Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's Milestones: Memoirs 1927 - 1977.


Page 16.


O.K., here it's like the future Pope Benedict XVI is showing us how the NAZI's were beginning to tinker with a sort of New Age Revolutionary approach to promoting anti - Christianity!

Just what we're seeing in Catholic parishes all across America in 2008, including right there in Brackettville, at least with our own shake and bake "Liturgy Committee" para - liturgical productions like what I'm sure is planned for tonight, you can better believe it...

Now, as the future Pope tells us about his own native German village prior to WW II:

"There was, however one very gifted young teacher who was quite enthusiastic about the new [NAZI or New Age, either one!] ideas.

"He attempted to make a breach in the solid structure of a village life that bore the deep imprint of the Church's liturgical year.

"So it was that he erected a Maypole with great pomp and circumstance and composed a kind of prayer to the Maypole [like our favorite Deacon's ritual for tonight of ceremoniously burning deceased persons' name as an offering to some Great Unknown Hindu Tribal Deity or whatever!] as symbol of a life force perpetually renewing itself.

"The Maypole was supposed to bring back a portion of Germanic religion and thus help gradually to expel Christianity, which was now denounced as alienating Germans form their own great festivals, again as a return to the sacredness of nature and to Germanic origins, to take the place of alien notions such as Jewish and Roman religion.


"When nowadays I hear how in many parts of the world Christianity is criticized [including that same criticism implicit in the forthcoming trashy ceremony concocted by our very own St. Mary Magdalene's Catholic Parish Liturgical Committee, for tonight's menu!] as a destruction of individual cultural identity and an imposition of European values, I am amazed at how similar the types of argumentation are and at how familiar many a turn of phrase sounds..."