Tag: Catholic Church

Once more with feeling: final thoughts on Ireland’s Marriage Equality referendum #MarRef

May 29, 2015 • 4:08 pm

by Grania Spingies

Terry Pratchett once wrote:

“Words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.”

Pratchett was right, of course. I don’t think the Vatican can help it much, for Terminal Foot-In-Mouth Disease seems to be afflicting many high-ranking members of the clergy. Hot on the heels of Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin denouncing Ireland’s “Yes” result in its Marriage Equality Referendum as a “disaster for humanity”, we have another senior cardinal, Raymond Burke, pronouncing Ireland as “worse than Pagans and “defying God”.

I’m at risk of appearing obsessive about the subject, so I will try to make my final points and then bow out as gracefully as possible.

First, yes, they really believe this stuff.
 
These men may represent the Old Guard of the Catholic Church, but as Cardinals they can hardly be called radical outliers. Yet their pronouncements are fairly extreme. Whether the issue is born of a desire to arbitrate morality or to maintain a position of power over peoples’ lives; the result is the same: they are aghast at the notion that anybody – let alone a nation of mostly Catholics – could even contemplate same-sex marriage as an issue of equality. The legal rights aspect of the recent Referendum is something that doesn’t appear to register at all in their counter-arguments.

The vote comprehensively rejected the Church position. That ought to cause concern among the clergy, and it clearly does in the case of Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin as it doesn’t bode well for the future of the religion. But even Martin’s comments didn’t show that he might be reconsidering whether his Church’s position was wrong, merely that it had clearly failed to impress its position on its members.
 
Its official position, lest we forget, is this:

Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

This quote is not from some hard-line lunatic fringe. It is from the Catholic Catechism on the Vatican’s own website.

This is why weirdly offensive letters were written by Bishops to be read to the faithful of Ireland at Mass during the Sunday Homily. However progressive and liberal the local parish and its priest may be, there is no getting around what the Church actually has to say about homosexuality.

Second, they are so out of touch with people that they have no idea how unintentionally funny and simultaneously insulting they are.
 
I think I can speak for everybody here when I say being called “worse than a pagan” is not the worst thing one can be called in life, nor is it likely to cause most atheists a moment’s pause. However, one has to remember that the overwhelming majority of people voting Yes in the Irish Referendum were Catholics. Those Catholics presumably do have an opinion about being told that they have defied God for ratifying the idea that people are entitled to equal rights regardless of their sexual orientation. These sorts of pronouncements do the Church’s reputation a great deal of harm, so it’s telling that even now the Vatican permits its leading men to tell the world how they really feel rather than instructing them to maintain a dignified silence on an issue where they cannot fail to look archaic, intolerant and downright offensive. Gay Catholics who were hoping for the Church to start moving towards a more progressive and tolerant position must be profoundly disappointed and wary. 

Third, they fear the Internet
 
This is either because the Internet is the plaything of demons, or because it gives every Catholic access to opinions and ideas that may not coincide with those of the Church. With the Vatican going to enormous trouble to put an exorcist into every parish in the world, it is not impossible that it is the former that worries them the most as if the world were literally an episode of Supernatural, only with slightly less subtext.

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Realistically, it is also because ideas have to fight hard for credibility when they are forced to go up against a world of alternative ideas. “Because the book says so” is a pretty useless argument when your opponents also have books that say different things. However, it is pretty hard to exorcise the Internet, so it seems that people will “imbibe this poison that’s out there” and will ask harder questions and make better arguments. Terrible stuff really.
 
Fourth, they have no intention of changing the Church’s position
 
In spite of recent papal soundbites along the lines of “Who am I to judge?”, the official Church position is going to be difficult to alter or undo—assuming of course that those in power have any intention of changing the status quo. Religions are not democracies, and popular vote is not generally an option. Liberal academic Catholics can point to sound analyses of scriptures that show the original texts are not a particularly good source for justifying the intense homophobia displayed in the official Catholic position. Unfortunately, the usual reaction from the Vatican on this sort of issue is to completely ignore the arguments made, or as last resort to point out: “There seems to be a certain element who think that the Synod has the capacity to create some totally new teaching in the Church, which is simply false.”

I’ve never been so proud of Ireland as when the Yes result came in on Saturday 23rd May; even though I think that equality is something that shouldn’t even have been put to the vote in the first place. Nevertheless, Ireland was wonderful in every possible way. It’s not going to change the Catholic Church’s position. Perhaps that doesn’t matter, because Ireland is already changed in the very best way and the battle about morality and equality has already been won. I’ll leave you with this quote from the  heart-warming piece by Irish blogger and journalist Donal O’Keeffe on his experiences canvassing for the Marriage Equality referendum.

Then two young men, walking close together, came toward me from Rory Gallagher Plaza. “Hello,” I said. “Are you voting on Friday?” They gave me the most beautiful smiles and held up their joined hands.
I thought that was a really mean thing to do, to make a grown man cry in public like that.

After the party: what the Yes vote in Ireland means for the Catholic Church and its position on homosexuality

May 27, 2015 • 11:04 am

by Grania Spingies

Quite a lot of headlines around the world announced that Ireland’s voting for equality by endorsing same-sex marriage last week was the dawn of a new era for the position of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The truth of the matter is that it was really just the most recent and most public display of how things have already changed in the country. In spite of a comfortable 87% of the population self-identifying as Catholic and around 90% of Irish citizens having attended a Catholic school for 12 years; the referendum result on the 24th of May was undeniable evidence that the average Irish Catholic pays little to no attention to what the Vatican or its Bishops advise.

In itself, it isn’t really news. Regular church attendance in Ireland is poor (as low as 5% in some areas to 30-40% at best), and getting poorer amongst the younger generations; and has long been a cause for concern amongst Irish priests and bishops. So it is no surprise that whatever does influence the Irish electorate, it probably won’t be the Catholic Church.

In fact, even church-attending Catholics cannot be relied on to listen let alone endorse the official party line. When local parish priests were required to read their Bishop’s letter to their congregation urging them not to support equality for same-sex couples, some of the faithful walked out. One of the attendees said afterwards:

When he started speaking he talked about God and love and I thought it was going in the right direction and that they (the Church) were going to come into the 21st century, but then he read out the letter and I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t in all conscience sit there and listen to it. I never thought I’d be someone that would walk out of Mass but I had to leave. I couldn’t believe we were being told what way to vote. I got into such a temper I couldn’t even stay and listen to it all.

When even the faithful are prepared to publicly shun the Church, it is worth noting. The Archbishop of Ireland, Diarmuid Martin said much the same:

I ask myself, most of these young people who voted yes are products of our Catholic school system for 12 years. I’m saying there’s a big challenge there to see how we get across the message of the Church.

It appears that as many as a third of Irish Catholic clergy may have also voted Yes in the referendum. The Association of Catholic Priests consists of liberal clergy who frequently butt heads with the traditional Church hierarchy on issues that have long been sticking points in the Church such as celibacy, the ordination of women etc. The Irish talk show radio station NewsTalk surveyed 100 priests to poll their views on this.

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Clearly, there is certainly no unanimous agreement on the issue.

In spite of promising sounds from the pope last year on the subject of homosexuality, as well as the apparent crisis within the Church’s own ranks – or at least the European parts of it; the Vatican appears to be standing by their position and have called the Irish referendum results a “defeat for humanity”.

The Church never ceases to amaze me as an ex-Catholic, at its dogged insistence of ignoring the concerns and interests of its own people as well as the advances in secular morality in the society in which it exists. But it appears that if there is going to be any change, it is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. Talking may happen. Change is going to be a lot less likely. At least the Vatican can find a small measure of support in the lunatic fringe group Westboro Baptist Church, who would no doubt at least agree in principle with their verdict on the referendum. On the other hand, the Church may not really want support from a group that clearly does not get out much, as this exchange with writer J.K. Rowling demonstrates.

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I would almost pay money to see that, cos that would be awesome ¹.

 

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1. Yes, I am using the word awesome, because watching two of the world’s most famousest of wizards take on a grubby band of haters would be, well, thing.

Pope Francis puts his foot in it again, this time with retrograde views on women

December 12, 2014 • 6:51 am

Religion News Service, was, I thought, a news organization pretty sympathetic to faith, but you couldn’t prove it from its article on Wednesday, “Lost in translation? 7 reasons why women wince when Pope Francis starts talking.”

What it shows is what people on this website already know, but many faitheists and even atheists don’t realize: the Pope really does embody all the retrograde doctrine of the Catholic church, and his reputation for being a “new Pope” comes from his few offhand statements that made people think he’s leading the Vatican into a new age of tolerance and modernity.

Well, not when it comes to women. As author David Gibson reports:

But when he speaks about women, Francis can sound a lot like the (almost) 78-year-old Argentine churchman that he is, using analogies that sound alternately condescending and impolitic, even if well-intentioned.

Indeed, Francis has spoken repeatedly of the “feminine genius” and the need for a church to develop “a deeper theology of women,” and of his determination to promote women to senior positions in Rome. He also points out that some of his remarks are meant as jokes, the fruit of a sense of humor that is part of his appeal.

Still, not everyone is amused.

“I am at a loss to see how this could be other than insulting to women who’ve already given up having families of their own to serve God,” The Washington Post’s Melinda Henneberger wrote after a speech in which the pope warned nuns not to become spiritual “old maids.”

And in a Los Angeles Times column this week, New Testament scholar Candida Moss of Notre Dame and Yale Bible professor Joel Baden blasted Francis’ granny comments to the European Parliament as “nothing other than crass chauvinism.”

For all his positive comments and reforms, they said, the pope “reveals a highly patriarchal view” of the value and traditional role of women.

The Pope seems to have an obsession with fostering reproduction (of course, that’s traditional in the Church), but along with that goes his general criticism of what he calls “old maids” and “spinsters”. It’s simply insulting to childless women. Here are a few of the seven quotes that Gibson uses to instantiate Francis’s backwardness on women’s issues:

“Be a mother and not an old maid!”

“Please, let it be a fruitful chastity, a chastity that generates sons and daughters in the church. The consecrated woman is a mother, must be a mother and not an old maid (or “spinster”). … Forgive me for speaking this way, but the motherhood of consecrated life, its fertility, is important.”

— Address to nuns from around the world, May 8, 2013

and

“Europe is a ‘grandmother’, no longer fertile and vibrant.”

“In many quarters we encounter a general impression of weariness and aging, of a Europe which is now a ‘grandmother,’ no longer fertile and vibrant. As a result, the great ideas which once inspired Europe seem to have lost their attraction … “

— Address to the European Parliament, Nov. 25, 2014

and, finally (the article has four others):

“A church that seems more like a spinster than a mother.”

“When the church does not (evangelize), then the church stops herself, is closed in on herself, even if she is well-organized, has a perfect organizational chart, everything’s fine, everything’s tidy — but she lacks joy, she lacks peace, and so she becomes a disheartened church, anxious, sad, a church that seems more like a spinster than a mother, and this church doesn’t work, it is a church in a museum. The joy of the Church is to give birth … “

— Homily at morning Mass, Dec. 9, 2014

Even if two of these are metaphorical, it’s still insensitive. But of course what does the Pope know about women?

h/t: Bruce

The New Yorker tries its hand at accommodationism

November 14, 2014 • 1:22 pm

I find myself deluged with accommodationist articles today, so we’ll have one more post after this, and then, if you’re good boys and girls, we can have some cute animals.

Nobody expects the New Yorker to come down on religion. And indeed, although there are pieces that in effect express the nonbelief of their authors (see here, for instance), there’s always some lip-service paid to faith, or some atheism-dissing (in my case, my love of cats and Motown songs was characterized as “irrational love,” entirely similar to that seen in religion).  On some fine day, maybe I’ll open my New Yorker to find a take-no-prisoners piece on the perfidies of faith. But that day will come when, say, we have an atheist President in the U.S.

At any rate, the New Yorker has patted itself on the back for defending science in a new piece (free online) by Michael Specter, “Pope Francis and the GOP’s bad science.” (For non-Americans, the “GOP” stands for the “Grand Old Party,” i.e., Republicans.) The author’s credential are these:

Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, and has written frequently about AIDS, T.B., and malaria in the developing world, as well as about agricultural biotechnology, avian influenza, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, and synthetic biology.

And his message is that the Pope, religious though he is, is infinitely more accepting of science than those climate- and evolution-denialist Republican politicians who dominate science policy in Congress:

It’s a shame that there is no provision in the Constitution of the United States that would permit Pope Francis to serve as the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

. . . That’s too bad, because the Pope believes that science, rational thought, and data all play powerful and positive roles in human life. The senators seem as if they do not. Last month, Francis made a lot of news when, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he said, essentially, that the Catholic Church had no problem with evolution or with the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe. “When we read the account of Creation in Genesis, we risk imagining that God was a magician, complete with an all-powerful magic wand. But that was not so. … Evolution in nature does not conflict with the notion of Creation,’’ Francis said.

. . . Still, this Pope made a point of talking about evolution—and to do so at a time when the men and women we have chosen to represent us in Washington often equate support for Darwinism with eternal damnation.

Specter goes on to decry, correctly, that the House Science & Technology committee is peopled with representatives who call anthropogenic climate change a hoax, and don’t accept evolution.  He also claims, and he’s probably right again, that Americans used to elect politicians who didn’t make their names by attacking settled science. He uses Bobby Jindal as an example of how times have changed:

Jindal, who was a Rhodes scholar and before that received an honors degree in biology from Brown University, was recently asked at a public forum if he believed in evolution. “The reality is I was not an evolutionary biologist,” he responded, as if study in that one field was required to address the issue. He then went on to say that local school systems should decide “how they teach science” in their classrooms.

No, they shouldn’t get to decide what qualifies as legitimate science, as even the Pope seems to understand. In his speech at the Pontifical Academy, he said that, at least since the creation of the universe, we have all followed a logical, scientifically defined path—not a path determined by parish priests, reactionary American senators, or local school systems.

“I am happy to express my profound esteem and my warm encouragement to carry forward scientific progress,’’ the Pope said.  It would be nice if we could elect political leaders capable of that kind of thought. But, in this country, that might take a miracle.

Where Specter goes wrong is claiming that the Pope is down with evolution, and therefore is down with science, and therefore would be a good person to head a congressional committee.  And that’s just wrong.

True, Francis has expressed sentiments saying that evolution did happen, and for that liberals have fallen all over themselves extolling the Pontiff’s scientific acumen. “What a great move forward for accepting evolution!”, they cry.

The problem is, as I pointed out in The New Republic, what Francis said has been church policy all along. Move along folks: Francis said nothing new. The Catholic Church has accepted the process of evolution, in a limited way, since Pope Pius XII. But there are several caveats to this:

1. Humans are an exception to naturalistic evolution, as God instilled souls into us somewhere in the hominin lineage. That is not, as Specter maintains, the church’s position that, “at least since the creation of the universe, we have all followed a logical, scientifically defined path.” Since when have souls been a pit stop on the scientifically defined path of evolution?

2. The church still maintains that Adam and Eve were the historic and sole ancestors of all modern humans.

There is no evidence for claim #1: it’s what Anthony Grayling calls an “arbitrary superfluity,” added to a scientific theory to satisfy the emotional needs of Catholics.  And #2 just flies in the face of evoution per se, for we know from population genetics that at no point in the last million years did the human population sink below about 12,500 individuals, much less to two (or eight, if you take Noah, his wife, and his sons). That’s settled Church doctrine, and is explicit. There’s no metaphor in the Church’s insistence on the historicity of Adam and Eve. The policy below is from Humani Generis, written in 1950 and still representing Catholic dogma:

Screen Shot 2014-11-14 at 12.19.48 PM

Not much wiggle room there, eh? You can’t metaphorize it, either, as it says that it’s wrong to think that Adam either wasn’t our historical father or that he “represented a certain number of first parents” (the tactic that metaphorizers often take).

So, really, souls and two historical ancestors of modern Homo sapiens? Not to mention Francis’s belief in Satan, demonic possession, and guardian angels. Oh, and there’s that “original sin.” What, exactly is that?

Is Francis a man we want to hold up as a model of scientific belief to oppose to Republicans? I don’t think so. He’s infested with all the metaphysical superstitions of Catholicism, and really said nothing new. The view that he’s breathing a love of science into Catholicism is based solely on wishful thinking. And when you hear someone like Specter put the Pope on a pedestal of science, without mentioning his other beliefs I’ve mentioned, you know you’re dealing with someone who is trying to osculate religion, and who has not done his homework about what the Vatican really thinks about evolution.

It would be nice if The New Yorker were as honest about the Church’s beliefs as is The New Republic. 

h/t: Stephen Q. Muth, Butter’s staff ~