Sunday - April 21, 2002
Why You Shouldn't be a Catholic. (or any kind of Christian)
The recent spate of priests being accused of
being perverts and pedophiles is hardly surprising to anyone who has spent time
among men pursuing the priesthood. (I matriculated at a Catholic university, and
my brother is a priest.) There are without doubt some very nice guys who desire
to be priests, but the requirement of celibacy discourages most men with healthy
urges (and even minds) from living such an unnatural life. The priesthood was
more popular in poorer nations like in Ireland during the Potato Famine, or in
Spain before their Civil War, and in most of Europe when poverty was common. In
most of these countries the priesthood was a good way to get an education and to
make sure you had food to eat. Celibacy was often winked at or ignored as a
requirement. In the fifteenth century one of the best selling books was written
by a Spanish priest entitled "The Book of Good Love," filled with lurid details
how to seduce every type of woman. It was obviously written from personal
experience. That priest was eventually jailed, but the propensity for priests to
have "maids" or "cousins" living with them was still very common. Shortly before
the Spanish Inquisition there was an attempt to enforce the celibacy
requirement, but this was scoffed at by most. Even Popes have been known to have
children and mistresses. It appears to me that this past century has been one of
the rarer times where priests are expected to observe this vow.
Today in the United States, celibacy is expected
to be observed with the result that normal men, and I use the term "normal" very
purposefully, generally will not consider being a priest. There are exceptions:
Some men really are quite devout and such staunch believers that they consider
it a worthwhile sacrifce, but for the most part men with unhealthy or unnatural
minds become priests. Celibacy doesn't make them perverts, they were the type to
be perverts before they became priests. The church tries to weed these out, but
their desparate shortage of priests (US churches now recruit heavily from third
world countries where men join the clergy to escape poverty) clearly has made
them reduce standards.
Of course the
real tragedy (beyond the plight of the victims) isn't that the church is
suffering from a bad reputation, the real tragedy is that the church heirarchy
protected these perverts from receiving the punishments they richly deserve.
According to Roman Catholic doctrine, any priest has the ability to forgive any
sin, but it appears that they have forgotten the other side of that doctrine:
They have the authority to hold the sinners bound to their guilt. They can also
make forgiveness dependent on submitting to "worldly"
justice.
In fact, the concept of
separation of church and state is much older than our nation, it is strongly
implied in the New Testament itself when Jesus advised his followers to give to
Caesar that which is Caesar's, and to give to god that which belongs to god.
According to Jesus, the "soul" (whatever that is) belongs to god, while the body
belongs to this world, symbolized by
Caesar.
In our nation of laws, we
tolerate (and often encourage) people to believe in magic and we respect
peoples' rights to believe in every kind of faeries or demons or gods that they
desire. This freedom of minds is extremely important. Freedom is only possible
when it includes the freedom to be wrong. Thus we should embrace our freedom of
religion, no matter how nonsensical religion is, but we should also be sure to
keep this freedom of thought and expression within the bounds of otherwise moral
behavior. For example, we can allow people to believe that pedophilia is a good
thing and express that idea, but the line is drawn when people use religion to
commit pedophilia, or protect those who do so even while objecting to the
practice.
In short, the Catholic church
may have forgiven these perverts, but we as a society haven't. They may forgive
them all they like, and even call them saints and claim they will go to some
idyllic paradise after they are dead, but we as a society have a responsibility
to make sure that pedophiles are indeed dead. Whatever they want to believe
about what happens after their peers are dead is their concern, and irrelevent
to justice in the world that really
exists.
Conceptually, there is little
difference between a religion that is used to protect men that like to play with
little boys' private parts, and a religion that encourages men to fly airplanes
into skyscrapers. Both are examples of people using their belief in magic to
permit crimes against their fellow man. The Catholic church officially doesn't
approve of the men who have committed these crimes, but they appear to have
condoned it for decades that we know of. We should not forget how the Catholic
church encourages people to murder political opponents, even as recently as the
1930's in Spain. We should never allow them to protect perverts either. Both
perverts and their protectors should be prosecuted vigorously and unmercifully
within the fullest allowable penalties of the
law.
All Americans should examine this
event and reconsider how they can obey such a cabal of men, for the Catholic
church demands not only belief, but obedience. Those who wish to live a life of
morality would do better to depend on their own minds to discern right from
wrong rather than depend on the likes of these to interpret it for
them.
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