I am definitely dreading what horrendous tortures the UK media and supercilious sanctimonious secularists - blindly driven by irrational hostility - are preparing to unload as the Holy Father's visit to the UK approaches... One of them seems to have an attack of conscience here, but in the end, his prejudices win out...
I'm an atheist but this anti-Catholic
rhetoric is making me nervous
BY Padraig Reidy
Sunday, 22 August 2010
The Church's critics have been mobilised by the Pope's visit but the rhetoric is tipping over into the extreme.
The messages keep coming: "We Protest the Pope: Want to join us?"
asked the first, a few weeks ago. More recently, an invitation came to a Protest the Pope meeting in Richmond, south London, where ideas such as blocking the route of the Pope's cavalcade during his visit to Britain next month were discussed.
I should not be surprised to receive these invitations. I'm one of the few people in the world who could truthfully put the phrase "professional atheist" on their CV. For three years, I was deputy editor of
New Humanist magazine, the publication of choice for UK humanists.
So why do I feel uneasy?
My first encounter with the British establishment happened on my first day of university. A Hapsburg-lipped, Holland Park resident, a fellow student on the journalism degree I was about to embark upon, heard my Irish name, and my Irish accent, and commented, clearly rather pleased with himself: "So who do you write for, the
Catholic Herald?"
Here I was, clearly identified as kicking with the other foot. As time went on, even an
atheist Catholic like me could not help but note this ingrained prejudice, either blatantly expressed or just as often on the edge of a remark. Smells and bells and superstition.
My journey to atheism was not the crisis some imagine of "lapsed" Catholics. An eminent sociologist once told me that the difference between Catholic atheists and Protestant atheists was that the Protestant variety gradually moved towards godlessness through questioning and reason, whereas the Catholic ones have one dark night of the soul when the entire edifice came crumbling down, leaving them resentful of the world's kicking away of their crutch.
That never happened to me. I mostly just lost interest in the church, in spite of being educated by the Presentation Brothers, a monastic offshoot of the more notorious Christian Brothers. The argument for God just doesn't make sense to me.
Arriving in England, I went from a country where religion was everywhere, but of little interest to me, to a country that had little interest in religion, but still defined me by my purported beliefs.
Modern Britain is a country founded in large part on anti-Catholicism. This is obvious in establishment bedrocks such as the succession, which bars Roman Catholics from becoming head of state or even being married to the head of state. But it is not just the establishment that distrusts Roman Catholics.
Catholicism is viewed with suspicion by significant sections of the British left. While some of this stems from European anti-clericalism, there is a deeper motif, a part of the patriotic left espoused at various points by Tom Paine and George Orwell that draws on notions of the "free-born Englishman".
The Catholic, owing his allegiance to Rome, rather than this green and pleasant land, does not fit this narrative.
[What allegiance are we talking of here? It must be defined and not left equivocal. The sensible Catholic knows the difference between his civic duty and therefore civic allegiance to his government, and the allegiance of his faith - his spiritual allegiance, which is not 'to Rome' or 'to the Vatican' but to Christ who happenss to be represented on earth by his Vicar the Pope.]
With Benedict on his way, the chorus rises. A Facebook invitation asks me to "Give Pope Benedict a lesson in British Values of Equality". On leading left blog Liberal Conspiracy, one writer, discussing the Vatican's stance on euthanasia, tells us: "This is, after all, a Vhurch that expects its followers to mumble incantations in front of a large statue of a mostly naked European bloke nailed to a Roman torture implement and includes an act of ritual cannibalism in its rites… so who's really obsessed with death here."
Examine the language here. "Incantations", "cannibalism".
This is the tone of Ian Paisley's rabidly anti-papist Free Presbyterian church, not of rational secular debate.
The faux-sympathy over child sexual abuse feels similarly galling, used as an opportunity to attack the church rather than express genuine concern for victims. Almost the entire focus on clerical abuse scandals is on sexual attacks on young boys by old priests,
despite the fact that most of the abuse detailed in the various inquiries' reports consists of beating and physical and mental torture.
[That is quite misleading, except in the case of the Ryan Report that looked into systematic abuses - including sexual abuse, psychological abuse and corporal punishment - that went on in many Irish institutions run by religious orders since the 1930s.]
Compare the taunts over buggery and the sneering at transubstantiation with the
dignity of the people who actually know Catholicism. [Since the writer proceeds to name people who have been quite bitterly critical of the Church, he uses the pat and patently wrongful generalization that "people who actuually know Catholcism" all have a terrible tale to say about it, even if they say it 'with dignity"!]
Ireland was rocked last year when Michael O'Brien, a former politician and victim of childhood abuse at the hands of the Rosiminian order, confronted a government minister on live television over state complicity in the Church's cover-up.
In the past few weeks, a call by 80-year-old Jennifer Sleeman for a boycott of the churches on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, in protest at the Vatican's treatment of women, has clearly rattled the hierarchy. Sleeman's son, who is a Benedictine monk, is said to have described her initiative as "brilliant".
In the September issue of
New Humanist magazine, noted secularists and Catholics such as Philip Pullman, Claire Rayner, Richard Dawkins and Conor Gearty are asked what they would say to the Pope if they met him on his trip.
Rayner says his views are "so disgusting, so repellent, and so hugely damaging to the rest of us, that the only thing to do is to get rid of him". [What a typical statement of take-no-prisoners bigotry professed by someone who, I suppose, considers himself an 'intellectual' but speaks out of ideological hatred rather than any common sense or logic!].]
Some of these views, such as opposition to abortion and opposition to the death sentence, are shared by many Catholics and many more non-Catholics. Professor Dawkins remarks that Benedict is head of the world's "second most evil religion" (one can only assume the professor would put Islam at the top of that league table).
It is Catholics such as Gearty and abuse victim Graham Wilmer who express a real wish for change and justice from the Church, rather than hector.
[Hey, who has been doing all the hectoring????? The Church has taken all the hectoring here, while her detractors simply ignore the Holy Father's messaage, language and tone. In fact, the detractors refuse to see what is Christian - humility, love and forgiveness - in the actions of the Church, and simply see the sins of the few which they project onto every Catholic without exception.]
In Graham Greene's
The End of the Affair, Richard Smythe of the South London Rationalist Society explains love to Sarah, the book's heroine, who struggles toward Catholicism bearing her human load of angst, guilt, fear and longing:
"The desire to possess in some, like avarice: in others the desire to surrender, to lose the sense of responsibility, the wish to be admired. Sometimes just the wish to be able to talk, to unburden yourself to someone who won't be bored. The desire to find again a mother and a father. And of course under it all a biological motive."
"And the love of God?" Sarah asks.
"It's all the same."
To Sarah's ears, he is describing Catholic religious belief. Smythe's successors in south London and beyond should remember
the impulse that drives believers; they must aim to bring comfort to the afflicted above afflicting the comfortable.
Otherwise, many Catholics – the people most likely to suffer from the Vatican's prejudices and cover-ups, and the only people with any potential to bring change in the Church, not noted for its responsiveness to outside pressures – will draw ranks and understandably so. It is the structure of the Church that should be challenged, not the beliefs of Catholics. [Naturally, the writer falls back into his own comfortable and natural posture of prejudice and condescension toward the Church that almost nullify anything positive he wrote earlier in the essay. As if expressing his uneasiness over the extreme rhetoric used against the Pope somehow makes him better than the other detractors! Well, marginally so, perhaps, though there is not one element in his last paragraph that does not echo the bedrock convictions of the most belligerent anti-Papist... But I am grateful he has expressed the sensible sentiments that he did earlier.]
Comment from
Even Padraig Reidy’s credentials as an ex-Catholic, atheist deputy editor of the
New Humanist magazine are not enough to protect him from the rage of the anti-Catholic bigots on
The Guardian comments page. In their hate-filled world anyone expressing the slightest criticism of their anti-Catholic campaign or sympathy for ordinary Catholics becomes the object of their sneering contempt.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/08/2010 22:02]