Italian Bishops Don't Like Benedict's Message

Here's the relevant part of a lengthy article focusing on recent Italian church-politics. It's relevant because it's not too far from the situation in the USA.

During the first three days in Verona, the Tettamanzi effect had stunning success. In the absence of Benedict XVI and with the silence of cardinal Ruini, the dominant words among the delegates, divided into dozens of groups for parallel discussions, were “welcoming,” “listening,” “dialogue,” “oblation”: words imbued more with passion than with analysis of the epochal changes that have taken place in the world and in the Church over the past twenty years. The pope was almost completely ignored, even by the official speakers. His lecture in Regensburg was cited only once: by the rector of the Catholic University of Milan, Lorenzo Ornaghi, a dyed-in-the-wool disciple of Ruini.

That was until Benedict XVI arrived and pulverized what had held the stage until then. “L’Osservatore Romano,” on the mark for once, printed the papal address beneath a full-page headline: “To restore full citizenship to the Christian faith.” This means the public citizenship, equivalent in secular terms, of Christians capable of saying ‘no’ (and the pope omitted nothing of what he sees as obligatory for the defense of human life from conception to natural death, the family, freedom of education) but above all of saying ‘yes’ “to everything that is right, true, and pure in cultures and civilizations,” in short, “that great ‘yes’ that, in Jesus Christ, God has spoken to man and to his life.” This is, in essence – the pope said – the “cultural project” conceived and implemented for the Italian Church by cardinal Ruini.

Ruini had been ignored, and his first sponsor, John Paul II, was derided as a rube from Poland who didn't really get it. (Yes, the Intellectualoids over there are the same as here--brie-and-wine dilettantes...)

Perhaps the most obnoxious (but, to be sure, suave and debonair Italian nay-sayer was until recently the Cardinal of Milan--a Jesuit--and close personal friend of none other than Rembert Weakland.

NOW you know why it's relevant...