Infallible

I can't say I'm not amused by watching Ratzo's past come back to haunt him, nor am I surprised by his (and his adherents') response to the fact that he hid child rapists from the law -- that he is the persecuted one (like Jesus, you know). The New Yorker's Jane Kramer provides some perspective.

What Ratzinger managed, under cover of the ur-populist, airplane-hopping John Paul II, was to further, and in some sense complete, the isolation of the Church of Rome from the concerns of the world beyond the papal state. He conflated the dogma of infallibility, a baby doctrine in church terms—it dates from 1870 and has only been invoked once, to confirm the assumption of the Virgin—with the papal “teachings” that went through his office, and left a billion Catholics to accept them or to risk their souls dissenting. As Pope, he has regarded his own pronouncements as law; a case in point was his recent reaffirmation of a 1968 encyclical against birth control, issued despite the advice of the Vatican’s own commission on contraception, which found nothing in scripture to justify a ban that, in fact, was always as much concerned with producing Catholic babies as with theology. He has reinstated a small group of ultra-conservative priests, among them a Holocaust denier, who had been excommunicated, along with their renegade archbishop, in the late eighties. And he has continued to marginalize progressive theologians—including the Jesuits of the Pontifical Gregorian University, who have had their interfaith theology seminars put in question. Put simply, he has given Catholics a choice between his heaven and a hell he insists is of their own making.