POPE BENEDICT XVI AND VATILEAKS: RETHINKING THE IMAGE OF THE HOLY SEE

“A massive information dump nicknamed “Vatileaks” has the Catholic Church sweating”.

That is just how one journalist captured the leakage of official memos and correspondences written to or by Pope Benedict XVI to the Italian Press. And those who are familiar with the workings in the Vatican can, in reality, feel  the rise in the pulse of the different ecclesial communities and institutions across the globe.

To rest the assumption, in socio-cultural terms, that Joseph is the husband of Mary and to have this grafted back on the trunk of settled biblical facts will surely raise difficult questions on whether Joseph was really a man or whether his humanity was not just a manifest tragic symbolism of a violently bottled up emotions tightly corked by weird Biblicism.

But biblical textual criticisms have proved the opposite and so far, there has not been a discovery or a discreet filming or imaging of a hidden promiscuous or polygamous trait in Joseph that can withstand a mild scrutiny.  Again, the scandalous issue of Mary’s pregnancy, no matter the perspective one brings to it, is and will always remain a strong indictment very difficult to evacuate from the scale of justice of every man and woman who appreciates the rights, even if tangentially, of a husband in contemporary traditional society and yet goes ahead to acclaim Mary as the symbol of perfect womanhood both in youthfulness, in marriage, in the family and in the larger society.  And the story of Jesus, the publicly executed criminal forecloses every avenue of integration, and inevitably opens a new chapter of despicable history in the Nazareth family presenting it as a creedal symbolism of abominable deeds, and would also finally provide an excuse for the people of Israel that refused to believe in the Son of God.

 Caught in between and latter on torn apart by the truth-contents of a dream that defiled the testimony of common sense and facts that presumptuously usurped the status of a scientific truth on the one hand, and a certain disdainful permissiveness taught to be at the service of love but which in actual fact played the transgressor against tradition, Joseph must have been one of the earliest victims that was consumed in the tension elicited by the wrath of God to which the entire members of the Nazareth family was ransomed as  an expiatory offering for an abominable son.  And Jesus cowardly solicitation unto the Apostle John unbehalf of his mother did actually sign, seal and serve upon Mary the edict of banishment which the family’s abominable deeds had passed against her.  This is the human side of the story.

In confronting the challenges posed by the Vatileaks, especially against the background of the invading arsenals of global Satanism which have been unleashed on the Church family  and divine government which the Holy See authentically signifies, represents, professes and proudly propagates in the world, this pellet of the Holy family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is surely a story which all of us Christians, most especially Catholics, should be proud of in reference to the 11^th Chapter of the book of Hebrews.  Otherwise the enemy and his coterie of unbelievers may as well return to the literary market in search of a publisher for the Volume II of Brown’s book “The Dan Vinci Code”.

Remarkably, however, if indeed it is true that greed and unbelief have the capacity to deal death–blows on a person’s life; and that corruption and violence, no matter how coded, are great masterminds in the collapse of national governments, then one has to observe out rightly that the aggressive politicization of the Roman Curia and cooperate pharisaism are twin factors that have the capacity to undermine the immunity and security of the Holy See, the Local Churches and the ecclesiastical institutions.

 Between that which is constructively human and that which is deconstructively ecclesial, Vatileaks signifies a metaphor for reforms in the Roman Curia and a change in the general ecclesial atmosphere heavily perfumed by relativism and pharisaism.  

Surely, human beings, not God, are the target of reforms. And so, it is not about a Third Vatican Council, and cannot be about doctrines. And if this metaphor for change is propelled by human elements that are still deeply committed to a revelation, a vision and a mission that define the events of divinity as distinguished from those that define and rule the secular, then the many who are hopeful for a brand of reform that will endorse homosexual, lesbian and gay marriage theories and practices should begin now to equip their weird imaginations with brand new shock kits, and then go ahead to pass the necessity of the need for this kit to those agitators of women ordination, married clergy and Vatican control who are still whistling in their neighborhood.

For the rest who still believe and practice the Catholic faith, but  who resent the idea of  exerting undue pressures on God to showcase their frustrations against the manifestation, in others, of the invalid and the imbecility that are equally true of their own humanity,  it is time to rethink the image of the Holy See again. And if the poverty of human language is greatly revealed in its failure to adequately conceive God more than anywhere else, and whereas God is still present and actively at work in the Church through the Eucharist, then Pope Benedict XVI actually did mean it when he asserted that “totally gratuitous accounts in the media offer an image of the Holy See which does not correspond to reality.” But beyond this, some bold steps in the direction of fumigating the already infested Papal household must be seen to have been taken. And, as a follow up, proper measures should also be taken to ventilate the adjoining rooms so as to lower the escalating rate of suffocation in those places.