I don’t like the church’s spoon
Madeleine Bunting again, as with the Ryan report last year, almost gets it, but then she drops the ball at the end.
There will be plenty celebrating the Catholic church’s plight, and it is hard not to agree in some part with MacCulloch, that hubris has played a huge part in this institution’s history and its current crisis. But it is also important to acknowledge that this is more tragedy than anything else. For the victims, their families, their congregations – many of whom see no cause for celebration despite their need for truth – and for those causes on which the church has proved a trenchant champion, stirring lazy consciences on the arms race, global inequality and capitalist excess.
Causes don’t need the Catholic church. They really don’t. This is the most fundamental point of the whole loathsome tale, the one that Bunting almost got but then lost again: the church has no moral standing, so it is not useful for stirring lazy consciences. We just don’t need the church’s help on the arms race, global inequality and capitalist excess – especially since it comes at the price of the church’s ‘help’ on abortion and contraception. We don’t look to the Mafia for help with causes, and we don’t look to the Catholic church either.
“Only the most virulent anti-papist could ever have quite envisaged the scale of child abuse and the doggedness of the church’s desire to stifle scandal.”
Why does she fail to go the next obvious step, which would be to praise the most virulent anti-papists as having been the only ones to see the church for what it really is and always has been? She does actually say it, but apparently her loathing of those who got it right all along forces her to be impossibly indirect about it.
I know, isn’t that classic? Only the most virulent anti-papist…er, got it right.
See, Mad, we actually have reasons for being anti-papist. We think all-male hierarchies with holy powers are dangerous – for reasons – and now you see why.
You’re welcome!
In Germany, a Bishop gave a talk and said that the current “hateful commentary” by the media reminded him of the persecution of the Church under the Nazi regime.
He also said the media would be one-sided and not tell the whole story in order to make it seem as if the Church was wholly corrupted.
http://hpd.de/node/9107
Never mind that every single discussion I am aware of had zero or only one person in there who was not a Catholic, often two critics and three or four honest church-goers. Never mind that if one-sided, the discussion leaves too many things out. If the media would actually portray things comparable to what I read in the Boston jury report about child abuse, then public opinion would turn even farther against the Church. Never mind that the pope himself is now directly implicit, not only indirectly for his church law and rulership.
Also, never mind the “persecution of Catholics during the Nazi regime”, a comment that betrays the exact same amount of empathy regarding the major victims of the Nazis then and the victims of child abuse now.
You now what that sounds like? Like someone who’s wholly corrupted. Not surprisingly, the Church is trying to withhold video of the bishop’s comments because withholding evidence is just what they do.
“We just don’t need the church’s help on the arms race, global inequality and capitalist excess – especially since it comes at the price of the church’s ‘help’ on abortion and contraception.”
Indeed…this points up what we discussed earlier about the problems with even liberal adherents of very conservative religions and traditions. A lot of ugly stuff gets carried along with the “good” stuff, because such beliefs cannot be so easily divorced from the institution that’s supposedly the source of this “moral authority.”
Incidentally, I always found it irritating that on the one hand, Catholic bishops’ pronouncements on abortion and so on were said to constitute a breach of the separation of church and state…but when the same bishops spoke against the death penalty or the arms race or fighting poverty, the same people were oddly silent. “Make up your mind!” I remember thinking…and still do! Either it’s acceptable for bishops to sound off about politics or not, not just when it’s “convenient” for your cause. (End rant…but then I’m a stickler for consistency in this area. If nobody can pray in public schools, neither can Muslim students, that kind of thing.)
It has never been clearer than it is today that the Catholic Church has nothing to teach the rest of us about morality and ethics. It is now the hierarchy’s turn to shut up and listen. Maybe they will learn something.
As for Hitler and the Nazi regime: Hitler was baptised a Catholic and never (at least to my knowledge) publicly renounced it. He died a Catholic and was never excommunicated. According to Catholic theology he could have just made it into Heaven, or at least be a time-serving candidate in Purgatory. Right now it is just possible he could be trying to persuade the choir to follow his lead in ‘Deutschland Uber Alles.’
But according to Catholic theology, the Pope has the power to remove him from Heaven if he has made it in. Right now it would be worth the effort as a distraction, because it would get the sex scandals off the front pages, even if only for a little while.
“We just don’t need the church’s help on the arms race, global inequality and capitalist excess – especially since it comes at the price of the church’s ‘help’ on abortion and contraception.”
In the 1970s the peace and anti-nuclear activists were in part legitimised by the media highlighting the involvement of churches and individual christians. Without them the left-dominated campaigns might have been seen as the tools of Soviet information warfare that they really were.
Isn’t the Church position that “nobody but God” knows who will or won’t go to heaven and/or hell, since only God knows a person’s heart (and all that stuff). Even the Pope isn’t privy to that information (supposedly), so even he couldn’t say for sure that, e.g., Hitler is in hell because he MIGHT have repented the moment before he died…or whatever. On the other hand, the saints are supposed to be people whom they KNOW went to heaven…hmmm…
True, there’s not much point in debating such irrational notions, but it’s good to know the “truth” of the matter, ridiculous as it is, so you won’t be accused of building a straw man.
Given the root of the abuse was basically that the Church was using the kids as a means of getting money from the state (In other words, poor kids = cost of sales) and what Hitchens has to say about Mother Theresa’s hospices…
I think the “stirring lazy consciences” has an awful lot more to do with getting money into the Church’s coffers than food into the poor’s bellies.