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from: The Guardian
Polly Toynbee
With the clash of two state funerals and a wedding, unreason is in full flood
this week. Yet again, rationalists who thought they understood this secular,
sceptical age have been shocked at the coverage from Rome.
The BBC airwaves have disgraced themselves. The Mail went mad with its
front-page headlines, "Safe in Heaven" and the next day
"Amen". Even this august organ, which sprang from the loins of
nonconformist dissent, astounded many readers with its broad acres of Pope
reverencing. Poor old Prince Rainier of that squalid little tax haven missed his
full Hello! death rites through bad timing.
The arcane flummery brings forth dusty academics in Vaticanology, the Act of
Settlement and laws of Monegasque succession. These pantomimes of power
fascinate in their quaintness, but they signify nothing beyond momentary
frisson.
The millions pouring into Rome (pray there is no Mecca-style disaster) herald
no resurgence of Catholicism. The devout are there, but this is essentially a
Diana moment, a Queen Mother's catafalque. People queue to join great public
spectacles, hoping it's a tell-my-grandchildren event. Communing with public
emotion is easy now travel is cheap. These things are driven by rolling,
unctuous television telling people a great event is unfolding, focusing on the
few hysterics in tears and not the many who come to feel their pain.
Bill Clinton had it right yesterday: "The man knows how to build a
crowd." Curiously, the celebrity nature of this event - a must-do for 200
world leaders - signifies the opposite of what it seems. It shows how far people
have forgotten what the church really is, how profoundly ignorant and
indifferent they have become to history and theology. Hell, he was just a good
ol' boy, wore white, blessed folk, prayed for peace - why not?
In Europe church attendance is plummeting, even in Poland, the heart of
reactionary Catholicism. Here the young are clueless about the most basic
Christian stories. How about the DJ who opened his show with "Happy Good
Friday!" Art galleries now need to explain the agony in the garden, the
raising of Lazarus and even the annunciation. In surveys, half the population
couldn't say what Easter meant. It is precisely this insouciant ignorance that
lets people emote with the flow; they know not what they do.
The Vatican is not a charming Monaco for tourists collecting Ruritanian
stamps or gazing at past glories in the Sistine Chapel. It is a modern, potent
force for cruelty and hypocrisy. It has weak temporal power, so George Bush can
safely pray at the corpse of the man who criticised the Iraq war and capital
punishment; it simply didn't matter as the Pope never made a serious issue of it
or ordered the US church to take strong action.
The Vatican's deeper power is in its personal authority over 1.3 billion
worshippers, which is strongest over the poorest, most helpless devotees. With
its ban on condoms the church has caused the death of millions of Catholics and
others in areas dominated by Catholic missionaries, in Africa and right across
the world. In countries where 50% are infected, millions of very young Aids
orphans are today's immediate victims of the curia. Refusing support to all who
offer condoms, spreading the lie that the Aids virus passes easily through
microscopic holes in condoms - this irresponsibility is beyond all
comprehension.
This is said often, even in this unctuous week - and yet still it does not
permeate. He was a good, caring man nevertheless, they say, as if it were a
minor aberration. But genuflecting before this corpse is scarcely different to
parading past Lenin: they both put extreme ideology before human life and
happiness, at unimaginable human cost. How dare our prime minister go there in
our name to give the Vatican our approval for this? Will he think of Africa when
on his knees today? I trust history will some day express astonishment at moral
outrage wasted on sexual trivia while papal celebrity and charisma cloaked this
great Vatican crime.
The editor of the Catholic Herald was somewhat Jesuitical when I argued with
him in a BBC studio yesterday. He asked how the Pope could be blamed when all
the church calls for is sex within marriage and abstinence. But abstinence and
celibacy are not the human condition. If the Vatican learned anything about
humanity, it would humbly meditate on 4,450 Catholic clergy in the US alone
accused of molesting children since 1950, and no doubt as many in Catholic
churches elsewhere still in denial.
The scale of it is breathtaking yet not at all surprising: most humans are
sexual beings. A Vatican edict in the 1960s threatened to excommunicate anyone
breaking secrecy on child sex allegations, and guaranteed that ever more
children continued to suffer. And within its walls the Vatican shields an
American priest from allegations.
Still the Vatican turns a blind eye to this most repugnant and damaging of
all sexual practices, the suffering little children whose priests come unto
them. Yet at the same time it thunders disapproval of sex in every other more
innocent circumstance, blighting the lives of millions with its teaching on
gays, divorce, abortion and unrealistic self-denial. There is no reckoning how
many of the world's poorest women have died giving birth to more children than
they can survive; contraception is women's true saviour.
In 1971 I interviewed Mother Teresa and asked how she justified letting
starving babies be born to die on Calcutta streets for lack of contraception.
She said sublimely that every baby entering the world was another soul created
in praise of God, even if it lived only a few hours. She was never keen on
cures: suffering was a gift of God that enabled those who cared for the
afflicted to demonstrate their love. She was beatified by John Paul II for their
shared religious mania. Those who met them talk of an aura of love, power,
listening and intensity. But goodness is in doing good; good intent is no excuse
for murderous error.
Today's saccharine sanctimony will try to whiten the sepulchre of yet another
Pope whose obscurantist faith has caused pointless suffering; it is no defence
that he was only obeying higher orders.
At the funeral will be a convocation of mullahs, rabbis and all the other
medieval faiths that increasingly conspire together against modernity. Islamic
groups are sternly warning the Vatican to stand firm against liberal influences
on homosexuality, abortion, contraception and the ordination of women. What is
it about religion that unites them all on sex? It always expresses itself as
disgust for women's bodies, leading to a need to suppress women altogether. Why
is controlling women's bodies the shared battle flag of every faith?
Disgracefully, the European rich quietly ignore the church's outlandish
teachings on contraception without rebelling on behalf of the helpless
third-world poor who die for their misplaced faith. Those "civilised"
Catholics have as much blood on their hands as the Vatican they support. They
are like the Bollinger Bolsheviks who defended the USSR and a murderous ideology
that they could do much to change. For today, just remember what lies beneath
all this magnificent display. » The Real Legacy of Pope John Paul II «» Pope John Paul II: 25 Years of Laughs « » Pope forgives molested children « » Starving Masses Warned Against the Evils of Contraception « » go to Atheists of Silicon Valley Commentary page « » go to Atheists of Silicon Valley homepage «
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