I happened upon this story in the Vatican Insider section of La Stampa:
Gerhard Ludwig Müller is a Doctor Honoris Causa at the former Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP). As a Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he had stayed out of the conflict between the institution’s authorities, the Archbishop of Lima and the Holy See. But a letter of his addressed to Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani was interpreted as an expression of support for the university’s rebellion against the Pope.
In the letter, Müller asks some Professors from the university’s Theology Department for an explanation regarding the decision not to renew the Church’s permission for him to teach at the PUCP. The decision to withhold permission was communicated by the archbishop last December and came as a result of the decree issued by the Vatican last June, forbidding the university to use the titles “Pontifical” and “Catholic”.
Although the content is meant to be confidential, Peruvian magazine Caretas revealed some parts of the text. The Prefect apparently wrote that the university can continue to give theology lectures until the Holy See has fully resolved the problem. If this is true, it would come as a huge blow to the archbishop of Lima who is fighting a legal and ecclesiastical battle to drive home the fact that the university belongs to the Church.
In Peru, the sheer fact that this letter exists was an encouragement to rector Marcial Rubio and his collaborators, who on several occasions refused to reform the university’s statutes to bring them in line with the Vatican’s regulations on Catholic universities, the Apostolic Constitution “Ex Corde Ecclesiae”.
To tell you the truth, I am not all that comfortable with liberation theology but then maybe I don’t understand enough except that to me it comes across as prettified Marxism with a utopian thrust towards trying to make the Kingdom of God on earth and dealing with structures of sin as opposed to all of us dealing with our individual sin through Jesus Christ. Structures of sin like human trafficking and drug cartels, yeah, but sometimes capitalism and free markets drift into the structure of sin definition and I cringe. I hate the words “social justice” together. How about just plain justice, okay? So many attempts to rectify social inequalities for example merely increase the size of the state and confiscate the product of one person’s hard work to benefit those who can’t or don’t work, and sadly it is now considered bad form to differentiate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
I read the above story with a grain of salt. We have yet to see any verification that the letter in question is actually from Archbishop Muller or whether he did in fact dress down the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima, who is see is Opus Dei.
Not long ago, I found myself having virtual palpitations when I read that Pope Benedict XVI was a fan of the Frankfurt School, according to this blog post I ran across:
If you thought Critical Theory — the neo-Marxist philosophy of social criticism developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930’s — is only for aging lefto-pinko radicals, verbose art gallery press releases, and confused liberal arts students, think again. In the sister categories of “who knew” and “wtf,” it turns out that Pope Benedict XVI is an avid fanboy of “the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.” In article 22 of the Pope’s2007 encyclical letter, the man in the pointy hat himself gives a pontifical shout out to dialectical materialist thinkers’ anti-positivist theory of modernity.
In the nineteenth century, faith in progress was already subject to critique. In the twentieth century, Theodor W. Adorno formulated the problem of faith in progress quite drastically: he said that progress, seen accurately, is progress from the sling to the atom bomb. Now this is certainly an aspect of progress that must not be concealed. To put it another way: the ambiguity of progress becomes evident.
Here, His Holiness is paraphrasing Adorno’s famous passage from “Negative Dialectics”: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”
The Frankfurt School! Sweat flying off my brow. From everything I know about the Frankfurt School, it is the root of political correctness and the kind of identity politics where aggrieved minority groups take the place of the proletariat seeing as the proletariat was not as interested in Marxism as Marx thought.
Now, despite the above, I have been an avid Ratzinger fan from long before he became Pope. I rejoiced when he did. And so far, Archbishop Muller has proven to be just fine so I’d like to suspend judgment until I see more about this letter and the status of this university and its relationship with the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima.
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For analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of liberation theology, Deborah, it’s hard to beat these two by . . . Cardinal Ratzinger. Very long but worthwhile.
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theology-liberation_en.html
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19860322_freedom-liberation_en.html
Yes, the Frankfurt School- During the period between World War 1 and World War 2, Marxists who predicted that a global revolt by the working classes in rich democracies were dumbfounded when, instead of that revolution occurring in wealthy, industrialized places teeming with capitalists like the United States, and instead happening at the last place they expected- backwards, feudal, agricultural, Tsarist Russia. So, the Marxists met at the University of Frankfurt am Main, and set up their thinktank there and came to the conclusion that the reason there were no revolutions in rich, industrialized, capitalist countries, was because their wealth had provided so much relative prosperity that the common, working man was living a far better life than he ever had before, and so decided if the Marxist Worker’s Classless Paradise could not be brought about through Class Warfare and economic struggle, then it would not be a war about those things- they would instead turn it into a Culture War
Political Correctness and Critical Theory are the two ideas of the Cultural Marxists which they use in the Culture War:
1. Political Correctness is the idea which states certain arguments are out of bounds, and is a way to shut people up, by determining certain arguments as a form of hate speech, defined arbitrarily (Based on feelings) by intellectual circles and capitalizing on an individual’s fundamental sense of decency and shaming the opposition into silence or agreement. This is what people are planning to do with the Catholic Church- for the Church’s opposition against homosexual “marriage” and against contraception/abortion and women’s ordinations, the Catholic Church is desired to be called a hate group and her teachings as promoting hate crime. Of course, certain rebellious “Catholics” aren’t helping.
2.. Critical Theory is the sword, which constantly attacks and questions the dominant culture from all sides- It is to tear down, criticize, deconstruct Western Culture- and that includes the Catholic Church. (This process had been started by the Protestants, by the way.) And now it manifests itself in issues such as gay “marriage”, contraception/abortion and women’s ordinations- On these issues, Protestants unsurprisingly capitulated to the ways of the world. (Yes, even Anglicans!)
The Church, having gone through the horrors of World War 2 suddenly became populated by young priests who believed that somehow, war is always preventable, that human beings are fundamentally good, but forgetting how fallen and flawed they are. Suddenly, people behaved as if there was nothing separating Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic- and that would be extended to the sameness of the righteous and the wicked to the point where people don’t bother to differentiate what is righteous and what is wicked- we see then subjectivism and moral relativism even in the Church! To call that era as being naive and misguided is to be charitable; delusional is more apt.
Societies fall from the top down. Bored, over-educated, guilt-ridden, self-loathing members of the elites, always fiddle or contribute to the bonfire while their city burned. (The French Revolution, The Russian Revolution, etc.) It’s a psychological illness that we can properly call “Oikophobia”, the opposite of “Xenophobia”, which means hatred of the familiar. Hatred of one’s own culture and people. Followed into its logical conclusion, it is self-hatred which manifests itself in the Oikophobe’s desire to divorce himself from his roots and culture.
In the Church, the guilt of a Catholic Oikophobe is centered more on the teaching that “There is no salvation outside the Church” and that Christianity is the One, True Religion- to have been baptized and be told he is destined for heaven- he would feel that was all unearned. He feels bitter and desires to be morally and intellectually superior than the happy, faithful Catholic who has faith in the promise of God and the Grace which He freely gives.
The irony is that traditionalists are now portrayed as the Oikophobes rather than the modernists who threw away the things older than 1960,