Anti-clerical sentiment in Ireland

Excellent news: the tide is rising against the Vatican in Ireland. More people are speaking out, the newspapers are publishing pictures of the pope labeled “persona non grata”, there’s a simmering resentment everywhere. It’s leading to comments like this one, which sees a secular Ireland coexisting with religious sentiment, but no longer with the long arm of the Vatican meddling with the state.

Such sweeping changes could occur in what was once Catholic Ireland: the state could become as secularist as France, with all allusion to the Almighty officially excised. Yet even in France, the holy days continue, with Pentecost and Ascension and All Saints, and Lourdes attracting millions.

The Church in Ireland will never be what it was, but the faith, at grassroots level, will not disappear. The people will climb the holy mountain of St Patrick, and come in their thousands to the shrine of Our Lady at Knock, and beggar themselves to provide children with first communion regalia; and when there is a tragedy in a small town, the church and parish priest will still be at the centre of the community, offering age-old comforts, not of the Vatican, but of the faith.

I could live with that kind of arrangement. I detest faith and think it’s a poison of the mind, but I’m not going to march into people’s homes and tell them what they must believe. Atheist resentment is over the fact that in countries like mine, religion motivates bad policy and excessive meddling in people’s private lives.

The Vatican is not happy with Ireland, which is also cool. The pope’s ambassador to Ireland has been withdrawn — which probably causes about as much regret and despair to the Republic as when the English left.

Pat Buchanan go home

It’s sad. The terrorism in Norway was by a right wing nationalist extremist of the pale-skinned, Christian variety, and it’s like we broke our home-grown right-wingers’ small, feeble, crumbly hearts with that news. But have no fear! They are dogged and single-minded, and they will find a way to blame the desired targets of retribution one way or another! Latest case: Pat Buchanan. He regrets that the terrorist was a cowardly, murdering punk, but we are supposed to recognize that Breivik may be right.

But, awful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat to the continent.

That threat comes from a burgeoning Muslim presence in a Europe that has never known mass immigration, its failure to assimilate, its growing alienation, and its sometime sympathy for Islamic militants and terrorists.

Europe faces today an authentic and historic crisis.

With her native-born populations aging, shrinking and dying, Europe’s nations have not discovered how to maintain their prosperity without immigrants. Yet the immigrants who have come — from the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia – have been slow to learn the language and have failed to attain the educational and occupational levels of Europeans. And the welfare states of Europe are breaking under the burden.[…]

As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.

Umm, Pat, you draft-dodging, Confederacy-sympathizing old bigot, you can’t whine about other countries failing to assimilate — you’ve been one of the reactionary old guard crusading against immigrants in this country.

He’s also an ahistorical kook. Every wave of immigrants that came ashore in the United States faced generations of discrimination and struggle to assimilate. “NO IRISH NEED APPLY,” you know.

But that doesn’t matter. The fact that Pat Buchanan would find common cause with a psychopathic coward, a vile creature who dressed in a police uniform and promised young people assistance as he gathered them together before gunning them down, is fact enough to discredit him. When will the media wake up and stop paying the fascist bigot to play pundit on TV?

Save the James Webb Space Telescope

Lawrence Krauss has written an excellent defense of the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble which is currently under threat of cancellation. I was really down on the space shuttle the other day, but that’s because I think it was a failure at doing its job of enabling exploration and discovery — the Space Telescope is a fabulous tool that works, and I want NASA to focus more on cost-effective, powerful methods of exploring the universe.

Lawrence Krauss also criticized the space shuttle, and urges us to send more robots into space. Uh-oh. Cue ominous music as Neil deGrasse Tyson emerges from the wings, carrying a folding chair.

Psychopath in Norway = INCREASE DEFENSE SPENDING!

You want to see how the Right loves to twist events to whatever end they want, just read the conservative columnists. Jennifer Rubin at the WaPo has already decided this was the work of jihadists, and sees this as an opportunity to lobby for mo’ money for defense.

This is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists. I spoke to Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute, who has been critical of proposed cuts in defense and of President Obama’s Afghanistan withdrawal plan. “There has been a lot of talk over the past few months on how we’ve got al-Qaeda on the run and, compared with what it once was, it’s become a rump organization. But as the attack in Oslo reminds us, there are plenty of al-Qaeda allies still operating. No doubt cutting the head off a snake is important; the problem is, we’re dealing with global nest of snakes.”

Well, leaving aside the point that it’s not clear how more tanks, stealth bombers, and drones would make the streets of Oslo safer, this is a great idea, marred by the poor aim of the conservatives who always seem to go after the wrong target. I would support more tanks for the army iff they were immediately dispatched to take out the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Discovery Institute, Focus on the Family, a few thousand megachurches, and miscellaneous other extremist organizations. It’s a nest of snakes, you know. And as these loons are always urging us, stomping on a nest of snakes really, really hard always works to end the problem. (For the snark impaired, cock one eyebrow and read the last two sentences sardonically.)

(via Lawyers, Guns, and Money)

I don’t know if I believe this

Texas, that hotbed of creationism, has been reviewing curriculum supplements, including some additions composed by creationists. Governor Rick Perry recently appointed a hard conservative, Barbara Cargill, to head the state board of education. It was looking gloomy.

And now the board voted 8:0 to reject the creationists and approve good evolutionary biology standards. I’m impressed. But I can’t quite shake the feeling that they’ve got something devious in mind.

Just maybe, though, the board is wising up.

The many failings of the Catholic church

Now that the Cloyne report is available, the perfidy of the Catholic church is directly measurable. Michael Nugent has tallied up a list of all the documented, unambiguous cases of Irish Catholic officials lying — just blatant, undeniable, flat out lying to investigators. I’m pretty sure that’s against one of their commandments.

If you want to see a Catholic nuisance closer to home, look to Philadelphia. They have a new archbishop, and he’s apparently because he’s overtly political.

“I think that with Chaput you will see a much more politically active archbishop than we saw with Cardinal Rigali,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, former editor of the Jesuit magazine America and author of numerous books on the Catholic hierarchy.

Reese described Chaput as an “in-your-face” leader who is “going to be a real pain in the neck for the Democratic Party.”

…

But he has been even more forceful in articulating what it means to live as a Catholic. He has regularly rebuked the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

A month after President Obama’s inauguration, Chaput decried what he called a “spirit of adulation bordering on servility” toward Obama by “some . . . Democratic-friendly Catholic writers, scholars, editors and activists. He said, “There’s no way to reinvent his record on abortion and related issues with rosy marketing about unity, hope, and change.”

Oh, boy. Let’s see the Catholic Church find common cause with the teabaggers. Roger Ebert has a nice summary of the ways the GOP is the party of the past; I’m happy to see the church hopping on that same train to oblivion.

Ireland stands up to the Catholic Church

Last week, the Cloyne report was released. This document describes patterns of child abuse and in particular the willful intransigence of the Catholic church in correcting the problems in Ireland, and it’s pretty damned damning. One significant detail: the Church’s defense in recent months consists of claiming priestly pedophilia was a thing of the past, a product of the laxity and corruption of the general social atmosphere in the 60s and 70s, pushing the blame onto that awful liberal culture, not the church. Unfortunately, the Cloyne report assesses policies in the late 1990s, so we’re talking about relatively contemporary church practices. Maybe they can start blaming investment bankers instead of hippies.

Anyway, the report rips into the church at all levels, from the local diocese to the Vatican, and accuses them of failing to report cases of abuse, providing support for victims, or even of recording problems — the church had basically closed all doors for redress, and had insisted as usual on keeping the horrors hidden in house. It’s been a cult of secrecy that has permitted the abuses to continue.

Some of the local church officials have apologized — small comfort to the people who were sexually abused as children — but wouldn’t you know it, the Vatican rejects all criticisms. They say the Vatican’s instructions to Irish clergy were perfectly reasonable, because opening up these cases to secular authorities “risked contravening canonical law”. Right. Raping children isn’t as significant a contravention of canonical law as arresting child-rapers in a dog collar would be. It’s just more of the same dodginess from the Vatican.

However Maeve Lewis, director of abuse survivors’ group One in Four, hit out at Fr Lombardi’s claims. Saying they “completely lack substance”, she added his words are “part of the now familiar refusal by the Vatican to acknowledge that the culture of loyalty and secrecy which facilitated the sexual abuse of children extended far beyond the Irish Church.

“It is further evidence, if needed, that the Vatican’s claim to prioritise the safety of children is completely lacking in credibility,” she said.

Now though, in a major step, the Taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland Enda Kenny has spoken out rather forcefully against the church.

Mr Kenny told the Dáil that the Cloyne Report highlighted the ‘dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.’

The rape and torture of children had been downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold, instead, the primacy of the institution, which are its power, standing and ‘reputation’.

The hierarchy had proved either unwilling or unable to address what he called the horrors uncovered in successive reports, a failure which he said must be devastating for so many good priests.

Mr Kenny said that the Catholic Church needed to be truly and deeply penitent for the wrongdoing it perpetrated, hid and denied.

‘Instead of listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal,’ Mr Kenny pointed out that the Vatican’s reaction had been to parse and analyse it, with the eye of a canon lawyer.

The full speech is available online. Kenny is a believing Catholic, unfortunately, but good common sense and a recognition of what is morally right overrides obedience to the church, and here are a few more parts I liked.

But thankfully for them, and for us, this is not Rome.
Nor is it industrial-school or Magdalene Ireland, where the swish of a soutane smothered conscience and humanity and the swing of a thurible ruled the Irish-Catholic world.

This is the ‘Republic’ of Ireland 2011.

A Republic of laws…of rights and responsibilities…of proper civic order…where the delinquency and arrogance of a particular version…of a particular kind of ‘morality’…will no longer be tolerated or ignored.

Cardinal Josef Ratzinger said “Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.”

As the Holy See prepares its considered response to the Cloyne Report, as Taoiseach, I am making it absolutely clear, that when it comes to the protection of the children of this State, the standards of conduct which the Church deems appropriate to itself, cannot and will not, be applied to the workings of democracy and civil society in this republic.

Not purely, or simply or otherwise.

CHILDREN FIRST.

Bravo!