Benedict XVI on war

"There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a 'just war.'"

- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, May 2, 2003.

I wasn't paying a bit of attention to politics until our country's horribly misguided, mistaken, WRONG, response to 9/11. I agree wholeheartedly with this positon of our new pope. If the new "young priests" were to take some active attention to THIS bit of the Holy Father's wisdom, I would buy them all the fancy dishes and frilly clothes they want.

But, I suspect they only want to follow him in as much as he appears to give them power & control.

My wonderful pastor was treating us Sunday with his insight that the last 40 years in the Catholic Church have been a "wasteland" from which he and our newly Confirmed are going to rescue all of us. He says "that's why we got the Pope we got." He crowed about that a little, then did some name-dropping about his connection with "Uncle Joe" Ratzinger.

All this from a newly-ordained convert to the Catholic Church who never lived through the last 40 years with us. What an ass. Every Sunday, from the ambo and the altar, we get put-downs--who we are, what we've learned, the people who taught us (priests, sisters, laypeople in the church, Archdiocese, the American Bishops, liberals), the things we do. And there is almost always a good statement about how educated or how ordained he is, or just plain name-dropping. He is "instructing" us now, from the ambo and in our Sunday bulletin.

It's a unique experience. Certainly not a performance I've ever seen from a priest of the Archdiocese of Louisville.

I will say one thing. Sunday, he mentioned the word "Christ" 4 or 5 times. That's a record. I think that's more often than he's said the word during the whole 10 months of Sunday sermons.