Another Conservative Pope: Enjoying the NY Times’ Misery

I flew to Chicago last night on business and on the way read every article on Pope Benedict in yesterday’s New York Times. I’ll have to admit that I enjoyed immensely the obvious displeasure the Times showed in the selection of another conservative Pontiff. While showing more restraint than they show with conservative evangelicals, the Times nonetheless demonstrated its discomfort with another Pope from the “conservative wing” of the church with “hard line” theological positions.

“In a Celebrating Crowd,” the Times sub-head reads, “Some Show Concern Over His Doctrine.” I watched the announcement on television and it was difficult to see much concern in the roar and adulation of the huge crowd. If a liberal Pope had been chosen, I’m sure the Times would not have been looking for concerned conservatives in the crowd.

For evangelicals, it is hard to imagine a choice that would be more pleasing, for it appears likely that the positive alignment between conservative Protestants and a Roman Catholic church with a conservative shepherd will continue.

The homily Pope Benedict gave the morning of the first day of the conclave should be enough to give those of us in the evangelical great hope that we will continue as co-belligerents against the forces of secularism.

The soon-to-be-Pope said:

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.
We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."

Then Cardinal Ratzinger was the central voice in the 2000 Vatican document "Dominus Jesus, which reads:

"This truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out, in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that 'one religion is as good as another.' "

He was roundly criticized for saying that Jesus was the only way to God. As evangelicals, that part of his message is music to our ears.

--James Jewell