MIRACLE MAX IN EUROPE

There was a very funny movie made back in 1987 called The Princess Bride. Imagine an Errol Flynn swashbuckler with a Monty Python script. One of my favorite scenes is when the hero, Westley (played by Cary Elwes) is wounded and his friends drag his limp body to a Yiddish Wizard named Miracle Max (played by Billy Crystal) in hopes of saving him. But it’s too late. He’s dead, they tell Max.

“Look who knows so much,” Max replies after examining Westley. “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there’s usually only one thing you can do.”

“What’s that?” his friends ask. Max answers, “Go through his clothes and look for loose change.”

It turns out there was an adaptive replay of this scene in the Sistine Chapel this week. The College of Cardinals dragged in the limp body of European Christianity – which means of European civilization and culture – and placed it at Josef Ratzinger’s feet. Can you save him? they asked, because we are afraid he’s dead. Their Dean and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith replied that yes, he is mostly dead – but not all dead, so there is hope for his revival. That hope is what elected Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy.

There is a lot of speculation on the significance of the papal name of Benedict XVI – that Benedict XV was a pacifist during World War II; that St. Benedict (480-543 AD), founder of the Benedictine Order, rescued Christianity from a collapsing Rome – but when I first heard the name, I thought of Andechs.

Andechs (on-decks) is a Benedictine monastery southwest of Munich, built in 1455 high on a hill overlooking the Ammersee lake. The monks have been brewing beer there for over 500 years – and it is absolutely, positively, the best beer in the world. (The problem is you have to drive up to it via this hairpin-curvy road with no guardrails. The beer is served in liter steins and after coming all that way it’s just wrong to limit yourself to one. When you try to drive back down after two or three steins, you are sure you will never get to the bottom of the hill alive.)

Andechs epitomizes the Gemütlichkeit that characterizes Bavaria, that warm-hearted cheerfulness and joy of living exuded by Bavarians. It is important to understand that we don’t just have a “German Pope” – we have a Bavarian Pope, born and raised who rose to be the Archbishop of Munich, who enjoys life and laughter and is far from the stern, mirthless Prussian Hun caricature the Left is already portraying him to be.

For the caricature has already begun, as can be seen in news stories like Feminists and Homosexuals Turn Thumbs Down on New Pope . This is a pope who is seriously intellectual and intellectually serious, who has the moral courage to publicly denounce the Left’s Original Sin: its denial of objective reality.

In three words – the “dictatorship of relativism” – he identified the link between the denial of objective reality and fascism. You don’t get more “to the point” than that. (Last week’s Victory and Certainty discussed this connection.)

Thus the comparison between St. Benedict and Benedict XVI is apt, for like his namesake, he intends to awaken the minds of native European barbarians (e.g., the Italians in bars who insisted on watching on television the latest soccer match rather than the announcement of a new pope), and to stem a foreign invasion threatening to overwhelm the heart of Christendom.

It takes both heroic optimism and heroic faith to attempt a revival of Europe now at death’s door. For many astute observers, Europe is doomed by a “perfect storm” of inescapably negative demographics, welfare state bankruptcy, and the creeping seizure of its cities by Moslem immigrants. Yet the cause of all three is Europeans’ willful abandonment of their cultural souls. Restore that to them and all three of the clouds creating this perfect storm start to clear.

Such restoration can only be done with and cannot be done without Christianity – and not some wishy-washy, apologize-for-the-Crusades, can’t-we-all-get-along, multicultural-diversity-transgendered theological goulash, but a straight-talk, look-you-in-the-eye Christianity of muscular moral certainty with no excuses and no apologies.

What convinced the Conclave that Europe just might not be culturally all dead yet was the breathtakingly massive outpouring of emotion during the funeral of John Paul the Great. Four million Christians came from all over Europe to peacefully pay homage to him – and in so doing paid homage to the religion of which he was the living symbol.

Witnessing this, the Conclave recognized that a Third World pontiff could not save Europe’s soul – and that was the soul most in need of salvation. For if Christianity fails in Europe, whatever is left elsewhere will become transformed into something unrecognizable. Thus they chose a European, and the one among them who could best fight for the soul of Europe.

Pope Benedict XVI will begin with an ecumenical appeal for Christian unity, for mutual respect and cooperation between all Christian churches and denominations. He will start out soothingly to calm his critics, preaching not only ecumenism but peace with “other religions.”

The most fascinating, and most critical, test to see how Pope Benedict XVI ultimately wages this fight will be in his strategy towards Islam. I predict it will be one of respectful competition, rather than appeasing conciliation.

He will likely avoid argumentative confrontation, such as demanding Moslems apologize for their Crusades conquering the Christian/Jewish Middle East and Christian Spain during the 7th Century Arab Conquest. Where he will make his stand is on the twin issues of apostasy and evangelization.

While native Europeans simply refuse to have children and are committing demographic suicide, Moslem immigrants are breeding like bunnies. Right now, in many European cities, 30 to 40 percent of all the children are Moslem. It seems all but inevitable that Europe will become Eurabia with a majority Moslem population in most metropolitan areas within a generation.

There are only two ways to prevent this: eviction or conversion. Either evict those illegal Moslem immigrants out of Europe and back to their country of origin – or convert them to Christianity. Benedict XVI will advocate the latter path. The obstacle in this path is that Islamic law or Sharia views apostasy or irtidad as a crime punishable by death. The murtadd or apostate, by “turning his back on Allah” deserves to be killed.

You can expect Benedict XVI to publicly demand that Moslems be free of any punishment should they choose to convert to Christianity, citing Article 18 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief.”

You can further expect him to promote efforts by Christians to evangelize Moslems, making positive efforts to persuade them to convert to Christianity. First in Europe – and then in Islamic countries around the world.

Pope Benedict XVI’s underlying message will be one of respect for religious freedom. This necessitates criticizing Sunni Islam’s inherent tendency to merge politics and religion, and contrasting it with Christ’s admonition – “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s” (Luke 20:25).

In an interview he gave to the Italian newspaper Il Giornale in November 2003, he argued that “Christianity brought an entirely new idea into the world’s history by making a distinction between the emperor and God.”

With the rise of Islam, he continued, “a substantial portion of the world returned to the earlier identification between the political world and the religious world.” Moslem countries and societies, therefore, must respect a distinction between spiritual and temporal power which “creates a space for freedom.”

President Ronald Reagan was abjured by his critics as a backward-looking conservative – when he was in reality a forward-looking revolutionary who brought political freedom to millions. Similarly, Pope Benedict XVI may do the same for religious freedom. Like President Reagan, this new pope is a conservative revolutionary aiming to overthrow the entrenched modern orthodoxies of secularism and relativism, and rescue Western Civilization from a massive alien threat.

May he live long enough to accomplish his goal.