The pope talked to the Bundestag a couple of weeks ago, and according to the Iona Institute, his remarks went down a treat. The II says they gave him a two-minute standing ovation, as if he’d sung an aria or acted Hamlet.
(Why, one wonders? German boy made good? Big famous holy guy in gleaming white outfit? Name recognition? Why?)
His talk was the usual bullshit – the Catholic church had a great deal to do with the wonderful flawless perfect morality we have today, even though the morality we have today is quite different from the morality we had when the Catholic church had real power and didn’t hesitate to use it, and even though the pope spends a lot of his time and talk saying how bad and rotten the morality we have today is and what a crying shame the world doesn’t pay more attention to the Catholic church when it thinks about morality.
…he reminded MPs that our concept of human rights is ultimately derived from Christianity.
He said: “The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions.”
Really. Is that a fact. Then why was there no such thing as equality before the law during the many many centuries the church was in the ascendant? Why did the conviction that there is a Creator God fail to give rise to the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person the Spanish conquistadors bumped up against in the Americas? For that matter why did the conviction that there is a Creator God fail to give rise to the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single child a Catholic priest ever encountered?
Ratzinger needs to stop telling other people to remember and ponder and think about things, and do some real thinking himself.