First off, I can’t quite make sense of David Allen White’s reaction to Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address and the aftermath. While I agree with White that Benedict may well have been surprised by the reaction to his remarks - it doesn’t seem Benedict’s character deliberately to incite riots around the world - I don’t agree that Benedict’s remarks were thereby “foolhardy.” Though Benedict didn’t anticipate the reaction of the Muslim world, he spoke the truth nonetheless.

Certainly as a traditionalist Catholic, I was cheering the way in which the quotation from the Byzantine emperor stuck it straight to the Mohammedans. Then, the worldwide reaction only confirmed what the emperor had said (quoted by Benedict). What a great object lesson! “See, children, if we say these few words in an obscure speech (aside: the rest of which the raving street Muslims are too ignorant to understand), they’ll have this HUGE reaction!” And lo and behold, this is what we saw.

I said “as a traditionalist Catholic” because here was an example of someone from the Vatican - anyone - calling a spade a spade. I agree with White that the language of obfuscation, lack of clarity, and unwillingness to define things precisely is characteristic of the post-Conciliar period. This often soft and imprecise language is used, it seems, in deference to politcal correctness and an unwillingness to risk offending certain groups or sensibilities. So when the Pope finally lets someone have it - in this case, the Mohammedans - why would a traditionalist complain, as though there could ever be an inopportune time for the Pope to speak the truth boldly before the world!

I can appreciate the frustrations which some of the SSPX crowd feel with the Vatican and the Pope. But White’s remarks sound as though Benedict, in White’s eyes, can do no right. I’m sure that White has his reasons for adopting this stance, but I disagree with the weight we ought to assign to those reasons. After reading Stephen Heiner’s interview with Bishop Williamson and his interview with Dr. White, I can see this view in common between the two men: Benedict has a mental handicap (called “liberalism”) and so we have to be patient with him like a mentally-slow child. While allowing that Benedict is not what we call a “traditionalist”, I don’t see the need to impugn his mental faculties; there are other good and plausible reasons for thinking that the Pope - whether Benedict or John Paul - is hampered in what he can achieve by the men around him. Mind you! I’m not apologizing for Koran kissing or any of the other wonderful works done by the late and Great Luminous Doctor of the Church. But I think that someone, especially someone like Benedict is concerned not to rock the Barque too much, too soon. Festina lente, yes?

I’m not saying that we’re going to see a restoration, true or otheriwse, of tradition by the end of Benedict’s reign. We shouldn’t fall into this view, I don’t think, that each new pontiff to come along is our latest messiah. But we can give the man some space (and positive encouragement) to make some changes for the better which seem to be within his power and willingness to perform, e.g. a freeing of the old Mass.

Second, the question of the modern university. Clara said this much to me in private correspondence: why send everyone to community college instead? That’s going to be better?! I agree, I don’t see how that’s much of a fix. Perhaps by living at home, with mom and dad and sis, the young student can avoid some of the depradations amidst which his more liberated peers will find themselves when 200 miles from home. But this doesn’t address what’s going on in the classrooms, the liberal ideas and liberal peers which are found there. If you’re at a big state school, yes, maybe you can slip into the crowd, but you can’t escape the ideas coming from the lectern or the texts.

If the young student has been sufficiently grounded in the Faith to respond critically to such ideas, then why not also think that he can handle himself living away from home? He will, after all, have to live away from home eventually, right? I’m not for sending children off into the big wide world at the age of six, but by the age of 18, I think we should expect them to begin to take some steps on their own.

More problematic, I think, is the thought of keeping faithful and well-qualified Catholic students from the best institutions of higher learning in the land. Whatever this Society’s disagreements with the SSPX or the SSPX crowd or David Allen White or the David Allen White crowd, I hope that these folks can see that, though we are Cornell Catholics, we declared war on our Chaplaincy, gave our Sundays to driving two hours (one way) for the old rite Mass, studied together the Roman Catechism on Sundays, have, all of us, a fair to very good knowledge of the contents of encyclicals of the stripe found in The Popes Against Modern Errors. In short, we’re full-blown traditionalists even though we’re studying (or did) at a nasty secular university in a miserable little liberal town in one of the worst dioceses in America.

Whatever we go on to do after Cornell - well, half of us or so have already moved on - we’ll be much better off with the Cornell name than if we had all gone, say, to Lansing Community College. And it’s not just the name, of course, it’s the education we’ve received, dangerous and wily as our teachers may have been. Whether we go on to write books for Angelus Press or we become academics seeking to subvert the dominant paradigm of liberalism, there’s no way we would have been better off going to community college.

Dr. White may be serious about that advice, but I, for one, can’t take it seriously. Yet I don’t believe that he takes it seriously, either. It seems to reflect a kind of retreat into the burrow mentality which White himself, though he may talk like it at times, doesn’t actually live. All the electricity is going to go out? That sounds kinda cool, but that’s going to put a damper on those John Ford Film festivals at the White family compound. He uses the internet, he watches movies, and he wrote a book in “soundbite” format - White seems like a normal guy to me, if only he cooled the rhetoric. But when you say that all the power is going to go out or that everyone ought to go to community college - if not avoid college altogether - this isn’t going to make you popular with the hip crowd. Plus, you won’t be popular with the nerds (us) either, because you’re too freaky even for the nerds. So people will dislike you, you’re gonna get picked on, Iacobus will nurse a special grudge against you - but I think that someone like White is used to this by now.

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