Ratzinger

“I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.”

[The cardinals burst in]

“NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Amongst our weaponry
are diverse elements:
fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency
an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope
and nice red uniforms”


And that is the way it was. Monty Python shows off their preternatural sense of prediction. The world can always get sillier, but not sillier that a Monty Python sketch. Gone are the nice opinion columns of the past weeks, toying with the idea of a progressive pope from Latin America, or from Africa. The challenges of the catholic congregation (like women in the curia, married priests and diverse ecumenisms) will remain what they are, challenges. The well-wishers had short time to try to convince themselves that the catholic church could still be a reform-able organism. It seems that they did not expect a kind of Spanish inquisition. They got the german inquisition instead.

Of course, now we will be willing to edge our bets in the expectedly short term of a papacy that start with a cardinal of almost 80 years. With some luck within a decade cardinals will be burning dry weeds again. Few more, few less, they will be the same cardinals that yesterday choose the head of the inquisition as new pope for the century XXI. Not a big hope there neither. The press reports that the smoke was nor clearly white, nor black. It seems that for a while the conclave was giving away mixed signals. But that was only for a short while. I can imagine very few signals more clear than Ratzinger, the head of the inquisition, chosen as pope. For a long or a short papacy, the catholic church is a conservative entity.

Ratzinger has passed the last twenty years defending the catholic church against the heretics, those away from the dogma of the church. I cannot stop thinking in the passage of the testament in which Jesus explains why the pater noster is enough pray to establish the relation in between the person and god. No wonder that the catholic church needs a mayor inquisitor for pope. A century like ours, more and more liberal, gives more and more space to the individual convictions. We might even go back to that explanation of Jesus. The Vatican, hoping for preserving their whole apparatus as intermediary in between god and the human, should have an inquisitor in the Peter’s seat. Challenges habemus? A strong hand offero. Not surprisingly Argentina had as chaplain of the army a monster that suggested that heretics should be thrown with a stone in the river. Any other scenario will simply accelerate the long way along which we humans are trying to get rid of spiritual leaders of different clothing and conviction, in the search of our own paths. Yesterday a Spanish court sentenced one of the confessed responsibles of actually throwing the heretics of a dictatorship to the river. He will be in jail for the next 640 years. I wonder about the chaplain. And about the new pope, the inquisitor.

Nobody expects a kind of Spanish Inquisition? That is what the Vatican has to offer today.

Hotel in Paris

In the middle of a Europe gone hysterical with refugee’s issues, we should be able to take a better look at ourselves, and be ashamed. And I am not talking only on the current disparaged electoral campaign of conservative -and racist- english politicians “do you think what we think?”, or some other populist and “spontaneous” declaration of a dutch right winger, staple of today political debate. What I am talking now is about the cold decision of allocate asylum seekers in a hotel, converted overnight in a deadly furnace.

I should go back to my forays in european tourism. It is hard to forget a week expend in a cheap room of Paris, walking each day back and forth to the Louvre, to finally see with own eyes pieces that I stare at (along the previous twenty five years) in book plates and posters. Paris still remains as the repository of treasures that allow me to be proud of my humanity. The rather basic sleeping quarter was irrelevant, I was with money enough in my pockets to roam the galleries during the day, and still walk the streets at night.

Politicians, and a rather relevant group of our citizens today, are threatened by the illegal immigration, by the refugee. Or so they shout untiringly in the media. And so different governments are in the struggle for different solutions. At one extreme we have the dutch government trying to kick out 26000 asylum seekers that are waiting for a decision more than five years already. At the other extreme we have the Spanish government, with her policy of legalizing workers that lack official documents. And somewhere in between we had the French, willing to put money of the city council for renting hotels of Paris, Paris of all places! to temporarily allocate the asylum seekers. Policy apparently illuminated and humanitarian. It was easy to think that the asylum seekers would then enjoy the resources of one of the most important cities of the world, one that still today holds high our culture.

But to my shame, that was far away from reality. The hotel in the center of the city resulted to be a new oven, were already twenty persons burned to death. The hotel thought as a temporary house resulted in a place with only an emergency exit, with un-existent fire fighting resources. A wrecking hell as departure from this world, for persons that already escaped from the hell of their own countries. Waiting for the permission to live in a better world, they died in fire.

I wonder if this tragedy, perfect mirror of our immeasurable egoism at making from the asylum seekers a political question (instead of the humanitarian need that it is) will be able to put again in context not only the severity of the problem, but also the cruelty of the solutions that are today offered. Sadly I believe that the scorched remains of the asylum seekers will not weight heavily in the conscience of the nowadays European, nor politician nor citizen. And it should. If Europe desires any credibility in the Brussels declarations of “being a social and humanitarian force in the world” Europe should be deeply ashamed of the people that looking for a better future in that project found death in fire.

Wojtila

Wojtila is dead. Not able to escape the globalized media, I have to swipe my eyes from furtive tears, at opening my dutch newspaper and finding the photo of the pope leaning on a cross, contorted face and silken clothes flapping at the wind. That was indeed a man that carried the suffering of many. A man that used this huge load the best he could. And he certainly could. The world would have been quite different without Karol Wojtila.

What strikes me today is the easiness that so many opinion makers in the global press have to throw away not furtive, but all sort of tears of sadness and regret. I can’t avoid feeling repulsed by so much recognition of good deeds. Perhaps the whole thing is a best proof of God’s existence. He has descended on the people of our planet a colossal, massive amnesia, at the moment of call back his son in earth.

Of course today, knowing what we know, one could not but agree in the intrinsic desirability of the fall of the Soviet Union. But at seeing the decomposition of that society at barely fifteen years since their incorporation in the capitalist side, at least one could wonder about better processes of transformation. Or one could show a bit more of measure at declaring Wojtila the hero of the war between freedom and sovietism. Perhaps that war has been won. But the costs of the way it ended are costs that we are still dealing with, and that we will pay for long time.

And that is regarding the most positive relevance of Wojtila in international policy. But now, I really wonder in amazement at all those latinos and third worlders that today cry at the lying figure. How could they have possibly forgot the role of Wojtila in the destruction of the liberation theology? (Unless god did really made all of them amnesiac).

The catholic church, the most formidable survivor of the last two thousand years, still has a lot to say and to change, as everybody seems to acknowledge today. Perhaps it should change following the course of those antiglobalists-loathed institutions, the world bank and the IMF. It is high time for the catholic church to reestablish the progressive streak that declared a preferential option for the poor. A streak that the all powerful and finally death Wojtila crush so efficiently.