Apolitical Pontiff

"If the church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice, because she would lose her independence and her moral authority," Pope Benedict has said in an attack on the doctrine of Liberation Theology, which believes that the church's primary concern must be the poor and the oppressed.

In a desperate attempt to plug the gushing flood of impoverished Christians who are leaving his church in desperation and crossing the street to join the fast-talking forhead-slapping suits of evangelicism, who welcome them with open arms and eyes smiling as bright as shiny pennies,
Pope Benidect has called for his devotees to stay loyal to the church. The present Pontiff has always been a political animal, and spent a large amount of his time under John Paul II attacking and excommunicating like a crusading inquisitor those of the clergy in Latin America who were doing some of the most important and self-sacrificing work amongst the poor. Why? Because many of their ideas are close to socialist in thinking.

As far as Ratzinger is concerned, the church in Latin America has traditionally aligned itself with powerful and wealthy elites, with a respectful distance between the poor and the authority of the church, and he has no interest in upsetting the status quo that has allowed the Catholic church to maintain its authority in so many nations. Earning the respect of those on the bottom through working with them in their struggles would go against the natural order of things; it must be a respect enforced from the top down and gained through charity and authority rather than solidarity, with a strong capitalist consensus to back it up (like the evangelical model in many ways).

Thus he can ask conservative governments to act as kinder rulers and pay heed to 'the ever-increasing sectors of society that find themselves oppressed by immense poverty or even despoiled of their own natural resources', and at the same time condemn those governments who are actually making the radical changes necessary to help towards solving these problems.

While representing the Catholic Church's 'moral authority' the present Pope has shown himself a dab hand at blurring the boundaries between politics and religion. In an elegant contradiction, he argues passionately for a politically independent church, something rarely seen in the history books, during an address in which he warns against the general swing towards left wing government amongst Latin American voters.

Ratzinger was speaking at the opening of the fifth General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean at the end of a five day pastoral visit to Brazil, his first visit as Pope to the region. "There are grounds for concern in the face of authoritarian forms of government and regimes wedded to certain ideologies that we thought had been superseded, and which do not correspond to the Christian vision of man and society as taught by the social doctrine of the church," the pope said in his opening speech, clearly referring to the election of left leaning governments in Bolivia, Venezuela and other countries across the region.

So the church's position as Ratzinger outlines it seems to be as follows:

A. Liberation theology is wrong because the church should stay out of politics in order to preserve its independence and moral authority.

B. However, the church believes that Left wing ideologies do not correspond to the Christian vision of man and society (which seems to be naturally conservative).

C. This is not a political position (because he said so-see point A)