It is my pleasure to present the annual “Pot Calling The Kettle Black Award.” This year’s honoree came after much deliberation and consideration, for there were several candidates.
Eventually the academy decided upon a distinct and deserving fellow. Fresh off the heels of his Good Friday sermon, the academy would like to present this year’s award to Pope Benedict XVI. Congratulations, Bennie, you deserve it.
The statement that the Pope recently made that locked up the award will be addressed shortly, but first, we must cover some honorable mentions. The Pope can always be counted on, it seems, for a dose of wacky and backwards statements.
Take, for instance, his March visit to Africa, where according to Reuters, “25 million people have died from [AIDS] in recent decades.” That being the case, of course the Pope would urge a “no-condom” policy. “[AIDS] cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms,” he said. “On the contrary, they increase the problem.”
Good old Bennie obviously missed third-period sex education back in high school. Either way, next time you’re in Africa, take it from the Pope — leave those condoms at home. It’s all in God’s hands anyway, right?
Another recent speech the Pope made that was rife with hilarity was his Good Friday sermon last week, where he criticized Western society for wandering into a “desert of godlessness.” Seated in his perch high in the Coliseum in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI said, among other things, “‘Religious sentiments’ were increasingly ranked among the ‘unwelcome leftovers of antiquity’ and ‘held up to scorn and ridicule.'”
Maybe this is because people are finally waking up and realizing that modern society shouldn’t be 100 percent dependent on religion? Maybe this is because more and more people are saying that they are less and less religious in this day and age?
Or maybe this is all just wishful thinking. I’m not a highly religious person, but I will be the first to say that religion in modern times is a highly antiquated thing. While many people do find some form of strength from it, the Pope needs to realize that not everyone believes in God as he does and this kind of diversity in belief is what makes the world go ’round.
The comment that eventually won the Pope his coveted award was made during his Good Friday sermon. He said, “Jesus is humiliated in new ways even today when things that are most holy and profound in the faith are being trivialized; the sense of the sacred is allowed to erode.”
If the Pope dislikes the trivialization of profound things as much as he claims, perhaps he should look within his own organization to one of his bishops, Richard Williamson. The Pope recently lifted Williamson’s excommunication for being ordained in 1988 by an archbishop who was not qualified to make such a “promotion.” This is beside the point.
My question is, why lift an excommunication on or do anything to help a guy like Williamson, who is a public Holocaust denier? Williamson publicly denied the existence of gas chambers on Swedish television in January by saying, “I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers … There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!”
It seems that as much as the Pope hates the trivialization of Jesus, the trivialization of the slaughter of Jews — voiced by one of his comrades — is A-OK. Now that is the pot calling the kettle black and that is why the Pope was awarded the prestigious honor today.
According to Williamson, it was only 200,000 to 300,000 Jews that were killed — I guess that’s no biggie. Imagine if it were in the millions. Now that would be something!
Gerry Wachovsky is a graduate student and a columnist for the Daily Forty-Niner.
thanks for keeping it brief aaron
I thought your article was excellent. I found three areas where his sermon is rendered ineffectual in its borrowing of DAOIST Ideas:”The gravitational pull of love is stronger than that of hatred; the force of gravity of life is stronger than that of death,” Benedict said in his homily reflecting on the mystery of Christian belief in the resurrection, in which is seen the most sublime fulfillment of what this text describes as the beginning of all things–the Church reads the account of creation as a prophecy. This Gospel is according to the revelation of the mystery kept secret since the world began but now made manifest, and by the prophetic Scriptures made known to all nations, according to the commandment of the everlasting God: [Romans 16:25-26]The Torah perspective of cosmogony associated to the Mysteries as conveyed by the Book of Genesis appears identical to the Chinese Daoist literature: “The Mystery of which we speak in hidden places, as dazzling light from the infinite and fiery brilliance out of the boundless unfolds (li or chang: ‘to expand’) the myriad species (categories) from the primordial chaos as the holding place for Being, without revealing a form of its own:It fashions the stuff of (ie. gives birth to and nourishes) Emptiness and Formlessness (of the primordial chaos), giving birth to the regulations (ie. the circular motion of the sun). Tied to the gods in Heaven and the spirits on Earth (ie. The Way is a daemonic equivalent to these potencies; cf: #60), it fixes the models (mo: numbers or shu: calculations). It pervades and assimilates past and present, originating the categories. It unfolds and intersperses yin and yang, generating the chi’i (as the vitality which informs the entire cosmos and binds all humans to the rest of phenomena).” [Nylan, Hsuan Li (Evolution of the Mystery), Canon of Supreme Mystery 1993:429, 64]By a supposed lack of evidence, one or two assume we know as much that there is to know about science and the universe. There’s no doubt more yet to be discovered, that explains the nature of the strong and weak forces, rather than merely acknowledging their effects. It’s not like science has a theory of everything, science really is still relatively recent on the timeline of human achievements.”First of all,” he said, “there is light”: “Where there is light, life is born, chaos can be transformed into cosmos.” And in this regard seventh-day sabbath belief derived from emanation of light out of the void, formlessness is distinct to Hymeneal Mysticism.Benedict XVI said that the second symbol, water, has “two opposed meanings”: On the one hand there is the sea, which appears as a force antagonistic to life on earth, continually threatening it; yet God has placed a limit upon it. Hence the book of Revelation says that in God’s new world, the sea will be no more. It is the element of death. And so it becomes the symbolic representation of Jesus’ death on the Cross: Christ descended into the sea, into the waters of death, as Israel did into the Red Sea. Having risen from death, he gives us life.This means that baptism is not only a cleansing, but a new birth: with Christ we, as it were, descend into the sea of death, so as to rise up again as new creatures.He said the other “way in which we encounter water is in the form of the fresh spring that gives life, or the great river from which life comes forth.” Yet within Oriental and Occidental Sapiental literature in which the seasonal garden [Genesis 2:8-14] is a metaphor for the governing of empire: “A large state is the lower reaches of a river: The place where all the streams of the world unite. In the union of the world, the female always gets the better of the male by stillness. Being still, she takes the lower position. Hence the large state, by taking the lower position, annexes the small state; The small state, by taking the lower position, affiliates itself to the large state.” [DAO TE CHING #61 – Virtuosity at Using ‘Beneath’/ Virtue of Humility; I-Ching: H64 – Before Completion; Tetra: #78 – On the Verge]”Without water there is no life,” the Pontiff affirmed. “It is striking how much importance is attached to wells in sacred Scripture. They are places from which life rises forth. Beside Jacob’s well, Christ spoke to the Samaritan woman of the new well, the water of true life.””The reason why the River and the Sea are able to be king of the hundred valleys is that they excel in taking the lower position. Hence they are able to be king of the hundred valleys. Therefore, desiring to rule over the people, One must in one’s words humble oneself before them; And, desiring to lead the people, One must, in one’s person, follow behind them. Therefore the sage takes his place over the people yet is no burden; takes his place ahead of the people yet causes no obstruction. That is why the empire supports him joyfully and never tires of doing so. It is because he does not contend that no one in the empire is in a position to…