The college campus cancel mob came for Pope Benedict XVI, too
Matt Lamb
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Pope Benedict XVI, who died on Saturday, was no stranger to the college campus cancel mob, seeing what leftist German students could do even decades before it became a widespread problem here in the United States.
In 1966, the scholarly priest took up a professor job at University of Tuebingen in Germany, where he was hired to teach Catholic theology.
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Anyone who signed up for a theology class with Fr. Joseph Ratzinger would presumably understand that the course would cover Catholic Church teaching, salvation, the Gospels, and other standard theology topics. But this being the 1960s and a college campus, some students demanded that the professor and priest focus on their particular interests.
According to the New York Times, “his students interrupted his lectures, shouting him down and demanding that he discuss Vietnam.”
“At some point he heard his own students utter the scandalous words: ‘Jesus be damned,’” the paper reported. “Horrified, he left Tuebingen for a position at the more conservative and tranquil University of Regensburg.”
The Los Angeles Times added further details. “Marxist rabble rousers would burst into the classroom of Father Joseph Ratzinger, a diminutive intellectual who preferred Mozart and the writings of St. Augustine to the chaotic and changing times around him,” the paper reported.
The article added that the future pope “became increasingly agitated by the Marxist student protesters.”
The professor saw the atheism and leftist politics expressed by the student Marxists as akin to the Nazism he despised. “Germany and Western Europe, it seemed to Ratzinger, were careening away from their spiritual centers and drifting toward a dangerous moral vacuum,” the L.A. Times reported. “The violence of Nazism afforded his first encounter with a godless tyranny, and the unruly liberal environment of the late ‘60s, along with the materialism and moral relativism that followed, would all again be viewed by Ratzinger as shackles on human aspirations for freedom.”
The late pope foresaw the dangers of moral relativism that continue to flourish today on college campuses and in society as a whole. Moral relativism proponents want to eliminate any established norms and rules for making ethical and moral judgments.
“We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires,” he said in 2005, upon becoming the pope.
Moral relativism from students, seen in the shouting down of speakers, the demand for free abortions, and the rapid spike in LGBT identification, continues to plague college campuses today, nearly 60 years after a young German priest saw it in his classroom and at his university.
While I mourn the death of Pope Benedict the XVI, I would gladly welcome the demise of leftist moral relativism and the campus cancel culture it created.
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Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate editor for the College Fix and has previously worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.