The Roomse Gevaar Makes An Unwelcome Comeback
I am not a Catholic – lapsed or otherwise. I have no Catholic relatives (but quite a few Catholic friends.) I did not go to a Catholic school.
I don’t believe for a second that the Pope is God’s annointed representative on earth, and take a pretty dim view of the man presently occupying that position. I find it hard to forgive Mr Joseph Ratzinger his Nazi past, and even harder to forget the overwhelming evidence that he participated directly in the cover-up of sexual abuse by priests.
In short, I carry no brief for the Catholic Church.
I have, however, been considerably dismayed by the hysterical witch-burning tone that has crept into public criticism of the Pope’s current visit to the United Kingdom. As I understand it, this criticism is founded on a number of points:
- Many Britons do not recognise the Vatican as an independent nation-state and therefore resent, as taxpayers, having to foot the bill for his official state visit.
- The Catholic Church has been battered by a tidal wave of sexual abuse allegations in recent years, all of which have led to a great deal of anger against it as an institution.
- The Pope, and indeed the Church itself, have intransigent views on the equality of women and homosexuals, and actively discourage the use of condoms, even in societies with a rampant rate of HIV infection.
I quite understand these points of view and have a great deal of sympathy for them. What I don’t sympathise with is the reductionist attempt to wrap all the world’s evils up into one convenient package called the Catholic Church. Yes, it may be handy to have just one target to hate – to project all your loathing onto one manageable and easily identifiable Other, but you’re hardly going to address the real ills of the world that way.
A conglomeration of atheists and agnostics – headed by men like Richard Dawkins and mistakenly considering themselves to be ‘liberal’ – would go further than branding the Catholic Church as the root of all evil. It’s religion in general that’s the problem, they would argue. Most wars throughout history have been started by religious fanatics. Wipe out religion and we would all be living in a marvellously tolerant Utopia.
Does one really need to point out how naive this proposition is? Yes, Marxist historiography may have fallen out of fashion lately, but one cannot forget the lessons it taught: that most wars – actually make that ALL wars – throughout history have been about power and access to material resources. Yes, religious fanatacism may have been dragged in by the hair to whip up enthusiasm among the populace about sending their young men off to die, but when you cut to the heart of it, it has all been about controlling the means of production.
Anyone who believes that taking religion out of the equation will reduce human conflict is talking arrant bloody nonsense.
But let’s return for a moment to the argument that societies with a higher proportion of atheists and agnostics are more likely to be peaceful and tolerant. Which societies would those be? The United Kingdom, by any chance? Or would that be the United States of America? Both have entirely secular governments and a total separation of church and state. I bet the innocent citizens of Iraq felt the warm glow of tolerance as missiles starting raining down on them eight years ago in the most vile and wicked unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation in modern history.
Let’s see what else these celebrated atheists and agnostics have been responsible for. Do they build clinics in the world’s most impoverished areas? Do they build orphanages and schools run by unpaid volunteers? Did they protest apartheid years before it became fashionable to do so? Do they stand shivering on street corners in Hillbrow handing out sleeping bags and blankets to the homeless in winter? Did they create a refuge for hundreds of displaced victims of xenophobia in central Johannesburg?
Did they hell.
So who were those sainted do-gooders responsible for these admirable initiatives? Why, they belonged to various religious institutions, of course – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu – with the Catholic Church frequently leading the way. While atheists and agnostics might not be good for much beyond writing snarky columns in The Guardian, it’s the religious folk who spit on their hands and get down to the real, dirty business of poverty alleviation.
Which is why it makes me madder than a wet hen to see remarks like a recent one on Twitter: “Who actually admits to being a Catholic anymore?” Who actually admits to being an intolerant bigot anymore? is what I was tempted to reply. Add to that the self-satisfied agnosticism of the chattering classes who would happily lynch the Pope from the nearest tree and abolish the Catholic Church as an institution, and I feel a very strong urge to start knocking some heads together.
