The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend

Predictably, the left's honeymoon with the new Pope was short. Wizbang sums things up well:

As soon as I saw the white smoke--and well before the new pope was announced--I predicted it would take some moron 2 hours to whine about the choice of pope. I apologize to the Wizbang readers for underestimating the stupidity of some on the left.

"So how BAD is Ratiznger? I dont know much or anything about him BUT that he
was a Nazi or a member of the Nazi party. How does he stand on issues and how far back will he turn the church. "

From there the bashing continues. For the record it took about 120 seconds. I'll still take 2 hours for the first organized group whine.

BTW Look out for words like "lost opportunity." As in, "The Catholic church had a great opportunity to open itself up to a broader base. They could have supported premarital sex, adultery and abortion on demand but they lost that opportunity when they selected someone who actually believed in the teachings of their own religion."

Update From your friends at Kos:

"It's a great day to be a Nazi! The best thing we can hope for is that this will be the "worse" in "it's gotta get worse before it gets better." If we're lucky, Pope Ratf**ker will be even more reactionary, orthodox, and fascist than he has been in the past."

And then they wonder why people say Democrats are hostile to people of faith.

For my part, I don't wonder. I don't have a good name (yet) for Christianity's most dangerous rival religion--call it modern relativism, perhaps--but I do know that its adherents and Christ's visible church are natural enemies, even more so than the church and islam are. Relativism is more dangerous by far, having the full engine of secular modernity behind it: fascism and communism directly killed more people in less than a century than islam had adherents in its first five centuries--the period of its greatest glory.

And yes, relativism is a religion. It fills the God hole in people's souls, giving them reasons to live, die ... and kill. Fascism, communism, Bonapartist romanticism, 19th century social darwinism, 20th century existentialism, progressivist "liberalism," and today's nihilistic hedonism are some of its denominations. The first two are essentially no further apart than are Catholicism and Protestantism, or than Sunni and Shia. These are all merely the conscious expressions of the inchoate, unexpressed root philosophy, which holds as its central tenet that nothing is absolute--even "god," if she exists, is maleable and/or "evolving." And the second tenet is like unto this: love thyself as The Self, for thou art the center of the universe.

I've written more on this philosophy here. "Papa Ratzi" has thought through it further and written extensively and eloquently on it here, for instance.

Before we go on, let's have some more fun with the leftist reaction, shall we?

Oh great. Pope Wingnut the First.

"To have a clear faith according to the church's creed is today often labeled fundamentalism," he said, "while relativism, letting ourselves be carried away by any wind of doctrine, appears as the only appropriate attitude for the today's times. A dictatorship of relativism is established that recognizes nothing definite and leaves only one's own ego and one's own desires as the final measure."

Keep your Church out of my state.

UPDATE: This man is going to be a huge pain in the ass. The quote above looks like it was written around the corner from me, at the American Enterprise Institute. It's part of the rightist moral conceit we've been getting for years from sinners like Bill Bennett and Newt Gingrich.

There is also this (via Kevin): "He wrote a letter of advice to U.S. bishops on denying
communion to politicians who support abortion rights, which some observers viewed as a slam at Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry. He publicly cautioned Europe against admitting Turkey to the European Union and wrote a letter to bishops around the world justifying that stand on the grounds that the
continent is essentially Christian in nature. In another letter to bishops
worldwide, he decried a sort of feminism that makes women "adversaries" of men."

The Post headline is "Guardian of Orthodoxy." The Turkish/'Christian in nature' bit is not orthodoxy. It's bigotry. There is no other appropriate word. If it is orthodoxy, the Church is in more trouble than anyone can guess.

Here's more:

They elected another Pope. It’s Ratzinger - the Goebbels of the Vatican. Un-f.......g-believable, even for an organization as self-destructively oblivious as this one.

Well, for Catholics and the dwindling number of Westerners who still take Catholicism seriously, it’s time to kiss the Dark Ages hello again. For the rest of us, we can only hunker down and await an onslaught of rabidly reactionary politicking from an extremely rich, tax-exempt organization that claims mandatory authority over its members, including public office-holders. The medieval wing of an organization that just barely got over Galileo has now claimed the right to declare itself “infallible” (the irony of which they never seem to get). If you thought John Paul II was bad, wait till you get a load of Pope Torquemada Jr.

And here's Planet Raspeberry's bet-settlers at the NYT, using a "man in the street" quote to voice their own editorial position, as they typically do:

But many in the crowd were openly and greatly distressed by the choice of the new pope - widely regarded as an extreme conservative on a wide variety of social issues. This included many Catholics who said he would take the church in the wrong direction.

"I am very, very upset because I was hoping for a more open pope, one who was more open to the problems of the world," said Paolo Tasselli, a retired bank worker and a practicing Catholic, who said he had hoped the church would give more rights to women and be more involved in social issues.

Of course, the Euroweenie press has its collective frilly pink panties in a wad over the PanzerPope:

There were indeed some negative editorial negative headlines Wednesday, particularly in Europe, including references to "God's Rottweiler, and the "Panzer Cardinal," according to a survey by the Reuters news agency.

"A Warrior To Challenge Modernity," concluded La Repubblica in Italy, the papal backyard. "Intransigence" ran the editorial headline in France's left-wing Liberation. From his native Bavaria, though, the liberal Sueddeutsche Zeitung said he was no "monster" and the new pope might be surprisingly flexible.

"From Hitler Youth to Holy See," splashed Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad on its front page. Catholic Austria's Die Presse newspaper wrote in an editorial: "For European and North American Catholics in particular, the new pope is a symbol of dogmatic rigidity."

"People of faith" (rapidly becoming an epithet among lefties) should welcome such a "warrior" of "dogmatic rigidity." Even if he may prove a pest to fertile Protestant mission work in Latin America (as seems likely), one must admit he has all the right foes and, as the Arabs say, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Monk