[Marxism] Rabbi Lerner: "Ratzinger is Bad News for the World and for Jews"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anyone who is trembling that the new pope is going to break ties with
Cuba or go on an anti-Semitic bender is almost certain  to be both
relieved and pleased by what happens.  Neither of the above is within
the realm of major happening.

Honestly, I don't know what Lerner is talking about.  He blames
Ratzinger for 25 years of bad policies.  Rumor has it that there was a
pope all those years, not just a right-hand man.  What's his name? You
know, the dead guy.

It's like Bush steps down or dies and Cheney comes in, and everybody
panics.  Continuity and slow deepening of the policy course, not some
kind of radical right-wing bender is the most likely course.

The policy on Cuba is a product of 40 years of evolution since Castro
defeated Pius XII and the Francoist priests of the Batista era. The
church hierarchy has learned the hard way that they can only lose from a
confrontation with the revolutionary government in Cuba or Latin
America.  They will follow a cautious anti-Chavez course, but leave the
talking to the local hierarchs.  An open fight with Castro in Latin
America would only mean more empty pews, more converts to Protestantism
and the rest of it.

In the United States, questions are already arising -- not among
supporters of abortion rights, but among those carrying out the rightist
campaign -- that the Church is getting to close to the right-wing
fundamentalists, and building their churches, not the Catholic one.
They have to settle the question of whether the Gibson family is just
extremist Catholics or a heretical sect. My guess is Ratzinger will go
the latter route.

The new pope will be yet another reactionary pope, not a fascist pope.
And as all popes do to some degree -- perhaps the most recent one and
John XXIII more -- they will criticize the cruelties of capitalism and
competition as well. Except as financil operators, they have no
ideological stake in capitalist globalization.  The Church has long held
for a certain corporatist (no, NOT the same thing as fascist) kind of
"mutual protection and charity among the classes.  The last pope wasn't
and this one won't be a Bush-Cheney man on economic welfare issues.
There will be no encyclical calling for replacement of Social Security
by private accounts.

The church's basic ideological standpoint predates capitalism, and some
parts of it predate feudalism.

The greatest danger to Jews is not a revived papal anti-Semitism or the
threat that he will continue to disagree with the Jewish religion as
with all others, but that he will align the church more  closely with
the war on terrorism in general and Israel in particular -- perhaps even
in the form of a religiously-sanctioned war against Muslim extremism.
The stance on Turkey in the UN could point in THIS direction. It is
certainly not an indication that he is going to favor the expulsion of
the Jews from Europe, restrictions on Jewish rights, or anything of that
sort.

This would make him the most popular pope in the history of the church
among official Jewry, and it would deepen the isolation of the great
majority of Jewry from the oppressed and exploited in the world and the
entanglement of their leading layers with the oppressors and exploiters.

Very, VERY bad for the Jews.
Fred Feldman




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