The election of the great Bavarian intellectual Josef Ratzinger, picked as a dark horse by Roger McCaffrey in an earlier VDARE.COM blog item, is very good news indeed for those who treasure the heritage of the West. As a good American Europhile, I celebrated the news by belting out an old patriotic German Catholic song. Some conservative Catholics—okay, me—had hoped for the election of the Nigerian Cardinal Arinze, who is equally orthodox. I thought the fact that he is black and from the developing world would have flummoxed and silenced liberal critics for at least five years, giving him time to enact needed reforms in the Church.

Ratzinger has been treated as a virtual pi?ata for decades by the secular and liberal Catholic press, pictured as the evil genius responsible for the “conservatism” of Pope John Paul II on moral and theological issues. Journalists just couldn’t shoehorn into their minds the fact that the grinning Polish pope of whom everyone is so fond REALLY believed all the hoary doctrines they deplored.

But most importantly for readers of VDARE.COM, Ratzinger was the loudest voice at the Vatican saying “non possumus” to the entry of Turkey into the European Union—an act which, as I’ve written here before, would throw open the gates of Christendom’s cradle to massive Islamic immigration, extending the already porous border of Europe to the frontiers of Iraq and Iran.

By permitting such a man to become pope, rather than a Third World cardinal, however holy, I feel that God is offering Europe and the West one more chance to wake up and repent. The saints who died to evangelize Europe are still interceding for our old mother continent—as well as for Mother Church.