Posts Tagged ‘catholicism’
more cardinal sins
protesting too much
Lauryn Oates, an admirable woman in every way, has written an incisive little essay here, wishing the backward-facing hierarchs of the Catholic Church a hearty good riddance. Of course it’s all wishful thinking, of the kind all positive-thinking humanists indulge in, but you have to wonder why it is so many apparently educated, humane, intelligent people still cling to this awful institution. Is it force of habit? Is it fear of offending family and friends? Is it faith, whatever that may mean? Or is it, dare I say, profound intellectual analysis and reflection?
And let’s face it, the evidence of this institution’s awfulness is everywhere. Oates wrote her damning little piece before the latest scandal involving Keith O’Brien, the most senior Catholic clergyman in Britain no less, who has made admissions regarding sexual molestation accusations by a number of fellow priests. After all the focus, the relentless focus, on exploitative priests and cover-ups, we still find this sort of thing going on at the very top. However, O’Brien’s admission (it was feeble and vague – ‘I haven’t lived up to the standards expected of me’, and it’s unlikely anything further will be dragged out of him) is particularly devastating – and some illustrious figures would say, inevitable – because he was so rabidly homophobic in his pronouncements. So, now that his hypocrisy is revealed, the LGBT community is having a field day, and why not? (They recently named him their Bigot of the Year). I’ve just been acquainting myself with the many contemptible remarks this individual has made against homosexuality, and some interesting reflections on him, now that he stands exposed, so to speak. Some to the effect that he’s obviously a deeply troubled person who might be treated with compassion. The thing is, though, we can always find ways to more deeply understand, and even sympathise with, the behaviour of people who have done immense damage to others, but we always have to weigh the suffering they cause against the suffering they experience. And it seems to me obvious that O’Brian’s depredations, combined with his regular and lashing condemnations of the freely chosen sexual activities of others, from a position of exalted religious status, represents something pretty fundamentally disgusting and only partially mitigated by his own inner turmoil. Another mitigating factor, of course, is the gay orientation of many senior Catholic clergy, encouraged and cemented in their youth in seminaries the world over.
O’Brian has now been ‘retired’, and will take no further part in the Catholic Church, but he still retains his title of Cardinal, and he was planning to retire later this month anyway. There are those, though, who’ll be fighting to visit a more fitting punishment on the man, and I wish them well. The Church itself is to conduct an investigation into his activities, but I can’t take that seriously. The secular route is best, but it’s unclear as yet whether his behaviour has contravened the law. It may well be that he’ll end up being let off, if not exonerated, by the very liberal regime that he affects to despise.
keep up the pressure
This guy, Tarcisio Bertone, a cardinal, blames it all on homosexuality
Big problems for the college of cardinals in electing the next pope – and that’s a cardinal’s only real job. A number of them are under scrutiny for their action and lack of action over abusive clergy, and under pressure not to participate in the election, and much of the pressure’s coming from catholics themselves, in Italy and in the cardinals’ home territories. It’s an unprecedented situation, and it seems unlikely to me that this trend will be reversed – it’s more likely to grow. Cardinals under the spotlight include Justin Rigali and Roger Mahony (USA), Sean Brady (Ireland) and Godfried Danneels (Belgium).
Story from Nicole Winfield of Associated Press.
a more realistic pope? don’t hold your breath
‘Catholic’ kids in Haiti, and plenty more where they come from
Herr Ratzinger has resigned, citing ill-health and old age, and a consequently increasing inability to get his head around all the issues and complexities involved in pretending to be the moral and spiritual leader of all humanity, whether humanity likes it or knows about it or not.
It might be argued that the fact that the 85-year-old’s decision caused ‘shockwaves’ through his community is an indication of how ‘away with the fairies’ that community is, but with some 600 years’ history of the big papa holding onto power till his last gasp, they can perhaps be forgiven their complacent fantasies.
So there’ll be a new pope soon, and the rest of us – that’s to say, those who take little personal notice of the pronouncements of the pontiff and the organisation he heads, but who also realize that a worrying proportion of the human population does take him seriously – engage in the more or less slim hope that a new leader will have a more realistic and less hubristic outlook, in terms of attitudes to women, to homosexuals, to contraception, to knowledge and ideas, and so forth.
But of course we outsiders won’t have a say in the election of the next male spokesman for a decidedly male one-and-only god. Nor will most catholics.
So who elects the next pope? A college of cardinals (as opposed to a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows or a conspiracy of ravens), that’s who. And, amusingly, if you’re a cardinal and over 80, you’re not considered compos mentis enough to vote for the next incumbent. That at least seems more in line with realism, but I don’t hear any noises about mandatory retirement of pontiffs – or cardinals, for that matter.
In Australia, judges of the High Court, the highest court in the land, are mandated to retire at age 70. That ruling came in in 1977, and before that the appointment was for life. No doubt similar rulings have been made internationally. And these days, because of the onerous workload, judges often retire before the mandatory date.
The next pope will be elected by about 118 cardinals (depending on when the election takes place, with cardies hurrying over the 80-year cliff as fast as their ruby-red dresses permit). More than half of these blokes were appointed by Ratzinger, and the remainder by his equally ultra-conservative predecessor, Karol Wojtyla, so it’s unlikely that many of them would be overly infected with realism. And of course the problem is that realism, a fairly mundane and anodyne notion for most of us, has been seen as forbidden fruit to the hierarchy of this organisation for centuries. So a dose of realism always carries the risk of Vaticanonical anaphylaxis (quite proud of that one).
Consider the last ‘realistic’ pope (it’s a relative term), Angelo Roncalli, who called the second Vatican Council in the sixties. Certainly his papacy made a case for ecumenicism that has been pursued, at least, in name, ever since, but Vatican 2’s promise has been almost entirely unfulfilled, and Roncalli’s famous ‘open the windows’ pronouncement has fallen on clogged ears inside the Vatican. What’s more, the possibilities Vatican 2 just might have opened up have proved so scarey to the hierarchy that a veil of silence appears to have been cast over its very existence. I suspect their attitude to reform has something in common with the notions of that old fuddy-duddy Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens, with his apparent loathing of softies, considered the Anglicans, with their female priests and their modern services and their acceptance of poofs and the like, to be far worse than the Catholics, who at least stood for something. The question is, is it better to stand for misogyny, homophobia, celibacy, anti-intellectualism and ignorant authoritarianism, than to stand for nothing at all? Well, actually, if bums on seats are the measure, the answer appears to be yes. Not that I’m convinced that the Anglicans stand for nothing, but whatever they do stand for, it doesn’t appear to be very popular. Anglican numbers are crashing in this country, whereas the Catholics are creeping rather more slowly towards extinction. Of course this has a little to do with the influx of Catholics as against Anglicans, compared to earlier days, but I’d bet too that it has much to do with the age-old appeal of militant conservatism, from Genghis Khan to little Adolf. And the Vatican has managed, over the years, to clothe its iron fist with the fetching velvet gloves of a humanism that almost seems modern. Kindness to children, to the poor, to the dispossessed and disadvantaged, that sort of thing.
So I’m not expecting anything particularly positive to come out of this change in leadership. The noises coming out of Africa, the fastest-growing Catholic region, are all about holding the line on the homosexual scourge, upholding the traditional family and the dignity of manhood, etc. If anything I see the Catholic Church moving backwards into the foreseeable future, retreating into conservative, anti-intellectual fantasy, much like the Pentecostals, only different. We shall tediously see.
a harem-scarem of heretics and heresies: Marcion
That’s Marcion on the left, with John the Apostle, apparently
Christianity’s a funny religion, custom-built for ‘heresy’, heresy which will never be resolved because of the massive and, to a non-believer, frankly hilarious conundrum at its inception, the creation of a new supernatural being, who’s the son of another supernatural being, while at the same time being the same supernatural being, and also at the same time, or for a tiny part of the time, being completely human, or natural. Thus we have a monotheism with two heads, and a supernatural and also natural object of worship at the same time, not to mention some abstruse entity called a holy spirit or ‘Paraclete’. This mess will never ever have a chance of being resolved, because of course nobody can ever prove anything where the supernatural is concerned. Precisely for this reason, the only ‘resolution’ to this conundrum, now as throughout Christian history, is one involving power and violence – which isn’t always so hilarious.
Of course, there are many theological bones of contention, and sources of heresy, within Christianity apart from the status of Jesus (an area of dispute called ‘Christology’), such as the status of Mary, the meaning of sainthood, predestination and other eschatological matters.
Theology is, IMHO, the most inane pursuit humans have ever invented for themselves, but of course when it’s the only game in town, its political implications are explosive. It’s entirely about power. It’s the power that’s of interest, historically, and the political machinations. So let’s have a little look at Christianity’s battles and brutality in trying to enforce an orthodoxy amongst all the equally valid, or invalid, interpretations of Jesus’s true identity.
Marcion and Marcionism
Marcion, an apparently wealthy bishop’s son from near the Black Sea in what is now Turkey, who landed up in Rome around 140CE, seems to have been one of the first early Christians smart enough to realize that the new religion needed a thorough rethink, and one of the first Christians prominent enough to make an impact with his thinking.
Marcion clearly had a problem with Christianity’s intimate connection with Judaism, and their sharing of the same god. His solution was a pretty radical one; noting that the essentially absent but much talked-about god of the New Testament writings bore little resemblance to the thundering, partisan dictator-type of the Old Testament, he declared that they were in fact separate beings, with the New Testament one being vastly superior. It was a mad gamble, which was never likely to come off, but it certainly stirred things up, and kept them stirred for a long time after his excommunication in 144. Marcionism as an official heresy lasted into the 5th century, and his ideas still have currency today, and why not? His criticisms of the Old Testament’s brutalities and its nasty god have a distinctly modern feel to them. He also argued, cogently enough, that the description in Genesis of the god walking through the garden and discovering Adam being naughty proved that this god was an embodied, and therefore minor, god, who couldn’t possibly possess universal knowledge.
Marcion’s views on the identity of Jesus were obviously influenced by his conception of the New Testament god. In Judaism, Yahweh or God is often spoken of as ‘the father’, or ‘our heavenly father’, because he is the creator of humans – and everything else, but humans were his ‘special creation’. So we are his ‘children’, made in his likeness. But in the New Testament, and especially in the writings of Paul, God the father is contrasted with Jesus the son, a different tweak on the father idea. Marcion, a great supporter and admirer of Pauline thought, with its more abstract and ahistorical god, took those ideas a step or two further, severing the Pauline god from the Old Testament god as a separate entity. In other words he was a kind of religious dualist. Not content with that dangerous innovation, he considered Jesus’s physical existence to be a kind of mirage, a phantom – no doubting in keeping with his view of the New Testament god as non-embodied. This view of Jesus, as essentially a being too important to have ever had something so lowly as mere physical or natural existence, came to be known as Docetism, and it was roundly rejected as heretical at the first council of Nicaea in 325. Marcion’s excommunication turned him into one of Christianity’s first heresiarchs, or founders of a heretical movement or tradition, but his writing and thinking profoundly influenced the orthodoxy. For example, he proposed the first New Testament canon. Though the canon finally agreed upon centuries later differed greatly from the one proposed by Marcion (his canon was notably short – an edited version of Luke, and the letters of Paul), it was Marcion who first saw the need for regulating on what was ‘in’ and what was ‘out’, among the enormously proliferating gospels.
Marcion considered the Old Testament god to be a ‘demiurge’ – something close to a devil. It’s a maltheistic view shared by more than a few modern secular readers (Mark Twain for example), though they would usually replace the theistic term ‘devil’ with ‘dictator’, ‘tyrant’ or ‘mass-murderer’. Interestingly, this god’s inflexibility and capriciousness led Marcion and others to be more rather than less convinced of his reality as the world’s creator. He felt the god’s activity pretty well explained the suffering and injustice of the world. With Jesus, a new god was introduced, superior to the demiurge, ethically if not in terms of power. Marcion’s emphasis on the non-Jewish text of Luke, and his suppression of genealogies linking Jesus to ‘King David’, was part of an anti-Judaic agenda which denied the idea of a Jewish messiah and emphasised the idea of a redeemer. He also highlighted Paul as the ‘one true apostle’ of Jesus, the only one who really ‘got it’ about Jesus’s universality, and the new hope he brought. However – and this is where Marcion leads us down the path into gnosticism, other-worldliness and the sort of contempt for physical reality that the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge were into – redemption could not be attained within the massively flawed world of the demiurge. This was a view in keeping with the apocalyptic eschatology that dominated the early Christian movement.
Marcion, one of Christianity’s first heretics, also seems to have been one of the most influential and enduring. He himself managed to avoid the fate of many heretics of the early Christian era, perhaps because his heresies were promulgated well before a well-attested orthodoxy was established (the Emperor Theodosius first promulgated a law declaring heresy a capital crime in 382), but also no doubt due to his wealth, prominence and popularity. He returned to Asia Minor after being ex-communicated, and apparently established a flourishing teaching and an alternative church in the area. He was a prolific writer, but almost all of his writings appear to have been destroyed by the control and power merchants of Catholic orthodoxy, along with the writings of many other heretics, probably in the fourth century. So we largely know about his thinking through the writings that have survived from that era – that’s to say the writers later accepted as orthodox, and so unsympathetic to Marcion. In fact most of what we know about Marcion derives from Tertullian’s work Adversus Marcionem.
Marcion’s ‘church’ may have survived even into the fifth century, and his teaching, still influential today, may have inspired the Cathars, a remarkably widespread and stubborn bunch of European heretics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who held similar dualist and gnostic views. The extent of the connection, if any, will never be known, as the Catholic orthodoxy destroyed Cathar writings as comprehensively as they destroyed the Cathars themselves.
Long live secularism.
religion in australia: what the census tells us
The 2011 Australian census stats, recently released, are good news for secularists, and it’s well worth dwelling on this and the overall picture of religion in Australia. I’ve been gathering bits of info from all over the net, but the graphic above, from a Wikipedia article on religion in Oz, and updated to include the latest figures, is probably the most useful thing I’ve found for quickly comprehending what’s been happening.
The census question on religion has always been the only voluntary question. So there’s always a percentage [8.6% in 2011] who don’t answer it. And of course there’s endless speculation as to how many of these are non-religious, a question that can never be answered. At least the format of this question has been consistent over a long period of time. If the question format was changed to try to capture more accurately the percentage of non-religious, then comparisons between one census and another with a different question format would be difficult. My feeling is that the question format could definitely be improved, but that the cost, in inconsistency over different censuses, would be too great. It’s clear in any case that the question as it stands is measuring a movement away from religious belief in Australia.
An indication of how a different description on the census can alter percentages is shown in the graph. Note the ‘not stated/inadequately described’ section [purple] increased markedly in 1933, to 12.8%, from 1.7% in the 1921 census. This is largely explained by the fact that in 1933, for the first time, it was explicitly stated that people were not legally obliged to answer the question. Before that, ‘the voluntary nature of the question was not
referred to on the census form but there were instructions indicating that people could write ‘object to state” [Ian Castles, statistician, 1991]. The difference between positively stating an objection and just ignoring the question makes a big difference.
And another difference that made a big difference occurred in 1971. That was the year that the ‘no religion’ option [green stripes in the graph] was introduced for the first time. 6.7% of the population chose to claim ‘no religion’ that year. In the previous 1966 census, 0.8% had claimed no religion, though there was no clearly marked space for people to do so, and that was up from 0.4% in the 1961 census. Interestingly, the number of people who chose not to answer the question in 1971 dropped to 6.1% from 10% in 1966, suggesting that many previous refuseniks now availed themselves of the ‘no religion’ option, but this assumption has been confounded by later censuses in which the number of refuseniks has risen, and then oscillated incomprehensibly from census to census, while the number of the not religious has grown steadily.
I wouldn’t be willing to infer too much from the refusenik figures. Why has the 8.6% figure of last year dropped so much from the 11.1% of 2006? Who can say? Possibly it’s a result of the atheist campaign before the census to encourage people to ‘come out’ and positively state their non-religiosity, but there are so many possible factors, and there have been so many oscillations, it’s hard to be sure.
What is sure, though, is the steady growth of the positively non-religious. I can well understand why so many of my fellow unbelievers want to claim a majority of the refuseniks as belonging to our camp, as that would make us the single biggest category in the census. Currently, the professedly non-religious are at 22.3%, second behind the Catholics at 25.3%. In the 2006 census we were at 18.7%, level pegging with the Anglicans, who’ve been on the decline for decades, and who in 2011 were down to 17.1%. Further, in 2006, the category that included all other Christian denominations [except Catholics and Anglicans] was the second largest at 19.4%. They’ve declined to 18.7% in 2011. In fact that category has declined every single year since the first census. The Catholic category has also been in decline in the last 20 years, though much more slowly than the others.
So 2016 will be the big year to celebrate. Between 2001 and 2006, non-believers increased their percentage by 3.2%, and then by another 3.6% between 2006 and 2011. These are huge increases. We’re now only 3% behind the Catholics, whose percentage dropped by 0.5% in the last five years, and by 0.8% in the five years before that. If the current trend continues, we’ll easily be the top category in the next census.
Of course we shouldn’t get too excited. Australia can still call itself a Christian country, with 61.1% of Australians identifying themselves as such, a quite marked decline from 63.9% in 2006, but… Oh well, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, it’s not light yet, but it’s gettin there.
imaginary interviews 2: on sainthood
Another little effort, posted on youtube. I’m having trouble with my logitech webcam, and so I’ve recorded this on my internal webcam on the netbook, which looks quite acceptable in daylight. Haven’t worked editing out as yet, so it has to be one-take stuff.