We know our rights!
The Vatican is restless, and fretful, and aggrieved. The Vatican thinks it’s all most unfair.
the Vatican is concerned about the way in which human rights are being used to regulate the activities of church organisations or to restrict religious displays in public places. For example, the decision of the European Court of Human Rights to order the removal of crucifixes from the walls of state schools in Italy was greeted with dismay by Catholics.
Why? What business do ‘Catholics’ have being dismayed about such a thing? Do the state schools belong to them? No. Do they have authority over state schools? No.* So what business would they have sticking their paraphernalia on the walls of classrooms in state schools? And why, looking at the matter from a wider perspecitve, would it be a good thing for classrooms to have lethal torture machines nailed to their walls? They’re nasty, ugly, sick things if you look at them from outside the religion – yet a particular religion wants to impose them on state school classrooms. It’s a peculiar religion, too – it frets about its right to impose lethal torture devices on the attention of school children, but it’s debonair about the rights of school children to be protected from priestly rapists. It has disordered priorities, if you ask me.
*Do they? Is Italy worse than I realize?
…human rights are being used to regulate the activities of church organisations…
Can’t be having our activities regulated now, can we? Where would that lead?
I had a discussion about this on facebook with someone who said: Look at all these laws, etc. restricting religion etc. such as someone getting fired for talking about bashing gays. – He then gave a list. I replied that the list is impressive – now we need to make it ten times larger! I chastised him for trying to hide his xenophobia, racism and misogyny.
In other words, Catholics are upset that human rights are being used as a reason to curtail their abuses of human rights.
I remember attending a confirmation ceremony for the children of a friend where, after the ceremony, the priest gave a sermon(?) of guidance for the future. The phrase that stuck in my mind was “Do not be seduced by the siren call of ‘human rights’, there are no ‘human rights’, only God’s Laws”.
Jeezis, really? Do you remember the denomination, Tom?
Stephen – is ‘here’ Spain? Or Chile? Or somewhere else?
Here is Spain. José Bono is currently the speaker of the Parliament, and seems to be seen as well-respected and honest.
Latin American affairs are closely followed here.
Actually there are a number of prominent people in public life in Spain, very strong Catholics, and who really seem to be decent. Bono is one, another is Baltasar Garzón, the magistrate who prosecuted Pinochet and is the scourge of ETA and other abusers of human rights around the world.
Abortion rights are _extremely_ limited in S America in general. The Vatican has immense influence, even in the southern cone, the most developed part. I saw a photo of Ben16 a few days ago with the presidents of Chile and Argentina (both are women BTW). They were thanking him for the Vatican’s mediation in a boundary dispute.
Garzón is one of my heroes. I still remember the day Pinochet got busted.
I know, about abortion and S. America and the church. There’s a discussion of that in Does God Hate Women?. Daniel Ortega is decidedly not one of my heroes – the bastard.
Justine McCarthy (journalist threatened with rape by Bishop Brendan Comiskey) has a good article in the Sunday Irish Times.
“In the country we call Mother Ireland, the church that calls itself Mother Church has behaved since the inception of the state as if it despises women. It claims to venerate the Madonna, but my mother and her generation, and the generations before them, had to be “churched” after childbirth; purified after the dirty deed of producing human life”
Donal Murray has asked his congregation to pray for HIM, while he reflects on the future.
“Evidence has been given on behalf of the tortured in Ireland, and judgment has been delivered. But we still haven’t the guts to put the torturers and their protectors in the dock. We haven’t even stripped them of their awesome power. And dear god, our victims were children.”
Too true! The Vatican will protect them to the last.
Eimer O’ Kelly (Irish Independent) as with above journalist, has been very empathetic towards victims/survivors of institutional abuse in her reportage of abuse over the years, and is certainly not to be found wanting again in relation to the Murphy Report.