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 Open Letter 2 to Pope Benedikt XVI.
July 19, 2005
Honorable Pope Benedict,
Please allow me to refer to my extensive letter of May 2, 2005.
I do not know why I have received no answer of any kind until now. I cannot imagine that your state secretariat is so poorly organized. After all, time was found to give thanks for the teddy bear “Pope Benedict XVI” – in a “smiling” and “cordial” way, as it was emphasized. The pope as a teddy bear of “quality, white, curly, mohair plush with a classic excelsior stuffing and elegant clothing” – is better received than the critical inquiry of a Christian, who bases himself on Early Christianity and asks for an explanation on the ecclesiastical contradictions to the teachings of Jesus.
Now, I have to guess whether my letter was tossed in the wastebasket by an overly eager prelate or whether it was considered at higher levels to be an insult to his majesty. Just to make sure, I am including the letter again. At the same time, I will send it to several cardinals in Germany and Italy, who perhaps may give more attention to my questions. In any case, I will continue the correspondence indefinitely, by way of Internet, since questions of public interest are concerned here, given that your Church bases itself on Christ and many people are of the opinion that this is wrongly done. During the first 100 days of your time in office, you have made it clear that you apparently do not intend to lessen the distance between your Church and Jesus of Nazareth, not even little by little.
The hectic pace with which you want to canonize your predecessor proves just the opposite. As a theologian trained in history, you know better than I that the cult of saints and relics has not the least thing in common with Jesus. It has its source in ancient mystery cults, a primitive, physically-oriented belief in spirits, which was later adopted by the Church. The Catholic cult of relics, in which bones of the deceased are revered, even being used for “miracle healings,” proves itself as a perpetuation of pagan sorcery. Biblical findings conclude that holiness is due to only One, namely the “Lord of the Hosts.” (Isaiah) The cult of a person as saint practiced by the Roman-Catholic Church is a sacrilege, above all when you think about all those who have already been canonized or at least revered as saints – for example, Emperor Constantine, who exterminated his family, or Bernhard of Clairvaux, who called for murder and manslaughter, and many others, who, through a cruelty practiced in service of their Church, were canonized.
While you speed up the canonization process, you are simultaneously allowing so-called exorcism to be intensified. According to a report by the Catholic Press Agency, the ecclesiastical Regina Apostolorum University in Rome gives training courses in exorcism. The reason given by the university for its unusual class offering was the fact that the “fascination with the devil” is growing. While one can still smile at many an aberration of the cult of saints, it gets bloody serious in the case of exorcism: Surely you are aware that people died recently or at least bore severe physical and mental damages from it. Many an aspect reminds one of African voodoo magic, in which they work with astral forces as do the Roman-Catholic exorcists. I would be so bold as to ask: In what world does the Vatican actually live? That no public outcry is raised when a pope of the 21st century allows such life-endangering magical rituals to be practiced can only be understood under the fact that people have become accustomed to the medieval carryings-on of the Church or are simply indifferent to it. Could it be that magic is increasing in the same proportion as spirituality is declining? Someone practicing deep psychology would presumably verify that the more one represses one’s own shadows, the more one encounters the devil.
Of the many positions stated by you during your first 100 days in office, one in particular calls attention to itself: Along with “pseudo marriages among those of the same gender,” “unions outside the bonds of matrimony” and “trial marriages” would also lead to “a trivializing of the body.” At about the same time, German Cardinal Lehmann made an appeal on television for organ donations – in full agreement with the prevailing church position. Where is there a greater trivializing of the human body? Is it when dying people are used as a warehouse for human spare parts and robbed of their still beating hearts and still functioning kidneys, in order to prolong for a few years the life of a person who is likewise deathly ill, thus mixing his body parts with the body of another person? Or is it when two people live together without the blessing of the Church?
I do not want to seem impolite, but I really cannot avoid the question of whether you should not proceed more cautiously with verdicts on trivializing the human body, as long as the number of homosexual child-molesters in your Church still continues to rise and the trivializing of sexuality in seminaries for the priesthood leads to orgies such as those that took place in St. Pölten.
If you were to answer me, you would probably counter with the statement that of course, the Church frowns on this. Certainly you do this with words. Nevertheless, honorable Pope Benedict, you are under the awful suspicion of having systematically protected the culprits from criminal prosecution. In April of this year, a report went through the English press entitled “Pope ‘Obstructed’ Sex Abuse Inquiry,” whereby you, as Prelate of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, are said to have sent a confidential letter to all Catholic bishops in which you requested them to keep investigations against child-molesters quiet, and at that, for a period of ten years after the victim of abuse had attained legal age. According to German criminal law, this is clearly an act to prevent prosecution according to § 258 of the German Penal Code. If you were not pope and thus simultaneously a head of state, you would have to expect that the public prosecutor’s office initiate preliminary proceedings when you visit Germany in the future. Presumably, the prelates of your state secretariat will consider this statement improper and again look for the nearest wastepaper basket. But this simply is the legal situation. Or are the reports in the “Observer” and “Guardian” false reports? Why then, did the Vatican not disclaim them?
Apropos head of state: What do you have to say about the demand of 80 Catalonian priests that you should resign as “head of state”? The letter was published in the newspaper “La Vanguardia de Barcelona” on June 29, 2005. The authors, who were supported by several priest forums from southern and northern Catalonia, at the same time asked you to reinstate all theologians whom you silenced as Prelate of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Those who wrote the letter based their demands on the desire that the Church again draw closer to the Gospel of Jesus. This is why they also condemn “the spectacle around the death of John Paul II and your election as pope,” as being “neither Christian nor constructive.” “Even the presence of heads of states and governments – some of whom promote war, dictatorship and hunger – has nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth, just as the hullabaloo of church authorities with their luxury and splendor.” Finally, the authors of the letter request that you no longer let yourself be called “Holy Father, Pontifex Maximus and Your Holiness.”
The priests who spoke this out are not opponents of the Church; instead, they feel under obligation to the Nazarene. What would Jesus have had to say about this letter? And how does the resurrected Christ view this matter? Therefore, it is of particular interest to know what you, who see yourself as the representative of Christ, will answer to this. Basically, you should agree with these Christ-friends. If you do not, or if you consider the requests of your fellow brothers to be insubordination, you are acting as the opponent of God, even though directly after your election, you proclaimed that you wanted to work as “a modest servant in the vineyard of the Lord.” When a person in one breath allows himself to be called Pontifex Maximus and Holy Father, it is probably difficult for him to not lose sight of reality. And when in addition, he still wants to speak in the name of Christ, then he is surely exposing his soul to quite an acid test of schizophrenia.
Symptoms of such a split consciousness were recognized many times during the first 100 days of your pontificate.
Particularly with regard to your appeal after the terrorist acts in London. You called for Moslems to stop “in the name of God” (CNN online July 11, 2005). A person must have more than his fair share of historical ignorance to not become speechless here. Are you really not aware of the fact that one of your predecessors, Pope Urban II, called for the first Crusade against the Islamic world using the same words, “in the name of God,” and promised every Crusader who sacrificed his life “in the battle against the pagans” that all his sins would be immediately forgiven?
The appeals of the pope 900 years ago are almost literally the same as the calls for jihad by the Islamic fundamentalists of today. Right up until today, what the Christians did back then and during the following centuries to the Islamic world has not been forgotten. The leaders of Al-Quaida have expressly referred to the cruelty of the Christians who murdered and plundered in Jerusalem, to then conclude by “honoring the grave of the Redeemer.” Already back then, the terrible crimes of your Church poisoned world history. Your predecessor, John Paul II, did not seriously apologize for this; instead, he placed the blame on some Christians who had strayed. The satanic energy that was released on the side of the Church against the Moslem world is hitting back today, at the entire western world. This does not in any way justify the cruel deeds in New York, Madrid or London. But when, of all people, the representative of that organization that bears the greatest guilt for the bloody embroilments over centuries of world history authoritatively calls in the direction of the East for peace, this is like pouring oil into the fire for that part of Islam that reacts with suicide assassinations to the abasements caused by the West.
Would it not have been politically smarter and ethically long since called for, that the new pope take the opportunity to apologize for the many wounds that the so-called Christian western world has caused to the Islamic world? And that he then call for relieving their material need with energetic help, making available a part of the wealth of his Church for this (since much of it was acquired through a series of plundering raids throughout the whole world); that he then strongly call on the American president and the British prime minister to seriously investigate the torture of and religious discrimination against Moslem prisoners, to punish those responsible and to stop it …? Only then would a papal appeal for peace in the Middle and Far East no longer seem a provocation coming from inveterate crusaders. When the pope puts himself in the limelight as you did – and perhaps secretly harbors the illusion that he is still at the “helm of the globe” – then this concerns every contemporary, because we are all threatened by the anger and hatred of the terrorists, who may feel even more provoked by insensitive appeals from Rome, even if old crimes and abasements hardly justify new acts of cruelty.
It may very well be that what is heard from you and seen of you concern only the Catholics and members of the Church. But as long as the pope of this Church keeps speaking in the name of “Christendom,” everyone who is close to Jesus, the Christ, is touched by this, and experiences how little ecclesiastical statements and behavior patterns have to do with Him. This is the reason why I turn to you publicly. I will also do so in the future – even if my letters do not reach you or are even ignored with your knowledge.
You must decide yourself whether in your world of papal holiness and infallibility you avoid critical questions and want to limit communication with the external world to safe dialogue of a diplomatic kind. When the German Secretary of Treasury receives your blessing for a postage stamp, then he certainly does not tell you that he will gradually be unable to pay the billions in subsidies to your Church from state coffers. But a normal taxpayer like myself would point out to you that German taxpayers will not pay much longer the 14 billion euro annual subsidies of church bureaucrats, whom the faithful are leaving in droves. And when in August the youth acclaim you in Cologne, then do not risk a Catholic boy scout asking you why the Church so unconditionally protects life in an unborn state and lets it be so freely destroyed after birth – for instance, in “just wars” or even by forbidding birth control, which brings hunger and misery, Aids and death with it.
This is why you have to be confronted with such questions by normal contemporaries as myself, who feels a deep connection to Jesus of Nazareth.
Until next time, I greet you in Christ
Christian Sailer
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