Joseph Ratzinger, from Priest to Peritus to Pope. What did he believe and why was I never told? (1)

Like many Catholics who have always believed in the Faith once delivered, I was misled by putative experts as to who this cleric was and what he believed; so misled what when he was elected Pope I openly cheered.

Lord have mercy.

Here are a few excerpts from his "In the Beginning" text;

Creation and Evolution

All of this is well and good, one might say, but is it not ultimately disproved by our scientific knowledge of how the human being evolved from the animal kingdom? Now, more reflective spirits have long been aware that there is no either-or here. We cannot say: creation or evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the “project” of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary—rather than mutually exclusive—realities.

Did you know that Genesis and Catholic Theology

considered the creation of man a "project?"

He goes on, and it only gets worse, far worse;

Limitations and Freedom of the Human Being

This text proclaims its truth, which surpasses our understanding, by way of two great images in particular—that of the garden, to which the image of the tree belongs, and that of the serpent. The garden is an image of the world, which to humankind is not a wilderness, a danger, or a threat, but a home, which shelters, nourishes, and sustains. It is an expression for a world that bears the imprint of the Spirit, for a world that came into existence in accordance with the will of the Creator. Thus two movements are interacting here. One is that of human beings who do not exploit the world and do not want to detach it from the Creator’s governance and make it their own property; rather they recognize it as God’s gift and build it up in keeping with what it was created for. Conversely, we see that the world, which was created to be at one with its Lord, is not a threat but a gift and a sign of the saving and unifying goodness of God.

The second movement involves the image of the serpent, which is taken from the Eastern fertility cults. These fertility religions were severe temptations for Israel for centuries, tempting it to abandon the covenant and to enter into the religious milieu of the time. Through the fertility cults the serpent speaks to the human being: Do not cling to this distant God, who has nothing to offer you. Do not cling to this covenant, which is so alien to you and which imposes so many restrictions on you. Plunge into the current of life, into its delirium and its ecstasy, and thus you will be able to partake of the reality of life and of its immortality.3

At the moment when the paradise narrative took its final literary form there was a great danger that Israel would succumb to the many seductive elements of these religions and that the God of the promise and of creation, who seemed so far off, would disappear and be forgotten

Ratzinger does not think the Bible is the word of God but the product of a community, a narrative  - it will get even clearer when we turn to "Theological Highlights..." but back to "In the Beginning:"

Original Sin

In the Genesis story that we are considering, still a further characteristic of sin is described. Sin is not spoken of in general as an abstract possibility but as a deed, as the sin of a particular person, Adam, who stands at the origin of humankind and with whom the history of sin begins. The account tells us that sin begets sin, and that therefore all the sins of history are interlinked. Theology refers to this state of affairs by the certainly misleading and imprecise term “original sin.” What does this mean? Nothing seems to us today to be stranger or, indeed, more absurd than to insist upon original sin, since, according to our way of thinking, guilt can only be something very personal, and since God does not run a concentration camp, in which one’s relatives are imprisoned, because he is a liberating God of love, who calls each one by name. What does original sin mean, then, when we interpret it correctly?

One run across this haughty hermeneutic of his in much of his theologising of all matters that came before him; that is, this is not a humble man but one who has, more than once, stated boldly that no one before him knew the true meaning of thus and such, from Original Sin to the problems of the Jews.

Here he is denying the consequences of Original Sin, an infallible teaching:

At the very moment that a person begins human existence, which is a good, he or she is confronted by a sin-damaged world. 

No. The Person himself is damaged by Original Sin which is one reason why Baptism is required.

http://www.thecounciloftrent.com/ch5.htm

I wish I knew this future Pope, who was the Prefect of the Sacred Doctrine of the Faith denied significant portions of it.

Is this why the who Cardinals elected him - because they too did not hold the Faith once delivered - elected him?

I do know that the excellent editor of the American Ecclesiastical Review, Msgr Joseph Fenton, discovered that when he went to Rome as a peritus at Vatican Two, he discovered that prominent Priests and Prelates were not believers;

One of the high points of Fentons' visit in Rome was the "interview with P. at the Supreme" because P, Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo, Secretary of the Holy Office and the Prefect of the Congregation of the of Seminaries and Universities, seemed to be the only one who knew what was happening with the Jesuits. Pizzardo was also one of the few who complimented Fenton for helping to identify that Americanism was afflicting the Church. "Pizzardo, according to Fenton, was "under the impression that the present evil is not modernism but something like it and worse than it..."

On the evening of Sept. 3, (1956) Fenton dined with Fr Coffey, a professor at the Gregorian. It was a disturbing encounter for it revealed that the purity of Catholic doctrine was endangered. Coffey ' seemed convinced that al the old Catholic teaching that we received from the ...Baltimore Catechism was false. 

He told the story that Edmund Walsh has been bawled out by Pius XI for saying that the Bolsheviks were malicious, and for speaking of mortal sin. He claimed that Ratti (he was elected Pius XI) had said it was practically impossible to commit a mortal sin...If the nonsense these people were saying (again according to Coffey) is generally accepted in the Church, we are certainly on the way to a terrible apostasy."  (Page 492-493)

"John Courtney Murray , Time/Life, and the American Proposition; How the CIA/s Doctrinal Program Changed the Catho9lic Church." by David A. Wemhoff.

Tomorrow, more from Ratzinger. In his own words. Prepared to be shocked and disgusted.