a bonobo humanity?

women of the world – heed this call!

I’ve written about this august institution probably too often before, but a recent conversation with a friend has prompted me to reflect further upon it. After all, it holds sway, even here in Australia, more than any other Christian denomination. It seems to me that the movement away from Catholicism to other Christian denominations is often a first step towards accepting a naturalistic understanding of the world (I adopt here Sean Carroll’s use of ‘naturalism’ as a more positive term than ‘atheism’, for reasons that are hopefully obvious).

During this conversation, I mentioned some rather shocking facts I read about in Angela Saini’s book The Patriarchs, from which I will quote:

In 1889, activists in the United States faced considerable resistance from local leaders when they tried to petition the state of Delaware to raise the age of consent to sex for girls from seven to eighteen. The age of consent in the state had already been lowered in 1871 to seven years from ten. In Georgia, the age of consent remained ten until 1918.

.. and as I often say, we tend to live in an eternal present, when in fact things were often very different in unexpected places not so very long ago.

So my friend then told me that the age of consent in the Vatican was ten until quite recently (ten years ago). I’ve since checked, and it was twelve, which is bad enough. The ‘country’ also has an exception – “the offence does not exist if the sexual acts take place within a marriage”, and marriages are quite legal there for girls from the age of fourteen. It hardly needs to be stated that no fourteen-year-old has anywhere near the neurological development of an adult. And one also should ask, why 16 for boys and 14 for girls, when after all it is the girl who risks pregnancy, especially considering the Catholic opposition to contraception.

The Catholic Church is a bastion of extreme patriarchy, but it endures better than any other Christian denomination. The reasons are clear enough. Unlike other denominations, the earliest of which were born of the Reformation in the 16th century (including Anglicanism, which is tied to its inglorious beginnings – an increasingly porcine monarch’s desire to be rid of his wife), Catholicism has claims to be the original Church, dating back nearly two millennia, and boasting a catalogue of saints, relics, architectural wonders, and above all, rituals. As such it is seen to form whole cultures as much as informing them, just as Islam is woven into the formation of many Middle Eastern cultures. Many people who rarely enter a church consider themselves Catholic – they see it as part of their identity.

And yet, it is fading slowly, here in Australia, and in western Europe. It needs to do so, of course, for women to rise to the dominant position in our society. And everything points to the ‘outlying’ WEIRD countries leading the way in this project (which is not yet a project – it may take a few more centuries for a public declaration of intent). Countries like Australia, New Zealand and the Scandinavian and Baltic nations – if nations in today’s sense are still in existence in the year 2500. For these are regions that wear their culture most lightly.

It’s best to take the long view, as countries like Australia often take in immigrants from heavily acculturated and patriarchal regions. In this respect they’re a ‘mixed bag’, torn between wanting to escape the most oppressive or ‘poisoned’ aspects of their culture in the old country, and wanting to maintain those aspects of the culture they see as constituting their identity. Assimilation into the more WEIRD forms of the new country, the ways of which are described in Joseph Henrich’s book The Weirdest People in the World, will be a generational process.

Meanwhile, how do we combat the patriarchal attitudes of the Catholic Church more directly? Of course, revelations of widespread child abuse, highlighted by the 2015 Academy Award-winning film Spotlight, and exposed by investigative journalists worldwide, have played their part, but the Church, even under the more responsive leadership of Pope Francis, can reasonably claim that abusers are in a minority, with other denominations, especially ‘evangelicals’, engaging in similar levels of misconduct. Heavily hierarchical systems are indeed, generally infected by abuse, sexual or otherwise.

However, it is extreme patriarchy that is the issue for me. The Church supposedly derives its power from being the earthly intermediary of the heavenly father and son gods of Christianity. So we have a six-level hierarchy of maledom – at the top is the father-and-son act of God and Jesus, with the second tier being the all-male Popes or Papas. Third comes the all-male Cardinals, fourth the all-male Archbishops, fifth the all-male Bishops, and sixth the all-male Priests. With all of this hierarchy pressing down upon them, it’s a wonder that female parishioners are able to breathe, let alone carry out their good works on behalf of their male masters.

The good thing is that the Church is taken far less seriously as a moral arbiter in the WEIRD world these days – which explains why it has tended to focus its outreach on the non-WEIRD world in recent decades. However, it is still a very wealthy organisation, and very much part of the Establishment in countries like Australia. Two of our recent Prime Ministers, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott were educated at Catholic schools, as well as other major political figures such as Barnaby Joyce and Bill Shorten. In 2019 the progressive think tank Per Capita produced a paper, The Way In: Representation in the Australian Parliament. The paper’s author, Abigail Lewis, looked at various elements of parliamentarians’ background, including gender, ethnicity and education, over a 30-year period from 1988 to 2018. This paragraph interested me:

Graduates from government schools were under-represented in 1988, and they are still under-represented today. Then and now, MPs are much more likely to be privately educated than the broader public, but an unexpected trend has been the surge in MPs who were educated at Catholic schools. A full quarter of 2018’s Parliament received a Catholic education.

References

Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: how men came to rule, 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_Europe

Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, 2020

on private schools in Australia, the egalitarian nation