Pope Benedict the XVI & the US

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abelville

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Hi friends,

This is a weird question, at least I feel weird asking it. Does our new Pope seem a little cold to the United States?

As a convert to Catholosism, I’m still kind of playing catch up to all that is going on - and I’m really slow at that. I guess I’m still so thankful to have a real church home that I’m numb to the politics and other stuff happening.

I’ve heard some rumblings by some Catholics at work who say that some of our liberal clergy caused some of this but I’d feel better getting some of your opinions. One even pointed out that he did not wish the United States (and some other English speaking countries) a happy Easter this year.

Myself, I believe that God put him there of course (PaPa). I guess the concern is that he is upset at the US as a whole. Maybe Tuff Love?

What say you my Catholic family?

BEST!!!

Al
 
I do agree that he’s been pretty quiet. I had hoped that he would speak out a little more against the many abuses, especially in the U.S. But, who knows what he’s planning? 🙂
 
Rome has been suspicious and distrustful of democracy in general, and the US in particular, pretty much as long as we have been around.

As a country where people at all levels are free to speak their minds, and tend toward being relatively independent thinkers who are not afraid to question, the tendency toward a preference for a monarchical governing structure in Rome is not a real compatible match.

In saying that, I do not mean to imply that American Catholics are not faithful to the Church. But I don’t believe that the Church fully trusts us.
 
Should he though judge the whole nation though? I’m not saying he is, but it feels like it. I talk to many Catholics who really want to follow Rome’s teachings all the way. It hurts to want to please papa, when the feeling is that he doesn’t want to accept us because of where we were born.

Al:(
 
ncjohn said:
In saying that, I do not mean to imply that American Catholics are not faithful to the Church. But I don’t believe that the Church fully trusts us.
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That’s not saying much…I don’t fully trust us. :rolleyes:
 
What country can FULLY be trusted? There are individuals practicing the faith dillegently in all countries.
 
I don’t perceive the Pope as being ‘cold’ to any ‘nation’ (including the U.S.)

I perceive him as a good shepherd who is trying to lead his people, to witness to those non-Catholic, Christian and non-Christian, to speak the truth, and to follow the Holy Spirit.

With everything that he has to address, the spiritual welfare not just of his own soul but of billions, and the state of the world today which is extremely complicated in so many ways, and also considering his own ‘person’ and the way that he, Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, ‘is’ as a person, I think that probably one of the last things on his mind is whether he ‘appears’ as ‘cold’ to a given nation. I think one of his strengths is that he has always gone ‘beyond’ appearance to concentrate on reality. He did not worry over whether he, or “the Church” appeared to be X,Y, or Z in his years of service with the Propagation of the Faith, probably because he knows that you cannot please all of the people all the time, and that concentrating on ‘looking’ or ‘appearing’ to be warm, or tolerant, or whatever the majority says they ‘want’, means that you’ve already lost your integrity on what you are actually trying to say.
 
abelville said:
Should he though judge the whole nation though? I’m not saying he is, but it feels like it. I talk to many Catholics who really want to follow Rome’s teachings all the way. It hurts to want to please papa, when the feeling is that he doesn’t want to accept us because of where we were born.

Al:(
Click to expand...
I think part of it also has to do with our country’s position regarding the war in Iraq. The Church consistently came out against it, yet most of the country has supported it, and a large proportion of the Catholic population has been very supportive of it regardless of what the Pope has said.

At the least I would think that must provide a source of frustration.
 
abelville said:
Hi friends,

This is a weird question, at least I feel weird asking it. Does our new Pope seem a little cold to the United States?

As a convert to Catholosism, I’m still kind of playing catch up to all that is going on - and I’m really slow at that. I guess I’m still so thankful to have a real church home that I’m numb to the politics and other stuff happening.

I’ve heard some rumblings by some Catholics at work who say that some of our liberal clergy caused some of this but I’d feel better getting some of your opinions. One even pointed out that he did not wish the United States (and some other English speaking countries) a happy Easter this year.

Myself, I believe that God put him there of course (PaPa). I guess the concern is that he is upset at the US as a whole. Maybe Tuff Love?

What say you my Catholic family?

BEST!!!

Al
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I am confident that he has given his blessing on all of his flock, but it would not surprise me if he were not to act very strictly with this part of his wayward clan. There are an awful lot of stray sheep here, and it is the fault of modernism, bad teaching, bad pastoring, and rebellion against authority. I am appalled at the number of people who brush off the teaching and still call themselves Catholic, as if it were some sort of cafeteria.
 
ncjohn said:
I think part of it also has to do with our country’s position regarding the war in Iraq. The Church consistently came out against it, yet most of the country has supported it, and a large proportion of the Catholic population has been very supportive of it regardless of what the Pope has said.

At the least I would think that must provide a source of frustration.
Click to expand...
So true!!!

I hope and pray for a peaceful end to it now.

I REALLY APPRECIATE ALL OF YOUR RESPONSES!!!

BEST!!!

Al
 
abelville said:
Hi friends,
This is a weird question, at least I feel weird asking it. Does our new Pope seem a little cold to the United States?

I’ve heard some rumblings by some Catholics at work who say that some of our liberal clergy caused some of this but I’d feel better getting some of your opinions. One even pointed out that he did not wish the United States (and some other English speaking countries) a happy Easter this year.
Click to expand...
Germany lost a war with the US and then had to tolerate fifty years as a junior partner in an alliance, with US troops on its soil. So it wouldn’t be surprising if some resentment has rubbed off on the Pope.

The other problem, which Americans often don’t recognise, is that that what the US exports is the worst of its culture; Madonna, McDonald’s, Terminator III, jeans, chewing gum, sports utility vehicles. This is what the rest of the world associates with the USA. All the good things about America either remain there or are appreciated by only the few. American newspapers are very thoughtful, for instance, but no one reads them in Britain. American science is the best in the world, but unless you are scientist yourself this has almost no impact.
 
Malcolm_McLean said:
Germany lost a war with the US and then had to tolerate fifty years as a junior partner in an alliance, with US troops on its soil. So it wouldn’t be surprising if some resentment has rubbed off on the Pope.
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Very true. Also true is that Germans would be speaking Russian today if not for those US troops acting as a live trip wire in central Europe. Sometimes, if just for a brief, brief nano-second, I find myself wishing that the Soviet Union had occupied Western Europe as well…just to shut up the liberals who for 50 years decried the US military presence. There…whew…rant over…I’m over it now…
 
Let’s not forget that Americans are still very much a pro-abortive and pro-contraceptive society. Catholic growth can be done basically through immigration, which the U.S. is now taking issue with.

Contrast that with South America where there is lots of potential growth along with a very heavy base but Catholics are choosing to bail out. (So as Campos went, so did SA?)
 
Pope Benedict has more to worry about in Western Europe than he does in the United States.

Much of the world’s popular culture, garbage that it is, comes from Hollywood.

However, radical leftist politics, and its hostility to all religion, including the Catholic Church, came from France and Germany, not the United States. Voltaire, Nietzche (SIC), Marx and Englels were not Americans.

The US isn’t perfect. Neither is anyplace else.

There was a time when radical Islam was seen as an enemy by the Vatican.
I guess it is no longer. Well, Queen Isabella and King Jan Sobieski didn’t ask the Muslim invaders to leave.
 
America really isn’t a Catholic country like those in Europe and Latin America. We’re kind of minor in the great scheme of Catholic things.
 
JW10631 said:
Pope Benedict has more to worry about in Western Europe than he does in the United States.

Much of the world’s popular culture, garbage that it is, comes from Hollywood.

However, radical leftist politics, and its hostility to all religion, including the Catholic Church, came from France and Germany, not the United States. Voltaire, Nietzche (SIC), Marx and Englels were not Americans.

The US isn’t perfect. Neither is anyplace else.
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I think that’s right. A hamburger and action movie type culture tends to infantilise people, but it doesn’t strike at the soul.

Jacques Derrida, an export the other way, was much more damaging, because his disciples thought of themselves as an intellectual elite. Never mind that Hollywood movies are, on their own terms, at least successful as art, whilst Derrida’s deconstructionists never produced so much as a readable novel or a watchable film; because they managed to capture Harvard the deconstructionist social position is unassailable. Real art is almost always either produced by the Church, or produced by people like William Blake, who defined themselves in reaction to it, or it is pre-Christian classical stuff.
 
Genesis315 said:
America really isn’t a Catholic country like those in Europe and Latin America. We’re kind of minor in the great scheme of Catholic things.
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In fact, we’re essentially a Calvinistic culture, with relation to Catholicism often only in accidentals or via our immigrants who are hanging on to that which they had in the old country.
 
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