Benedictolatry

I wouldn’t call him a quisling. I would call him very wrong about some fundamentally important things. I suppose that wrongness may be mixed up with vanity or cowardliness or stubbornness or whatever, as it can be for all of us, but that doesn’t change my gut-feeling about him.

On the other hand, as Hilary White and others have conclusively shown, he’s always been a sort of a Modernist, as he himself has pretty much admitted many times, though with different words. That he was seen by some as a a traditionalist had as much to do with style (as he himself states in that very letter) than anything else.

To me, he appears to be, like so many good men, as much of a victim of Modernism as a collaborator.

It really grieves me to see good Catholics and good friends coming to blows over this. It strikes me that the facts – from what Benedict said in that letter to his record, containing both good and bad, but bad in this context, going all the way back to, most significantly, Vatican II – are just not in dispute. But among the “anti-Benedict” people I don’t see the animus about the man itself, that the “pro-Benedict” people seem to see, though “quisling” does seem a bit harsh.

We all want a savior, and so we pin that label on others. And then we arguably overreact when they “let us down.” But there may just not be any saviors in the immediate post-Vatican II generation. The whole thing was so bad it infected virtually everybody.