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.

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.