Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit's Puberty Crisis

Berlin's Mayor Klaus Wowereit has said that he feels "great sympathy" for people who plan to protest Pope Benedict XVI's first official visit to Germany later this month.  Wowereit, who is openly homosexual, also said that, "the Catholic Church expresses with its doctrine theories that belong to the past millennia, not the modern age."  See here.

This is nothing more than a cheap tactic employed by individuals who are not up to the task of providing sound philosophical arguments for their premises.  For example, when Barack Obama said that opposition toward homosexuality was based upon "worn out" arguments, he failed to explain his position.  Because he could not.  Another German, Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand, who unlike Klaus Wowereit was a great philosopher and an intellectual giant, explained in his work entitled "Trojan Horse in the City of God," that, "Incessantly we hear today the self-satisfied slogan, 'Man has finally come of age.' Yet there are so many features of the present epoch - the dethronement of truth by historical relativism, the fetishization of science, the devastation of our lives as a result of the laboratory view, and many others - that make it more than doubtful that modern man has really and truly come of age.

There is, moreover, something inherently self-deceptive in the very idea. It is a characteristic symptom of immaturity to feel oneself more mature and independent than men of previous times, to forget what one owes the past, and, in a kind of adolescent self-assertion, to refuse any assistance. One need only recall Dostoyevsky's masterly description of the puberty crisis - Kolya Krassotkin in The Brothers Karamazov, Hypolit in The Idiot, the hero of The Adolescent - to grasp the special immaturity of the man who is convinced of his superior maturity, who thinks that in him humanity has in a unique way come of age, who is dominated by one preoccupation - to show his independence. His ludicrous smallness is manifest as he looks down on everything passed on through tradition, even the most timeless values. The illusion of an historic coming of age is not the exclusive possession of our epoch. In the period of the so-called Enlightenment, man also felt themselves to have come of age and looked down on former times as periods of darkness and immaturity. This illusion is a recurring phenomenon in social history and it bears a striking resemblance to the puberty crisis in the life of the individual person. But the contemporary assertion that whereas this perennial boast was never before justified, it is now really true makes its self-serving character all the more clear. One of the many indications of the intellectual and moral immaturity of the present age is the fact that the percentage of worthless books and articles that captivate the minds of intellectuals seems greater today than in any other time in history." (pp.143-144).


Indeed.  Such is our age.  Jacques Maritain, another of the Church's great philosophers, refers to this condition as "chronolatry" in his work "Le paysan de la Garonne" - The Peasant of the Garonne.  He defines it as the idolatry of what is newest or latest in time.  This is the characteristic flaw of today's "progressive" who looks upon the wisdom of the ages and dismisses it as nothing more than "theories" which belong to the past.

To such "progressives," the Scripture sounds a warning: "Anyone who is so 'progressive' that he does not remain rooted in the teaching of Christ does not possess God, while anyone who remains rooted in the teaching possesses both the Father and the Son." (2 John 9).