Pope culture references

It's almost Easter which should be reminding Christians of the story of the resurrection of Christ. All across Atlanta and the metro area folks are having easter egg hunts. And I thought about writing about the curious pagan history of the holiday. It never fails to amuse me, that incongruity between the story of the holiday and the way most people celebrate it. But one tradition which is absolutely on message is that of the Pope's Easter vigil and sermon. And in a normal year, as thousands of devotees head to Vatican City to light candles, pray and celebrate the resurrection of Jesus they probably would not be distracted by a sex scandal.

The Catholic church has been annoyed by allegations that priests have been molesting children. The pope started Holy Week by issuing a statement that he would use his faith to work "toward the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion."

Is it petty gossip?

In Ireland two bishops have resigned over how they handled a priest who was accused of abusing children. Priests covered up the scandal and protected the abuser rather than the victims.

The church would not defrock a priest accused of molesting as many as 200 deaf boys in the 1950's and 1960's. And one of the people who could have taken action was Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

The pope himself has even come out with an apology for the abuse - sort of. The apology acknowledges something went shamefully wrong, but doesn't really deal with the fact that the church's protectionism ran all the way to the Vatican.

Let's pretend - just for a moment - that it wasn't the glorious Catholic church behind this terrible series of crimes and cover-ups. What if it was a franchise daycare center? Would you continue to send your kids to the daycare as case after case of abuse and cover-up came to light? Would you rally around the daycare center and defend it as a nice place even as the owner authorizes payouts, hush money and relocates gropers to different facilities? Or would you snatch your kids out of there and get them to somewhere safe?

Maybe that last comment is unfair. Maybe nowhere is really safe for your kids. But some places are clearly more dangerous than others, and if it was any other organization besides the Catholic church, I think the outrage would knock that organization down. But the church is an institution more than a thousand years old and it can absorb a few thousand abused kids with the same impassivity with which it handles AIDS and condoms. And it could be that the abuse itself is within statistical norms for all denominations, but it is the way in which the Church treated the abuse and the abusers as well as the victims which lies at the heart of the problem.

Recently The Catholic World Report ran an article by George Neumayr on this problem. George asks some hard questions. On what moral authority do non-Catholics criticize the church?

Moreover, what moral authority and “credibility” do they bring to the issue of protecting children, exactly? These are the same people who favor the abortion of unborn children. They favor the high-brow child abuse of turning children over to homosexual couples at gay adoption agencies. They think it enlightened to bring Planned Parenthood representatives into elementary schools. They celebrate on Main Street gay-pride parades that include the North American Man/Boy Love Association. (Neumayr, 2010)

Of course, he may be building straw-men. I know lots of pro-choice folks, but don't know any that "favor abortion." And I'm absolutely in favor of gays being able to adopt - if they're able to take care of the kids and bring them up in a loving family. Right now I'm thinking gay couples are a much safer choice than priest-run Catholic orphanages. I support sex education - sure. But I don't know what the heck he's talking about with the NAMBLA reference. I assume that's just a giant child-raping straw man. And when it comes to NAMBLA - surely their crime is the same as the one these priests are accused of? Oh, and trying to tie homosexuals to pedophilia is just ignorant. Read a book, Neumayr. Something written this century.

But the moral question - on what moral authority do I condemn the church? That's a serious question and one I have an answer for.

As a human being with a sincere concern about my fellow man, I condemn the Catholic church for covering up such abuse from the simple moral authority that I know it is wrong for an adult to take sexual advantage of a minor. To an outsider, such abuse seems unconscionable - and I can only imagine what it must do to those who are still in the church and have children - or were abused and re reminded by these new allegations. I don't need the Church to tell me that such acts are morally wrong - it is self-evident. (Though, to be accurate, the vast majority of these abuses are of post-pubescent teens and are technically known as ephebophilia rather than pedophilia. And there's some pedagogy on pedophilia.)

As a skeptic it would be easy to say that things like this should be a wake up call to members of the church - that corruption has usurped conviction. As an outsider it would be easy to say that the responsible thing would be for the pope to step down. (But honestly, I would have thought Ratzinger would have passed on accepting the position in the first place. Surely there were candidates for Pope that weren't Hitler Youth? I know he's not a Nazi - but surely somebody was qualified that hadn't been that involved?)

The harder thing for me to say as a skeptic and outsider is this: The Catholic church provides comfort and peace to millions of people. That is a fact which seems at odds with all the things the church does which annoy my humanist sensibilities. I have plenty of peace, but there are millions and millions of people who find that they need the church for a variety of reasons. The church helps feed people. The church is a focal point for family and social events. The church is a solid physical reminder of Christian community, and the glorious promise of hope for life after death.

And yet, it seems at its core that it has lost its way. Dogmatic adherence to ancient wisdom when that wisdom has been overturned by strong, replicable evidence - this is foolish. The church changes very slowly. But there seems to be a strong, primitive and willfully ignorant core behind the priest cover-ups as well as the outmoded sexual policies of the Catholic church.

Something should change. And if it can't change from the top, it should change from the bottom. The church wouldn't need people to growl like watchdogs and defend it if it would stop acting like an inviolate and infallible institution. The church is composed of men - all of whom can and do make mistakes. If the core idea of Christianity is forgiveness, surely that starts with confession and ends not with contrition but with corrective acts to prevent such failures in the future?

This weekend the Pope will comfort millions with a message calling back to the story of how Jesus was resurrected. People will go through their Easter rituals and as Spring sweeps across the northern side of the globe, the sense of renewal will be powerful.

My easter prayer is that reason prevails over dogma in the Catholic church. It'd be cool if it were that easy.

Other links on this topic:

The Pope's Preacher compares the outcry on the sex abuse scandal to anti-semitism.

Historical/Population Perspective on Catholic Sex Abuse scandal.