Author: Ophelia Benson

The pope’s letter has been delivered.

In almost every family in Ireland, there has been someone – a son or a daughter, an aunt or an uncle – who has given his or her life to the Church. Irish families rightly esteem and cherish their loved ones who have dedicated their lives to Christ…In recent decades, however, the Church in your country has had to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society. Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people’s traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values. All too often, the sacramental and devotional practices that sustain faith and enable it to grow, such as frequent confession, daily prayer and annual retreats, were neglected. Significant too was the tendency during this period, also on the part of priests and religious, to adopt ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel.

Oh. It was secularism what did it. Who knew?

At the conclusion of my meeting with the Irish bishops, I asked that Lent this year be set aside as a time to pray for an outpouring of God’s mercy and the Holy Spirit’s gifts of holiness and strength upon the Church in your country…Particular attention should also be given to Eucharistic adoration, and in every diocese there should be churches or chapels specifically devoted to this purpose. I ask parishes, seminaries, religious houses and monasteries to organize periods of Eucharistic adoration, so that all have an opportunity to take part. Through intense prayer before the real presence of the Lord, you can make reparation for the sins of abuse that have done so much harm…

No you can’t. No you can’t. ‘Intense prayer’ is beside the point. ‘The Lord’ is not there. The presence is not real. Magic, and ceremonies, and fiddling about with people who aren’t there, are not any kind of way to make reparations to real people who have suffered real harm. Forget the sodding Eucharistic adoration, and pay attention to this here, the real world, where you and your colleagues fucked up thousands of children. Skip the cant.

Oh look, a new Chris Mooney, just what the world needs. He’s here to tell us the ‘problems’ he has with ‘the radical atheists.’ You’re excited already, aren’t you! And rightly so. He tells a thrilling tale.

Starting in 2005, American public was hit with a fresh wave of secular thought openly criticizing organized religion and religious faith…Many have called these authors and their followers the “New Atheists” – practitioners of a form of atheism that is outspoken and brash in its condemnation of religion and religious belief. These atheists were not content to disbelieve and go on with their lives; they also wanted to let religious beliefs know they were wrong (though it should be added it is not like these men broke into homes; they sold books and wrote blog posts). But this new, bold assault on religion did bring many secularists out of the woodwork – and what made wave perhaps unique was a call by men such as Dawkins and Myers to organize around atheism and sharp rhetoric.

That’s not the most elegant writing we’ve ever seen, but never mind, it’s easy to spot the Mooneyisms – the accusation of ‘openly criticizing religious faith’; the sneer behind ‘brash’ and ‘assault,’ the bizarre notion of organizing around sharp rhetoric. We have been here before.

[I]t is generally agreed that some good did come from these books in that they pushed important issues to the public. However, an issue that received less focus was a more strategic one: the fact that many atheists define their entire lives around unbelief and critique of theism.

No they don’t. And what makes Michael De Dora think he knows they do? He doesn’t say. He perhaps means that many atheists give a lot of time and attention to critique of theism – but he said more than that.

Atheism isn’t enough. This is the first argument against atheism. It is not a philosophy or a worldview, it is a lack of a specific religious belief, and that isn’t enough to carry us forward in any meaningful way.

That’s an argument? For what? That doesn’t look like an argument to me; it looks like a free-standing assertion which doesn’t say much of anything.

This brings us to the second argument: atheists tend to view religion as either the problem, or the cause of the problem, even when other problems are apparent. But while theism is a problem, it is not the problem, and while atheism might be correct, atheism is not the answer.

Oy. Who thinks anything else? No one, that I know of. That is some heavy-duty strawman.

The third argument against the march of organized atheism is it’s tendency toward an angry, uncompassionate line of attack. It is argued that the general approach to the matters taken by, foremost, Dawkins and Hitchens is one of sneering at religious belief…However, there is something to hearing these men speak, and reading certain of their writing, that sends the message they have a short temper for religious belief…Yet the problem isn’t necessarily the arguments, but the tone. There is not enough room or time here for an exhaustive sampling, and a quick visit to Myers’ blog, or YouTube to watch some clips from Hitchens or Dawkins would give you a better insight…

And we’re off, into a long and screamingly familiar laundry list of things Michael De Dora doesn’t like about MyersDawkinsHitchens…including, of course, ‘Myers has publicly desecrated a communion wafer and called the WWII Pope Pius XII a “sniveling rat bastard”’ – which, also of course, does not bother to say why Myers did that.

This brings us to the fourth argument: this view of the world divides people rather than bringing them together.

As does all disagreement, which is why in the New Dispensation disagreement will be forbidden and we will all be Brought Together. Disagreement shall die and from the ashes shall arise a brand-new Buick furnished with a beaming nuclear family and their dog Spot, driving off into the sunset of togetherness.

Anyway. There’s a fair bit more, but you get the idea. I dislike it. I dislike the rhetoric, I dislike the sly tattle-tale manner, I dislike the coercive conformism, I dislike the anti-intellectualism. It gives me the creeps. And this is the Center for Inquiry.

Damian Thompson is again upset that people think Ratzinger is implicated in the church’s cover-up of generations of child-rape and other abuse. He ought to read what Hans Kung has to say.

Is it not time for Pope Benedict XVI himself to acknowledge his share of responsibility, instead of whining about a campaign against his person? No other person in the Church has had to deal with so many cases of abuse crossing his desk…

In his 24 years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, from around the world, all cases of grave sexual offences by clerics had to be reported, under strictest secrecy (“secretum pontificum”), to his curial office, which was exclusively responsible for dealing with them. Ratzinger himself, in a letter on “grave sexual crimes” addressed to all the bishops under the date of 18 May, 2001, warned the bishops, under threat of ecclesiastical punishment, to observe “papal secrecy” in such cases.

In his five years as Pope, Benedict XVI has done nothing to change this practice with all its fateful consequences.

I have nothing to add.

In Ethiopia, men grab little girls, rape them and then marry them. The little girls don’t like it.

even though she was eight years old, she suspected at once what was happening. She had heard whispers that, when a girl is considered ready for marriage, a man will seize her, and rape her, and then she must serve him for the rest of her life. “That was the culture,” she says. But it wasn’t her culture: like all the other little girls, she didn’t want it. “I started screaming and tried to run out of the hut,” she says…She was taken back to his home, held down in front of his family, raped, and taken to be married the next morning. Dazed, she signed the papers, and waited for a moment when she could flee.

After three days she had a chance to escape, and she ran miles back home; she was crying with joy when she got there – but her parents told her she had to ‘go back to him and be a good wife.’ So she did.

Nurame has a distant sense of another life, one she will never lead now. “If it hadn’t happened to me … I would have been educated and got my own work and lived my own life. I wish to God that had happened.”

There’s a rebellion now, started by Boge Gebre.

When Boge was 12, she was pinned down and had her genitals cut out with a knife…This happened to all Boge’s sisters too – and it killed one of them…Men came to abduct Boge twice – but both times she ran away before they could rape her. “So – here I am!” she says.

When she was told this was her culture and she had to accept it, she found the argument ridiculous. “I thought – how can this be my culture, if it kills me?” she says, leaning forward. “What is culture? It is something that is constantly changing. In Europe, you burned witches. That culture changed. Every woman has a sense of her own dignity. I knew I was not a cow, a chattel, and I did not want to be treated like one. No woman wants to be abducted or cut up. This is true whatever your culture. Culture is not stagnant – it is transient.”

That is what ‘culture’ is. That. culture. changed. The victim’s culture is not the same as the perp’s. No woman wants to be abducted or cut up. Amen.

The pope is not a modernist, nor is he any kind of pluralist. He is not one to think that morality improves over time.

When he was crowned Pope nearly five years ago, Benedict promised to clean up the Church. He would not be a showman Pope like John Paul II, he would not flog himself around the world addressing huge stadiums. The Church under his guidance would not have expansiveness as its goal, but purification.

He had a reformist phase in his youth, but he got over it.

…around 1968, he rejected all that and became a counter-revolutionary warrior, dedicated to liberating the Church from trendy nonsense and restoring the purity which he saw the reform movement as having polluted. As such, his ardour has never flagged.

But then…What is Sean Brady’s explanation for the actions he is now apologizing for?

Delivering his St Patrick’s Day mass on Wednesday, Cardinal Brady said: “This week a painful episode from my own past has come before me. I have listened to reaction from people to my role in events 35 years ago. I want to say to anyone who has been hurt by any failure on my part that I apologise to you with all my heart. I also apologise to all those who feel I have let them down. Looking back I am ashamed that I have not always upheld the values that I profess and believe in.”

He’s cagy, he does a classic guy apology (I’m sorry you were offended), but he does in the end admit that he did bad things. Well why did he do them? Because he wanted to? Or because at the time he didn’t get how bad they were?

The latter seems to be the view of the people who still turn up at Armagh cathedral.

The applause that rippled through Armagh’s vast St Patrick’s Cathedral as Dr Séan Brady entered this morning stated in the clearest terms exactly what his parishioners think of their cardinal…Marie Ryan said to condemn him for failing to alert the authorities about notorious paedophile priest Brendan Smyth 35 years ago was to judge him using today’s standards. “It was a different era back then and a lot of things happened that shouldn’t,” she said.

Ah. It was a different era back then. Times change, people change, views on morality change.

But then – if times change, and views on morality change, and people can look back on their pasts and feel ashamed of things they did many years ago, then –

Then why is the Catholic church so god damn confident that it is right to go on discriminating against gays?

Why does it not occur to the Catholic church that views on the morality of discriminating against people for bad stupid empty reasons have changed, and that it is entirely possible that they have changed for the better, and that the Catholic church ought not to preen itself on insisting on ‘church teachings’ when to other people those teachings are not just wrong but evil?

The church needs to get it. The church needs to realize that it has no moral high ground and no monopoly on moral wisdom; that it is in fact worse than many secular institutions, not better; that it has every reason to be very very humble, and to err on the side of generosity rather than purity. It’s not going to, of course, but it needs to.