Guest post: In following the higher commands of God
Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Like shards of glass stuck in your brain.
I have just read the Croatian writer Daša Drndić’s extraordinary novel-cum-documentary, ‘Trieste’, which is about the destruction of the Italian Jews. A number of Jewish families gave their children to the Catholic Church for safe-keeping. After the defeat of Naziism & the Fascists, the Catholic Church refused to return the children to their families. Monsignor Angelo Roncall, papal nuncio to France and future Pope John XXIII was required to ensure that the Church retained supervision and guardianship over Jewish children who were baptised. Jewish children who had been baptised were on no account to be handed over to Jewish agencies with responsibility for the care of children, since these agencies could not guarantee the further Christian upbringing of these Jewish children, and could not be reunited with their families, assuming these had survived, who would not agree to continue their Christian upbringing…
This of course meant that virtually none of these Jewish children were reunited with their families. The Church used every bureaucratic obfuscation in order to prevent it.
I recommend reading pages 280-284 of ‘Trieste’ (at least – read the whole thing if you can), from which I have adapted the above.
Why? Because the Church’s first priority is ‘saving souls’. Unbaptised children’s fate after death was anomalous (though there was limbo for centuries), and the fate of children brought up in Judaism was, well… unless they were baptised and brought into the Catholic faith. Therefore the Church is permitted, in following the higher commands of God, to ignore any human law and to behave in the most dishonest and inhumane ways in order to ensure that its first priority is maintained.
The same applies to abortion, of course, so that the Church is perfectly happy that a woman should go to prison for many years for having a miscarriage or that an adolescent girl impregnated by some close relative or raped by some man should have to bear the child, as happens in El Salvador, where there is a ban on abortion in any circumstances that the Church supports. But souls are being saved! For unwanted babies or babies who will not survive outside the womb or may kill their mothers in childbirth may be christened.
This putting of ‘God’s law’ above any human law, so that the latter may be broken or twisted with impunity in the name of the former, runs through Catholicism, whose priests are really mages, able to perform the powerfully magical act, conferred by God, of turning wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ. One need only read Chesterton, whom I now loathe with a passion though I enjoyed his Father Brown stories in youth when I didn’t recognise their implications. There is a fascination in them with the immense power conferred by God on ministering priests, who are therefore quite within their rights to break mere human law. Father Brown, being God’s representative on earth, is able to act as a god, and he and Chesterton rejoice in it.
Wow. My guest post generated another guest post. Sort of like dominoes.
It can happen.
Could be the start of a runaway effect. What has iknklast unleashed?
“This putting of ‘God’s law’ above any human law, so that the latter may be broken or twisted with impunity in the name of the former, runs through Catholicism, whose priests are really mages.”
There it is in a nutshell. Religion confers power: to the priest and on up the hierarchy, and from the hierarchy to the congregation of believers.
Yes, it confers power. And the fact that it does is something that in particular Christianity ignores or pretends does not exist.
Also, any religious organisation is necessarily a political organisation, despite all the protestations to the contrary – the idea that religion is ‘above’ politics and that it is therefore not good form to address someone’s religious beliefs (as in the case of Amy Coney Barrett) is nonsense, and always has been (look at history), and it is nonsense that is trotted out in bad faith. The Holy See has no illusions about its political nature, but cynically pretends that it possesses no such nature. It was granted the status a Non-Member State and maintains a permanent observer Mission at the United Nations, and is allowed to vote in various UN conferences and to participate in the General Assembly discussions and consensus agreements. Anglican bishops are Members of the House of Lords in the UK. From Wikipedia:
‘The Lords Spiritual at first declared themselves entirely outside the jurisdiction of secular authorities; the question of trial in the House of Lords did not arise. When papal authority was great, the King could do little but admit a lack of jurisdiction over the prelates. Later, however, when the power of the Pope in England was reduced, the Lords Spiritual came under the authority of the secular courts. The jurisdiction of the common courts was clearly established by the time of Henry VIII, who declared himself head of the Church of England in place of the Pope, ending the constitutional power of the Roman Catholic Church in England.’
Nevertheless, the bishops vote on all sorts of matters in the House of Lords. There have been some pretty nasty Archbishops of Canterbury, the most recent being George Carey, another coverer-up of sexual abuse by a bishop.
I’m reminded of Steven Weinberg’s comment:
Unfortunately at least some of the people who do these awful things really do think they’re following God’s wishes. The other evening we were watching the Danish series Kidnapping, in which the nuns in a convent were looking after unmarried pregnant women, delivering each baby, and then handing it over for adoption even if the mother wanted to keep the baby to bring up herself.
Athel # 7. But it is not just religion that does this. This kind of thing runs through all that is human. Political movements – in particular Communism, which I suppose one can regard as a quasi-religion – allow this; as, I’m afraid, does the dogmatic capitalism that is destroying the world, and destroying society, particularly in Anglophone nations. I remember also Karl Polyani remarking, somewhere in his ‘The Great Transformation’, how at the time of the Great Famine in Ireland (as well as at other times), people who seem to have been otherwise reasonably well-meaning, ‘steeled themselves with science’ and thereby allowed huge suffering. Not many British or American people bothered their heads about the bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc. This is what we are.