Author: Ophelia Benson

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.

Damian Thompson, a Catholic, is in a frothing rage – not at the pope or the all-male hierarchy of his authoritarian church, but at the Times for reporting on it.

There is international outrage in Catholic circles over a headline in The Times this morning that many people regard as utterly misleading and part of the newspaper’s reliably biased coverage (reinforced by vicious cartoons) of anything to do with Pope Benedict XVI…A universally admired Catholic journalist contacted me this morning and accused The Times of (and I am toning this down for legal reasons) an extremely serious error of judgment.

A universally admired Catholic journalist? There is no such thing. There’s no universally admired anything, and certainly not a Catholic journalist. Thompson is clearly very keen to give the impression that the outrage he is describing and attributing is widespread. It may be, but his heated rhetoric doesn’t convince me of that.

Another respected commentator, the American journalist Phil Lawler, takes the headline to pieces on CatholicCulture.org.

There it is again. He’s citing Catholics as authorities for the unfairness of coverage of a Catholic issue, without so much as acknowledging the potential for bias, but instead simply announcing that his chosen Catholics are admired and respected. Admired and respected by whom? Other Catholics? Other loyalist Catholics? Other Catholics so loyal that for them the church can do no wrong? Other Catholics so loyal that they are more worried about the coverage than they are about the reality of what the church has been doing all this time? That’s the appearance he gives, at least.

Thompson quotes the ‘respected’ Lawler (ironically named, he turns out to be):

Here’s what we know: While the Pope was Archbishop of Munich, a priest there was accused of sexual abuse. He was pulled out of ministry and sent off for counseling. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger was involved in the decision to remove the priest from his parish assignment – got that? remove him.

Yes, got that. But what he wasn’t, was ‘pulled out of ministry and sent off’ to the police. Got that? The police. What he was accused of was a crime, and not no victimless crime, neither, but a peculiarly nasty crime against people. Ratzinger was involved in this failure to report a crime to the police. Got that? To report a crime.

Several years later, long after Cardinal Ratzinger had moved to a new assignment at the Vatican, the priest was again accused of sexual abuse. A grievous mistake was made in this case; that much is clear now, and the vicar general has sorrowfully taken responsibility for the error. Could you say that the future Pontiff should have been more vigilant? Perhaps. But to suggest that he made the decision to put a pedophile back in circulation is an outrageous distortion of the facts.

Is it? Really? In particular, is it really an outrageous distortion? In a sense it’s more of a distortion not to put it that way. Lawler is an American, so he should be aware of the crime of reckless endangerment. He’s right that we don’t know, and it’s not likely, that Ratzinger said ‘let’s not report this priest to the cops so that he can go back into circulation as a pedophile later on.’ But the fact is that that’s what happened, and the not reporting the priest to the cops wasn’t the best way to prevent its happening.

Thompson finishes up by shouting at Ruth Gledhill for saying, ‘The Pope is pretty unassailable. He is not elected…’ Thompson points out, acidly, that there is such a thing as a conclave. Well yes, but ‘elected’ is commonly used to mean ‘democratically elected’ – elected by the people as a whole, not elected by a tiny powerful exclusive secretive body of celibate men. The pope is not ‘elected’ by Catholics, he is ‘elected’ by some cardinals. That makes a difference.

Thompson continues the theme later.

Fr Tim Finigan, one of the most respected traditionalist priests in England and certainly its most influential priest-blogger, described it as a “Disgraceful attack on the Holy Father in The Times”…There is a wider perception that The Times’s entire coverage of the scandals in the Catholic Church, including Peter Brookes’s revolting cartoons, has the flavour of an anti-Catholic crusade…Let me quote my colleague Cristina Odone, former editor of The Catholic Herald: “I have been shocked by the Times’s anti-Catholic coverage.”

Same stuff, see? Loose references to respected and influential and wider perception, and citation of Catholics without mention of the possibility of pro-church bias.

What I’d like to do is put The Times’s elder statesman, Lord Rees-Mogg, on the spot. How can he, as a former editor of the paper and a devout and distinguished Catholic, stand by as the paper he loves traduces the Holy Father?

And there you have theist slavishness at its most revolting.

Too bad for you if you’re Irish and you want to leave the Catholic church – the church is so dominant in public life that you can’t leave without making life difficult for yourself. Sor-reeeeee.

[T]he church is so deeply woven into the fabric of Irish life, it is difficult for many ordinary Irish people to distance themselves from it. The church is involved in education and health care, and its imprint on the Irish national identity is deep…Ninety-two percent of primary schools are still run by the Catholic Church and most of the best schools are Catholic.

So parents who want to leave are screwed. But hey, the remaining fans of the church are having a hard time too.

“It’s a very difficult time to be a committed Roman Catholic in Ireland,” says Breda O’Brien, who teaches religious education at a Roman Catholic school in central Dublin, and also writes a column for The Irish Times on religion. “There has been scandal after scandal, compounded by mismanagement within the church,” O’Brien says. “The church has not covered itself in glory…No one can deny the problems the church has had, but that does not make everything the church does wrong,” she says.

No, it doesn’t (though that certainly doesn’t rule out the possibility that everything the church does is wrong), but what it does do is drive a hole the size of a tank through the church’s claim to moral superiority and insight and scrupulosity. What it does do is make a laughing stock of the idea that Catholic clergy have some sort of extra-highly-developed moral awareness. What it does do is make a mockery of the church’s ostentatious concern for foetuses and for suffering people who want to escape their suffering in the only way left to them, given that the church has made it so blindingly obvious that it does not care in the slightest about the minimal well-being and safety of actual living conscious feeling children in their care who have been raped or enslaved or savagely punished or systematically deprived or all those, for year after year, decade after decade. What it does do is show up the Catholic clergy as a benighted self-protecting insular pack of men with all the moral sensitivity of a rock. Given what the church claims to be, that showing up is fatal to its pretensions. This isn’t Wal-Mart, or a bank, or an accounting firm, or a hamburger chain. This is a different kind of enterprise altogether, and now that it has become abundantly, lavishly clear that its first concern is always for itself and never for helpless victims in its power, how can it possibly continue to pretend to be better than everyone else?

I don’t think there’s a good answer to that, but I also expect that it will nevertheless go on pretending. Fewer people will buy the pretense, but some still will.

Things are getting hot for the Catholic church.

The pope, meanwhile, continues to be under fire for a 2001 Vatican letter he sent to all bishops advising them that all cases of sexual abuse of minors must be forwarded to his then-office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and that the cases were to be subject to pontifical secret…But canon lawyers insisted Friday that there was nothing in the document that would preclude bishops from fulfilling their moral and civic duties of going to police when confronted with a case of child abuse. They stressed that the document merely concerned procedures for handling the church trial of an accused priest, and that the secrecy required by Rome for that hearing by no means extended to a ban on reporting such crimes to civil authorities.

Right…that’s the issue we discussed last month – concluding that it was so damn ambiguous and woolly and evasive we couldn’t be sure what it was saying.

Well guess what.

Bishop John McAreavey of Dromore in Northern Ireland, told a news conference this week that Irish bishops “widely misinterpreted” the directive and couldn’t get a clear reading from Rome on how to proceed. “One of the difficulties that bishops expressed was the fact that at times it wasn’t always possible to get clear guidance from the Holy See and there wasn’t always a consistent approach within the different Vatican departments,” he said. “Obviously, Rome is aware of this misinterpretation and the harm that this has done, or could potentially do, to the trust that the people have in how the church deals with these matters,” he said.

Interesting, isn’t it. They knew perfectly well that the document was hard to interpret, and they gave no help.

An Irish government-authorized investigation into the scandal and cover up harshly criticized the Vatican for its mixed messages and insistence on secrecy in the 2001 directive and previous Vatican documents on the topic. “An obligation to secrecy/confidentialtiy on the part of participants in a canonical process could undoubtedly constitute an inhibition on reporting child sexual abuse to the civil authorities or others,” it concluded.

In the United States, Dan Shea, an attorney for several victims, has introduced the Ratzinger letter in court as evidence that the church was trying to obstruct justice. He has argued that the church impeded civil reporting by keeping the cases secret and “reserving” them for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “This is an international criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice,” Shea told The Associated Press.

Hotter and hotter…but still never hot enough. Yet.