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Clarification and Response to Michael Higgins

By Hilary White

TORONTO, October 17, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In his column in the October 22 edition of the Catholic Register, Canada's largest circulation Catholic publication, Michael Higgins, the president of St. Thomas University and a well-known writer on the Canadian Catholic left, claims that I misquoted him and "misrepresented" his opinions on Pope Benedict XVI's address in Regensburg in mid-September.

Higgins bitterly complains that the atmosphere in the Catholic discourse in Canada is "becoming nasty and brutish" and that the unpleasantness was especially aggravated by my September 25th LifeSiteNews.com article on his remarks in MacLean's magazine to journalist Brian Bethune.

Higgins, however, is only too eager to supply his own contributions to the "nasty and brutish" atmosphere, writing of myself and LifeSiteNews.com that we are "a website and news source of dubious credibility." He accuses me of an ad hominem attack, implying that I had misquoted him and misrepresented his position.

It is often difficult to see when a double standard is being applied, so in the interests of improving the atmosphere, I'm happy to clarify.

I spoke to MacLeans' Brian Bethune, and he apologized personally to me if the passage in question had some ambiguous attributions. In the article, Bethune wrote that "for Higgins…the only possible answer to why [the Pope] said [what he said at Regensburg] is gross stupidity." Bethune admitted that the last two words of the quote, which he called "strong language" did not directly come from Higgins. Nor did the passage that followed to the effect that the Pope's comment "transgresses even a child's grasp of basic Christian ethics."

"That was me," Bethune clarified.

Fair enough. I apologize for having confused some of Dr. Higgins' direct quotes with Mr. Bethune's paraphrasing of Dr. Higgins' intentions.  And my editors have corrected the LifeSiteNews.com story to reflect that, and warned me to be more careful of such things in future.

This does not address the other issue, one confirmed for me by Bethune, that he and Higgins were in general agreement over the substance of the remarks, if not the niceties of expression.

In the article, Benedict XVI is accused of "gross stupidity"; of being incapable of grasping that he is in a different and more accountable position as Pope than as the lowly former Cardinal Ratzinger; of hiring inexperienced, and probably negligent aids in the person of the new Vatican Secretary of State; of having failed in humility when he did not mention the alleged crimes of the Church; of a grave "moral error," one that ended with the murder of a nun in Somalia and more recently, the beheading of a priest in Iraq.

The article also stated that one of the most prominent theologians in the world, a former peritus at the Second Vatican Council and for 24 years the head of the Vatican's doctrinal office, did not possess "even a child's grasp of basic Christian ethics."

But, according to Michael Higgins, we may not make any objection to these foundational tenets of Canadian Catholic liberalism; to do so is to create a nasty and brutish" atmosphere. How uncivil!

That these are indeed the tenets of the liberal Catholic creed Bethune confirmed to me when he said, with an indulgent laugh, that it is "universally agreed" that the "Church has a horrible past." The Pope, apparently, should have minded his P's & Q's…life in a glass house, don't you know.

Of course, in the liberal mind, there can only be one valid opinion: theirs. And whether it is expressed sweetly as "the Pope goofed big time," or as his having been guilty of "gross stupidity," the "fact" of the Pope's "stupidity" and his "blunder" at Regensburg is now a matter of infallible doctrine and may not be questioned.

Higgins sniffs that he would "never even think" that the Pope lacks a child's grasp of basic Christian ethics and that my article was a "pure and simple" ad hominem attack that "provides ample evidence to prove my point that it is getting nastier out there."

On this last point, I could not agree more with Higgins.

It seems to have failed to obtrude upon Dr. Higgins that, having felt free, in a national news magazine, to shake his moral finger at the Pope - a man to whom, by the law of his religion, he owes love, devotion and obedience as the Vicar of Christ - he is himself guilty of an equal, if lightly veiled, ad hominem attack on the head of his own Church.

Oddly, given Higgins' protestations of admiration for Benedict, the actual author of the actual quotes about the Pope's stupidity and moral negligence has not been corrected by Higgins' wagging finger. Brian Bethune told me that Higgins, who presumably has read the MacLean's article, did not call him or object in any way to Bethune's characterization of the Pope. Of course, according to Bethune, they were speaking in a fellowship of agreement.

When not accusing the Vicar of Christ of gross stupidity, in fact if not in word, Higgins makes an exhibition of moral outrage, denouncing the denouncing in the "culture of delation" in which ordinary Catholics, with no respectable academic credentials, seeing the doctrinal ruin in the modern Church and the disaster it has created in the public sphere, simply refuse to get over it and get together for hugs all round.

Those who "fashion themselves the defenders of orthodoxy," we are to conclude, suffer from an uncivil attachment to "The Truth" that should "be deplored by all who genuinely care for the community of faith."

Higgins complains that "it is very hard to see the credibility of the church's (sic) liberating message being well served with Catholics smiting Catholics for the love of the Truth."

Higgins asks why there is not room in the Church for both sides in the debate. Oddly, that is precisely the question I would like to put to Dr. Higgins.

See the corrected story online here:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/sep/06092505.html

See the Catholic Register article by Michael Higgins
http://catholicregister.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=PagEd&file=index...

See the orginal MacLeans article
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/religion/article.jsp?content=20061002_133783_1...

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