and sorrows of Christ’s own dying and rising in the quotidian made up what Rahner called a “liturgy of the world.” The mysteries of the Incarnation and Grace unfolded into every dimension of human life leading to a “theology of everyday things” --a theology of work, of seeing, of laughing, of eating and sleeping, of walking and sitting. There was an echo of St. Benedict in this. Ora et Laboro, became Ora est Laboro (which is indeed a common gloss on Saint Benedict’s motto).

There were also dollops of optimism. As they say, “If God is with us, who can stand against us?” If God was in everything -- and in the 20th century “everything” was quite a disaster -- then in spite of all the horrors, despite all the affirmative denials of The Good, God was at our side, leading us forward. Pope John’s statement about a divinely operated new order of things clearly echoed this Rahnerian optimism.

But optimistic as Rahner’s anthropological theology might be, it had definite weak points, the first of which was that it implicated pantheism. (Syllabus Error No. 1) There is nothing wrong with pantheism, it is just not Christianity (as we've heard conservatives complaining). It can also be seen how “God is here and now” could be easily twisted into a post Vatican II, hippiesque theology of vulgarity.

Rahner’s God-in-All theology also led to the Christian acceptance of Non Christianity. Lumen Gentium's notion that “sanctification and of truth are found outside [the Church’s] visible confines” was a reflection of Rahner’s concept of the Anonymous Christian.-- a person who, while in every way not a Christian, had undergone a saving "baptism of desire".

“Even a person who does not know Christ conceptually can be saved through the power of the Holy Spirit, evidenced by a life lived, as Christ’s was, in faith, hope and love of the church.”
Of course it is indisputably true that God saves whom he will save and we have no say in it. But if we can be baptized by desire, why is Christianity necessary at all?

It is was hardly surprising that Rahner should have come under a bombardment of criticism. In the view of his critics, Rahner’s theology did not sufficiently account for the Crucifixion which is integral to the Christian world-view. Put a little less academically, if our desire is sufficient for salvation then Christ’s sacrifice was an unnecessary and useless act.

It is semantically clever to say that the atheist “implicitly” accepts the existence of what he denies, because one cannot deny nothing. But such Heideggerian jeux do little address the Christian objection that atheism is more than a mere consumer choice among philosophical objects. Rahner himself, was adamantly opposed to reducing God to a mere object of thought but his marginalization of sin lead to that result and, perhaps worse, failed to grapple with the challenge to Christianity raised by the God’s historical "self-contemplation" in the 20th century.

Rahner was ordered into silence by none other than Happy Pope John. At that point, the German theological establishment -- including the so-called Rotweiler -- rose up in protest and Pope John withdrew the order. Rahner and Ratzinger went on to collaborate as advisors to Vatican II.

It is dubious that Rahner ever intended a Cole Porter theology of All-is-Good / Anything Goes. Whether that was “implicit in” or an “erroneous inference from” his theology, a relativism which renders Christianity essentially accidental and irrelevant is not acceptable. To label that “conservative” misses the point.

But to say that Benedict rejects a touchy-feely latitudinarianism is not to say that he seeks lockdown in the Syllabus. Benedict’s conservatism goes beyond Trent to the earliest days of the Church and its Helleno-Judaic origins -- to a pre-Cartesian concept of Reason and Faith.

Yesterday Lost

The man who pointed in that direction was the second great Catholic theologian of the 20th century, Hans Uhr von Balthasar who, with Ratzinger, founded the theological journal Communio, and who two days before he died was honorifically made a cardinal by John Paul II.

Like Rahner, Balthasar objected to modern theology’s objectification of God. In his view academe had turned God into a mere occasion for speculative study -- a phantom and an idol -- when in fact He was the “light and fire” at the center of the cosmos. For Balthasar, as for Rahner, the living God, if he was anything, had to be supremely concrete; not something abstract or ghostly.

But from that cosmic point, Balthasar followed a divergent path. Whereas for Rahner, God was in all that is, for Balthasar the eternal God and the historical Man were parallel lines that only intersected at the junctures of Beauty, Truth and Goodness. These points of intersection gave rise to what Balthasar called a theology of aesthetics by which he most emphatically did not simply mean forms of beauty but more importantly beautiful actions, like Love and Humility. Put another way, God’s presence was only evident when the “concrete” and the “everyday” embodied certain qualities like truth, beauty and goodness.

Balthasar’s aesthetic action, gave rise to a further difference. Whereas for Rahner, God’s relationship to Man was His own self contemplation through Man, in Balthasar’s aesthetic theology Man and God stood in an I-Thou relationship bonded and made possible by love, analogous to a child becoming aware of his own self through feeling the otherness of his mother’s love for him.

For Balthasar, the God-Man relationship did not produce a “liturgy of the world” but rather a theologie dramatique the crucial act of which was the Crucifixion.

In his view “salvation” was not a natural in-built potential in the vein of a Platonic “all men desire the good” but rather was something that resulted from a free and undetermined response to a call from without. In this case, Christ’s call to man from the Cross.

Unlike Rahner, von Balthasar was not content to see the good in every day things. Rather it was his view that everyday life -- that, is “society” - had to provide man with reasons for being good. Not only was our liberal world failing to do this, it was actively working against it, dinning out the call from the Cross.

The Catholic Church has never been entirely at ease with Liberalism which it has criticised since before the French Revolution while at the same time condemning the equally critical Marx. Unfortunately, much of the Church’s criticism has been in the nature of declaiming against errors of degree; acknowledging and accepting the benefits of the bourgeois system while nattering against its excesses. Balthasar was utterly unforgiving and struck at the root.

He began by denying the validity of Cartesian rationalism. True knowing, he wrote, is not based on detachment and objectification but on love and surrender.

This view represented a return to medieval usage in which the word intelectus did not mean gear grinding brain activity but rather a “taking in” to the mind of the thing contemplated in all its functionality, essence, sense, beauty and purpose. To the medieval mind there was nothing curious in saying “I am intellecting a rose”. Nor was it considered “unscientific” to say that if the typical rose had seven or twelve petals, they stood for the seven virtues or the twelve apostles. Medieval man saw nothing absurd in seeking symmetries between the material and the spiritual and among all that was.

Balthasar’s axe swipe went to very roots of our present day civilization which insists on the validity of only a particular kind of knowledge -- of what might be said to be a mutilated form of knowledge. Having committed this great secular sin, Balthasar went on to denounce a culture of self-indulgence and violence that systematically denied man reasons for being good

“We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, .... whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
"But whenever the relationship between nature and grace is severed (as happens... where 'faith' and 'knowledge' are constructed as opposites), then the whole of worldly being falls under the dominion of 'knowledge', and the springs and forces of love immanent in the world are overpowered and finally suffocated by science, technology and cybernetics. The result is a world without women, without children, without reverence for love in poverty and humiliation — a world in which power and the profit-margin are the sole criteria, where the disinterested, the useless, the purposeless is despised, persecuted and in the end exterminated — a world in which art itself is forced to wear the mask and features of technique.”
Balthasar’s pessimism stood in sharp contrast to Rahner’s optimism; and, of the two, Balthasar’s rejection of the modern world was far more radical than Rahner’s acceptance of it. Philosophies grounded in materialism (whether Marxist, capitalist or simply technocratic) will denigrate Balthasar as a looney reactionary. But the criticism is beside the point; Balthasar would counter-accuse the modern world with having lost its humanity.

Con-sysnthesis

Rahner and Von Balthasar represent the true liberal-conservative dialectic within the Church today. The Tridentine conservatives, while they may be more at ease with Balthasar’s language, do not seem to be up to his challenge. They are basically Catholic fundamentalists taking refuge in a sort of 16th century originalism. While Benedict is just as much pope to them as anyone else, his recent writings reflect a greater concern to harmonize two competing theological perspectives into a con-synthesis that speaks for the whole Church.

Spe Salvi was very much in the spirit of a theology of aesthetics when it stated “It is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by love.” (§ 26) However, what could be more theologically here-and-now than following up with, “When someone has the experience of a great love in his life, this is a moment of “redemption” which gives a new meaning to his life.” (Ibid ) In virtually the same breath, Benedict blended von Balthasar with Rahner in a way that made lovely sense.

In the same vein, Rahner’s version of Loyola’s “mystical moment” as an historical (i.e. here and now) experience of eternity found echo in Benedict’s beautiful paragraph describing “eternal life” as the “moment” in which the individual is embraced by and in turn embraces the All and Everything. (Spe Salvi § 12 )

Turning from the “personal” to the “social”, Benedict’s assertion that beyond “structures” to relieve suffering, faith -- living the hope of things to come -- consists in personal compassion with the existing suffering of others is a restatement of Balthasar’s aesthetic theology. At the same time, Benedict’s definition of faith as the “embryo” of habits to come was lifted from Rahner’s notion of Grace as a “pre-apprehension” of the infinite.

Viewed as a prescription, Spe Salvi’s social doctrine of love and hope was essentially a restatement of Rahner’s Rule that Christian action involves: an absolute love towards neighbors coupled with a habit of hope for the future.

However, viewed as a social critique, Spe Salvi landed squarely in von Balthasar’s corner. Here, Benedict (as von Balthasar) did not stop at condemning the manifestations of modern society -- which is simply moralizing; but rather attacked the foundations of modern society -- which is radical and even revolutionary.

Benedict critiqued the “disturbing step” that was taken when Francis Bacon (Novus Organum) substituted “faith and practice” (Ora et Laboro) with “science and praxis.” (Spe Salvi § 16) “Faith in progress,” was misplaced because “man can never be redeemed simply from outside.... this kind of hope is deceptive. Science can contribute greatly to making the world and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it...” (Spe Salvi § 25) Benedict’s rejection of the modern world’s idolatrization of Cartesian rationalism is so Balthasarian as to bear re-quoting.

“[I]f science as a whole is [empiricism] and this alone, it is man himself who it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, ...then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by ‘science’ ... and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective ‘conscience’ becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, ... ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.” (Regensburg Address)
In so striking at the Baconian roots of the modern world, Benedict was unmistakably in Balthasar’s corner and would appear to be at least extremely skeptical that God is present in our pathologies.

This short illustrative review is perhaps sufficient to show that Benedict is neither “liberal” nor “conservative” but rather pope, whose first task is to speak for the whole Church. Whether Benedict appears “conservative” or “liberal” is largely a function of which faction is fussing over his position on which obsession du jour. If he is said to be “conservative” by the New York Times it is only because its Religion editor is more interested in “women’s issues” than whether Maria should be qualified as Redemptorix. Benedict himself is far more interested in effecting a Summa of Parts that restates what the Church is, has been and will be about.

--o0o--

Pontification

The Pope’s mission to speak for the whole Church in unfortunately misconceived by many, including even some popes, to mean speaking at the whole Church. This cannot be. True pontification is not a matter of diktat but a question of distillation and in this regard a pope truly acts as servus servorum dei.

What I have denoted as the “three churches” is but a gross sketch of a millennial confluence of voices. It is in fact risible to speak of “a medieval church” or even of a singular tridentine church. If the 20th century Church encompasses such “opposing” voices like Rahner and von Balthasar, how much more so a church during the span of a thousand years. Even the first two popes were at odds.

If one were to hear the Church’s Chatter from within Augustine’s eternal, present moment, it would have the sound of a vast chorus whose singers were all improvising at once. What would that sound like? We cannot say; but at any given moment Christ’s meistersinger can whistle out what he thinks the melody is. ...correctly sung that is. :)

The two striking things about Benedict’s writings are their astonishing breath and their refined Mozartian playfulness. This is not a man who is pounding out Biblical quotes on an anvil, but rather someone with a thorough grasp and deep affection for the Western Tradition in the broadest sense. His writings defy reporting and are like “thought-symphonies” that can only be enjoyed and gestated.

From the outset, the reader gets the impression that Benedict is “pulling things together” in a delightful way that unfortunately has gone out of fashion. He reaches into an arcane corner of classical Greek thought, steals a quote from Islamic theology, then stretches back to the Old Testament for an idea before taking a swipe at Kant illustrated with a quote from some early rustic abbot. While he is certainly effecting a synthesis between present day “liberals” and “conservatives,” his style, encompassing the whole garden of human thought, goes beyond that.

To an extent this method is the message, for it embodies a return to a medieval way of talking. Benedict sees this “pulling” and “melding” to be the historical gift and proper function of the Church. In his view the rapprochement faith and inquiry “was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history.” (Regensburg Address)

In Benedict’s view that historical rapprochment has been destroyed and needs to be re-accomplished. He is clear that the anti-reason of either a transcendental fanaticism or a hippieseque know-nothingism, are subjective dementia which are products of an even deeper pathology; namely, the Baconian cleavage between reason and faith -- a cleavage which was the crevice on which the Reformation was founded. In both Benedict’s and von Balthasar’s view this was a catastrophic mistake. Benedict is calling on us to rethink our thinking so that truth and beauty, logic and aesthetics, science and faith, mysticism and politics are not viewed as opposites but as inclusives.

When writers on the Left scowl that Benedict is winding back to the Middle Ages they can be answered: Yes! Yes! That’s exactly it! Only you don’t get it. Swallowing the Voltairian Canard whole, they miss the real point. Benedict’s medievalism in fact rises to meet a Marxist challenge.

In a famous passage of Das Kapital, Marx criticised what he called the Fetish of the Commodity. Marx did not mean a fetishistic love of stuff -- what people call “being materialistic”. What he meant was that the capitalist economic system demanded a certain self-perpetuating way of looking at things which ultimately became a fetish in itself rather than any exercise of truly free thought.

For example, the purpose of health insurance is to provide payments for health care in the event of an illness. However, it is typical in the United States for an insurance company to deny health insurance to someone on account age or past habits, because he might get sick, even if he has no existing condition. “We have to keep our costs down, in order to protect our shareholder’s investment,” is the typical rationale. Thus the ideal applicant is a person who will pay the company money for no foreseeable benefit.

Another example of the fetish can be seen in the attempt to justify protecting the environment on the grounds that green policies “create jobs” and “are in fact cost effective.” Why not simply say that this Earth is too stonishingly beautiful to be destroyed for any reason?

What the “bottom line” fetish does is to supplant values such as beauty, caring, love of creation and compassion for fellow man with the demand to create surplus value.

Neither Marx nor Benedict be considered a “hater of science”. The difference between them is close. Whereas Benedict says that science, unguided by principles external to it, becomes destructive, Marx would say that it becomes destructive when guided by external principles that are selfish. Both would agree that “world in which power and the profit-margin are the sole criteria” is a world that has opted to exterminate itself, and both would insist that Man has to break loose from an imprisoned way of thinking.

However, style and a revived way of looking at things is only half the story. Benedict is equally clear that faith is not a question of subjective attitudes but is something active and social. A pope’s second job is to lead and once the sheep have been gathered into consensus they presumable have to set off on some journey. Unfortunately, since Trent, the Church has tended to specialize in huddling. To the scorn of progressives and revolutionaries -- it has too often ended up instilling a political quietism under the guise of spirituality. Not Benedict.

Writing in 1991, then Cardinal Ratzinger warned European Churches that they “must not allow themselves to be downgraded to a mere means for making society moral, as the liberal state wishes; still less should they want to justify themselves through the usefulness of their social work".

Mere means for making society moral” ?!?! - What kind of conservative would say such a thing? “Personal morality” has been the hallmark of the politically conservative Church and along comes Ratzinger announcing that the Gospel requires more than "Keep your nose clean and say the rosary twice a day".

However, Liberal “activists” fared no better. Substantially giving in to scientific rationalism they wanted the Church to carve out a sociological function for itself that would justify its role in society. To what were undoubtedly hearty chuckles from the Lutheran corner of the gallery, along came Ratzinger to admonish them against seeking justification through useful works.

What Ratzinger was really saying was that the Church was no one’s flying buttress; and perhaps that is the simplest metaphor for explaining what Benedict sees as the active role of the Church. A cathedral is a place of beauty, of song, of color, and of worship but also, in medieval times, a place of hospice, refuge, consolation, and yes of amorous trysts, conspiracy and community planning. In those days, the stone cathedral was the visible and focal manifestation of the communio around it -- not as “a place of prayer” but as a structure integrated into and reflecting the human life around it. “The Church” that is, all Christians together, have to be this place of work and prayer. Much of the homiletic aspect of Benedict’s writings is describing how this communio is animated and is. The substance of his encyclicals consists in painting a picture of the hope we should live out today.

The difference between the then and the now is the difference between Chartres in the plain and St. Patricks at 445 Fifth Avenue. Although as pope, Benedict will do his pastoral duty to animate all, he is not very sanguine about the mass church and would rather have a smaller cadre of Christians living communio than a larger church engaging in occasional feel good religiosity.


This is not to say that Benedict discounts the value of socio-economic structures. On the contrary, he has written that the Church should promote organized charity and he urges each generation to build just and compassionate political structures. He has expressed the view that “democratic socialism" is closer to the Gospel than free- market capitalism. But closer is not the same. In his view, the Christian way of life is some differential point between being personally good and socially useful.

Similarly, Benedict’s insistence on the over-riding importance of personal freedom as against utopian social structures is an echo of what might be called Balthasar’s “dramatic moment”. Once this echo is heard, it becomes clear that Benedict’s call for “personal freedom” is not an apology for Liberal platitudes about economic and personal “free choice”. Far from vindicating a right to chose wrong in the name of “freedom” Benedict is demanding that society remove the barriers that disallow man to be truly free.

Those who seek a structural change to the present system are no doubt dissatisfied with a revolution that to them appears hopelessly abstract and sentimental. When people are homeless, jobless, sick and starving, reduced to slave labor or dying in gutters, speaking of “a better way of intellecting” can be exasperating to say the least.

But exasperating or not the characterization of Benedict as a conservative, in the sense of supporting the status quo is entirely misplaced. His writings evince an awareness that the ecclesiastical Church is withering away and Global Liberalism has reached a self-destructive dead end. These are indeed dark assessments for the future and he is girding those who choose to be faithful to face an oncoming historical crisis he himself will not live to see.

Benedict is a small man, with an impish presence, a subtle sense of humor and a soft voice given to gentle exhortation and encouragement. This presence is at odds with a man who supposedly sees a gotterdamerung of both Church and Civilization. But once again Benedict pulls together Rahnerian optimism with Balthasarian pessimism. His vision is not Apocalyptic and his solution is anything but private subjective raptures. What he is saying to his despairing predecessor is that the Church can help lift the tombstone man has fashioned for himself, if in the time to come we live the hope of things to come.



Let us build a church so grand the world will think us mad!!
People of Seville - 1401

Ite Discursus Est

It is undeniably grotesque to attempt a summary of a philosophical history that spans 2,500 years in 24 pages. I have done so merely to give an imperfect sense of context and some explanation behind my conclusions concerning Benedict. It is appropriate to end with two personal vignettes that reflect upon the Joseph Ratzinger, neither as cardinal nor pope, but simply a human being.

A protestant seminarian studying in Germany tells of the time he was asked to translate an interview between two American Dominicans and then professor Ratzinger: “At length one of the Dominicans asked, ‘Did Jesus have a vision of God in Mary's womb?’ Ratzinger looked surprised. He turned to me, and asked in German,"Did I understand that question correctly?" I nodded yes. Answering directly in Latin, Ratzinger quoted William of Ockham: “Miracles should not be multiplied beyond necessity.”

Uta Ranke-Heinemann, the world's first female professor of Catholic theology and a leading liberal speaks admiringly and affectionately of Benedict. “And all my life, many people have been astonished that I've always sort of defended Ratzinger, even though I've said that many of his opinions are totally wrong.” ... The enormous difference between John Paul II and Ratzinger is intelligence. Ratzinger is more, much more, intelligent. Quite frankly, John Paul II was tedious without end. ... Ratzinger has much more of what the French call l’esprit de finesse.”

And also humility and kindness, Ranke-Heinemann remembers his shy student days, his humility and the fact that when John Paul II had excommunicated her, Ratzinger was the only one, of all those bishops and cardinals, to write to her “ in a friendly way, offering support.” Ranke-Heinemann was hardly a moderate... she questioned the Church’s meddling in private sexuality, the biological virgin birth, the Trinity and nothing less than the Incarnation. She considers Benedict’s belief in such irrational things to be an “enigma.” “But, she says, “with Ratzinger, I am already reconciled with him in life. Why? I don't know. Perhaps because, like Socrates, the more I know, the less I understand.”

Indeed. With the occasional exception there is the sense among those who call themselves Catholics, that the Church is greater than any of us and that the mystery of existence is greater than all of us.

©WCG, 2008

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