What the pope said
I watched part of the pope’s speech at Westminster Hall on C-Span yesterday evening. He’s sure as hell not what you’d call charismatic, or even tolerable to listen to – fast, whispery, monotone – not fun. But the substance is what counts. The point is what he said.
Britain has emerged as a pluralist democracy which places great value on freedom of speech, freedom of political affiliation and respect for the rule of law, with a strong sense of the individual’s rights and duties, and of the equality of all citizens before the law.While couched in different language, Catholic social teaching has much in common with this approach, in its overriding concern to safeguard the unique dignity of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God.
No it doesn’t. The Catholic church does not have an overriding concern to safeguard the unique dignity of every human person. If it did it wouldn’t have let its priests fuck little boys in the ass, as Tim Minchin so elegantly put it. If it did it wouldn’t think it better for a woman to die than to abort a pregnancy. If it did it wouldn’t tell people not to use condoms during an Aids epidemic – if it did it wouldn’t tell people not to use contraception, period. If it did it wouldn’t have such scorching contempt for the notion that women should be allowed to be priests.
If the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident…
Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person.
Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century.
But religion was around then, offering its “corrective” – but the Catholic church was perfectly fine with slavery at the time, and it didn’t do much to “correct” Hitler, either. So what is the pope thinking of? That’s not clear. Perhaps he’s just hoping no one will notice that, and instead people will just think the Catholic church is just the ticket for a “corrective” now. That would be a stupid thing to think. The Catholic church has an absolutely terrible record of “taking full account of the dignity of the human person.” It’s been taking full account of the dignity of the Catholic church, but that’s not the same thing.
I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalisation of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance.There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere.
He says, talking to a hall full of former prime ministers and other movers and shakers. He says, in the middle of a news-dominating trip to a mostly secular and/or Protestant country. He says, having received an amount and quality of deference and attention that would have made an emperor blush.
there are those who argue – paradoxically with the intention of eliminating discrimination – that Christians in public roles should be required at times to act against their conscience.These are worrying signs of a failure to appreciate not only the rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but also the legitimate role of religion in the public square.
“Their conscience” being the bit of them that thinks gays are icky and wants to treat them as different from and worse than other people. “The rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion” being the rights of people to treat certain sets of people as inferiors. That’s what this reactionary theocratic bastard is telling the British state – and complaining about being marginalized while he does it.
The Roman Catholic Church misuses the word ‘dignity’. Medical ethicists nowadays tend to believe that the idea of dignity is empty, but I disagree. Dignity pertains to a person’s self-regard or respect, plus something that pertains to the person because of his or her ability to make autonomous choices, and this use may survive the Roman Catholic misuse of the term. Self respect and autonomy are, I think, clearly related. There is, I believe, sufficient ground for this interpretation in both Greek philosophical usage as well as the usage of the church over the centuries.
The modern Roman Catholic Church has made a completely idiosyncratic decision to use the word ‘dignity’ to apply to two unrelated things: (i) to the mere fact of biological life in anything biologically human from conception until death. (They usually add ‘natural’ to death, but there is no clear definition of what natural death would look like in a cultural context.) (ii) to the natural law understanding of what it means to live a ethical life. Thus, conscience applies, in the first place, to life from conception to “natural” death, and in the second, to what can be construed as “natural” ethically, which rules out, for example, all “unnatural uses of sexuality,” such as masturbation, homosexual sexual acts, sex outside of marriage, contraception, etc.
These are the foci of human dignity from the Roman Catholic point of view. Other aspects of so-called Catholic social teaching are simply utilitarian concerns, except insofar as the church’s reputation and status are affected. Thus, in a South America crippled by tyranny and greed, the church opposed liberation theology, which tried to combine aspects of socialism with catholic social ethics. The church’s prerogatives and the prerogatives of believers, especially those with political power, are protected, and the interests of those who disagree with the church’s stand on any issue related to the church’s understanding of ethical priorities (especially the two principles of human dignity adumbrated above) are secondary. The church is essentially autocratic and totalitarian, and does not provide for any freedom outside of the limits it prescribes. The man is a monster, and, in my view, the church he leads is monstrous. Here ends the lesson. As you say:
Yes. Everyone who disagrees. This is not to deny some of the good work that catholics and catholic agencies do, but it is my conviction that the good it does is at variance with its autocratic/totalitarian nature. This is amply in evidence in practically everything concerning the matter of the sexual abuse and rape of children. (And not only of children, apparently, but the sexual abuse of women in religious orders in certain parts of the world.)
I was at the protest the pope meeting at Conway Hall here in London, a rather raucous affair. One of the things that really struck me was when one of the apologists there, Ivery from Catholic Voices I think it was, stood up and argued for the Pope’s injunction against condoms. It was a strange thing, and one of only two occasions when I felt compelled to boo, but rather than make the case that makes the most sense from a Catholic perspective, that this whole thing is about religious purity, he felt compelled to lie about the impact of condom use. He really did repeat the canard about condoms increasing the spread of HIV.
Now I can understand why he did this, the idea that the state of your willy matters more to the Church than the actual lives of people is horribly anachronistic but that in itself tells me all I need to know. The Church has no moral authority and it knows it because push comes to shove, it doesn’t make religious arguments for its morality, it makes secular arguments. This is what is really evil about the Pope’s comments about rising secularism because if the modern world is moral at all, it’s moral because secular principles have made it so.
But of course the church does this itself. As many people have pointed out before, there are injunctions in the bible, particularly the Old Testament, particularly Leviticus, that contain injunctions that would horrify people if they were applied now. The catholic church cherry-picks its doctrine by applying the social consensus, so it’s disingenuous of this pope to suggest that this process is ‘fragile’ if applied in wider society.
Phill:
I agree completely. The point I was making was what is it that the religious are appealing to when they make those decisions about what to keep; it’s not religious principles, it’s secular and atheist ones. It’s not simply that religion is on the same level morally as us secularists, it’s that when they are acting morally at all, they’re doing so because of us.
The fact that our laws and morals emerge from a social consensus is actually the source of their robustness. They can change as our society evolves. Rules promulgated by any arbitrary authority are inherently fragile and become increasingly brittle over time.
You don’t need to appeal to the Bible (nor is it necessarily appropriate when dealing the Catholics) to refute the contention that religious teachings are superior to human reasoning. The long history of the church itself is sufficient.
“Leader of declining minority non-state religion previously banned by government argues against secularism.”
Jim:
I might be wrong here, but I don’t think that dictums such as “slavery is wrong” or “rape is wrong” are going to cease to be moral so their ability to change and develop can’t be what defines them. I’d argue the reason secular principles are so much more robust is that they come from a sufficiently broad sense of who and what matters when we’re making ethical condirations.
‘the legitimate role of religion in the public square’; well, as to whether it is legitimate is questionable, but the remark at least draws attention to the necessarily public nature of religion, which is something that our liberal believers have been so eager to deny and ignore (the lot at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen blog, for example, with their touching faith in the ‘metaphorical’ and private nature of religion). Yes, I would say, make religion as public as possible, and stop trying to pretend that it isn’t, and let us have a proper debate: too often the debate does not take place because the religious assert that 1) religion is a private matter (between every individual and his/her god), and 2) that religion is somehow exempt from the sort of questioning that anything else gets. The Catholics, the Mormons, the Anglicans, the various fundamentalists are up to their eyes in trying to influence political processes while simultaneously trying to pretend they are not.
Ye gods I do miss Pauly Two. For all his faults, politics and throwback beliefs there was always a certain dignity to his approach. A respectful grace while he addressed the faithful and the non-faithful alike. A glimmer of hope and even evidence of fresh air while he was around. Mind you, not a blast of fresh air, just evidence of a breeze. And in the dense and cloistered halls of the Vatican, any evidence of oxygen was an amazing thing. That is, before he was so old as to be catatonic and the church simply wheeled him out to wave and mutter at the crowds. Ratzi makes my skin crawl, everything from his facial expressions to his deliberate choice of words makes me wonder wearily about where this church is going.
Catholicism is not a reason-distorting ideology? Has B-Rat considered, for example, the doctrine of transubstantiation?
So, he’s calling for an increased role for religion in the formulation of political policies as a “corrective” to the inherently “fragile” nature of public consensus.
Setting aside the insurmountable difficulties posed by the multifarious conflicting claims to authority within Christianity itself (let alone religion in general), something which itself would demand the kind of consensus he’s dismissing, just what can we reasonably expect to be the consequence of giving him what he asks?
We need look no further than the Catholic church itself. They’ve had almost complete freedom for 2000 years to let the Catholic “corrective” run free and create precisely the kind of framework he’s proposing. The policies and practices which govern the church’s offices and institutions should therefore be a shining beacon of ethical perfection.
As the recent enquiries into the Catholic institutions in Ireland demonstrate, it was not uncommon for the fragile, wishy-washy, public consensus based secular authorities to defer to the robust, ethically pure authority of the church in matters of abuse. Surely, the results of such interventions, on Ratzinger’s account, should be examples for us all to follow.
Why does anyone still assume that he has anything of value to contribute to the subject of ethics and morality?
On this side of the pond:
ass = animal like a donkey
arse = thing you sit on
Is it different over there, cousin?