Traditional Catholics betrayed by Benedict XVI

Sandro Magister is a leading "Vaticanista" -- Vatican-watcher -- and editor/publisher of the highly-respected Chiesa newsletter. He generally tries to maintain an objective, albeit conservative, stance in his articles. In other words, he's not an ultra-traditionalist who believes that everything decided and done by the Church since 1962 is wrong.

So, for Signore Magister to criticize the Pope, or even to echo the criticisms of others, is to express the profound malaise that infects today's Church. Yet that is what he does, in "High Up, Let Down by Pope Benedict", Chiesa's leading article this week.

Voices of disapproval have been raised over the Holy See's confirmation that on October 27th, Benedict XVI will preside over a day of "reflection, dialogue and prayer" together with "Christians of other confessions", representatives of other religions and "men of good will."

The encounter will come in the same place -- Assisi -- and twenty-five years after the infamous one convened by John Paul II. Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, did not take part in it. Now that he's pope, he says, the next encounter will be reviewed and corrected, scrubbed clean of the slightest hint of the assimilation of the Catholic Church to other faiths.

But, the traditionalists say, the problem is that such "encounters" should not be held at all! Some of them have signed a critical appeal, of which Chiesa gives details. The "spirit of Assisi," in their view, is part of a more general confusion, originating in Vatican II, that is disrupting Catholic doctrine -- a confusion to which Benedict XVI is not reacting as he should.

Most recently, Sig. Magister continues, the criticisms of Pope Benedict by traditional Catholics have grown in intensity. And they reflect a growing disappointment with respect to the expectations initially invested in the restorative action of the current pontificate.

The criticisms of some traditionalists are focused in particular on how Benedict XVI interprets Vatican Council II and the postconciliar period.

The pope errs, in their view, when he limits his criticism to the deterioration of the Church's beliefs and practices in the aftermath of Vatican II. In fact, they say, Vatican II was not only poorly interpreted and applied: it was itself a source of grave errors.

The first of those was the renunciation of the Church's authority to exercise, when necessary, a magisterium of definition and condemnation, i.e. the renunciation of the anathema.

In exchange for "dialogue" with "other expression of Christianity" and other religions, the Church gave up Her God-given power to declare what is right and what is wrong. And for the sake of dialogue and political correctness, She stopped proclaiming the dogma extra Ecclesiam nulla sanctus -- outside the Church there is no salvation.

The dogma has not been "repealed". Dogma cannot be changed or "taken back". But by refusing to talk about religious rights and wrongs, by treating other confessions and other religions as more or less equal "seekers of truth", Pope Benedict does the True Faith a lamentable and grave disservice. He is, in fact, leading us in the wrong direction.