RUSH: You know, my friends, I am so good, I frighten myself. I literally sometimes frighten myself, no fooling. I know these people like every square inch of my glorious naked body, not just the back of my hand. As soon as the new pope was named, did I not tell you what the reaction would be in leftist media circles? Mr. Snerdley just brought me from the Associated Press, a story from Germany: “Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger alienated some Roman Catholics in Germany with his zeal enforcing church orthodoxy.” That’s the lead. “But in the conservative Alpine foothills of Bavaria where he grew up, he remains a favorite son who many think will make a good pope.”
Okay, so in most of Germany the guy is an absolute tyrant, but Bavaria to the media is probably no different than Mississippi here in America. So to the rednecks in Bavaria, he’s good. “Ratzinger, a rigorously conservative guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy…” You won’t find anybody in the College of Cardinals that isn’t. They cannot understand. Folks, I’m not Catholic, but I understand this. “…a rigorously conservative guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy who turned 78 on Saturday and was chosen the Catholic Church’s 265th pontiff Tuesday, went into the Vatican conclave a leading candidate to succeed Pope John Paul II. But opinion about him remains deeply divided in Germany, a sharp contrast to John Paul, who was revered in his native Poland.”
See? They’re already doing it. It’s like trying to sink a battleship with BBs but they’re still firing out there. “A recent poll for Der Spiegel news weekly said Germans opposed to Ratzinger becoming pope outnumbered…” I guess the College of Cardinals didn’t see the poll. I guess those dopes ought to start reading the newspapers more. Somebody needs to get them a subscription to Der Spiegel. They don’t know what the people think. Can you imagine? Why, this is arrogance beyond belief, this church is out of control! That’s what I’m hearing as I read this story. Let’s continue here. “A recent poll for Der Spiegel news weekly said Germans opposed to Ratzinger becoming pope outnumbered supporters 36 percent to 29 percent, with 17 percent having no preference. The poll of 1,000 people, taken April 5-7, gave no margin of error.” Of course not, there is no margin of error.
It’s a religion about the pope. Nobody’s ever wrong when they criticize the pope. That’s why they have a margin of error here. “Many blame Ratzinger for decrees from Rome barring Catholic priests from counseling pregnant teens on their options and blocking German Catholics from sharing communion with their Lutheran brethren at a joint gathering in 2003. Ratzinger has clashed with prominent theologians at home, most notably the liberal Hans Kueng, who helped him get a teaching post at the University of Tuebingen in the 1960s.”
This guy is an ingrate now. He has no respect for the people who actually made him and he’s going to force his views on everyone, ladies and gentlemen. It’s time to run for the hills, folks. “He has also sparred openly in articles with fellow German Cardinal Walter Kasper, a moderate who has urged less centralized church governance and is considered a dark horse papal candidate.” Well, he can be moderate all day long when it comes to the governance of the church, i.e., in administration, but there’s no such thing as moderate in interpreting the scripture in the Catholic church, and I don’t understand why some of you people on the left don’t understand that. It’s like you have your church, liberalism, I don’t have to accept it. If I join it I do, but I have no intention of joining your church. I don’t believe anything of what you believe. Why should I? And if I did join your church and tried to change it, what would you think of me? I might not be around long. At least able to speak.
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RUSH: Mr. Snerdley went out there and dug up a bunch of current stories and some past articles on the new pope, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, and there are just three more. One’s AP, one’s Reuters, and one is the BBC. The BBC is the pi?ce de r?sistance. “AP, Vatican City — Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, the church’s leading hardliner…” I don’t need to read anything else after that. Here’s the Reuters: “German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a strict defender of Catholic orthodoxy for the past 23 years was elected pope on Tuesday, despite a widespread assumption he was too old and divisive to win election. Papal experts expressed surprise at his election, given the opposition that seemed to have formed before the conclave.” Opposition to who by who? The opposition was on the part of the AP and the American left and the news media. How do we know what the opposition was amongst the College of Cardinals? They weren’t talking. They just have all these analysts out there, all these stand up news people called analysts say, “Well, I think what’s going to happen out there, Paula, you know, the church needs to liberalize.
The church needs to modernize. Ratzinger not all that popular, very close to Pope John Paul II. The new church knows that the pope needs to move the church to the left.” It was all BS. It was all just flat out uninformed speculation. What have I always told you? These people are projecting their own ideology and their own worldview on this institution that when it comes to Scripture is not oriented in politics, and now here’s the BBC. This is an older profile. This is December 18, 2003.
“To some, he is the Catholic church’s intellectual salvation during a time of confusion and compromise. To others, he is an intimidating enforcer, punishing liberal thinkers and keeping the church in the Middle Ages. Certainly in the world’s largest Christian community, the pope’s prefect of doctrine Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger cannot be overlooked. He wields the tools of his office with steely efficiency, by influencing diocese budgets, bishops’ transfers, and even excommunications, what an opponent calls ‘symbolic violence’ Ratzinger has clamped down on the more radical contingent of the church.” Symbolic violence? Excommunications are symbolic violence? And get this. “Schooled in the Nazis’ power of rhetoric during his childhood in Bavaria,” you know, Mississippi to the press, “Ratzinger later deserted the German army during World War II only to be sent to a POW camp when the allies reached his hometown.”
Well, my God, the man has even served his country! He joined the military! He can’t win, he joined the military. He was schooled in the Nazis’ power of rhetoric? Oh, folks! You understand how this choice has just destroyed the day, the week, the month of the world media? “Since the late sixties, Ratzinger has pursued a doctrine that can endure independent of cultural or social trends.” They’re not happy about this. “He argues that only with a completely separate value system can the church offer individual freedom. His critics call this papal fundamentalism, but Ratzinger is unflappable in his personal theology. The cardinal claims that everything falls apart without truth. Whether his noble aims justify his tactics is just one of the issues challenging the church today.” Whether his noble aims justify his tactics? You might as well write that about Jesus. Anyway, folks, I share all this with you because it’s news and I predicted it. I predicted it an hour ago; it’s already come true. Let’s grab some phone called. Jim in South Bend, Indiana. Welcome to the program, sir.
CALLER: Mega dittos Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: This is an extreme honor from Notre Dame and from the mountains of North Carolina. Rush, I think you’re right on. I don’t understand when people say “conservatives” in the Catholic church, because all we do is follow Christ’s teachings, and if conservative means there’s no gray area, no rationalization to make it easier or convenient, then we’re conservative. I’m a conservative Catholic. My children go to Notre Dame. I’m very blessed, and I don’t look at it as conservative or liberal. I just look at it as following Christ’s teaching through the church.
RUSH: I know you don’t. But look, there are plenty of liberal Catholics out there. Ted Kennedy you’d have to say is a liberal Catholic. He’ll probably call this guy the panzer pope before it’s all over with.
CALLER: Well, I’ll tell you. I’m not the best Catholic, but I’ve been around, and I don’t see this liberal split. I don’t meet liberal Catholics at Mass. I don’t see them at Notre Dame. They don’t go to Mass.
RUSH: Well, they may not, but they call themselves Catholics. You can’t deny it. It would be ridiculous here to deny that the flock has people in it who wish the church were not what it was, but they don’t want to quit the church. They don’t believe in it that much. They’re trying to reform the church. There are plenty of groups within the church that are trying to reform it; that’s where some of this comes from, but they too don’t understand. No organization of human beings is monolithic except maybe the college of cardinals, as men who are devoted to a single thing, but nevertheless it would be folly to think that the Catholic church does not have people who don’t ascribe to the, quote, unquote, orthodoxy, but the point is this. The church is not supposed to listen to that. What good is the church if a parishioner or a member, worshiper can come in and say, “I don’t like that. If I’m going to stay here, you’ve got to change.” If the church starts doing that then the church is no longer what it is. I, frankly, don’t understand what’s so hard to understand about that, but I do know that that kind of thing is rooted in fear.
It’s sort of like defining deviancy down, like Moynihan said. “Okay we’ve got some problems in society. Let’s say that armed robbery breaks out all over the country and it’s so frequent, so prevalent, that we can’t stop it, you know what? There are more important things than armed robbery, worse crimes than that, armed robbery we are going to stop sending cops out to investigate.” That’s defining deviancy down. When you just no longer can deal with the problem, you don’t have the guts, the energy, whatever. It’s like immigration. Pretty soon we’re not going to see such thing as illegal immigration because we’re going to stop doing anything about it, we’re going to define deviancy down. Well, the church doesn’t do that, and yet that’s what some people want it to do. Chuck in Oxnard, California. I’m glad you called. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Rush, a 15-year student of the EIB Institute and 24/7 subscriber mega dittos.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: I want to tell you that you scare me. In fact, when you get Antonin Scalia’s brain, can I have yours? At the second hour break, ABC reported that Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, cardinal, was referred to as Pope John’s Rottweiler.
RUSH: Well, I’m not going to say what the first thought into my mind came. No, no, no. What is it, that somebody let Ratzinger after the leash and did he attack some kids? Why was he called a Rottweiler?
CALLER: Well, I think what it boils down to is he is a conservative. He believes in the Bible, the absolute Word of God, and this just scares the liberals to death.
RUSH: Of course it does. He’s a competing Supreme Court, a competing chief justice.
CALLER: The Supreme Court, and that’s what scares them to death.
RUSH: That’s true, no question about it. I hope somebody refers to him as the Panzer Pope. Leave it to the BBC, if they’re going to be consistent with the story they wrote in 2003, refer to him as, you know, Pope Panzer the First, some such thing.
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RUSH: We have the bite now that’s from CBS. It’s John Roberts, the cookie-cutter-looking anchor, weekend anchor at CBS, and this is what he said.
ROBERTS: His conservative bent, his strict adherence to conservative Catholic doctrine, has earned him the nickname in some circles as “God’s Rottweiler.”
RUSH: Now, see, that is a media trick. What “circles”? Name the circles? Washington Post, all these people do this: “Critics say that Cardinal Ratzinger is referred to as ‘God’s Rottweiler’…” You know what, it’s just a trick. That’s just a trick for the reporter to get his view in but he can’t identify himself as the critic, so you just name these anonymous critics. This is CBS. The caller from Oxnard said he heard it on ABC. We’ll assume that he heard it on CBS.
If he heard it on ABC, if both ABC and CBS both said this, then there are talking points going around — and I swear, listen to this. “His conservative bent, his strict adherence to conservative Catholic doctrine…” That could be BBC, could be AP, could be Reuters, could be everything that we’ve already shared with you today about what the press is saying. They’re all in lockstep. They all think and report the same thing, because they’re all on the same page. They all have the same template about this church, and most other institutions that frighten them.