touching on the Christian legacy, inter alia

ethical solutions, inc

Happy new year to all my darling fans.

Now I mustn't forget my promise about a quotation, so this time, a double dose:

I've just read Geoffrey Robertson's The case of the pope, gifted to me for Christmas. Robertson does his usual thorough job, and is very convincing on the inadequacies of Canon Law, and the abysmal record of the current pontiff in his previous role as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The overall impression I get is of a profoundly insular, arrogant organisation, convinced of its moral superiority, and convinced that its 'house rules', aka Canon Law, is superior to all secular laws in dealing with every aspect of 'sin'. The result, of course, has been disastrous for thousands of children in every country the RCC has made inroads into. And there's no real sign of change in spite of the pressure being applied.

I'll review the book in more detail later perhaps. For now, I'm going to be a bit churlishly critical - I love a bit o' churlishness, especially during the festive season. In a section titled 'Reflections' at the end of the book, Robertson makes this statement, after arguing at length on the Vatican's abuses of human rights:

It should not be necessary to invoke human rights law against a great church, especially one whose founder laid down the Judeo-Christian ethics that have contributed considerably to the principles of that law.

Now, I suspect that this praise of Judeo-Christian ethics was a concessional bone thrown at the RCC after nearly 200 pages of relentless, but judicious, attack. But I must object to it on two counts. First, Robertson refers to the church's founder, by whom he clearly means the character known as Jesus. Now, the idea that Jesus founded the RCC is quite preposterous. Even if we assume that the name refers to a historically real character - a big assumption - there is no evidence from the gospels [and the gospels are all we have] that he intended to found a 'church' as such, and certainly not a church anything like the RCC. The RCC is, and has been since the beginning, a profoundly authoritarian, ritual obsessed, secretive organisation. There are certain consistent qualities of Jesus that emerge from the gospels - an impatience with ritual, a preference for substance over form, an anti-authoritarian tendency, an open simplicity of style and a preference for the company of the poor, the dispossessed and the powerless - notably women and children. His attack on the pharisees for being more concerned with dress and form than substantial teachings, for being essentially out of touch with ordinary people, gives a pretty clear indication of what he would've thought of the RCC, which raises the question of whether the RCC is or ever has been a Christian organisation.
The second point is the familiar one - that our modern ethics were 'laid down' by Jesus, as recorded in the gospels. I find it extremely difficult to comprehend how anybody reading the gospels carefully and with an open mind can find a foundation for modern ethics therein. The sayings of Jesus are not, in my opinion, particularly 'ethically rich', and the parables are often obscure and sometimes very dubious in their message. The golden rule, for example, is found in dozens of religious traditions, indicating that it transcends religion as a common-sense formula for social living. The peacemakers are, or should be, blessed, and the meek shall inherit the earth. This is wishful thinking - admirable enough, but hardly the basis of an ethical system. Love your enemies [a piece of preaching that Jesus didn't always practice himself] is merely a paradoxical remark that undermines the concepts love/hate and friends/enemies. The remark 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone' is a useful corrective against moral dudgeon, but it's hardly original [and in any case was a later insertion]. Altogether, all we have in the gospels are a few general remarks, mostly unobjectional and generally kindly, but not particularly earth-shattering. Had they never been published or bruited about, I strongly doubt that our modern ethical thinking and the laws based on it would have been any different.

My point is that Christianity continues to be over-rated from an ethical perspective, even by non-believers. We have always done better, in thinking about ethics, to leave religion out of it, as the Graeco-Romans did. It is to that tradition, more than any, that we owe the upholding of ethical standards in law.

Is the Catholic Church a cult?

A recent news item on ABC 24 about religious resurgence in Russia caught my attention, because the more orthodox Russian church has expressed concern about the growth of unorthodox 'cult' versions of Christianity. The news report took the line that many of these 'cults' would not be so regarded in Australia and the US, and that this was really about orthodox forces trying to impose their will.
It all raises interesting questions about what a cult actually is, and whether a so-called mainstream or traditional religion can still be regarded as a cult.
Without even reaching for wiki definitions, I think it's safe to say that the term cult is usually associated with new religions or new variations on established religions, as well as being associated with extreme behaviour, ritual and attitudes. So that, if we take the Catholic Church, its belief that, through ritual, you can partake of the actual blood and body of the central, foundational figure of the religion can't be considered cultic because, though extreme enough, surely, it's sanctioned by tradition, as well as by the agreement of church leaders throughout its history [most notably at the Council of Trent in 1551].
Basically this way of looking at things says that any 'orthodox' belief system can't be a cult, and that's the end of the story. The problem with this is that one person's orthodoxy is another person's weirdness. The opening line of the wikipedia definition of a cult, for what it's worth, says this:

The word cult pejoratively refers to a group whose beliefs or practices are considered strange.

That puts the Catholic Church well and truly in the cult category in my book, and many skeptics and scientists would surely agree, but of course there's more to it than that, otherwise flat-earthers and young earth creationists would be considered cult members, and that's going too far. Interestingly, the above quote has a note attached, saying it comes from the OED, and that note adds this, from the American Journal of Sociology, to the definition:

"Cults[...], like other deviant social movements, tend to recruit people with a grievance, people who suffer from some variety of deprivation."

Clearly this doesn't apply to Catholics, the majority of whom just find themselves in the religion for family and societal reasons. The common run of Catholics don't really look to the hierarchy for guidance in their everyday lives, especially not in developed countries. The Catholic commentator Paul Collins said exactly this in an interview this morning. In this respect you could say that the Catholic Church is a failed cult. One of the characteristics of cults, after all, is a slavish obedience to the dictates of the cult leadership. And didn't the Catholic cardinals 'make' the Pope infallible back in the nineteenth century precisely to encourage this slavish obedience? Infallibility is a supernatural category. Cults always endow their leaders with some supernatural quality or other.
When a Papal Bull or encyclical is issued from the Vatican, it's usually about directing the followers, like a shepherd directing his sheep. I've read one or two of these documents, and one of the features I've noticed in them is a tendency to declare Truths. Capitals are always used. It's a simple device to impart a supernatural flavour - truths are for commoners, Truths are declared by the Infallible. It's here that the cultish state of this very hierarchical church is most evident, but luckily for the followers [and the leaders too perhaps], it's undermined on every lower rung of the ladder by the pragmatic, the sensible, the perverse and the indifferent.
We shouldn't get too complacent about this wannabe cult though - yes, in the west it is seen as having more show than substance, but in Africa, in the Pacific Islands, in nearby Papua, where supernatural beliefs often saturate the atmosphere, just begging to be exploited, the Catholic Church is a very real and very dangerous force. We must continue to monitor it and combat it.

another stirpot letter

This letter writing malarky is beginning to appeal to me, after posting my first. But I'm thinking that the Pope isn't necessarily the best recipient - there are so many others, Christians and non-Christians, that I should write to, using snail mail, which can't be so easily ignored, I'm hoping, as email. I have nothing to lose, if nobody responds or even reads these letters, since nobody reads the blog anyway. So I could turn the criticisms I've made in the past [of Paul Collins, John Dickson, William Lane Craig, Charles Taylor and others] into letters actually sent to them. Pourquoi pas?

So let me begin with Paul Collins - who has apparently come out with a new book, Judgement Day, treating of environmental theology, may the gods help us. Of course it was a previous book of his, Believers, that I dealt with here. So, based on my critique, here's my next letter.

Dear Paul Collins

I hope this letter is able to find you, as obviously I have no proper address for you. I wanted to address to you some queries regarding a book you wrote a few years ago, Believers. I bought the book in order to get a sense of what is happening with Catholics and Christian believers in Australia, and as such it was quite informative. I imagine that some Catholics reading the book would find it quite grim and depressing reading. However, I'm neither a Catholic nor a Christian so I have a different perspective.

Of course, your book doesn't deal with theological issues or questions of beliefs and their justification, but you do make one reference in the text to non-belief or lack of belief, which, not surprisingly, alludes to the so-called 'new atheism'. Here is the passage:

...one of the focal sources of modern angst is the attempt to live without any sense of God or the transcendent, without faith in anything. This has become particularly virulent with the recent publication of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens' tomes attacking all forms of religious belief and equating mainstream faith with fundamentalism. These authors actively oppose God and set out to to explain reality as the product of evolution, without any sense of transcendence or spirituality. In the process they cut off any possibility of hope and creativity for a better world. Modern anxiety constitutes one of the basic ministerial challenges for Catholicism: to offer a sense of trust in God to the wider world.  

I find this a very strange passage, and I would like to examine it in more detail, to see if I can make sense of it.
To take the first sentence first, I myself, along with many others I know, have lived without any sense of 'God', by whom you presumably mean that male god called 'God', first described by Semitic writers a few millenia ago. This god is, of course, one of thousands of gods, some living, some dead, worshipped, loved, feared and so forth by different cultures and civilizations over the space and time of our planet. I wouldn't say that I've 'attempted' to live without this god, for I've not had to put much effort into it, and I've certainly not suffered angst over a life without him. However, in more recent times I've developed an interest in your god and in Christianity generally, out of historical curiosity. In reading the Bible, as well as some analyses of the text, I must say that I'm very happy that this 'God' fellow hasn't deeply affected my life, for it would be difficult to find a more unpleasant character in the world of fiction. I should also add, as a lifelong reader of fine literature, that I find the character quite implausible.
To return to your first sentence, in it you have linked three things, 'God', 'transcendence' and 'anything' [or everything]. You have linked the three items with the term 'faith'. There are, it seems, a couple of implications here. It seems that 'God' implies 'transcendence' [and/or vice versa], and that a lack of belief [or faith] in either [or both] implies a lack of faith in anything. I have to ask you - do you really seriously mean this? Are you not playing fast and loose with the term 'faith' here? I have faith in my nearest and dearest, I have faith in the postal service, and I have [a somewhat wavering] faith in my local football team, and that is just the tip of the iceberg, and all without any considerations about supernatural entities or transcendent beings. 'Faith' in terms of these transcendental [but yet strangely personal] beings seems to mean something entirely different - something like a belief in the real, objective existence of something non-material [a very specific something!] for which there is no evidence. Only in this highly circumscribed sense do I lack 'faith'.
So your first sentence presents a puzzlement. But I haven't finished with it yet! You claim that the attempt to live without 'faith' is a major source of angst. I wonder how you can know this? I myself have felt angst - and moral angst too - about many many things in my life, but certainly not about the lack of supernatural beings! I'm sure you're aware that, amongst the scientific community, the level of religious unbelief is far higher than it is amongst the general public. Now, scientists are generally high-achieving, intelligent, confident types, not overly given to angst. Nor are they particularly given to moral irresponsibility. To take the most famous example, Albert Einstein, who considered the belief in a personal god to be a form of childishness, you could hardly find a man more concerned about moral responsibility. So I can only assume that your statement about moral angst is a form of projection. You would feel a great deal of moral angst if someone tried to force you to live without your favourite supernatural being [what some nasty unbelievers unkindly describe as 'your imaginary friend'], so you project that angst onto others. I can assure you, we have no interest in sharing your angst, and we have no interest, either, in taking your god away from you. You can keep him.
Looking now at your second sentence, where you claim that the books of Dawkins and Hitchens, which I've read, 'equate mainstream religious faith with fundamentalism'. I think this is something of an over-simplification, and the issue is too philosophically complex to cover in a hopefully short letter. The central point is that all belief systems which cannot point to a mechanism [how the material world can be influenced by, let alone created by, a non-material force], whether god-beliefs, astrology or faith healing, are regarded as equally suspect by people like myself. Some religious believers are liberal and progressive, some are conservative, some are fundamentalist, and so forth, but to the non-believer or sceptic these are relatively unimportant distinctions. The problem is the lack of evidence, and indeed, the lack of plausibility. The implausibility of religious beliefs is underlined, in my view, by their self-serving nature, with humans being made in the image of the creator god, who is so concerned with his pet creatures that he knows every hair on each and every one of their heads. These are comforting childish fantasies, rendered 'plausible' by centuries of obsessive theological rationalisation.
But I digress. Let me finish by looking at the next two sentences, which presumably summarize your attitude to those who don't believe in supernatural beings:

These authors actively oppose God and set out to to explain reality as the product of evolution, without any sense of transcendence or spirituality. In the process they cut off any possibility of hope and creativity for a better world.

These extraordinary lines are well worth commenting on, though it's hard to know where to begin! Firstly I should point out Hitchens, Dawkins and others don't actively oppose the god called God any more than they actively oppose Ahura Mazda, Baal, Ganesh, the Rainbow Serpent or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. They don't believe that any of these entities have any real existence, so opposing them would make no sense. What they oppose is belief in these entities. That is a major, major distinction.
Second, nobody sets out to explain 'reality' as the product of evolution. Evolution by natural selection is a [phenomenally successful] theory that explains the proliferation of life on this tiny, insignificant speck of a planet. That's a very far cry from explaining 'reality'. It is science in general, not just the individual authors mentioned, that sets out to explain reality without resort to transcendence or spirituality, high-falutin terms always given a positive spin by believers, but less than useless as mechanisms for explaining anything. It should be further pointed out that Catholic 'spirituality' essentially means a belief, without any evidence whatever to support it, that humans, unlike any other mammal or primate, have an 'eternal soul', a preposterous notion that is an insult to the intelligence of any educated person.
But it is the following sentence that's the real doozy. 'In the process they [i.e. Dawkins and Hitchens, or do you mean all scientists, or all 'this-worlders'?] cut off any possibility of hope and creativity for a better world.'
Now, I'm hoping that even you will recognize that this sentence doesn't constitute one of your greatest literary efforts. Perhaps, though, you're thinking of the better world which awaits us when we pass over, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and nothing ever happens? Something to hope for, maybe, but nothing whatever to do with creativity. Otherwise, this sentence is just meaningless gibberish.
I myself live for the creative energy, the enthusiasm and the optimism around me. I'm a lifelong lover of the arts, especially literature and music, but in recent years I've been particularly enthused by the creative exploration of our world that goes under the general banner of science. I've just read an article on recent exciting initiatives to finally cure AIDS. Yesterday I read another exciting article about the possibility of life existing under the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. And today I've just received the extraordinary news that the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva has succeeded in creating a miniature 'big bang', at a temperature of around ten trillion degrees. The future looks pretty exciting to me!
I don't know what it is you believers are hoping for, and I don't think your hopes are particularly coherent. In any case, we won't build a better world by worshipping and endlessly praising dodgy superhuman father figures. That seems to me an insult to our creativity and our energy. We're not the puppets [or the free-willed creations] of a god, we're a bunch of apes - and we have mountains of evidence to prove it. But, as such, we've done pretty well for ourselves, especially when we've tried looking at our world as it really is. I respectfully suggest you try doing the same.
Good luck with your future literary endeavours.

my first letter to the pope

So, okay, I've been asked to start writing letters to the Vatican about their positions on various issues, and if I don't get responses, at least I can try collecting them in book form. I don't entirely like the idea of getting bogged down in such a project, but at least letters might provoke more of a response than my blog does.

Before I get started though, just another, entirely different subject to get off my chest. In the most recent issue of Cosmos there was an exciting piece on the exploration of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, by the space probe Huygens, named after the 17th century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who discovered Titan [a lovely romantic touch]. Turns out it's one of the most promising bits of rock in our solar system for exploring the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. It's believed, but not yet substantiated, that there's H20, in liquid form, beneath the crust, some 45kms deep. Evidence of radioactive decay suggests that this possibly watery area is a lot hotter than the surface [which averages -179 degrees celsius]. The combination of this subterranean ocean and a surface rich in hydrocarbons makes for very interesting possibilities. And even if the search for life turns out to be unsuccessful, it raises hope that certain chemical combinations friendly to life as we know it will surely exist elsewhere in the outer vastness. It's a cinch, surely. I truly believe that extra-terrestrial life will be discovered in the coming decades, hopefully in my life-time. These are among the thoughts that can keep a fellow bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Anyway, back to my letter.

Dear pope,
I don't mind if one of your employees responds to this enquiry as I realize you're a very busy man. Please send it on to whoever oversees this sort of thing. It's just that, in my part of the world, Australia, one of your archbishops recently advised his constituents - I don't know how many there were, but I don't think Australia is a very Catholic country - not to vote for the Greens, a political party, here as elsewhere, with an environmentalist and generally liberal agenda. It seems that the Greens are advocating reform in the fields of abortion and euthanasia, which the archbishop found offensive, presumably in line with the doctrine of the Catholic Church. He urged all Catholics to avoid voting for the Greens in an upcoming election. Or it may be that he urged all potential voters so to do. Which raises another niggling question, which I'm sure you are best placed to answer. Does Catholic doctrine on moral matters cover just Catholics or is it intended to cover all of humanity? I realize this is a big issue, but just to save time and effort, a yes or no answer would be fine. Thank you.
Anyway, because the Catholic Church comes out very strongly with its views on such topics, I thought I should do some research on Catholic doctrine. You know, on how, when and why it was formulated. I have been reading the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care services, fourth edition, which, to quote, was developed by the Committee on Doctrine of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops [in the USA] and approved as the national code by the full body of bishops at its June 2001 General Meeting. I'm not sure if the document was submitted for your approval, or that of your Vatican advisers, but I'm sure it's very much in line with Catholic doctrine, which is universal and unified, is it not?


Obviously the document doesn't go deeply into the history of the formulation of Catholic doctrine, but it does provide some hints, and I'm hoping you and your office can provide clarification. I won't go into all the questions I have, because I know you and your people are very busy, so I'll confine myself two one or two hopefully clearly formulated questions. First, in relation to this quote from the Introduction to Part One of the above-mentioned document:

 ... within a pluralistic society, Catholic health care services will encounter requests for medical procedures contrary to the moral teachings of the Church. Catholic health care does not offend the rights of individual conscience by refusing to provide or permit medical procedures that are judged morally wrong by the teaching authority of the Church.

Does the Catholic Church consider 'the rights of individual conscience' to be the rights of all human individuals with a conscience? If so, how can it claim to know that it is not offending anyone by its refusals?Or does 'individual conscience' here mean some kind of abstraction created or defined by the Catholic Church? In the first case, offence is a very personal, sometimes idiosyncratic thing, but in the second case something entirely created by the Catholic Church could be treated in whatever manner the church wants to treat it, for example as never being offended by any of that Church's decisions. So I would assume that by 'individual conscience' you mean something else, something more objectively defined as a morally active force or sounding board? If so how do you know that such a conscience is not offended by the Church's refusals? Clarification on this matter would be much appreciated. Thank you.


I will quote from another part of the document, ask a few questions, and then I will be finished, I promise. In the Introduction to Part Four, there is this passage: 

For legitimate reasons of responsible parenthood, married couples may limit the number of their children by natural means. The Church cannot approve contraceptive interventions that "either in anticipation of the marital act, or in its accomplishment or in the development of its natural consequences, have the purpose, whether as an end or a means, to render procreation impossible." Such interventions violate "the inseparable connection, willed by God . . . between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive and procreative meaning."

Now, I know that when Catholics use the term 'God' they're referring to their god, and I know, because I've researched the matter, that this god is one of hundreds, indeed thousands of gods, major and minor, universal and local, that people have believed in and do believe in throughout the space and time of this planet. So I'm wondering whether all the marital acts, of all kinds [and think of all the many different cultures and religions that have celebrated these acts] have been willed by your god, according to your church, and how you come to this conclusion. Does your beloved book, The Bible, state this explicitly anywhere? I will say nothing for now about the unitive and procreative meanings of the conjugal act, for now, because I think I may have already asked too many questions in this preliminary letter. I suppose I'm wondering whether your god, God, only connects Catholics in marriage by his will, or does he even connect those who reject or are ignorant of your god?  And how do you know the answer to this - whichever answer is correct?


I thank you and your team for their patience, and I look forward to your response. 


I've printed out a very slightly edited version of this letter ready for sending to the pontiff.

on Catholic morality, mainly

Reading round the blogosphere, flitting about silently, and I visited Panda's Thumb, Richard Hoppe's article on ID and the imminent demise of 'Darwinism', which took me to this intriguing site, apparently well known to proponents of the debate but new to me, and it was at turns hilarious, chilling and informative. I recall, apropos of this, one of my step-daughters [a converted Christian] relating to her brother, a geophysicist and presumably an atheist, that she'd heard that evolution was on the skids. This was about eight years ago, and my stepson had no ready reply, and neither had I. How different would be the situation now, but the opportunity has passed. The wonderful Yiddish word for this is trepverter, which I learned from a Saul Bellow novel, Herzog maybe.

On other vaguely religious matters [ID being vaguely religious], the Catholic Church in Victoria has come out against the Greens, because of their approach to abortion, euthanasia and same-sex marriage, issues I have strong views on myself, especially that last issue - and also here. The Archbishop of Melbourne, Dennis Hart, has come out so strongly against those nasty progressive Greens that pundits have to hark back to the fifties for an equally strident Catholic campaign. Hart reckons that candidates should reflect community values and community expectations [as he imagines the HRCC does]. Fortunately he represents urban Melbournians, with a Catholic population that is minuscule and falling, so I suspect his clarion call to the faithful will, when the election is done and dusted, provide a useful measure of the power of that ultra-conservative organisation in modern politics. Watch the Green vote in the Victorian election in a few weeks time. I wouldn't be surprised if the Catholic protest actually wins it a few votes.

Which of course brings us to the actual issues under scrutiny, namely euthanasia and abortion [since I've largely dealt with the gay marriage issue]. The Catholic Church 's attitude towards these issues are fairly basic and IMHO, dogmatic and dumb. It's the predictable line - human life [and no other life] is 'sacred', and that includes all fertilized cells, no matter how embryonic, and spermatozoa. For those remotely interested, here are the Catholic 'Ethical and Religious Directives' for their Health Care workers. Much of it is reasonable enough when it doesn't touch on theology. Unsurprisingly, it horribly mixes the reality of health care with the myths of Jesus's health 'ministry', and 'science' is naturally commandeered for this quasi-supernatural without being asked:

Through science the human race comes to understand God's wonderful work; and through technology it must conserve, protect, and perfect nature in harmony with God's purposes. Health care professionals pursue a special vocation to share in carrying forth God's life-giving and healing work.

No comment on the undeniable fact that an increasing number of scientists reject the existence of gods. And of course it gets worse, when apparently god-given Catholic dogma is at issue:

 ... within a pluralistic society, Catholic health care services will encounter requests for medical procedures contrary to the moral teachings of the Church. Catholic health care does not offend the rights of individual conscience by refusing to provide or permit medical procedures that are judged morally wrong by the teaching authority of the Church.

It doesn't offend individual conscience by refusing to, say, perform abortions? Says who? Says the Catholic Church, that's who. Apparently the Catholic Church decides who it has offended and who it hasn't. Not that I mind that Catholic health services refuse to perform procedures contrary to their dogma. I don't necessarily want them to change, I just want them to get out of the way. And I would dearly love for the general public to turn its collective back on the dogmatic approach of this institution. And, of course, it largely has.

As I say, most of these health care directives are unexceptionable, but there are of course some that are reflective of Catholic dogma. Take directive 36, which treats of female rape victims:

A female who has been raped should be able to defend herself against a potential conception from the sexual assault. If, after appropriate testing, there is no evidence that conception has occurred already, she may be treated with medications that would prevent ovulation, sperm capacitation, or fertilization. It is not permissible, however, to initiate or to recommend treatments that have as their purpose or direct effect the removal, destruction, or interference with the implantation of a fertilized ovum.

This may be all very well for people who choose to be Catholic, or who can't conceive of any alternative to being Catholic. My concern would be where the Catholic church provides the only health-care facilities in a particular region, permitting them to impose their moral dogma on unsuspecting rape victims.

The introduction to part four of the directives goes on a great deal about the sanctity of marriage [hardly a health-care issue]. Considering that the title of part four is 'Issues in Care for the Beginning of Life', one might wonder why marriage is such a focus [and I wonder, just as an aside, whether the HRCC still considers children born out of wedlock as illegitimate?], but of course, according to this institution marriage is the only way to procreate. And nothing should be allowed to interfere with [legitimate] procreation. Here's what the HRCC has to say about contraception:

For legitimate reasons of responsible parenthood, married couples may limit the number of their children by natural means. The Church cannot approve contraceptive interventions that "either in anticipation of the marital act, or in its accomplishment or in the development of its natural consequences, have the purpose, whether as an end or a means, to render procreation impossible." Such interventions violate "the inseparable connection, willed by God . . . between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive and procreative meaning."

The usual supernaturally sanctioned claptrap, always emphasizing that human life is different from mere animal life, and subject to holy, or holier, laws. And with this they get into some deep waters, using scientific terminology usually inimical to theological manipulation, as in directives 40 and 41:

Heterologous fertilization (that is, any technique used to achieve conception by the use of gametes coming from at least one donor other than the spouses) is prohibited because it is contrary to the covenant of marriage, the unity of the spouses, and the dignity proper to parents and the child.

Homologous artificial fertilization (that is, any technique used to achieve conception using the gametes of the two spouses joined in marriage) is prohibited when it separates procreation from the marital act in its unitive significance (e.g., any technique used to achieve extra-corporeal conception).

Presumably these directives carry their rationale within them, that is, that heterologous fertilization is contrary to the covenant of marriage as the HRCC conceives of it, though presumably the HRCC believes their conception to be 'objectively true' and supernaturally given, and that homologous artificial fertilization somehow interferes with the true nature of the marital act [again as the HRCC conceives of or defines it]. All of this makes me inclined to write to the Vatican [let's start at the top] to ask them to clarify, not so much when they arrived at this conception, but when their supernatural being informed them that this was the true definition of marriage, since I don't believe it is explicitly stated in the big book that is supposed to have been written by this being.   

Anyway, that is enough for now. I'll finish off on this issue in my next post

quel surprise - a flawed pope

While I was out the other day, collecting my thoroughly unremarkable academic transcript from campus west of Unisa, I took the time to visit Borders and catch up on some reading. The book I finally settled on was The hound of Hitler, by Gerard Noel, a biography of the controversial Pius XII, pope from 1939 to 1958. I had no intention of buying it - I have no money - but after a bout of reading, I was hooked, and definitely would have liked to buy it. It would have made a great companion volume to the new Geoffrey Robertson book - which I also can't afford.
I've heard Pius XII described as 'the nazi pope', and his activities got an airing at the atheists meetup I attended about a week ago. So what was coming out of the Vatican during the war and the immediate post-war years? What, if anything, was this pope's association with nazism? After reading only a dozen pages of this book, I have more inklings about this than I had previously.
The first thing to become clear about the book is that it's no hatchet job, which you might expect it to be from the title, though that title is ambiguous - was he a hound attacking Hitler or working for him? The author is himself a Catholic, having edited a major Catholic journal for a decade in the seventies and eighties, and he seems to know plenty about recent Catholic history and Catholic politics. More importantly, he has the historian's detachment and fealty to the deepest and fairest understanding of his subject. What comes out, in the small portion that I've read, is a judicious appraisal of a closeted, delicate, intellectual, unworldly personality, probably ill-fitted to the position of moral arbiter of millions of people's lives at such a time of storm and stress as the second world war provided. Eugenio Pacelli, to use his real name, was no Nazi. After all, Nazism invoked an extreme, specifically German nationalism, which could hardly appeal to anyone who wasn't German. As to whether he had fascist sympathies, I've not read enough yet to determine that, but it's possible. Pacelli's aristocratic family had been lawyers and advisers to various popes for decades. They were members of the soi-disant 'black nobility', nobles created by the Holy See who remained loyal to the papacy during the years of church-state conflict from 1870 to 1929, and Pacelli himself seems never to have questioned the authoritarianism of the RCC, an authoritarianism that fascist regimes, as well as sympathetic organisations such as Action Francaise, partly modelled themselves on.
Now I've just finished reading the quite comprehensive Wikipedia article on Pius XII, as well as reviews of Noel's book, such as this one [since it's sadly unlikely that I'll be able to secure myself a copy], and the figure that emerges is of a pope who, in spite of his previous extensive career as a Vatican diplomat, was a political naif who placed too much emphasis on treaties and agreements, a la Neville Chamberlain, and who failed to realize the threat of Hitler until too late. Pacelli was notoriously silent about Nazism during the war years, and in the post-war years reserved his strongest criticism for communism, the more 'natural' enemy of the RCC. This silence has been the subject of numerous books and articles, and the focus of furious debate for decades.   The question of the Jews and anti-semitism lies at the heart of it all. Anti-Judaism was a major feature of Roman Catholicism for centuries. Noel writes about an extraordinary ceremony that traditionally accompanied the inauguration of a new pope, in which the pope would offer to a rabbi a copy of the Bible, or perhaps it was the Tanach, upside-down, together with thirty pieces of silver. This symbolized, presumably, that the Jews had gotten the 'word of god' upside-down. No prizes for guessing what the silver coins represented. Pacelli would have been imbued with this traditional enmity towards the Judaic religion. All in all, though, he doesn't seem to have been any more anti-semitic than the rest of his tribe, and he really does seem to have made some efforts to help the Jews towards the end of the war - too little, too late. He seems particularly to have read Hitler all wrong, imagining him, because of an early pact made between the Nazis and a left-wing workers' group, to have been 'secretly' a creature of the left. And he always saw the greatest danger as coming from that direction. Apparently, in his days as as a Catholic diplomat in the thirties, he had an audience with Roosevelt, in which he harangued him about the threat of communism in the US.
Above all, this pope was concerned about the power of his church, a church whose 'truth' was beyond question. Plus ca change... His silence may have had something to do with his ambivalence about the Jews [there were no doubt plenty of rabid anti-Semites in the Vatican in the early twentieth century, and Pacelli's family had by and large come out against Dreyfus at the time of the notorious Dreyfus affair] but just as much to do with the fear of becoming the target of the Nazis, as had occurred when Dutch bishops protested against Nazi behaviour. A vast number of Dutch clergy and laity were then rounded up and executed.
It's probably unlikely that a more vociferously anti-Nazi pope would have made much of a difference to the Nazi killing machine during the war. However, I'm trying in vain to find an explicit statement from Pacelli about the Holocaust made after the war. I'll keep on trying. Meanwhile, I note that a number of Jewish historians and writers have come out in defence of Pacelli and the Catholic church's role in saving many thousands of Jewish lives during the war.

the patron saint of whistle-blowers?

Well the latest revelations about Mary Mackillop have suddenly raised my interest in the future 'saint'. Not that I've ever lacked admiration for a woman who was such a battler for children, education and overcoming disadvantage. Also for her struggles, as an obviously headstrong, dedicated and independent-minded woman, with the male authoritarian hierarchy of the RCC. It's just that she was no more a saint or a miracle-worker than anyone else.

The revelations are that Mackillop was ex-communicated in 1871 at least partly because she attempted to blow the whistle on a sex abuser in Kapunda. As is the way with these things, the offending priest, Father Keating, was shifted back to Ireland, where he continued to practise as a priest, and no doubt to pursue his other interests. Meanwhile, Keating's crony in Kapunda, Father Horan was apparently incensed by Mackillop's interference, and was bent on revenge. He prevailed upon bishop Shiel of Adelaide to act against the sisters of Joseph, the order set up by Mackillop and Father Tennison Woods.

In fact the article I'm referring to isn't clear about whether Mackillop was ever actually ex-communicated. It seems that the issue never actually went to Rome, and I'm not sure if local bishops, or archbishops, have the power to ex-communicate. In any case she was banished for a time. That means being put out on the street, with nothing but the habit on her back. A few months later the dying bishop repented of his decision and lifted the ban. It's quite likely that the bishop finally decided the Josephites' good work among the poor outweighed their meddlesome interference in secret men's business. One commentator suggested that Mackillop be declared the patron saint of whistle-blowers. That's one form of sainthood I would subscribe to..

Of course priestly child sexual abuse has been going on since the RCC came into power, and no doubt before. This site mentions four texts illuminating the problem, to which Geoffrey Robertson's new book should no doubt be added:

- ‘The Power and the Glory: Inside the Dark Heart of John Paul II’s Vatican, David Yallop, Constable & Robinson Ltd, London, 2007.
- ‘Sex Priests and Secret Codes: The Catholic Church’s 2,000-Year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse’, Doyle et al, Volt Press, Los Angeles, 2005.
- ‘Fallen Order: Intrigue, Heresy, and Scandal in the Rome of Galileo and Caravaggio’, Karen Liebreich, Grove Press, New York, 2004.
- Peter Damian, ‘Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Century Treatise against Clerical Homosexual Practices’, Ed. P Payer, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982.

The site also provides lots of online info and links on the subject.

I should also add, for my own information if nobody else's, the work of the American, Patrick Wall, especially his book 'Sex, priests and secret codes'.

contra the Catholic Church

gravely delinquent

I know nobody reads this blog, but I would urge all conscientious Catholics to seriously consider the institution they belong to. It would not exist, of course, without its millions of worshippers and supporters.
There has been a stream of 'revelations' in recent times, many of which have come as no surprise to those who are students of history and who are aware of the corruptions of power. Still, let's struggle against the fatigue which wave upon wave of sickening tales of Church cover-ups and outrageous Church pronouncements are likely to cause, and be clear and courageous about this impossible organisation.
To me, the only good thing about the recently revealed behaviour of the Irish Catholic Church in colluding with the state and the police to obstruct justice is that it just might hasten the demise of a too-long lingering institution.
The latest comes from the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland. A priest, James Chesney, known by just about everyone to have been a high-ranking figure in the IRA, became the central figure in a cover-up in 1972. In the summer of that year, the village of Claudy, in Londonderry, was struck by three car bombs which killed nine people. The resulting investigation was woefully, and apparently deliberately inadequate, as you can read here. Chesney was moved over the border into southern Ireland where he died in 1980, aged 46. The case was opened up again in 2002, leading to a report, just released, by the ombudsman. This report has been criticized on the basis that Derry was a 'war zone' at the time, with some 500 deaths in that year, the height of the 'troubles'. While this no doubt made the police's job very difficult, it doesn't excuse the fact that a crime was poorly investigated, and that there seems to have been interference from political and religious authorities. Nobody was ever charged over the Claudy bombing, in spite of many claims that Chesney had his hand in much of the IRA killing at that time. Given what we know about how the Catholic Church has tended to deal with pedophiles in its employ, and how reluctant authorities have been to deal with this powerful institution in the way they haven't hesitated to deal with other clubs or societies, these latest 'revelations' are hardly revelations - they're just more examples of the corrupting power of power.
All this reminds me of something I never got round to writing about a little while back, when this same institution came out with some sort of edict about the ordination of women...
In June, new disciplinary rules were issued, declaring the ordination of women as 'a crime against the faith'. Crime? The Catholic Church still derogates to itself the right to define what is or is not a crime? Well, apparently only in Canon Law - which, one hopes, has about as much legitimacy as shar'ia law in this country.
So what status does Canon Law, or I should say canon law, have here? Or anywhere else? We'll return to that later. 
The Australian online reported it thusly on July 16:

The ordination of women is now on the same level as child abuse in the eyes of the Church.

A sweeping revision to the laws on sexual abuse of children by priests includes the "attempted ordination of a woman" to the priesthood as a "grave delict" subject that can lead to immediate excommunication at the hands of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the disciplinary body once headed by the present Pope.

The newspaper doesn't mention what the status of these laws are, or what this organisation thinks it is doing in referring to what are presumably internal processes as laws. It can have rules, like a tennis club, but not laws. If you infringe the rules, you get kicked out of the club, fair enough, but those rules can't trump the laws of the land. The rules can't contravene anti-discrimination legislation, for example. And what is a delict? From Wikipedia:

In the most narrowly construed sense, delict is a Latin word and a legal term, which, in some civil law systems, signifies a wilful wrong, similar to the common law concept of tort though differing in many substantive ways

So, delict is not a term exclusive to the RCC, and I would question that institution's right to borrow this term from civil law systems, which are presumably backed up by proper state legislation. The remarks of the RCC's disciplinary body can only refer to a 'grave breach of its own rules or policy', not to any crime, for the RCC doesn't have the power [any more] to determine criminality of any kind. Much has been made of this elevation of the 'attempted ordination of women' to the status of a 'grave delict', which puts it on the same level as child abuse. Obviously some clever RCC watcher has noted the equivalence and put it about, and others have run with it. Not even the RCC would be arrogant enough to highlight such an equivalence, and its response is that 'grave delict' is a catch-all term which doesn't mean that all grave delicts are equivalent. perish the thought.
So what about the true legal status of canon law? A brief examination of the Wikipedia article on canon law makes it clear enough that it only governs the internal affairs of the RCC and affiliated bodies, such as the Anglican Communion. Maybe it has some state legal status within the Vatican, but nowhere else. Thus the term 'crime' or 'delict' [grave or otherwise] should only be understood in this highly circumscribed sense. The RCC should make this clear, but of course it won't, because it still believes it's the light of the world, and that it's 'law' is the only law that really matters.

hailing Myers, bemoaning the HRCAC

 always a hard act to follow

I'm a great fan of PZ Myers. Maybe sometimes he comes on too strong, but that's only in seeming - a reread usually convinces me of the logic and the need for toughness. And he's such a good writer - always entertaining, brief and clear. And informative with a word or two, not just on matters scientific. This recent post is an excellent example - I learned about Adonai [again - I'd forgotten the term] and shofars while having my thoughts provoked on how to deal with the more bizarre aspects of religious belief - in this little piece he manages to show how those bizarreries might be seriously combated while mocking such a serious combat and musing on the power of laughter. Mockery is often the most appropriate weapon but it pays to have a  whole, diverse arsenal. Anyway, the prolific PZ is always worth reading, and is also a corrective when I get too pseudo-philosophically prolix.
Keep it pungent, without sacrificing too much depth.

David Walker, erring bishop

Tonight's 7.30 Report featured abuse allegations, and damn convincing ones, against catholic priests in Australia - good for me to focus on the backyard instead of Ireland, Germany, South America... face it, their protection racket spreads o'er the planet. The 7.30 Report has been doing good work in this field in recent times, and tonight's report is a follow-up on two Irish-born priests recruited to Australia, Finian Egan and Paddy Maye. Egan in particular has a lot of evidence against him, and tonight's report has two more women, twins, adding to the other allegations. In fact, the church has found against both Maye and Egan but has failed to prevent them from administering services as priests. In this case, the neglectful authority seems to have been bishop David Walker, of Broken Bay in northern Sydney. The old old story, and Egan used the old methods, described by Colm O'Gorman in his book Beyond Belief, written from the perspective of an abuse victim in Ireland. He inveigled himself into the family, winning their trust and respect, thus throwing the poor child into a confusion of guilt and self-blame. My advice to anyone who has suffered abuse at the hands of such people is to go to the police straight away. Never, never, never leave it to the church to sort out. In fact many catholic clergy are coming to the same conclusion - they understand the church's divided loyalties and ineffectiveness in this sphere. I wish sometimes people knew about or read this blog, so I could make this advice effective - but the message is already getting through by many other means.

more on Catholic statehood and immunity

Canto: John Allen, a Catholic journalist and author of a bio of the current pope, has written an article, reprinted in the Weekend Australian, in Herr Ratzinger's defence. He makes two main points - legal eagles have no real basis on which to arrest the pope, and second, the pope shouldn't be targeted anyway because 'no senior figure in the Catholic Church has done more to combat priestly sex abuse.'  
Jacinta: Allen describes all this, rather condescendingly, in terms of two 'misunderstandings', one of international law, the other of the pope's record. On the first point, he says that the pope isn't the head of state of the Vatican,  a 43 hectare estate in Rome, but of the Holy See, a non-physical location which is the seat of the 'central government' of the Catholic Church.
Canto: Which seems a mere technical matter - he still has sovereign status, and that is the point. That he is in fact the sovereign head of a non-physical state only makes his position all the more absurd and anomolous.
Jacinta: Or maybe it is physical - maybe he's the sovereign of all the - quite considerable - territory owned by the Catholic Church worldwide.
Canto: No, they couldn't claim that. Those lands are still under the jurisdiction of the states in which they're situated. Or at least nowadays they are - in the earlier halcyon days of the RCC, they may well have claimed that church land was different, inviolate.
Jacinta: Sanctuary! Yes, I remember it from all the old movies. It's interesting that Allen writes of the 'central government' of the Church. Think government, think political entity. Think responsible political entity. On the one hand, when it wants to absolve itself from responsibility, the Catholic hierarchy describes the Church as a devolved organisation, administered at the local level, but when it wants sovereignty it describes itself as a government.
Canto: Well said, Jacinta, and Allen writes this in defence of sovereignty:

Sovereignty is designed to protect the papacy from undue influence by any one nation, allowing the Pope and his diplomatic corps to act as a neutral force of conscience on the global stage. 

This is unconvincing, to say the least. Sovereignty is designed, first and foremost, to raise the status of the pope, and the Catholic Church in general. Sovereignty is not required to protect the pope's 'neutrality' - many organisations operate effectively under the banner of neutrality - the International Red Cross, Medecins sans Frontieres, as well as more clearly driven conscience organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International - without requiring sovereignty.
Jacinta: And what is the Pope doing with a diplomatic corps? Does Amnesty International have a diplomatic corps? Clearly the Vatican has political pretensions, and these pretensions need to be quashed. The best way to do that would be to strip it of statehood. Allen describes the 'legal independence' of the Vatican as allowing the Pope and his envoys to be 'the most important moral critics of the 2003 invasion of Iraq'. I'd like to know how Allen measures 'importance', but that aside, such criticisms don't require 'legal independence'. I'm sure the Quakers were just as morally outraged by that invasion, and just as vocal, but they don't have the resources of the RCC. Legal independence shouldn't enter into it.
Canto: Hey, wasn't it Catholic fantasies about its legal independence that got them into this mess in the first place? They're the last organisation that should be claiming legal independence - they can't be trusted with it.
Jacinta: And I'm bemused by Allen's claim that the RCC acts as a neutral voice of conscience. Can a conscience be neutral? The Catholic Church, to be fair, campaigns on a number of issues, such as the alleviation of poverty and the prevention of war, which are unobjectionable, to me at least, but it also lobbies on a number of issues from an ultra-conservative position - on abortion, on homosexuality [and just about everything related to sex], on stem cell research and so forth. A neutral voice of conscience? I hardly think so.
Canto: Now let's move on, more briefly, to the second point - the 'misunderstanding' about the pope's attitude towards sexual abuse. Allen praises the pope's role in this, presumably referring to the fact that, in 2001, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he was given responsibility, by the then pope, for investigating cases of priestly child abuse. In other words, the role given to him made it imperative that he do more about it than any other Catholic.
Jacinta: Yes, so even if it's true that he's done more than any other Catholic, that's because it was his position to do so, and it still isn't saying much. After all, nobody would have had anything like the power to bring about change that Ratzinger had after 2001, and on that basis, and considering how changed the public attitude was by that time, his record doesn't seem so impressive. He seems to have held the conservative line largely, downplaying the number of priests involved, extending the statute of limitations to a mere ten years [for internal investigations - thus maintaining the usual lag in basic humanity between Catholic 'law' and the only law that should really matter, the secular law], and sending out a letter to all bishops emphasizing the penalties for breaching the confidentiality of matters under [internal] investigation. Let's maintain the secrecy, gentlemen, our Church depends upon it.
Jacinta: Yes, there was no great change of direction under Ratzinger in those years, and now he's under legitimate scrutiny for not doing enough when matters were brought to his, or his office's, attention. At least John Allen is honest enough in his article to admit that some issues need to be investigated further.
Canto: Yes, and by anyone but the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. No more Catholic immunity, no more Catholic secrecy, no more Canon law!

the vatican's protection racket

Colm O'Gorman, passionate campaigner

Colm O'Gorman's book Beyond Belief is an autobiographical account of the impact, upon himself and his family, of serious sexual abuse at the hands of a paedophile priest, Sean Fortune [who insisted on being addressed as Father Fortune right up to the eve of his suicide]. More than that, though, it's a well-documented account of the appalling, and in some sense harrowing failure of the Catholic hierarchy, in Fortune's diocese and throughout Ireland, to deal with sexual abusers within the priesthood, and its consequent betrayal of children and young people. It also clearly implicates the Vatican in this gross betrayal. Further investigations in other countries have revealed that the betrayals, the cover-ups, the protection rather than the outing of paedophile priests, are to be found in just about every Catholic diocese on the globe. Barely any digging required. It's true of course, that the abuse of children was widespread in many institutions up to a few decades ago, whether those institutions were religious or not, but no institution has been more concerned to protect its own reputation, often at the expense of children, than the Catholic Church, especially at the very top.

This stuff's very much in the media currently, with every armchair pundit having a spray. O'Gorman, as a victim, is very much at the coal-face. For him the key issue is that the power of the Church in Ireland, its unquestioned and unquestionable authority until recently, made it enormously difficult for a powerless adolescent boy to make sense of being abused and raped by an apparently respected member of that mighty institutiion. The church needs to be brought firmly and permanently within the confines of the law.

So it's as much about the abuse of power as the abuse of children, and the problem of course isn't confined to Ireland. The Catholic Church, receding in power and influence in Europe, Australia and especially the USA, where it's unlikely to recover from recent scandals, is still a disturbing authority in Latin America and many African nations. There's surely little doubt that it entrenches its position in those regions through its secretive and high-handed methods. Investigations in Brazil by a team including O'Gorman and reporter Sarah Macdonald found the same old pattern, and it was clear they'd only scraped the surface.

The Vatican itself has made a rod for its back by responding in a belated, half-hearted and blame-shifting way. Here's O'Gorman's response to a Papal letter dealing with the Irish reports into Church abuse cases:

The letter is clearly an effort to restore the credibility of a church rocked by the publication of three state investigations into clerical crimes and church cover ups in Ireland. The Pope has seen all three of these reports.

And yet, disgracefully, he used his letter and this issue to attack one of his favourite targets, secularization. We are asked to believe that the secularization of Irish society led to abuse and cover up. In fact, it is the secularization of society that finally led to the exposure of the crimes of the church. The most horrific abuse was perpetrated, not in a secularised Ireland, but at a time when Irish society was dominated, socially and politically, by the Catholic Church. That the Pope appears to have wilfully ignored this established fact is a blatant and disgraceful deceit. 

Such outraged and pained remarks would once have been dismissed as impertinent by an institution in the ruthless ascendant, but now they're given more credence than anything the former arbiters of Truth can come out with. And few are in doubt that O'Gorman has skewered the Vatican in its dishonesty, arrogance and callousness by pointing out, inter alia, the lack of attention, in the lengthy papal letter, to the sufferers of the abuse, the children and young people under Catholic care.

The self-serving nature of the Catholic hierarchy's response, not only to paedophile priests, but to criticisms of its management of children's homes, and its protection of Catholic war criminals from the second world war to Rwanda and beyond, has done incalculable damage to its brand. The Norman Jewieson film The Statement [2003], based on the book by Brian Moore, presents an ugly but convincing portrayal of the Church's machinations where war criminals are concerned, and its possible complicity in the Rwandan genocide is explored here and on many other websites. Again and again it comes to the same problem - protecting the rights of the clergy, and the laity, above the rights of others, and behaving as if it is above the law. Clearly they won't be getting away with it so easily in the west from now on, but they'll continue to try it on, methinks, in more complaisant states.

Beyond Belief is also a vital record of a personal journey. O'Gorman was abused for some two years by a relentlessly dominating priest, under the noses of his own family. Because of the enormous respect in which the Irish Catholic church was still held in the eighties, the fourteen-year-old couldn't bring himself to divulge what was happening, and took on the guilt for it himself [encouraged by the priest]. This captures a common pattern, but is no less harrowing for that. The effect of this abuse was devastating. O'Gorman left home and became a wanderer in the streets of Dublin, taking some years to find his way back to himself, to release the sense of guilt and corruption from his mind and body. Fortunately, thanks to the support of family and friends, and thanks to his own resilience, he was able to recover, and to become a force for reparation and recovery in others, founding the organisation One in Four [a reference to the proportion of the abused according to one study], to provide psychological and legal assistance to victims, first in London and later in Ireland. He has since become one of the most prominent spokesmen in Ireland for accountability and reform of the Catholic Church and for seeking real justice for its victims. It seems from some lines towards the end of his book that O'Gorman remains a Catholic - always surprising to me as I recall Chekhov's lines - and this makes his challenge to the Vatican all the more difficult to dismiss as 'anti-Catholic skullduggery'.

Reading this book has been rather felicitous for me, timing-wise, with further revelations from Germany coming hard on the heels of those from Ireland and the US, and with the Vatican trying to bluster its way out and getting into more hot water by claiming its mostly down to an anti-Catholicism on a level with anti-Semitism. It's good to see the Vatican lawyers, spin-doctors and supporters are coming out of their shell a bit, breaking their long silence. Now we can see and hear them for what they really are.

Christian claptrap

hilarious sad

It’s Good Friday, the day some people commemorate the execution of a character who they say was the son of a deity – in fact of the only deity who ever existed, in spite of the claimed existence, by members of other cults, of hundreds, if not thousands of other deities. It’s well-known, if not to all the believers of this cult, certainly to the cult’s top brass, that this son of their deity didn’t really die on this day. There is no evidence of any kind providing the date of Jesus’s death by crucifixion – in fact there is no evidence that he was executed at all, and no substantive evidence that he ever lived.

Of course, that is the way of cults. It’s necessary to have faith, not to be fashed by the evidence issue. And on the basis of their fervent faith, Christian leaders of various stripes feel it incumbent upon themselves to lecture us all at this time of the year, on various moral issues, which, due to some apparent mystical link with Jesus, their supernatural cult leader [and deity], they just know about.

Take George Pell, the Australian Catholic, who lectures us on the benefits his particular sect has brought us. His lecture is a disgrace and an insult to the intelligence. I could take apart every single line of it, but that would be tedious. Suffice to pick out the occasional howler. Take this piece of complacent nonsense:

Australians believe everyone is entitled to a fair go because of the Christian teaching that every person, unlike animals, is made in God's image.

Quite apart from the dubious linkage between the ‘fair go’ cliché and Christian belief in our god-like status, this claim, so deliberately made, that people, that’s to say Homo sapiens, are not animals, is a categorical rejection of the whole of biological science. The arrogance of such a claim can only be tolerable to an intelligent member of our species by the recognition that the man who uttered it is an imbecile.

Some of this year’s Easter homilies have stumblingly mentioned the atheist threat, an indication of how rattled they are. And always they go on about how angry atheists are. How fervent, how strident, how evangelical and so forth. Having attended a few atheist and skeptic meet-ups lately, I’m bound to say this is untrue. What I take from these meet-ups is a lot of wit, humour, playfulness, a fair pinch of scorn, and some quite stimulating speculative conversation. Why would atheists be angry about the fact that, in Britain, for example, the number of people professing Christian faith has dropped from 66% to 50% in the last two decades, while the number claiming to be atheist or agnostic has risen to 37%? The trend may not be as fast in Australia, but it’s definitely headed in the same way. Atheists have plenty to smile about.

It’s probably true though, to say that many nonbelievers have sensed that the tide has turned, and they’re happy to jump into the water where they would have been reluctant before. A boxer is never more aggressive than when he has the scent of victory in his nostrils. Writers like P Z Myers, of Pharyngula, no longer feel the need to pull any punches, to the delight of their swelling readership. Christian apologists, whose arguments have been so comprehensively refuted so often, have few options left, and are desperately resorting to insults, and the worst insult they can think of is that nonbelievers are behaving like evangelical Christians.

There are many reasons why Christianity is in recession in the west, but one of them is clearly the abuse of power by religious authorities, most noticeably the Catholic Church.

In the past decade or so, the massive power of the Catholic Church has crumbled under the weight of evidence relating to its profoundly inappropriate handling of serious child abuse by a number of its priests. Every time a diocese has been scrutinised, the same pattern of secrecy, of self-interest, of failure to act, and of consequent intolerable suffering, has been revealed, going back for as many decades as one would wish to, or be able to, investigate. Things are changing, but of course it’s too little, too late, and the most reluctant to accept culpability has been the Vatican itself. Now, moves are afoot to ensure the Pope’s immunity as head of perhaps the world’s most preposterous state [there’s some stiff competition], which is surely as close to an admission of guilt as we’re likely to get from the Vatican. This papal move should be fought on two fronts, neither of which is likely to succeed, at least in the short term. The Vatican should be de-listed as a sovereign state, and immunity for all heads of state should be prohibited. Of course, the consequences of such changes could hardly be underestimated. If the first occurred, it would devastate the Catholic Church, and if the second occurred, the former Bush administration, and its allies, could be prosecuted for the deaths of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqi people.

We may say blithely that this will never happen, but many extraordinary things have happened in recent decades. The question we should ask is, should it happen? Should the Vatican be stripped of its statehood? Should any head of state be immune from prosecution? If we answer yes, with justifications, to each of those questions, then we should work towards achieving those worthy aims.

clerical collar crimes

ex-cardinal R, believed to have signed with the red devils during the recent transfer window

The Catholic church is in the news again, seeking to defend, by blustering attacks on investigative reportage, its more than simply shaky self-image as an institution above the corruptions of the flesh. By the way, if you’re ever in the mood for a juicy read, and plenty of material to heighten your sense of self-righteous superiority, I suggest you google ‘catholic church denies allegations’, and you’ll be guaranteed to garner enough salacious stuff to keep you going for a month of Sundays.

It’s ironic to find the hierarchy of an organization so long tied to oppression, persecution, intimidation and worse crying foul over these carefully investigated and worded allegations, and making noises about witch-hunts. At the same time it’s probably true that liberal papers such as the NYT and the Guardian scent the blood of a wounded beast and are happy to go in for the kill – though I suspect the Catholic church will stagger on for a long time to come.

Of course, if a Pope were to be brought down, that would really be something, and currently it’s the man himself who’s in the crosshairs of the liberal media. The most recent claim from the NYT suggests damning evidence, but the wording is confusing.

 

The claim concerns the church’s treatment of Father Peter Hullermann, described as a known paedophile, in the seventies and eighties [and perhaps beyond]. According to the NYT:

the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was copied in on a memo from his deputy in which the priest was transferred to parish duties in Bavaria that brought him into contact with children. As a result of that decision by the then vicar-general, Father Gerhard Gruber, the priest was able to continue abusing boys, for which he was later tried and convicted.

It’s unclear what ‘copied in’ means here. Was the memo addressed to Ratzinger? Did he sign it? Does the memo still exist? Investigators are apparently still probing the records, and the church is still being evasive. The  former vicar-general, who’s more directly implicated in the scandal, is refusing to answer questions about the matter, all of which raises the question of Catholic immunity.

Immunity has been a major issue, and a cause of much outrage, in Ireland, where three separate inquiries have been conducted into priestly abuse in recent times.  In one of them, the Commission to Inquire into the Dublin Archdiocese, it was found that ‘hundreds  of crimes against children from the 1960s to the 1990s were not reported while police treated clergy as though they were above the law’. Four archbishops at least were involved in the cover-up, and it would be naïve in the extreme to imagine that Dublin was an isolated archdiocese in this respect.

The immunity issue was never spelt out, it seems, but it was taken for granted, from the sixties [before which child abuse hardly seems to have been recognized as an issue at all] through to the eighties, that the Catholic Church, which of course had a position of great power and prestige in Ireland, was beyond the remit of police and legal investigators. Now, with the church being forced to abandon its secrecy and its policy of harm-minimisation [to the reputation of the church that is] at all costs, it’s a matter of playing catch-up, and the revelations will continue to come thick and fast. But immunity is still something that the Catholic Church is determined to cling to, it seems. This sense of immunity, which hangs on an outmoded and destructive tradition, needs to be shredded.

Returning to Ratzinger, the Hullermann scandal comes hard on the heels of another, involving a Father Lawrence Murphy, serial abuser of some 200 deaf children in Wisconsin. Ratzinger was informed, or at least written to, but did nothing. He claims not to have known about the case. It’s true enough, I’m sure that hundreds and thousands of memos and notes and letters would have crossed the desk of the busy and ambitious cardinal in those days – but how many of them would have been about serious, criminal abuse of defenceless children? These should never have been ignored, though it’s possible that in this case the letter was intercepted by some underling [which might exonerate Ratzinger, but it would inculpate the Catholic hierarchy all the more].

An op-ed piece in the NYT yesterday, written by Maureen Dowd, whimsically argued for a Nope instead of a Pope next time round – or perhaps immediately, after Ratzinger’s impeachment or whatever. By a Nope, she means a nun-pope. Given everything we know about the Catholic Church and the papacy, it’s a laughable suggestion, even though, given all that we know about good governance, sanity, openness and trust, it’s the soundest option available.

The appalling attitude of the Catholic hierarchy to women is one of the major reasons why it’s been on the nose for centuries. Its appalling attitude to other religions and to ‘heretics’ is another reason of course, but you can always put that down to in-group prejudice and the need to patrol the margins, to clamp down on heterodoxy all the more when the orthodoxy is essentially arbitrary. But without doubt the church’s hostile attitude to women wielding power, together with the church’s own powerful position from the fourth or fifth century CE until quite recently, has had a disastrous impact on the position of women in the west. Sarah, an avid reader of ‘historicals’, as she calls them, recently read a book called Godiva [apparently pronounced Godeeva],  about the eleventh century lady of Coventry, which featured this interesting postscript:

… the historical Godiva lived at a moment in time when the history of women was about to take a turn for the worse. Up until the age of the Norman Conquest women throughout Britain, whether in England, Wales or Ireland, could inherit and bequeath substantial property, including land. Women could also instigate divorce [where there were grounds that were legally acceptable], and retain access to their children and to their share of the marital property. Widows and divorced women could also remarry. During marriage, women were protected by law against violence and neglect and were not, in general, prohibited from practising specific crafts or skills, or from riding, bearing arms or travelling. The basic social model for the pre-Conquest adult woman was that of a partner in a marital relationship: sometimes a lesser partner, often equal and occasionally superior.

Over the centuries following the Norman Conquest, under the influence of Church lawyers, all these advantages that women in Britain had hitherto possessed withered away and passed into history, leaving women of all social ranks subject to vastly increased male authority in the family, dispossessed of property in everything but name, and in general degraded to a state of inferiority – disarmed in an age of ‘chivalry’, unemployed in an age of guilds, and uneducated in an age of growing literacy. Men and women were set on routes of social change that split the age-old customs of partnership and introduced the enmity of the genders. The overwhelming responsibility for this unhappy change is borne by the Catholic Church, which obtained jurisdiction in all matters to do with the family and pushed forward an agenda for the dispossession of women – especially powerful, landowning women – which found keen support in ruling military circles in Norman England [from the postscript to Godiva, Nerys Jones].

I suspect there’s much truth in these lines. The Catholic Church, throughout its long history, has been socially and politically disastrous for women, and it would continue to be so, if given the power. It has changed but little, and that little with great reluctance and against its own eternally self-serving judgment.