EcoLogics

It seems that the Roman Catholic Church’s leadership in the Vatican has perfected a technique that we might describe, in the now seemingly ancient tradition of Marxist analysis, as ‘ideological inversion’. It involves turning history upside down, and politics inside out.

Just a few months after Rome’s man in Tegucigalpa, Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, came out in favour of the US-supported coup that deposed the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya, the good Joseph Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict XVI, has denounced what he describes as ‘political colonialism‘ in Africa.

Eh?

This blogger is left reeling by the historical revisionism, to not say contradiction which Ratzinger’s denunciation dissimulates. Even if we forget the Church’s own historical role in Latin America and in Africa itself, we cannot overlook the part that Ratzinger  played whilst he was the head of the modern version of the Holy Inquisition: between 1981 and 2005, Ratzinger was the ‘Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’. As this blog has documented in an analysis of Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga’s intervention in Honduran politics, Ratzinger made it his business to stamp out any hint of liberal, let alone liberation theology throughout the Church. During his pre-papal spell as the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger was, in effect, the éminence grise of the Roman Catholic Right, and spent over 20 years pursuing anyone who dared to espouse left-wing, or even centre-left views within the Church. (Perhaps this is a good reason to refer to Ratzinger as ‘his Eminence’).

So it is richly ironic to hear the same man, clothed now in the garb of Pope Benedict XVI, denouncing ‘political colonialism’ and the spreading of what he describes, somewhat comically, as materialist ‘toxic spiritual rubbish’. How extraordinary that the man who has arguably done the most to undermine left-wing critiques of the consumer culture that took off during the Reagan and Thatcherite era is now preaching, albeit from a right-wing perspective, about the pitfalls of that selfsame culture!

That he should use some of the vocabulary that was once so maligned by his own office is particularly ironic. EcoLogics is reminded of a story that seems especially appropriate in these times when the Right is rediscovering the discourse of the Left. In the 1850s, Charles Nisard was an ‘under secretary’ of the French Ministry of Police charged with repressing the street-literature that the French authorities found subversive. This allowed him to amass a collection of the so-called ‘colportage’ books, which he evidently read rather assiduously. Indeed, he became so fascinated by them that he went on to publish one of the first studies about their use of the Parisian argot.

Ratzinger, like Nisard, is one of countless political figures who have done their best first to destroy, but then to redeploy so-called ’subversive’ discourses. So it is that we now have Pope Benedict XVI denouncing colonialism in Africa even as he himself prohibits the use of condoms in the same continent, and as his man in Honduras works with coup plotters to try to ensure that the left is banished for good from that country. The world goes round and round, does it not Joseph?