PONTIFICATIONS

The former Hitler Youth conscript, Ratzinger, has given further life to the notion of papal bull. Announcing his intention to impose on the British taxpayer a bill of some £20m by deigning to visit these shores, the Pope simultaneously tore up the usual protocols observed by imminently visiting heads of state and set about the British government’s sovereign authority. His specific target is the equality legislation presently passing through parliament which, claims Ben XVI, would “impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs … [and] … violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed”.

What Joe Ratzo means is that Catholics want to be able to continue to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of lay people (specifically gay people) to seek gainful employment. The notion is that the British legislation would be liable to overrule, say, a parish priest not wishing to hire the best (only?) candidate for a church cleaning job because that applicant happened to be gay. One can perfectly well understand that no cleric would be comfortable with such a cleaner who is in a position, perhaps during choir practice, correctly to interpret the look in the cleric’s eye every time the choristers process. But his discomfort would not – and should not – give him the right to deny the cleaner the job.


Ratzo tries not to catch the eye of a member of the notorious Swiss Guard ...


... and then wonders if he's been found out

One is bound to ask what is this “natural law” Ratzo evokes that, he seems to think, absolves him of endorsing what, in his account, this natural law achieves, that is to “ground” and “guarantee” human equality. Clearly Ratzo doesn’t want equality enshrined in civil law because then British Catholics would have to do more than pay lip service to it. The natural law business is a mere smokescreen.

Westminster’s still shiny new Cardinal, Vincent Nichols, would have to be a serial killer crossed with a cheat on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to be worse news than his predecessor Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. But Vinnie too showed himself to be no novice at Vatican doublespeak. After the massed British cardinals had been addressed by Pope Joe-Benedict, he stepped up to support the latest expression of the public, formal homophobia: “We do not support the notion of discrimination. But you have to distinguish between people”. So is that “yes, we do discriminate” or “no, we don’t discriminate”, Vin? It’s make-up-your-mind time.


Archbishop Vinnie looks for guidance (as well he might)

One of the main attractions of espousing supernatural delusion is the centuries-old tradition by which the delusional claim that they are permitted to say or do anything they might wish, however brutal, outlandish, fantastical or plainly untrue, because they can always find some justification in some more or less incomprehensible ancient text. Thus Muslim fundamentalists justify sending children as young as seven to kill themselves and random others with bombs strapped to their bodies and – there was a case of this in Turkey in the last few days – burying alive a teenaged girl because she “dishonoured” her family by talking to (talking to) boys.


Benedict models a jaunty item for the cross-dressing man ...

Ratzo’s Weltanschauung is no less cruel, perverse or disordered than this. If every member of the Catholic communion who had ever mentally or physically abused a child were cast into jail, there would be no cell place left for parliamentarians found guilty of false accounting and not enough priests, monks, nuns and lay teachers to keep Catholicism in the business of indoctrination. Pope Joe knows this perfectly well but it would be far too damaging publicly to concede it. Those who were abused are too dispersed – and many of them too traumatised or simply grateful to put it behind them – for a sufficiently concerted effort to be mounted to make the church pay (in any sense) for its representatives’ sins.


... and a natty example of the 'Village People' range of millinery

Meanwhile, the way you do, His Hollowness attempted to pre-empt his critics in the same address to British cardinals: “it is important to recognise dissent for what it is and not to mistake it for a mature contribution to a balanced and wide-ranging debate”. No pontiff in my lifetime – not even that patently good man John XXIII – has shown the remotest readiness to partake in any kind of debate. Rather, they all deliver pronouncements – or, as they call them, edicts – which are certainly not designed to have comment threads attached. What’s more, we could argue (although it wouldn’t do anybody any good) about how far the term “wide-ranging” could be used to describe such edicts. Shutting down debate altogether is far more to pontiffs’ taste and that is just what Ratzinger is attempting to do here.


Cartoon in The Times twitting Ratzinger's policy on contraception

But of course it is he, the wholly egregious father, who is doing the dissenting. The equality legislation is the proposition. The only people opposing it are the supernaturally deluded who, as always, want to control everyone else and to discriminate against (sorry, Vin-boy, distinguish between) people. This dissent is certainly, as Ratzinger suggests, immature. Supernatural delusion is indeed infantile. If I may purloin a (frequently misquoted) line from that fascinating Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, the believer’s creed might be “And always keep a hold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse” [Cautionary Tales], wherein “Nurse” is the deity that the deluded imagine commands their fealty. You can hardly expect such under-developed minds to feel confident about coping with a world in which their intellectual superiors are prepared to treat them as their equals.


"Are you a gay dog, Bernard, or are you perhaps a saint?"

A WISE FATHER KNOWS HIS OWN CHILD

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is passing through the House of Lords. Among its provisions is one that grants the full legality of parenthood to both partners of a relationship that generates a child by IVF treatment. Needless to say, that fiercest of lobbies, the sanctity-of-marriage brigade, is back up on its high horse. A lesbian couple, they shriek, will be able to co-parent without benefit of a father figure.

The reigning father figure of the Catholic church in Britain, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, leads the charge. His letter to The Times on Monday raised a number of disputed areas upon which the bill touches, but none is more clearly in his sights than the family that does not conform to scriptural teaching or rather (to be scrupulous about it, given the lousy deal that women receive throughout The Bible) to contemporary theology. The Cardinal is most famous, of course, for his history of giving succour to pederast priests who operated in his see when he was a mere bishop. Despite being an unmarried virgin, he reckons to know more about the morality of parenthood than anyone else in Britain. We should listen to him carefully, though only because he wields power and influence out of all proportion to his experience of parenthood and family life.

On Monday’s World at One on Radio 4, M-O’C declared that “children need a known father and this bill seems to me to be saying that children don’t need a known father and I oppose – I think the majority of people in this country oppose – the deliberate creation of a situation where there’s no father”. Later, he said: “It’s not just about rights, about legislation even, it’s about the fundamental understanding of our country about marriage”.

A number of elements are at work here. The religious lobby – particularly in the United States – has been squaring up for a long time to grow a movement that aims to overthrow the legislature by irresistible force or to seize power by electoral means and control the legislature or (the least preferable option for them but the most likely to occur) to begin a campaign of civil disobedience. You see a nod to that development in the Cardinal’s sly downgrading of rights and legislation.

Meanwhile, the fear among the religious that the church’s control of the notion of family has been seriously weakened since World War II has persuaded even moderate church-goers to start to sound more fundamentalist on the differing family models that now obtain, even in religiously influenced nations like the States. Marriage and family have become interchangeable concepts for these people since co-habiting (as opposed to “living in sin”) became widely accepted and civil partnerships between same-sex couples were enshrined in law. M-O’C and his kind desperately wish to turn the clock back. Preferably a couple of thousand years.

I want to ask the Cardinal: “which is more desirable: for a child to have a quelled mother who works in vain to bring in money and a wastrel father who fritters the money away on drink and/or drugs and abuses (mentally, physically or both, take your pick) both the mother and the child; or for a child to have two loving, well-adjusted mothers?” It’s what is now called “a no-brainer”, isn’t it?

It is odd that Catholics prelates, who themselves foreswear conventional family life, fight so hard to uphold the conventional family model. Today, Elizabeth Windsor and her Greek husband mark 60 years of supposed wedded bliss. There is no need for me to air any of the rumours, some of them going back almost 60 years, of the Duke’s many and sustained infidelities. Conceivably they are all groundless. Your guess is at least as good as mine.

But the royal couple, whose durable arrangement was celebrated in the Abbey on Monday, head a family considerably more dysfunctional than the families of many of her subjects (and probably most of her church-going subjects). The Queen’s late sister and three of her four children went through the divorce courts. To the generation of Her Majesty’s mother, such a thing would have been unthinkable. After all, her own brother-in-law was obliged to abdicate because he insisted on marrying a divorcee.

To Catholics of the generation of Murphy-O’Connor’s parents, divorce was simply not permitted. Yet you don’t hear this leader of British Catholics condemning the royal divorcees. Perhaps the simple truth is that unnamed lesbian couples make a safer target.

PRIMATES AREN’T HUMAN

That's a fine show of hypocrisy we had this week from His Grace the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, head of the Catholic church in England and Wales. Seeking to scupper the government’s legislation that is designed to render illegal discrimination against homosexuals in all social and business transactions, he wrote to every member of the Cabinet to suggest that, if adoption agencies are obliged by law to accept same-sex couples as adoptive parents, the Catholic church will cease to operate an adoption service. Happily, the Cabinet has shown some spirit in rebuking this attempt to interfere with its legislation.

This of course is the same prelate who, ten years ago, sat on his hands while a child-abusing priest in his Arundel and Brighton diocese – whom Murphy-O'Connor had systematically shielded from investigation by the law – was finally convicted of attacks on a dozen boys. The Cardinal argued at the time that paedophilia was “little understood”. More objective observers felt that it was perfectly well understood by its victims.

Down the centuries and all over the world, the Catholic church has provided a safe seat of power from which countless paedophiles have abused the children they affect to help, protect and guide. The present pontiff handled the issue for his predecessor and no doubt was responsible for John Paul II's complacent statement on abuse by priests, that “grave scandal is caused with the result that a dark shadow of suspicion is cast over all the other fine priests who perform their ministry with honesty and integrity and often with heroic self-sacrifice”, merely allowing a crumb of “concern for the victims”. Still today, priests fleeing from arrest on this charge are offered sanctuary in the Vatican, the abused children no succour at all.

If any evidence existed that children placed with adoptive parents of whatever sexual orientation were remotely in the kind of peril they routinely face at the hands of the Catholic church, the Cardinal might have a useful point to make. As it is, his masterful silence on the subject would become him rather better.

Seemingly gratuitously, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, weighed in to support the Catholic hierarchy’s stance. The reason for his unusually dogmatic stance is soon found. Next week, the Anglican bishops and archbishops gather in convocation. That the beanfeast takes place in Dar es Salaam will only reinforce the fact that the homophobic backlash in the Anglican church is being led by the African primates, gay sex having been tolerated even less among black communities through the ages than among whites, despite heterosexual sodomy being the preferred method of contraception among African if not West Indian men (this is why Aids is so epidemic on the African continent, unprotected anal penetration being the most perilous activity for those at risk of infection).

The African bishops are fully prepared to provoke a schism and to break up the Anglican episcopacy. They know that they have Williams on the ropes. He wants to be remembered neither as the Archbishop on whose watch the church broke up, nor as the prelate who went against his own inclusive instincts and excluded the gay community. Either stance will drive out thousands of adherents. It’s hard to see how the Church of England is anything other than done for, its only future in its native England as a harmless sect of home counties spinsters and bachelors making jam and singing ancient hymns round a domestic piano.

The matter of adoption by gay people has exposed many of the contradictions at the heart of the supernatural delusion. If the working philosophy of a movement such as a religion has discrimination at its heart – between, for instance, “good” and “evil”, “saved” and “damned”, “devout” and “profane”– it is impossible for that movement simultaneously to embrace everyone. Religion cannot be simultaneously inclusive and exclusive.

Any priest can confirm that Catholic adoption agencies will, without a moment’s hesitation, place a child with a heterosexual, atheist couple. In the most literal sense, then, its homophobia is more important to the Roman church than the very tenets on which it is founded. And yet that church has been the most systematic instrument of child abuse – mental, physical and sexual (hetero and homosexual) – in human history. It is truly a strange conundrum.

The more “liberal” traditions of the Church of England have led it to adopt the “hate the sin, love the sinner” approach, cautiously accepting gay people and even gay vicars on the dubious, barely-spoken understanding that they do not “practise” or rather, in practice, that they do not say that they practise. The Catholic church, redder in tooth and claw, formally denounces lesbians and gay men as “objectively disordered”. I can think of nothing more objectively disordered than entertaining a supernatural delusion. It’s not as if believers can’t help themselves: indulging this delusion is a conscious choice. Being gay is not. To dismiss being gay as disordered is like dismissing being deaf or tall or black or diabetic as disordered. No wonder that the naturally kindly Dr Williams finds himself in a high degree of discomfort. He has a great many disobliging allies alongside him in the battle to come.