Author: Ophelia Benson

A scorching piece on Catholic brutality in Ireland by Sharon Owens.

The church that forbade birth control, yet despised big families of starving, barefoot children. The church that encouraged education yet hated free-thinkers. The church that revered Mary the Mother of God, yet treated all mortal women as sinners and whores. The church that raved about poverty and humility, yet lined the walls of the Vatican with priceless works of art. The church that took the pocket money off children during Lent, yet covered up the brutal rape and buggery of little boys and girls for more than 50 years. And I wondered, looking at those grovelling bishops kissing Pope Benedict’s hand, do they really understand, even now, why there is a crisis in the church? Have they any idea of how the survivors of abuse must feel? Have they no empathy whatsoever for the unnamed Magdalene slaves who died of exhaustion or malnutrition or a broken heart and were quietly buried behind those high stone walls? I’m beginning to think only snobs, sociopaths and narcissists are drawn to religious life in the first place, for I have yet to see a flicker of shame, regret or sadness from any bishops.

Except, of course, for themselves and their colleagues and their church.

It turns out that American foreign policy isn’t too religious, it’s not religious enough. So says the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

American foreign policy is handicapped by a narrow, ill-informed and “uncompromising Western secularism” that feeds religious extremism, threatens traditional cultures and fails to encourage religious groups that promote peace and human rights, according to a two-year study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The council’s 32-member task force, which included former government officials and scholars representing all major faiths, delivered its report to the White House on Tuesday. The report warns of a serious “capabilities gap” and recommends that President Obama make religion “an integral part of our foreign policy.”

Yeah great – then we can have the Christian nukes to go with the Islamic nukes and the Hindu nukes and the Jewish nukes. Coolerino.

“It’s a hot topic,” said Chris Seiple, president of the Institute for Global Engagement in Arlington County and a Council on Foreign Relations member. “It’s the elephant in the room. You’re taught not to talk about religion and politics, but the bummer is that it’s at the nexus of national security. The truth is the academy has been run by secular fundamentalists for a long time, people who believe religion is not a legitimate component of realpolitik.” The Chicago Council’s task force was led by R. Scott Appleby of the University of Notre Dame and Richard Cizik of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. “Religion,” the task force says, “is pivotal to the fate” of such nations as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria and Yemen, all vital to U.S. national and global security.

Well yes, religion is ‘pivotal to the fate’ of all those nations because the leadership of those nations takes religion far too seriously. It’s not obvious that the best way to deal with that is to emulate it – or to listen to advice from people who equate secularism with fundamentalism.

Ah the indispensable wisdom of Tariq Ramadan. He’s full of it.

We are equal citizens, but with different cultural and religious backgrounds. So, how can we, instead of being obsessed with potential “conflicts of identity” within communities, change that viewpoint to define and promote a common ethical framework, nurtured by the richness of diverse religious and cultural backgrounds?

I have no idea. I don’t in fact think we can do that – for the boringly simple reason that it combines two incompatible items: the (welcome) claim that we are equal citizens, and the claim that ‘diverse religious and cultural backgrounds’ are (in and of themselves, with no qualification) rich and nurturing. The drearily obvious problem there is that many ‘religious and cultural backgrounds’ are strongly and coercively anti-egalitarian. Many cultural and religious backgrounds consider women inherently and profoundly inferior. Many consider gays abhorrent; many group people into clean and unclean, touchable and untouchable; many consider slavery acceptable. Just saying ‘hoo-ray diversity’ ignores all that, or, worse, hides it. I suspect Ramadan of doing the latter – because he’s nowhere near stupid enough or sheltered enough to be unaware of it.

[A]n ethics of citizenship should itself reflect the diversity of the citizenship. For while we agree that no one has the right to impose their beliefs on another, we also understand that our common life should be defined in such a way that it includes the contributions of all the religious and philosophical traditions within it. Further, the way to bring about such inclusion is through critical debate.

Who’s we? I understand no such thing. And the claim that such ‘inclusion’ relies on critical debate introduces another incompatibility. Religious traditions are not about genuine critical debate. Traditions as such are not about genuine critical debate – the two are fundamentally opposed. Once genuine critical debate gets going, traditions become vulnerable. That’s not to say that no traditions can survive critical scrutiny, since plenty of them are harmless or beneficial, but it is to say that they’re not automatically partners or allies of critical debate, because they’re not rooted in it in the first place.

Islam is perceived as a “problem”, never as a gift in our quest for a rich and stimulating diversity. And that’s a mistake. Islam has much to offer…Islamic literature is full of injunctions about the centrality of an education based on ethics and proper ends. Individual responsibility, when it comes to communicating, learning and teaching is central to the Islamic message.

And so on and so on. That’s nice, but what about it is specific to Islam and cannot be found in other, secular systems of thought? Nothing. So what does Islam have to offer that no other sets of ideas have to offer? Nothing. Ramadan just bangs on about various ok ideas that can be found in Islam as well as other places (though he omits the last five words) and lets it go at that.

More broadly, the Muslim presence should be perceived as positive, too. It is not undermining the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian ethical and cultural roots of Europe. Neither is it introducing dogmatism into the debate, as if spiritual and religious traditions automatically draw on authoritarian sources. They can operate within both the limits of the law and in the open public sphere. On the contrary, the Muslim presence can play a critical role in thinking about our future and shaping a new common narrative. It can help recall and revive some of the fundamental principles upon which the cultures of Europe are based.

Here he’s shifted his ground, in a shifty way – he started out talking about what Islam has to offer, not ‘the Muslim presence.’ But translating ‘the Muslim presence’ back into Islam, what he says is pure assertion, and some of it is pretty damn bald, too. Yes Islam is inserting (though not introducing) dogmatism into the debate – as witness this very piece, for a start. ‘Spiritual and religious traditions’ do draw on authoritarian sources – not automatically, perhaps, but historically and as a matter of fact, yes. Tariq Ramadan is an interesting example of that very thing, dressed up in convincing modernish academicky garb.

(I was careful not to look at any of the comments before writing this because I knew if I looked at them I would decide ‘no need to bother’ and I wanted to say what I thought even if a couple of hundred people had already said it. I’ve looked at some now, and sure enough. The Graun is weird – insisting on this endless relentless Islamophilia while something like 90% of its readership tries to remind it of the secular heritage of the left and the not altogether progressive quality of life under sharia.)

It’s interesting and frightening how pervasive the thought is, that people can be taken to represent or stand in for something else, in such a way that it’s useful and meaningful and appropriate to attack the former in order to punish or instruct or threaten the latter.

I just read one example in one of the answers to last week’s CIF ‘Belief’ question. Jonathan Romain knew a guy whose daughter was killed in a car crash whose cause was unknown.

But Henry knew why it had happened. God was punishing him for not going to synagogue. I told Henry over and over again that this was ridiculous and God would not punish his daughter for his supposed sin. But Henry was adamant. Suddenly I realised what was going and stopped rebuking Henry. He couldn’t cope with his daughter’s death if it was meaningless…

But he could cope with it by thinking his daughter’s death was about him. He could cope with it by thinking that the way God found to punish him was to kill a different person. It’s not just the obvious moral perversion that’s interesting, it’s the weird egotism. It’s the weird belief that he, Henry, was all-important, while his daughter turned out to be just an instrument for his chastisement. It’s the bizarre belief that his daughter was just some kind of symbol or copy for Him.

Then shortly after reading that I read Norm on anti-semitism in Sweden. The mayor of Malmö said ‘he was opposed to anti-Semitism, but added: “I believe these are anti-Israel attacks, connected to the war in Gaza…”.’ Norm commented:

[H]atred of Jews or attacks on them and their places of worship, schools or other institutions are nothing but anti-Semitism, whether they are linked to passions about Israel or not. For the targets of them are not, in fact, Israel; they are, in this case, Swedish Jews.

Just so. And Swedish Jews, as Norm says, are not Israel, and Americans are not America, and Londoners are not British foreign policy, and so on. People don’t stand in for other people or for abstractions, and random strangers don’t stand in for anything, because they are an unknown quantity. Knowing they are ‘Jews’ or ‘Americans’ or ‘Nigerians’ or whatever it may be is not to know enough. People aren’t proxies, and it’s always stupid and often dangerous to treat them as such.

Right, the Vatican and the pope and secrecy and what oh what is the catholic church supposed to do about all these priests having sex with children. Wikipedia provides a parallel translation of Crimen sollicitationis, with a little commentary. Clearly the subject is using the ‘sacrament of Penance to make sexual advances to penitents’; that’s the crime, that’s the accusation at issue, that’s the problem. It’s a church thing. And one bit of the commentary reveals the…weirdness.

Except in connection with the sacrament of Penance, canon law imposed no legal obligation – though a moral one might exist – to denounce clerics guilty of engaging in or attempting a homosexual act; but the procedure described in Crimen sollicitationis was to be followed also in dealing with such accusations (71-72). And any gravely sinful external obscene act with prepubescent children of either sex or with animals engaged in or attempted by a cleric was to be treated, for its penal effects, as equivalent to an actual or attempted homosexual act (73).

If you read that carefully it bcomes clear that the issue is the priest, and the priest’s sin, and obscenity. It’s about the priest being dirty. It’s not about the priest harming anyone else. It’s dirty nasty sinny – it’s equivalent to an actual or attempted homosexual act. Eric pointed this out in comments, and there it is, spelled out. It’s not about harm, it’s about smut. It’s not about others, it’s about the self. It’s not altruistic or compassionate or even basically minimally decent, it’s self-regarding and self-protective and self-obsessed (the ‘self’ here being the church and the priesthood in general).

So no, I have no immediate plans to withdraw anything I’ve said about the pope. On the contrary, I’m learning that I haven’t yet understood how twisted and impervious they really are.