Image via Wikipedia
Brian McClinton, Chairman of the Humanist Association of Northern Ireland, had an article in today’s Belfast Telegraph re. the Pope and his visit to Britain. However, the article was not published in full. The full text is below.
By Brian McClinton, Humanist Association of Northern Ireland
Much of the criticism of the papal visit to Britain has focused on the pope’s alleged involvement in cover-ups of widespread sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. Certainly, these cases are scandalous and deserve all the media attention they have received. But they also serve to cast a light on the more general failings of an organisation to which the majority of the world’s Christian belong.
I would like to address these failings, without personalisation and accepting that there are millions of good Catholics, and argue that they are endemic to the Catholic Church per se and not just about the failings of Joseph Ratzinger, bad though they obviously are. So, here is a charge sheet.
In the first place, it is a highly institutionalised church, with a rigid hierarchy, set doctrines and habitual rituals. And as such it provides the classic case of what happens to a system of beliefs once they become structured and powerful. The institution loses sight of the basic message which it was established to promote and instead becomes preoccupied with its own preservation at all costs. Instead of the Church serving the people, it is the people who become servants of the Church.
Two illustrations serve to demonstrate this fundamental weakness. The first is central to its supposed raison d’etre. The Jesus of the Gospels lived a simple life of poverty and powerlessness. The Pope, by contrast, lives in imperial panoply in a 72-room palace, is attended hand and foot, has declared himself a head of state and demands the attention of political leaders throughout the world. He is manifestly more akin to a roman emperor than to the ‘Vicar of Christ’.
Again, in the child abuse scandals, the Church clearly placed its own reputation above that of the children it was meant to nourish and protect. It was prepared to indulge in massive and widespread cover-up of the abuse and even allow it to continue in order to protect itself from any hint of criticism. A religion which places great emphasis on safeguarding ‘little children’ betrayed them in its own interest.
A second failing is that it is still essentially a medieval autocracy persisting into a democratic age. It is a pyramidal hierarchy in which the Pope is not only held to be infallible when speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals, but also, as with any autocracy, his opinion on almost anything tends to be taken as Gospel. He stamps his authority and his views firmly on the whole organisation. The Church itself strengthens papal power by proclaiming itself as the one, true Church of God, and treating the pope as his representative on earth.
Let’s put it bluntly. There is nothing in the Gospels which remotely justifies such a totalitarian religion as the Catholic Church. Hitler recognised its real power: “So far there has been nothing more imposing on earth than the hierarchical organisation of the Catholic Church. A good part of that organisation I have transported directly to my own party”. Hitler recognised its strength and used it for his own purposes.
A further weakness is that it is patriarchal. It is completely dominated by middle-aged and elderly males exercising authority over the young as well as women. It prohibits contraceptives, the marriage of priests and the ordination of women. For centuries the church justified the exclusion of women from the priesthood on the grounds that they were inferior to men. Even though this view can no longer be sustained in the modern world, the Catholic Church clearly continues on the assumption that it is true.
The Catholic Church is also bigoted. It insists that ‘outside the Church, there is no salvation’. Under the present pope it has shown intolerance towards atheism, Protestantism and Islam. Benedict has declared atheism to be the cause of the ‘greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice’ in history, thus ignoring the Church’s own part in the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the persecutions of heretics, the censorship of art and literature, as well as the more recent clerical sex scandals.
He has also declared that Protestant and other Christian denominations are not true churches but merely ecclesial communities without the ‘means of salvation’, and implied that Islam is unreasonable because it deems as acceptable spreading the faith through violence.
The Catholic Church itself can be accused of being irrational because it thrives on superstition and mumbo-jumbo. Apart from blind obedience to popes and priests, it fosters fear, ignorance and superstition. In a supposedly humane era it still preaches the horrors of hell, the pains of purgatory and the loss of the beatific vision in limbo. In a supposedly rational world it is still infused with a bric-a-brac of relics and rosary beads, medals and shrines, wine and wafers, incantations and exorcisms, saints and statues, miracles and holy water. All of these rituals and superstitions can be seen as part of a deliberate fostering of credulity and an attack on rationality.
A final charge is that the Catholic Church is a reactionary faith and has been throughout its history. All the great movements of western progress, enlightenment and freedom have occurred not only outside its influence but usually also in the teeth of its vehement opposition. And its obsolete and loveless morality persists into the modern world. Its reactionary stance on many issues, such as abortion, homosexuality, women’s rights and attitudes to other Christian faiths, hinders the development of a genuinely pluralist and liberal democracy.
So, let’s not blame it all on Ratzinger. The criticisms extend deep into the very heart of Catholicism.
Related Articles
- What kind of Pope is Ratzinger? (bbc.co.uk)
- Welcome to Britain, Pope Benedict! (humanistlife.org.uk)
- Pope travels to Britain amid indifference, outrage (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
Recent Comments