Year: 2010

  • More Petulant Bullying Confusion from Bunting

    New atheists, shoddiness, sheer philosophical illiteracy, sheer aggressive intolerance, violent.

  • Individual Rights and Collective Responsibility

    The standard collectivist critique of individual rights has been with us a long time. It was best formulated in its classic outlines by the Catholic Church during the nineteenth century, amidst a great many cries for social and political change. The line the Church took at the time was essentially to say that rights cannot be understood without respect to “duties,” and that suffering and self-sacrifice are great virtues against which the individual should not be protected. As the classic statement on Catholic social teaching, the Rerum Novarum (1891), puts it, “The… pains and hardships of life will have no end or cessation on earth; for the consequences of sin are bitter and hard to bear, and they must accompany man so long as life lasts.” Rights guarantees, and efforts at social reform, therefore, prevent individuals from properly suffering. By endlessly insisting on individual rights, the document goes on to state, our modern societies tear apart the harmony of the community and lead to unrealistic calls for equality. “The great mistake… is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict… Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order.”

    To summarize the religious objection to individual rights, then, such rights guarantee too much to the individual. They destroy social solidarity in the long run by fulfilling the avaricious whims of each person and by accepting as unavoidable endless conflicts of competing rights claims. They leave individuals free from collective constraints: free, that is, to be self-centered, even callous.

    This is the most baffling sort of criticism human rights activists have to face. On the surface, in fact, it may appear utterly nonsensical. The argument is that by protecting people from injustice, human rights leave individuals free to pursue selfish objectives. If this is true, and standing up for the wellbeing of others furthers selfishness, then any opposition to oppression throughout human history has been done in the name of selfishness. To take an example close to the religious opponents of individual rights, we might say that by this logic, Jesus and St. Francis of Assisi were promoting selfishness when they gave all they had to the poor, since the poor could then spend whatever they received on self-centered objectives.

    The ways in which such an ideology is useful to the powerful have been made only too obvious by history. Women’s liberation in the 19th century was condemned as viciously self-centered, because it emphasized a woman’s freedom to make autonomous choices. What religious opponents of early feminism insisted was that suffering and self-sacrifice were virtuous, so patriarchal domination must be encouraged. But of course, in a patriarchal system, the ones doing the suffering are women, particularly lower class women, while powerful men are more capable than ever of pursuing selfish objectives. The entire doctrine of selflessness and self-sacrifice therefore gets turned on its head, becoming the perfect cover for all varieties of greed and domination.

    This is all clear enough. Strange as it may seem, however, it must be said that many of the major intellectuals who have criticized human rights as overly selfish have been anything but friends to injustice. It is these more humane arguments which we must examine and refute if we wish to defend human rights.

    One might debate the merits of Karl Marx as an historical prognosticator, but his vision of the ideal society was a desirable one. It was intended to be a society in which human individuals related to one another in a fundamentally affectionate and noncoercive way. Tied in with this was a serious critique of human rights, or what Marx would have dismissed as “bourgeois rights.” This is the line of thinking advanced in his “On the Jewish Question,” which derides rights as being useful only to “egoistic man.” It is only because people are self-interested and alienated from one another in capitalist society that such societies require rights guarantees. Once people get in touch with their more elementary human affections and natural solidarities, such rights won’t even be necessary, according to Marx.

    Simone Weil, the French intellectual, pursued a similar line of attack. One might have thought that human rights would be an unlikely target for a Resistance fighter and a participant on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, yet Weil eventually came to feel that rights only made sense in a world of privilege and inequality, even when those rights were meant to be equal rights. She felt that rights turn people out of their traditional communities and make them into autonomous dupes obsessed with their own self-interest and greed. When people are driven by motives such as these, the only possible result can be cruelty, narcissism, and inequality. Rights, even equal rights, are therefore simply an attempt to extend “privilege” to the underprivileged, writes Weil, which is fundamentally absurd because privilege can only ever be the product of inequality.

    Common to these and similar ideas is the belief that rights serve the self-interest of the individual and diminish her love and affection for other people. If this were true, rights would have a great deal to answer for. But I think that common sense and the political conscience of most people tells them that it is not true at all, which is why the human rights movement enjoys a great deal of moral esteem.

    The most important thing to insist in the face of Marx’s and Weil’s criticisms is that human rights are not a self-interested doctrine. We know this to be true because people devote their lives and livelihoods every day to defending the human rights of others. Bertrand Russell declared that the motivating force in his life was an “almost unbearable pity for the sufferings of mankind,” and this could be said, in greater or lesser degrees, of every major social reformer in history. Many of these held secular or humanistic views—the very same that are erroneously associated with selfishness and materialism—yet they were the ones on the front lines of every struggle for greater compassion in human affairs. The bishops and deacons of their days, meanwhile, were often nowhere to be found, or else complacently siding with the powerful.

    This is a truth commonly understood: that people fighting for human rights are not animated by self-interest or callous self-regard. In fact, human rights arise out of our most fundamental collective moral imperative: namely, to protect the weak and vulnerable from harm. Empathy is where they begin and end.

    According to Lynn Hunt’s fantastic book, Inventing Human Rights, rights language grew up in tandem with eighteenth century epistolary novels, such as Richardson’s Clarissa and Rousseau’s Julie, which introduced empathy into fiction and extended human feeling across class boundaries. By presenting the lives and needs of servants and governesses (women at that!) these novels made possible a kind of affectionate identification that traditional literature could not provide. Even if modern readers have a hard time relating to these sentimental eighteenth century novels, we can see the same sort of effect at work in Charlotte Bronte and other later writers. The goal of the author is clearly to present the hero or heroine as an individual worthy of respect, dignity, and personhood. As Jane Eyre declares at one point to Mr. Rochester: “Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings?… Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart!” This is not a self-interested or individualistic ideal—precisely because it insists on the rights of individuals!

    However, Weil might respond that even as human rights activists compassionately struggle for the rights of others, their efforts to do so will ultimately set back their own goals. Once rights are guaranteed to all people, those very same rights will turn the world into a cesspool of greed, with each autonomous citizen pursuing her own goals at the expense of everyone else.

    I think we would agree with her that sadism and callousness can exist even amidst a robust human rights regime. If you doubt it, just read Martin Amis’ Money. New York and Hollywood do well compared to Zimbabwe when it comes to human rights standards, but if we recognize any piece of reality in Amis’ novel, we see that these places are no strangers to greed and depravity.

    We also experience on a daily basis the fact that human beings can still be degraded even while their legal rights are respected. Modern societies are notoriously prone to coupling equal rights with savagely unequal social realities. People are degraded by inequality on both sides of the barrier. The poor obviously suffer all sorts of indignities, but they are not alone. The well-off are also degraded by the nature of ruthless competition. Marx pointed out that if you build a castle next to a cottage, the cottage becomes a hut. This sets off an endless struggle for greater and greater success, not to procure some useful end, but to outdo one’s peers. Build an even bigger castle next to the first and it becomes a hut as well.

    Human rights such as those embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) cannot solve all of the world’s problems. They do not promise an antidote to these forms of degradation or oppression. To argue that they can be used as the sole basis for a complete theory of human flourishing is a bad idea, because it might encourage the notion that our only moral duties are to respect minimal human rights. If we want to live in a more compassionate, egalitarian society, we need to find ideals of life which don’t base the worth of the individual on success or material gain. Our ideal of life should be that of self-sacrifice for the goal of social betterment, compassion, and justice.

    All this being said, however, Weil is ultimately and unforgivably wrong when she denounces human rights. Rights can coexist, as we have seen, with inequality and degradation, but they are goods in and of themselves. They may not alone produce perfectly compassionate societies, but they still take us a few steps in the right direction And if we ever want to go further, toward even more egalitarian and compassionate social arrangements, we at least need to start with these minimums. People can’t be expected to start caring about everyone all at once or lavishing love and compassion on the world if they don’t at least begin by respecting others enough not to torture or kill them.

    As for greater goals of equality, these aren’t necessarily part of the human rights movement, and human rights activists may feel quite differently about them. Someone like Michael Ignatieff embraces human rights while being perfectly sanguine about capitalist inequality. Meanwhile, I would identify more with democratic socialism and wouldn’t find anything good to say for any form of inequality. I also feel that in order for equal rights to ever be respected, we are going to have to have equal social relations at home and abroad. However, a human rights activist might not necessarily agree, yet we would both support human rights and make common cause for their advancement. This does not mean that the differences between capitalists and democratic socialists are insignificant. But any humane person must recognize that regardless of one’s ultimate social goals, the starting place for the betterment of society is to do away with unjust practices and achieve basic human rights. Our ideals as to how to behave justly in our personal lives should certainly be far more comprehensive, but that does not diminish the value of legal minimums.

    We may blame inequality for the modern worlds’ callousness and self-centeredness. In the United States, we see legions of “tea-partiers” and right-wingers today desperately clinging to privilege: small wonder that they do so when privilege is what seems to define a person’s self-worth in our societies. It is inequality which accounts for such pathological worldviews. But we cannot by any stretch of the imagination blame human rights. The effort to do away with all inequality must begin with rights. They are the starting-point, if not the end-point, of egalitarian justice.

    Let us take this one step further, and state that the UDHR is in some ways a collectivist document. In its first article, it does not insist that people should behave callously or selfishly toward one another while respecting a bare moral standard: it insists rather that they should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood. It is collectivist, therefore, but not in a way that any oppressive collective would recognize, because it sees that a truly affectionate and egalitarian community cannot have outsiders or “others” deprived of rights. We might even go so far as to declare that this sort of community is inextricably bound up with human rights.

  • Letters for April, 2010

    Letters for April, 2010.

  • Bunting pulls out the ‘new atheist’ file yet again

    Another consignment of rebarbative truculent inaccurate wool from Madeleine Bunting. About…? The Vatican’s petulant cries of ‘petty gossip’ in response to revelations of its settled habit of concealing and protecting child rape? No. The ‘new’ atheists – that’s what’s got her worked up: the endless unappeasable horror of the ‘new’ atheists. Their wrongness. Their violence. Their ignorance. Their deafness to the overwhelming arguments of Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton.

    …in the years since the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in 2006 and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great in 2007, there has been an addition every few weeks from enraged philosophers, theologians, historians and journalists, all trying to convince readers of the shoddiness of the New Atheists.

    Indeed there has. There has been, in fact, a reaction; there has been a classic backlash. There has been a prolific, energetic, often very hostile and very inaccurate backlash. Bunting herself is a part of it – she has written piece after petulant piece complaining of the ‘new’ atheists. This is another. She is part of the very loud and populous chorus trying to convince readers of the shoddiness of the shoddiness of the ‘new’ atheists. They could all be right, of course, but the mere fact that they exist doesn’t show that they are right. The wild inaccuracy that so many of them resort to tends to make me think they aren’t right, at least in their overarching assumption that there is something obviously illegitimate about explicit argumentative atheism. Bunting of course takes this assumption entirely for granted.

    Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens convey the fury of Old Testament prophets, while their opponents struggle in various well-mannered ways to contain theirs.

    Ohhhhhhh no they don’t. Bunting doesn’t, for one. Chris Hedges doesn’t for another. Eagleton doesn’t.

    And then, what reason do they have for fury anyway? Why should two or three or four atheist books fill so many people with such fury? Bunting doesn’t say – she just assumes it, because as mentioned she assumes that there is something obviously illegitimate about explicit argumentative atheism.

    From my rough survey I would suggest those with philosophical training are the most irritated by New Atheism, while the journalists seem to enjoy the opportunities the row provides…What staggers the “philosophers” (I use the term loosely to indicate writers who use philosophical arguments) is the sheer philosophical illiteracy of Dawkins. As Terry Eagleton puts it in Reason, Faith and Revolution…

    Stop right there. Eagleton is in no sense as writer who uses philosophical arguments. Eagleton doesn’t argue at all, he simply announces. There is no argument in his book. I looked for it; it isn’t there. Bunting was fooled, as she was meant to be, by Eagleton’s unearned air of omniscience.

    Faced with such ignorance of centuries of philosophical thought, there are two options. Either start from the beginning – Charles Taylor’s 800-page A Secular Age or Karen Armstrong’s speed history of western thought, The Case for God – or go for clever brevity, elegantly skewering the argument in the style of Eagleton or John Cornwell’s Darwin’s Angel. The problem with both genres is they don’t offer the kind of bestselling strident certainty that brought Dawkins such handsome financial rewards.

    What such ignorance of centuries of philosophical thought? Bunting hasn’t shown us any, she has only asserted it. And as for strident certainty – what, exactly, does she think she is offering in this piece and the rest of her body of work? And then the snide remark about Dawkins’s book sales, as if they too were obviously illegitimate.

    She gives us several more paragraphs of warmed-over Armstrong, and finishes by rejoicing that God is being discussed again. (Because there was a time, pre-Dawkins, when God wasn’t discussed? Has she visited the religion section of any bookstores lately? Some of the rows upon rows of books there pre-date 2006.) Then she gets savaged by CisF readers.

  • The Mafia doesn’t give Easter sermons

    Sholto Byrnes, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, doesn’t entirely buy Peter Hitchens’s line on atheism.

    For while Stalin’s atheism may have been a necessary condition for the atrocities he committed — I completely agree with Hitchens that “without God, many more things are possible than are permitted in a Godly order” — it is not a sufficient one. I part company with him when he claims that his preceding sentence proves that which follows it: “Atheism is a licence for ruthlessness, and appeals to the ruthless.”

    Good about parting company, but I part company earlier than that. Atheism is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for committing atrocities, and it isn’t necessarily the case that ‘without God, many more things are possible than are permitted in a Godly order.’ Given holy wars, the inquisition, religious massacres, the revolting ubiquitous cruelty of the Irish church, it just isn’t obvious that atheism permits atrocities any more than theism does. It’s clear that atheism doesn’t rule out horrendous savage murderous violence – but it’s clear that religion doesn’t either. It’s clear that religion doesn’t necessarily make people more compassionate or generous or fair or kind – just as atheism doesn’t. It could be that one or the other tends to do better, but it’s simply not possible to argue that either one reliably prevents – makes not ‘possible’ – any extreme of human brutality.

    In as much as the absence of God leaves any system of morality floundering when it comes to unarguable proof of its truth, Hitchens is on to something. An atheist society does not have the in-built defences against the will of a tyrannous majority that religion would supply, for instance.

    Would, if what? Would, when? The trouble with that thought is that there have (to put it mildly) been theist societies that had no built-in defences against the will of a tyrannous majority, at least none that worked. This is a massive stumbling block for the whole ‘belief in God makes people good’ idea. If belief in God really did make people good – good in the sense that people tend to mean it nowadays: compassionate, non-violent, kind – then there wouldn’t have been so many Christian supporters of slavery in the 19th century US. If belief in God made people good then sharia wouldn’t include so many savage punishments and such relentless limitation of women’s rights and freedom. (Sharia as practiced in the real world. People like to point out that various nasty things are not really part of sharia. Maybe they’re not, but that’s not much help when the relevant people think they are.)

    Atheism too, of course, has no in-built defences against the will of a tyrannous majority. In truth nothing does, apart from constitutions and bills of rights. That’s why such things are needed. Depending on the good will or the religious or atheist conscience of millions of people is a terrible idea. Neither religion nor atheism reliably makes people good, or bad either. On the other hand, religion does give a gloss of pseudo-goodness to bad actions, in the minds of people who have been raised on harsh religious beliefs. Atheism can’t put that kind of gloss on things.

    I was thinking all this earlier today while I read the piece, and then I suddenly bumped into my own name. That’s an odd experience!

    Last summer, I found myself in the middle of a minor fuss after I wrote a scathing review of Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom’s Does God Hate Women? for the Independent on Sunday. Put simply, my objection was that they detailed terrible barbarities perpetrated against women by religious people, chiefly Muslims, and then pretty much laid the blame on religion, again, chiefly Islam, for those crimes.

    Actually it wasn’t the analysis we disagreed with, it was the wild inaccuracy of many of the factual claims, but never mind. Let’s consider the analysis now. I’ll just say what I said there:

    We do lay the blame for certain kinds of barbarities perpetrated against women by religious people on religion, for the reason that the perpetrators of the crimes themselves cite religion as the justification for the crimes. We take them at their word. We quoted people saying things like “We will do what Allah has instructed us” (p 174). Without that, a bunch of men stoning a young girl to death in front of a crowd of people would be universally seen as a criminal act; with it, it is seen by some as pious, and not only permitted but mandated. This fact really does make a difference. It makes the same difference that the phrase “church teachings” makes when the pope and bishops fight equality legislation in the UK.

    We don’t claim that all religion always makes people act like that, or that some religion makes all its adherents act like that. We do claim that religion makes brutalities that would otherwise be obviously unacceptable into pious acts, and that that fact makes a major difference.

    That’s what I said there. Well it’s undeniable, surely. It’s not an all or nothing claim, it’s a something claim. That ‘something’ is not an invention or a fantasy. Just look at the self-righteous way the Vatican hierarchy is carrying on. You don’t see the Mafia acting that way! They don’t give sermons in huge churches saying all this fuss about child rape is just ‘petty gossip.’ They just shoot their way out, or bribe everyone in sight, or both. At least with them there’s no confusion.

  • Anxiety After Terreblanche Murder

    Afrikaner farmers have objected in court to ANC leader singing the old struggle song ‘Kill the Boer’ in public.

  • Vatican Still Complaining of ‘Petty Gossip’

    ‘Holy Father, the people of God are with you and will not let themselves be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment.’

  • Saudi Arabia: Lebanese ‘Sorcerer’ Gets Stay

    Not this Friday, but perhaps next Friday. Horoscopes are ‘condemned as un-Islamic’; off with his head.

  • Demonizing Atheism is a Bad Way to Defend Faith

    ‘People who are given to ruthlessness can always find a justification for it,’ notes Sholto Byrnes.

  • New Scientist Talks to Francisco Ayala

    Religion and science ‘deal with different ways of knowing.’

  • What kind of interface?

    Michael Ruse says why the Templeton Foundation is a good thing.

    More recently, the award has been given to academics working on the science-religion interface. It was therefore appropriate that this year the Prize went to Francisco Ayala, a Spanish-born population geneticist at the University of California at Irvine. Ayala (a former Catholic priest) has long been interested in the science-religion relationship…

    The science-religion interface? What’s that? That’s the kind of thing that Templeton always talks about, but what exactly is it? And what does Michael Ruse think it is?

    It could just mean, or be intended to mean, scientists and religious believers talking. That would certainly be unexceptionable. The trouble is, that doesn’t really seem like a very plausible understanding of what it means. One doesn’t hear about a history-mathematics interface as a way of referring to historians and mathematicians talking, nor does such an activity seem worth millions of dollars of foundation money. As far as I know, Templeton’s idea of the science-religion interface or relationship or whatever is that they are supposed to contribute to or enrich each other. But that’s just what’s contested. Critics think the two don’t have anything to contribute to each other, especially in the direction religion—>science. Ruse seems to be endorsing or at least taking for granted Templeton’s project, without spelling out exactly what he’s saying.

    The Templeton Foundation…is essentially devoted to the promotion of the interaction and harmony between science and religion.

    But interaction in what sense? Just chatting in the halls? Or substantive, disciplinary interaction? It does make a difference, to put it mildly.

    But it’s useless to repine. Ruse goes on to say a lot of wholly irrelevant things, so it turns out that actually this jumble of a piece was just an excuse to tell the world yet again about his expert witness gig in Arkansas and, more amusingly for him, to say rude things about Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne and especially (wait for it) PZ Myers. The closest he gets to explaining why Templeton is all right is to say ‘I don’t see anything morally wrong with someone trying to reconcile science and religion. Clarifying that a little, I don’t see anything morally wrong with religion as such.’ Morally wrong isn’t the issue! The point is that it’s epistemically wrong.

    But all of a sudden at the very end he simply agrees to that, or at least seems to.

    I don’t want to reconcile science and religion if this implies that religion must be true. At most, I want to show that science does not preclude being religious.

    Well – quite. So what did – oh never mind. Ruse just likes to mouth off. It’s pointless to expect him to make sense.

  • NY Times on Vatican’s Rebuke of NY Times

    Cardinal Levada singled out several Times reporters and columnists for criticism.

  • Vatican Official Rebukes New York Times

    Detailed fury at reporting, zero worry about victims.

  • Exiled Murphy May Have Continued Abuse

    He interacted freely with children for the rest of his life, never having been punished by church or secular law.

  • Vatican Quickly Distanced Itself From Remarks

    Yet the official Vatican newspaper published the remarks in its Saturday edition.

  • Angry Reaction to Cantalamessa’s Remarks

    Vatican is saying ‘nothing to do with us’ but the sermon probably circulated for comment at a senior level.

  • Atheists Reject Clerical Attack on Non-belief

    Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen on Friday described non-belief as an ‘assault on God.’

  • Some Speech Deserves to Be Marginalized

    The political freedom to speak your mind does not entail a right to be taken seriously or given deference.

  • Cardinal attends to what really matters

    Ratzinger gave his old job to an American when he (Ratz) was bumped upstairs. Cardinal William Levada now heads Ratzinger’s old Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This week he expressed his sorrow and sympathy for what the church has enabled priests to do to generations of children by…writing a long article saying how awful the New York Times is.

    He starts by singling out Laurie Goodstein.

    Only after eight paragraphs of purple prose does Goodstein reveal that Fr. Murphy, who criminally abused as many as 200 deaf children while working at a school in the Milwaukee Archdiocese from 1950 to 1974, “not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims.”

    But in paragraph 13, commenting on a statement of Fr. Lombardi (the Vatican spokesman) that Church law does not prohibit anyone from reporting cases of abuse to civil authorities, Goodstein writes, “He did not address why that had never happened in this case.” Did she forget, or did her editors not read, what she wrote in paragraph nine about Murphy getting “a pass from the police and prosecutors”?

    Oh dear god – he doesn’t even get it. He doesn’t even get a point as glaring as that. Why does he suppose Murphy got a pass from the police and prosecutors? Does he think all rapers of children get passes from the police and prosecutors? Does it not occur to him that Murphy got such a pass because he was a priest? Does it not occur to him that this hints at the level of undue deference paid to religion even by secular law enforcement, and does it not further occur to him to feel searching anguish at the thought of the kinds of advantage this has given predators? No, it apparently doesn’t, not for a second. He’s apparently much too busy concentrating on His Gang to feel any sympathy or concern for anyone else. And this is all too typical of the selfish self-centered clueless blind morally bankrupt outfit he helps to run.

    As a believer, I have no doubt that Murphy will face the One who judges both the living and the dead.

    And that lack of doubt perhaps helps to explain why your organization does such a crappy job of preventing harm to its subjects right here on planet earth. You have no doubt that everything will be all fixed up later on after everyone is dead. Well how convenient! Meanwhile, let them eat brioche.

    …about a man with and for whom I have the privilege of working, as his “successor” Prefect, a pope whose encyclicals on love and hope and economic virtue have both surprised us and made us think, whose weekly catecheses and Holy Week homilies inspire us, and yes, whose pro-active work to help the Church deal effectively with the sexual abuse of minors continues to enable us today, I ask the Times to reconsider its attack mode about Pope Benedict XVI and give the world a more balanced view of a leader it can and should count on.

    The pope is not our ‘leader.’ He is not ‘a leader.’ He is the head of an archaic reactionary authoritarian religious organization. He is not a leader and he is in no way a leader that ‘the world can and should count on.’ We do not want your leader, Mr Levada.

  • Shed a tear for the sufferings of the Vatican

    Un.Be.Lievable. They still don’t get it. They still think they are the victims. Still! Half the world has explained it to them with one voice, and they still don’t get it!

    The Pope’s preacher today likened recent attacks on the pontiff over the Catholic sex abuse scandal to the “most shameful acts of anti-Semitism”.

    Not ‘attacks by priests on children’ but ‘attacks’ meaning criticism by victims and observers on the pope who helped conceal and perpetuate those very attacks by priests on children – that’s what they’re comparing to anti-Semitism! It’s – it’s – it exhausts my capacity to revile it. The self-pity, the world-blotting egocentrism, the blank inability to grasp the misery of people outside their own circle, the moral imbecility – I lack the words to express my disgust.

    Father Cantalamessa, noting that this year the Jewish festival of Passover and Easter fell during the same week, said that Jews throughout history had been the victims of “collective violence” and drew a comparison with current attacks on the Church over the scandal. Speaking during a ceremony at St Peter’s Basilica commemorating Christ’s Passion, he read to the congregation, which included the Pope, part of a letter that he had received from an unidentified Jewish friend, who said that he was following “with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the Pope and all the faithful of the whole world. The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”

    Tell that to the Magdalens, to the little girls who tore up their hands making rosaries every day, to the children who were raped by the guy who was supposed to be (as Joseph Hoffmann tells us) ‘another Christ.’ Tell them you’re being treated the way Jews were treated in Poland and Germany and Russia from 1942 to 1945. Go ahead. We dare you.