Some time in the past few days, I remarked how ironic it is that the detractors of the Church and the Pope who love to underscore that the CDF used to be the Holy Office that carried out the Inquisition in the Middle Ages do not seem to realize that they are now playing the role of the Inquisition towards the Church and the Pope.... Someone has now articulated this concept very well on a British online journal that prides itself on being
"an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms. spiked is endorsed by free-thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, and hated by the narrow-minded such as Torquemada and Stalin. Or it would be, if they were lucky enough to be around to read it".
It is, I think, a seminal essay out of all the media muddle, and even among the strong 'defenses' in favor of the Pope but have really failed to consider the deep and rampant pathology at work behind the Pope-hunting and Church-hating.
The Secular Inquisition
by BRENDAN O'NEILL
April 13, 2010
The campaign to arrest the Pope is the product of an increasingly desperate secularism, which can only find meaning through ridiculing the religious.
The New Atheist campaign to have Pope Benedict XVI arrested when he visits Britain later this year exposes the deeply disturbing, authoritarian and even Inquisitorial side to today’s campaigning secularism.
There is nothing remotely positive in the demand that British cops lock up the pope and then drag him to some international court on charges of ‘crimes against humanity’. Instead it springs from an increasingly desperate and discombobulated secularism, one which, unable to assert itself positively through Enlightening society and celebrating the achievements of mankind, asserts itself negatively, even repressively, through ridiculing the religious.
Christopher Hitchens, author of
God is Not Great, first came up with the idea of arresting the Pope. Richard Dawkins, author of
The God Delusion and generally the Chosen One amongst the New Atheists, has backed the idea ‘wholeheartedly’.
Together they are consulting Geoffrey Robertson, the human rights lawyer, on the legalities and logistics of cornering His Holiness in Britain this September. Numerous columnists are cheering them on, one wildly fantasising that the angelic Hitchens/Dawkins/Robertson trio will wield the sword of justice in the name of all those ‘victims of sacerdotal rape’ and show the whole world that ‘the powerful’ cannot hide from justice.
It’s worth asking
why otherwise fairly intelligent thinkers get so dementedly exercised over the Pope and the Catholic Church. What exactly is their beef? What are they objecting to?
Very few (if any) of the Pope-hunters were raised Catholic, so this isn’t about personal vengeance for some perceived slight by a priest or nun. And despite their current
lowdown, historically illiterate attempt to equate a priest fondling a child with a state’s attempt to obliterate an entire people – under the collective tag ‘crime against humanity’ – the truth is that some of these Pope-hunters don’t really think child abuse is the worst crime in the world.
In 2006, Dawkins criticised ‘hysteria about paedophilia’ and said that, even though he was the victim of sexual abuse at boarding school, he would defend his abusive former teachers if ‘50 years on they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers’. Yet now he wants to put abusive priests on a par with genocidaires.
[O'Neill forgets to cite the recent example of 'intellectuals' around the world genuflecting to Roman Polanski and demanding that the United States ignore its criminal laws to spare him any asnwerability for his admitted rape of a minor and subsequent escape from the US justice system by fleeing to Europe!]
Also, while of course one incident of child sexual abuse by a priest is one too many, it simply isn’t the case that the Catholic Church is a vast, institutionalised paedophile ring wrecking the lives of millions of children around the world.
One Pope-hunting columnist describes the Vatican as an ‘international criminal conspiracy to protect child rapists’, yet the facts and figures don’t bear that out. If these anti-Pope crusaders really were interested in justice and equality, there are numerous other, even worse crimes and scandals that they might investigate and interrogate and try to alleviate.
Yet despite the lack of any obvious, sensible reason why they
break out in boils at the mention of the words ‘Benedict’, ‘priest’ or ‘Catholic’, the Pope-hunters’ campaign has acquired a
powerfully pathological, obsessive and deafeningly shrill character. It is screeching and emotional. It talks about ‘systematic evil’ and discusses the Pope as a ‘leering old villain in a frock’.
It uses up almost all the intellectual and physical energies of men and women who consider themselves to be serious thinkers. What is going on here?
The reason this crusade is so hysterical is because it is not really about the Pope at all – it is about the New Atheists themselves. The contemporary Pope-hunting springs from a secularist movement which feels incapable of asserting a sense of purpose or meaning in any positive, human-centred way – as the great atheists of old such as Marx or Darwin might have done – and which instead can only assert itself negatively, in contrast to the ‘evil’ of religion, by posturing against the alleged wickedness of institutionalised faith.
It is the inner emptiness, directionless and soullessness of contemporary secularism – in contrast to earlier, Enlightened and more positive secular movements – which has given birth to the bizarre clamour for the Pope’s head.
Secularism is in crisis. In Enlightened times, progressive secular movements, those which eschewed the guidance of God in favour of relying on mankind to work out what his problems were and how to solve them, were all about having a positive view of humanity. Their vision was both terrifying and extremely liberating: that man alone could master the complexities of life on Earth and improve it for himself and future generations.
Today, however, we live in misanthropic, deeply downbeat times, where mankind is looked upon as a greedy, destructive, unreliable force whose behaviour and thoughts must be governed from without.
Indeed, one of the newspaper writers who cheered on the vengeance of Hitchens and Dawkins against Benedict used the very same column to argue that ‘ecocide’ – otherwise known as mankind’s impact on the planet – should also be made a ‘crime against humanity’.
It perfectly illustrated that it is not faith in humankind that drives today’s ‘muscular secularism’, but something like its opposite: a profound confusion about mankind’s role, a discomfort with the world we inhabit today, a powerful sense of isolation amongst contemporary New Secularists – isolation from other people, from any coherent ideas, from any stand-up system of meaning.
Driven more by doubt and disarray than by a desire to Enlighten, the New Secularists come across as alarmingly intolerant of any system of meaning which, unlike theirs, appears to have some coherence and authority.
This is what drives their war against religion: an instinct for ridiculing those who still, unlike contemporary secularists themselves, have an overarching outlook on life and a strong belief system.
That is really what they find so alien about the Catholic Church in particular – its beliefs, its faith, its hierarchy.
An atheism utterly alienated from the mass of humanity and from any future-oriented vision can only lash out in an extreme and intolerant way against those who still seem to have strong beliefs: the religious, or the ‘deluded ones’, as the New Atheists see it.
As a consequence, their campaign against the Pope really does have the feel of a witch-hunt to it, even, ironically, of the Inquisition itself.
Firstly because, in order to endow their campaign with some logic, the Pope-hunters must
vastly exaggerate the scale and impact of the Catholic Church’s crimes against children.
Secondly because they are implicitly seeking to create a policing, repressive climate in relation to what they see as a problematic religion, to the extent that religious leaders might no longer feel free to travel the globe to visit their followers.
And thirdly, and most importantly, because
their hunting of the Pope is designed to satisfy themselves, to provide them with a feeling of power and purpose and legitimacy which they cannot secure through their own ideas or vision.
No doubt some will accuse me of ‘defending paedophile priests’ in contrast to the New Atheist campaign on behalf of ‘powerless victims’. In truth,
my only concern, as an atheistic libertarian, is with analysing the emergence of a new form of hysterical and repressive atheism.
And the New Atheists are not the first group of people in history to pursue their own,
deeply problematic, fearmongering, illiberal agenda under the guise of trying to win justice for ‘the powerless’.
An interesting note, which I will pursue later:
Previously on spiked:
Brendan O’Neill explained why humanists shouldn’t engage in Catholic-bashing. Michael Fitzpatrick discussed the Irish elite’s paradoxical attitude to clerical abuse and said New Atheists like Christopher Hitchen’s should follow the example of Marx and Darwin instead of baiting the devout. Nathalie Rothschild refused to hop aboard the atheist bus and reviewed a book that took a novel approach to New Atheism. Or read more at spiked issue Religion.
And once again, CNA has done a 'job' I would otherwise have done promptly if I were doing this fulltime and if going through the media morass one must nonetheless go through these days has not hampered my ability to translate as much as I would want to...
Veteran Vatican reporter denounces
anti-Catholic media bias
Rome, Italy, Apr 13, 2010 (CNA) - Vatican analyst Andrea Tornielli published a column this week discussing the Associated Press' manipulation of a letter from then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger which supposedly “proved” he covered up abuse by a California priest. Tornielli remarked that the media has a new bias: “The-Pope-Must-Be-Guilty.”
The AP article, published last Friday, was based on a letter signed in 1985 by then-Cardinal Ratzinger when he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). He was responding to a request by Bishop John Cummins of the Diocese of Oakland, California to remove priestly duties from Fr. Stephen Kiesle. At the time, Fr. Kiesle was accused of molesting two children in 1978.
The AP charged that then-Cardinal Ratzinger “resisted pleas to de-frock the priest.” In the letter, the Holy Father is quoted as saying that the case needed “careful consideration, which necessitates a longer period of time.”
Tornielli wrote: “As has been the case in recent days, the letter was presented as a case of ‘covering-up’ a pedophile priest on the part of the future Pope.”
However, Tornielli continued, a greater scrutiny of the context shows that at the time the Ratzinger-led CDF “did not have jurisdiction over cases of pedophilia and (Cardinal Ratzinger's) letter addresses the issue of laicization and not his trial.” He adds that “Ratzinger asked for more study of the case,” and "two years later, laicization was granted; and there was no cover-up of the guilty party.”
“What is most noteworthy is not that fact that these letters (Ratzinger must have signed many of them during his 23 years at the head of the former Holy Office) are published,” but that they are reprinted
“again and again without any verification of context or procedures,” without “looking into the circumstances that would allow whoever is reading them to have a clue.” This is what a “journalist is supposed to do.”
“I myself have made many mistakes in my profession throughout the years, and I don’t take any pleasure in lecturing or giving advice to others,” Tornielli said. “But as a reader, I think
we are dealing with a pre-established bias: The-Pope-must-be-guilty (perhaps for this reason they are trying to bring him to court) and it is through this lens that they are seeking out testimony and documents.”
Pope Benedict XVI has been leading the effort to address the sexual abuse crisis in the Church, he added, and it is “obvious” that the recent reports are an attempt to “discredit the moral authority of the Church and the Pope and weaken his message.”
“By this I am not saying we should minimize the scandals that we have all seen,” he added.
In an article for the Italian daily,
Il Giornale, Tornielli also pointed out that American attorney Jeff Anderson was behind the AP story. Anderson had previously made known his intention to continue filing lawsuits against the Church and that he has made millions from his efforts thus far.
Vatican spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi has not commented on the specifics of the letter, but noted on Friday that "The press office doesn't believe it is necessary to respond to every single document taken out of context regarding particular legal situations.”
I am in no position now to do the research simply because I do not have the time among so many 'priorities' I am trying to set for myself as far as this Forum, but why has no one in the media (at the very least, in the Catholic media) - as far as I have seen - looked back to see how the MSM reported and commented on the US 'sex scandals' when they broke in 2001-2002. I was not particularly following Vatican news at the time but I seem to recall a similar feeding frenzy in the American media that went on for months, and some of it must have been directed at the Pope at the time, John Paul II.
A quantitative and qualitative comparison of that frenzy to the present one would be useful, as it might show how much the present rabid mania, with fangs and claws and poison foaming at the mouth like mad dogs, is driven by media hostility, by itself, to the person of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.
A columnist early on during this manic-convulsive cycle said the madness was MSM's way of saying 'It's payback time' to someone they had maligned for the better part of two decades but who still 'managed somehow' to be elected Pope... But 'payback' is too paltry a term to describe this all-out vendetta - the kind even the Borgias could never have imagined, the equivalent of an Al-Qaeda aim-to-kill-and-maim order, only much deadlier and much much more malevolent because the assassins are targeting not just persons and an institution but truth itself.
But one cannot expect anything positive from a blindly driven mob on the rampage. Truth is meaningless to them - because ultimately, they are incapable even of common decency, much less of caritas which would and should open them to veritas!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/04/2010 15:09]