John Paul 11 thanks statue for saving his life |
Afscme Local 444, retired
I have not been a friend of the Catholic Church as anyone who reads this blog understands by now. I am from a Catholic family although my parents weren’t religious and never went to church as far as I can recall.
I have not been a friend of the Catholic Church as anyone who reads this blog understands by now. I am from a Catholic family although my parents weren’t religious and never went to church as far as I can recall.
But when we moved to a small
English village after my father left the army, we were the only Catholics in
that village I think and while I never experienced any religious prejudice from
the locals, my sister and me were very unhappy in the local school. To this
day, the thought of the teacher I had nauseates me. For whatever reason,
because we were not local people or because we were Catholics, I don’t really
know, she hated me and my sister who was younger was equally mistreated. The
woman that taught me had no right being a teacher. She was cruel. So my parents
sent us to the Catholic school in Banbury, a north Oxfordshire town about 12
miles away.
For a while I was going to Sunday
mass at the US air base in the next village which was a bit of an embarrassing
experience. The “Yanks” as we called
them, used to put paper money in the alms plate and I put in sixpence. They had
a lot of money back then.
On Sundays, a Jesuit priest
used to bicycle out to the village from Heythrop College and spend the
afternoon with me talking and I assume giving me religious instruction of
sorts. I remember he never wore a dog collar whatever that thing is called and
I have fond memories of our conversations. I was growing up in a pub and my
home life, like so many of us, was not always warm and nurturing despite my
mother’s best efforts to make it so.
The way I see it, all of the
established organized religions have little to do with spirituality or a
persons belief that there is some sort of force out there that set this all in
motion. And they certainly all have one thing in common, they are patriarchal and
extremely misogynistic.
The new Chancellor of Trinity
College Dublin and former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese is waging a war to change the Catholic Church
and its misogyny. She said this week that the Catholic priesthood is based on a“fundamental lie” about sexuality and
that men attracted to the priesthood had a “deeply
problematic” sexuality as those not heterosexual have to pretend to be. "The number of fake-hetero misogynistic, homophobic gays I met frightened me.", she added, and we all know now that the institution, along
with other religious organizations, are frequently havens for pedophiles.
There has been an ongoing
struggle to allow priests to marry and against the oppression of women and nuns
in the church, some nuns have been threatened with excommunication for this.
McAleese
also said that after years in a seminary studying Canon Law (the Catholic
equivalent of Sharia Law). “I Became very
much aware of the dysfunction at the heart of seminary life and the dysfunction
at the heart of much of the priesthood.”. Not unlike psychotherapists, teachers or any
other authority figure, as pastors, McAleese says, “Their capacity for dispersing misery is really immense…” I would add that the difference with priests
is they are supposed to be closer to god.
Included
in McAleese’s comments are a couple of quotes from a book of theology titled Love and Theology by the late Pope John
Paul 11. The man who I was told was god’s representative on Earth and
infallible (could not sin) wrote that a woman’s role in the sex act in the
marriage, “is a comparatively passive
partner whose function it is to accept and experience.”
God’s
vicar goes further in his book, “For the
purpose of the sex act, it is enough for her to be passive, and unresisting so
much that so that it can even take place without her volition while she is in a
state in which she has no awareness at all of what is happening----for instance,
when she is asleep or unconscious.”
Ms McAllese points out further that there was
opposition to this view from a late Irish priest Fr. Seán Fagan who openly
questioned it correctly claiming it sounded like rape. Fagan was censured sand
silenced by the Vatican Inc. while the author of the misogynistic tract was
made a Saint.
In
the multitude of cover ups of pedophile priests, many were just moved on to
greener pastures. One can only image the field day a habitual rapist of
children would have being sent in to indigenous communities in colonial
countries.
I
cannot for the life of me understand why anyone can remain in such an
institution but if they feel so compelled, they should at least be openly
waging a campaign to change it as Ms. McAleese appears to be.
I
have been accused of being opposed to people’s belief in a creator. Who can
prevent that? I believe people should be allowed to believe what they want and
to express it without fear. My biggest problem with it is that the worship of a supreme being is sanctioned
by the state, legitimized as something real, like science. It is up to people to
decide as individuals and religion should be a private matter. But when we talk
of indoctrination there is none greater than religious thought as it is given this
credibility by the state. It is a very useful political tool in maintaining
social control and dividing the working class in our struggle to actually
change the world in a real way. We are
taught it from the minute we are born, by our parents, the pulpit and society
as a whole.
This
is the issue I have with university degrees of religious knowledge, whether it
is Canon Law, Theology or any other name. We have degrees in Geek Mythology and
perhaps Roman Mythology because their gods are not divine as defined by the
state. Christian, Islamic or Jewish theology is as much mythology as these though.
As
Marx pointed out, all those that believe in a supernatural being as creator
believe all others’ gods are “mad made”
while theirs is divine. When something exists only in the imagination of the
believer, it’s hard to contest it.
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