"There is merit in the intuition that dark forces are moving..."

This is an exceptionally good analysis of the current furor around Benedict. Links in the original:

The media explosion of the early 21st century did serve to ensure that the administrative malefactors in the diocesan bureaucracies suffered some part of the humiliation they so richly deserve. Benedict XVI's case is quite otherwise. No one has made a plausible case that he facilitated the abusers. The recent exposes in the New York Times don't even go to much trouble to try. The point is simply to put the key terms "Benedict," "Ratzinger," "pedophile," "abuse," and "cover-up" into close proximity to each other in as many paragraphs as possible and in as many news outlets as possible. We are not dealing here with journalism, not even with bad journalism. What we are looking at is branding. The process is not different in principle from priming the public to associate a certain breakfast cereal with a famous athlete, so that every time they see the athlete they will be reminded of the cereal. What we are looking at is a transcontinental effort to render the Bishop of Rome connotatively toxic. This will make it unnecessary to argue against anything that Catholic authorities say, either in their own defense in this matter or on any other subject. One need not refute the punchline to an off-color joke. If you find this project not just discouraging but uncanny, you are not alone in feeling that someone has released the flying monkeys... There is merit in the intuition that dark forces are moving in for the kill, perhaps geopolitically and certainly with regard to the Catholic Church. One way or another, the pontificate of Benedict XVI marks the end of the post-Vatican II era. This is not because he is a reactionary seeking to undo the work of the Second Vatican Council. Quite the opposite: in some respects he is the first pope to try to implement what the Council actually intended. Vatican II was an attempt, not altogether unsuccessful, to allow the Church to assimilate the great goods that Western modernity had created since the French Revolution, just as the Church had absorbed the good things of every age through which it had passed. At the Council, the Church made peace with democracy and freedom of conscience and accepted them as necessary features of the good society. It re-embraced humane reason to an extent not seen since the High Middle Ages. It broke free of the last shreds of association with crepuscular monarchists to a vision of the world as an ecumenical whole. In the first half of the 1960s, modernity was still friendly, or at least tolerant. At almost the last possible moment, the Catholic Church made its own the best that modernity had to offer. In the early 21st century, modernity has entered a state of accelerating decay. Democracy is increasingly a venerable anachronism to the West's elites, like a titular monarch with no practical influence on governance. Conservatism, which at one time was hospitable at least to the the preservation of folk-Catholicism, has become a libertarian acid that rejects the very concept of the public good. The Church is now the last major institution that defends reason in the broad sense, as well as of many other things that had been the stuff of mere sanity sixty years earlier. In its capacity as the memory of Western Civilization, the Church's existence has become year-by-year more irksome to a variety of late modern actors. The Church's own episode of indiscipline in the last quarter of the 20th century left potent weapons of invective to hand. The wonder is that it took so long to bring them to bear. The flying monkeys will not have the last word, of course. The enterprise of subversion has its limits. I have in this space more than once linked Benedict's reforms to the proposal for a genuinely post-modern future that Hermann Hesse outlined in The Glass Bead Game. You can read the principal discussion here. That resolution, should it occur, is still a bit of a way off. Metahistory does not appeal to everybody; moreover, history no more has the last word than do the flying monkeys. Let me end with this reading I head at the Mass for Holy Thursday: Revelation 1:8 (New International Version) "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty." This requires a bit of exegesis, to put it mildly. On the whole, though, I would say that the New York Times has bitten off more than it can chew.