Author: Ophelia Benson

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.

The usual – the Australian media are united in their scorn and loathing for atheists – at least for atheists who actually collect in one spot to talk about atheism. I don’t suppose the united Australian media pour scorn on people who collect in one spot to talk about theism – in, you know, churches and mosques and similar – but atheists doing that are an affront to all decent people.

Honestly, I must be clueless; I keep being surprised by the level of unreasonable hostility, distortion and plain rage people allow themselves to express about something that ought to be as ordinary as milk. Clearly it really isn’t permissible, except purely formally, to be overtly and explicitly atheist even in what look like liberal and largely secular countries. Yes it’s legal, no they won’t come and haul you off to prison, but by golly they will throw everything else in the arsenal at you, they will buckle down and do their level best to make everyone think you’re stupid, conceited, aggressive, wrong, evil, and ugly. No, since you ask, they don’t believe in lively public debate; no, as a matter of fact, they don’t believe that the majority should let the minority have room to breathe; yes, actually, they do believe that the majority opinion should be the only opinion. At least when it comes to important stuff like belief in the mysterious God who loves us all to bits but never drops by to say hello.

Michael Ruse did a piece on God and morality for Comment is Free Belief and talked sense for nine paragraphs, then in the tenth and last went completely random and gratuitous and childish.

God is dead. The new atheists think that that is a significant finding. In this, as in just about everything else, they are completely mistaken. God is dead. Morality has no foundation. Long live morality. Thank goodness!

Stupid, isn’t it. Frightful man – always spoiling for a fight. Everyone says he’s like that in real life, too.

Hitchens doesn’t altogether see things the way Damian Thompson does.

On March 10, the chief exorcist of the Vatican, the Rev. Gabriele Amorth (who has held this demanding post for 25 years), was quoted as saying that “the Devil is at work inside the Vatican,” and that “when one speaks of ‘the smoke of Satan’ in the holy rooms, it is all true—including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia.” This can perhaps be taken as confirmation that something horrible has indeed been going on in the holy precincts, though most inquiries show it to have a perfectly good material explanation.

I had the same thought when I saw the exorcist piece. The Devil is at work inside the Vatican; yes isn’t he just.

Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture.

Yet now that the Murphy Report has been published that same Ratzinger has told us that he ‘shares the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by the Irish people.’ He never shared it before; he didn’t share it when he issued that confidential letter to all the bishops; he shares it only now, when he and the Vatican can no longer hide the truth. There’s devilish for you – the flaming gall to pretend to share feelings that you ignored for year after year.