Not possible to stick with the programme
India Knight on the other hand is not accepting the bluster. She’s not interested.
It is simply not possible, having read the papers or watched the news over the past couple of weeks, to stick with the programme. Like many of my generation, I could hardly be described as a good, or even decent, Catholic, but I’d managed to hang on in there, in the vaguest way imaginable.
Vague because it’s hard to pay lip-service to a faith that you feel hates you; a faith that would rather let you die in childbirth than have an abortion, won’t let you take the contraception necessary to prevent said abortion, hates gay people despite having many homosexual priests; a faith that talks ignorant nonsense about HIV and Aids, that would rather watch people die in Africa than let them use a condom; a faith that is unbelievably slow to say sorry about the fact that some of its members are habitual rapists of children.
Quite. And from that point of view, horribly enough, the child abuse scandal is a good thing. Damian Thompson is right in that sense. Because for a lot of people, as Knight indicates, all that other stuff isn’t enough. The fact that it isn’t enough means it just goes on. Since all that other stuff is seriously bad, it’s a good thing that some people are giving up on the church that perpetuates it.
I mean, you know, at some point you just give up. Not one of these things is defensible taken individually. Collectively, they are beyond comprehension. A faith based on central authority and infallibility must understand that failure immediately to condemn the rape of children — in Ireland, in America, in Austria, in Germany, in Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Brazil, so far — is essentially to allow it.
And that therefore they have no moral standing. Period. They have been exposed for what they are, which is just human beings like the rest of us, who are more interested in their own-well being than that of outsiders. Their role in their religion hasn’t given them some special moral alertness or sensitivity that goes beyond what the rest of us have; on the contrary.
Religion — all religion, not just Catholicism — is supposed to be good for the soul, but everything I’ve written about here pollutes mine. You can’t take lessons in morality from people who disgust you.
Exactly.
Good for her for leaving the church. She’s still in its mental grip though, with the last para, in which she seems to think it’s a good thing that Britons on average have had a relatively small number of sexual partners.
At most, it’s neither good nor bad, just a, y’know, thing. But it may actually be a bad thing: you can’t learn much about the variety of human sexual response from having had only five sexual partners, though it’s a lot better than zero or one (and a law of sharply diminishing returns probably applies at some point). Other things being equal, I’d rather the average Briton was better informed.
I think Madeline Bunting needs to get her a bit of India Knight. Just who is Ms. Knight? I haven’t read her before, but this piece was not only spot-on, but stylish to boot.
Here are a few variations on this ongoing theme that might be of interest to B&W readers:
Just ’cause Jesus is involved doesn’t make it not rape culture
Quite. In fact, rather the opposite, given the misogynistic character of Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in specific.
Why Does Congress Allow a Pedophilia-ridden Church to Control Women’s Rights?
Now isn’t that an excellent and pertinent question? Sadly, I think I know the answer, which starts and pretty much ends with numbers: First, count the number of women in Congress. Then, subtract the number of those women who are (1) anti-feminist reactionaries – either firmly ensconced on the religious and political far right themselves, or close enough to vote with them most of the time; or (2) so afraid that they might lose their seats due to misogynistic reactionary voters that they go along with those in group (1). (There’s no real trick to counting the numbers in groups 1 & 2: Count the votes on the Stupak Amendment and you’re done.)
*sigh*
In other news, I had one more go applying a clue bat vigorously to Michael de Dora (comment #44). (This is in reference to OB’s post of March 26, if anyone playing along at home missed it.) Hope does not, however, spring eternal. That’s the end of it for me.
President Richard Nixon got into just such a situation as Ratzinger is now in over the 1974 Watergate break-in. He finished up resigning, but with the greatest reluctance.
The operative word regarding the similarity of the situations is ‘cover up’. Both Nixon and Ratzinger had the power to throw their respective culprits to the wolves, but they both sought salvation in the opposite; trying to arrange things so that the public at large was kept in the dark.
Resignation might be the way out for Ratzinger, but it is clearly not so for the Church. Clear institutional changes are needed to remove the fundamental causes of the many problems. Getting rid of priestly celibacy has been suggested by many commentators, but that would lead to the end of nuns’ celibacy as well, and both would be of huge economic cost to the church. Yet as parishioners bail out in droves, the church will lose income and whatever prestige it has left.
It is also hard to see much future for papal infallibility, compulsory Catholic schooling for Catholic children, or recruitment to religious orders or the priesthood.
I think the Pope is hoping and praying it will all go away. On second thoughts, by now he has probably given up on prayer.
Just when you think that it couldnt possibly get worse for the catholic church, there is a piece today on CiF about the active role of catholic priests and nuns in the the Rwandan genocide. I really didnt know the details of that and it is stomach-turning stuff. One cannot hold the vatican responsible for the tribal loyalties and madnesses of its men and women in Rwanda, but to shield some of the perpetrators and to not evict them from the clerical ranks, simply fucking unbelievable.
Well, it’s true that Nixon resigned with great reluctance, but he had to: they’d have impeached him otherwise, and he knew it. I don’t think there’s any way to impeach someone who is, after all, infallible!
Good for India Knight, though. And yet Tony Blair signed up for this idiocy only a year or two ago — actually signed his name on the dotted line to all the nonsense that the church teaches, quite aside from what was, at the time, well known, that the church was involved in a cover up. And since it was a cover up, we didn’t know — and we many never know — how big of a cover up it is. And the pope talks about petty gossip! It staggers the mind. And this is the guy who is supposed to KNOW — in a pretty heavy sense of the word! This is the man who says that secularism is wayward and immoral, that society is living on the Christian capital of the past, which is running out!
I’ve got it! The sure way out of this mess for the whole RC clerical caste. And as with every breakthrough, the obvious question is why nobody has thought of it before. The answer is…
Two Popes! One in Rome, the other at say, Avignon. A Bad Pope to have the buckets tipped over him daily, and a Good Pope to carry on business as usual.
It can all end with the Bad Pope and all his minions being cast into outer darkness and the Good One’s line of succession reigning in glory for ever. Well at least till the end of the world.
Thanks for that, mirax. Jeezis. I was faintly aware of something about that but had failed to follow it up.