The Catholic Church: Lies Misogyny and Homophobia.

John Paul 11 thanks statue for saving his life

Richard Mellor

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.

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.