Batso for Ratzo

The right-wing relativism parade for Pope Ratzinger continues apace. The Wall Street Journal's Danniel Henninger, who deems the Pope's absurd "dictatorship of relativism" comment "apt," finds the crucial missing link between the Vatican's theological thumbwrestling and the filibuster:

"The impression grew steadily," [Ratzinger] writes, "that nothing was now stable in the Church, that everything was open to revision"–by these scholars. This is not just some arcane dispute over how many angels dance on the head of a pin. It is precisely the fight over intellectual authority and daily application being fought right now in the U.S. Senate over the Bush judges and Constitutional interpretation. As Joseph Ratzinger put it, he opposes a "reality" that someone has "simply thought up." Sounds like a soul-brother of Antonin Scalia to me. Like the U.S., the Catholic Church is a huge, sprawling, complex institution, and there are real issues at stake here that affect long-term life on the streets and in the pews.

Precisely!…. But it's William Donohue who truly carpes the diem on the Ratzinger-was-a-Hitler-Youth-so-his-enemies-are-Nazis opportunity:

Ironically, it was Joseph Ratzinger's fellow Germans who gave us the diabolical idea that moral absolutes are nonsense—nihilists such as Nietzsche and Nazis such as Heidegger. French philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida then corrupted the faculty of reason with their postmodernist assault on truth.

Postmodernist thought is alive in many ideological isms: subjectivism, historicism, multiculturalism, deconstructionism, moral relativism and nihilism. It is the work of leftist academics at war with the Catholic concept of natural law. But others have promulgated this invidious idea.

"There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or in the scientific sense." The author of this sentence was Adolf Hitler, although it could have been penned by any of today's postmodernist intellectuals.

Of course, if we're playing Hitler-coulda-said-it, I might nominate this one: "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? […] Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes."