skeptics and the law vs. the vatican
It seems that every week now, something new and disturbing surfaces about the Vatican’s institutionalization of tolerating and covering up sexual abuses by its priests and the church and its apologists are straining for new excuses for the inexcusable, failing miserably in the process due to the nature of their misdeeds. And while we keep hearing how today’s increasingly secular and open-minded societies are to blame, the roots of the scandal actually go back all the way to the beginning of Catholicism, with the very first reports of cover-ups to protect the institution and the priests dating back all the way to the 1040s AD, as pointed out in this video by the producers of an educational show about society and culture for a major Australian broadcast channel…
So in other words, the Vatican has done pretty much nothing for nearly a millennium to deal with reports of out of control priests and sexual abuse, and now blames modern society for its inability to do what’s right by those who were victimized by their priests. This is what happens when someone is blinded by dogma and cares far more about the organization being served than about the welfare of its constituency. If Ratzinger simply put his foot down and said that all priests found guilty of pedophilia or other sexual improprieties by a court of law are to be defrocked and face whatever punishments their home nation’s courts will assign them, I’d have nothing to say about the matter and neither would many of the other skeptics and atheists ridiculing the Vatican. But to uphold the seeming infallibility of the church and those who serve it, the Pope and his advisors chose to stick to a Medieval manuscript on the issue and hide crimes from the law. Need another reason why theocracy is a bad idea? How about this highly selective enforcement of laws and regulations for an example?
However, while we’re piling on the Vatican, Ratzinger, and his predecessors, one highly influential skeptic has a different take on how skeptics and atheists should be handling the issue. A little while go, Phil Plait wrote a rather interesting post saying that Catholic sex abuses are not a skeptical issue, and that skeptics should get really involved only if the Pope proclaims that God has allowed his immoral, illegal and unethical behavior since we don’t want to alienate the enraged faithful who are just as upset about what’s going on. And to some point he’s right. This isn’t so much a skeptical matter as much as it is a human matter. If we were to take faith out of the equation, we’d be dealing with a straightforward political problem: an abuse of power in which a top member of an organization put PR and appearances before the people he serves and did illegal things in the process. Whether you’re a faithful Catholic or a staunch atheist, your blood should boil equally intensely since we’re talking about basic human ethics here. To use this issue to stomp on people’s heartfelt beliefs and say you told them so is like kicking them in the stomach after someone they trusted hit them over the head with a rock and robbed them. Making people even more miserable by being tone deaf is not how you win fans.
Still, while in this case we do need diplomats more than warriors and the focus must be on helping victims to bring their abusers to justice, we can’t simply ignore the role religion plays in all this. Why did all the cover-ups begin nearly a thousand years ago? To protect the Vatican’s supposed holiness and infallibility. Why didn’t the priests get punished to show how the church had zero tolerance for immoral behavior? To avoid showing that it was and is still ran by fallible humans who think they have a divine mandate to issue moral edicts to others, and that those fallible humans can do very immoral and unbecoming things. Were Ratzinger the leader of just another powerful political group or a massive, secular corporation, he would be quickly summoned before the Italian Parliament to explain himself and his staff before furious lawmakers. But in Italy, the Vatican is its own city state which functions under its own vague and intentionally overcomplicated Byzantine rules and because of its long history and religious power, it holds enormous sway over the Italian government. The diplomats we need have very little power to actually bring anyone actually responsible to justice. And hence we see a fair bit of frustration from the warriors who really want to see some kind of restitution to their fellow humans.
Even though the religious influence of the Vatican is hard to ignore here, we really need to focus not on the big flaws of its dogmas, but the legality and ethics of the matter instead. The issue of whether we should ever give a group of people who went to a particular institution to read and debate holy texts the power to mandate what is expected of others in their daily lives is a much bigger problem which expands well beyond Catholicism. It’s just as important when it comes to the LDS and televangelists in the U.S. and the clerics of the Middle East, or any other place where people wearing religious symbols on their clothing demand money and power. But the issue we see with Catholic sex abuse scandals is much more immediate and concerns whether leaders of a very prominent and powerful religious institution is immune from the secular laws those of us in industrialized nations must follow, laws which couldn’t care less what your religious beliefs may be, but are only concerned with your actions. Let’s start with that and dive deeper into our relationship with organized religion when we’re given a point of reference and either a factual foothold for an argument, or a reason to sound the alarm.
gfish, I was with you right up to the last sentence. But that last sentence was transendental. EG. indecipehrable. Chill out man; you are so cool, you don’t need to get wrapped up in mysticism or any of its relatives. Just stick with the facts. We love you, and just because you are so down to earth.
Vatican statehood is a subject I’ve been thinking about for a while now, and I’m pretty sure it’s central to addressing the problem of concealment and abuse of power.
The problem goes back to at least the 8th century and the forgery referred to as the Donatio Constantini, which various popes over the years used to support their claim for temporal as well as spiritual power. The papacy remained a major player in European politics, with its own territory (making up about 1/3 of Italy) in the form of the Papal States. When the newly unified Italian state seized the Papal States, Pius IX had an almighty tantrum and locked himself into the Vatican, excommunicated everyone who wasn’t nice to him, and generally did his best to pretend that 500 years of history could be wished away.
And that was how things remained until 1929 when the well-known humanitarian Benito Mussolini soothed things down with Pius XI. The Lateran Treaty (three treaties, actually) gave the pope his own little statelet recognised first by Italy, and the by other Catholic countries (many of which had never really dropped recognition of the pope as a head of state). For some reason that I cannot understand, the recognition was extended to the UN, which gave the Vatican ‘observer state’ status rather than treating it as an NGO.
The main benefit that the Vatican gets from its independent status is soveriegn immunity. This is a principle of international law that makes it hard, if not impossible, to sue or prosecute an agent or representative of a head of state, or to seize etc their assets. It’s related to the similar doctrine of diplomatic immunity, (which only deals with the personnel and premises of accredited diplomatic missions).
The upshot is that (a) the Vatican’s local “charities” can collect all the money they can and send it tax-free to headquarters, without interference by your local charity supervisor as to how that money is spent; (b) the pope gets to appoint an area manager (“Papal Nuncio”) with diplomatic immunity to tell the bishops which political campaign or issue to back or condemn, and generally make sure they toe the party line; (c) when the local boys screw up, the money is safe in Rome and nobody can touch it.
Take away that immunity and watch them sing a different tune.
Despite our having been cleansed of any positive notions toward alternate sexuality by our cultural passage through the Victorian era, it has existed eternally, proven by the exploits (antics?) of the bonobo chimpanzee species in biological terms, and by human history.In history, one need delve no deeper than Julius Caesar’s life story, to gain a truer human perspective on the issue of male-on-male sex, with the perpetrator a powerful mentor, and the victim a pre-adolescent from outside the perpetrator’s family. Caesar was a state hostage, given over to the king of Bythinia, as was normal practice in classical times. While in that household, Caesar was raped continually by the Bythinian monarch, and had certain rumors to live down upon his return to Rome, thus explaining in part his voracious drive for political power. (We need not discuss the Attic Greeks who considered such sex to be a main feature of their society.) Any over-emotional reaction to the revelation of this eternal truism displays only the post-Victorian naivete of the person reacting. Our current ad hoc pop ethic to protect the young from same-sex initiation under an organizational mentor is not consonant with the Feudian description of human sexuality as polymorphous perverse. Humans, like bonobos, are biologically and emotionally fitted to experience all manner of sex, and all manner of adult initiation into it. In multi-class societies, servant children are a main sexual outlet for the proprietors, a situation even Sigmund Freud himself took advantage of. This biological and cultural reality exists always just beyond the limit of idealized moral systems, but its repeated expression generation after generation marks it as a true human potential. Thus we may view the current spin-up about the Vatican as what it truly is…. a scene-setting lawyeristic preparation of potential juries in anticipation of the raiding of the Vatican’s cash reserves by lawyered-up ex altar boys looking for a money handout. The cash reserves exist for now, but one might weigh the relative worth of the ultimate historical contribution of rape victims with trust funds, versus the long term value of a functioning world religion, before rushing to embarrassed, naive judgement. I am a non-catholic, heterosexual atheist, by the way.
B. Nobo, what exactly are trying to state? That the children who were molested purposely did so in the hope that when they grew old enough they might participate in a law suit against the papacy and secure a trust fund? And that we should “look the other way” in regards to sexual assault because you are able to site an ancient cultures accepted practices and because abuse perpetuates abuse? And I too am a non-catholic, heterosexual atheist, by the way, what ever difference that makes.
we may view the current spin-up about the Vatican as what it truly is…. lawyered-up ex altar boys looking for a money handout.
I think we may view your comment as what it truly is, a ridiculous attempt to blame an entire culture of wildly inappropriate abuses of power and status over many centuries on those who were on a receiving end, while armed with obtuse pseudoscience and trying to seem insightful and educated.
I’d recommend trying out for the Vatican’s apologist squad. They’re running out of the excuses they can muster and haven’t hit a new low for some time. You would be able to give them plenty of advice in this area.
Why would a heterosexual atheist try to excuse the Catholic Church’s pattern of covering up for homosexual pedophile priests? Perhaps there’s such a thing as openmindedness run amok.
Did you at least peruse the links’ content, before censoring the post?
Those links pretty well lay the problem at doors other than the Vatican. Mind you, the Vatican may be guilty as sin … they’ve started wars, and possibly have mafia connections (if one were to credit “The Godfather II”)and are certainly not sexually up to par (being celibate) etc., etc……
But manipulating this (nominally) skeptical commentary by censorship seems tellingly over-defensive. Do you have a particular anti-Vatican brief to pursue?
At any rate, since you will now eradicate THIS post, this becomes a personal communication between the 2 of us, does it not?
Go to U-Tube, search on “Bonobo Sexuality”, watch….learn.
Have a nice 2010
I see… you moderate only the LINKS
Isn’t that where all the opinions/facts contrary to your position are found? Simply add H T T P : / / and feel the power of evidence.
bit.ly/PROTT, bit.ly/SHOFAR, bit.ly/MIKVA, bit.ly/MOSQQQ, bit.ly/MOSQ2, bit.ly/ATHEISTT
Again, have a great decade !
Did you at least peruse the links’ content, before censoring the post?
Before you get all worked up and start throwing out the cries of censorship, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to go to the Q&A page and see that if you submit a comment with more than one link, my spam filter automatically holds it for my approval. Spambots pepper the fake comments they submit with links and Akismet can’t read your posts, decide that you’re actually posting a legitimate comment rather than a veiled ad, and approve it without my intervention.
Go to U-Tube, search on “Bonobo Sexuality”, watch….learn.
And what about it? Sure bonobos use sex as a social lubricant as do humans. Does that now make rape by trusted authority figures just fine? Is that the argument? A few bonobos in the video had sex, therefore… what exactly?
Oh and by the way, it seems that another commenter by the name Gerald Murphy left the same exact links as you, and was explained why the argument of “sex abuse isn’t just the Vatican’s problem” didn’t work in a previous post on the subject.
But you wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you now?
Does the fact that bonobos display a riotous sexual eclecticism say anything about humans? Chimpanzees must be extremely closely related to bonobos, I wouldn’t be suprised to find that they’re just variations on a single species. Has anybody tried interbreeding them to prove they’re distinct species? However chimps seem relatively sedate in this regard. We and chimps/bonobos diverged from our common ancestor at least 4.5 million years ago, probably more like 7 million. Do you think we may have developed some different attitudes in seven million years? Do you think I’m nonchalant about my boys getting anally raped by an authority figure. No. Why do I care? Because they’re going to carry the shame of their submission to that degradation for the rest of their lives; just as the lower class Greek boys did when they were forced to submit to the will of a higher ranking, bigger, stronger male. As with the rape of females, there’s a body of knowledge that suggests that it’s more about dominance than sex, and can be ranked with a host of other violent dominance behaviors. Not a matter of desire, but a demonstration of power. Your first post on this subject stated as much.
To use this issue to stomp on people’s heartfelt beliefs and say you told them so is like kicking them in the stomach after someone they trusted hit them over the head with a rock and robbed them.
Having warned someone not to trust a certain individual, then finding the one warned mugged, we should next say, “Sorry, you were right all along, let me help you get back to your friend’s place…”?
Given the depth of emotional commitments involved here, how often do you expect to catch teachable moments without pain?
Given the depth of emotional commitments involved here, how often do you expect to catch teachable moments without pain?
Rarely, but the point is that we shouldn’t focus on the pain but what could be done to avoid a repeat of this pain in the future. So to borrow your example, we should help a mugging victim whom we warned, dust him off and tell him that he should do a little thinking and consider who his friends really are: those who’ll abuse his trust to mug him, or those who warn him about the potential mugger.
There are multiple audiences for whatever is said in this context. For the immediate victims/survivors, a more gentle & helpful approach is usually called for – and nobody’s reported seeing even the most strident of the “New Atheists” proselytizing at Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
For the onlookers, passers-by, shocked neighbors and the rest, a little more adrenalin and decibelage may be more apropos.
The Pope and many of the Vatican hierarchy are still living in the thirteenth century when it was one law for them and another law for everyone else, Canon law and civil law, when a ploughman could be hanged for stealing a shilling and a cleric fined a shilling for killing a ploughman. Just last month the Pope asserted that God’s law overruled man’s law. That’s what he was talking about. For most of the last thousand years the church has been the sole arbiter of what was and was not legal and punishable for clerics. And if the punishment was to do a penance, just as the Pope suggested last month, that was the end of the matter.