(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

The scandal concerning the widespread sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church gets worse and worse. The latest example showing how deeply entrenched the policy of secrecy and cover up was in the church has been the publication in the Toronto Globe and Mail of a 1993 letter from J. R. Windle, Bishop of Pembroke in Ontario, to the representative of the Vatican in Canada concerning Bernard Prince, a priest in his diocese who had been found to have abused a child.

From the letter, it appears that the priest had acknowledged his crime but the diocese had managed to keep it secret. They did not hand him over to the police or want him transferred to another diocese within Canada but had agreed to have him sent to Rome in 1991 instead. The guilty priest was apparently a friend of Pope John Paul II and the latter had actually decided to promote him, if you can believe it, at about the same time that it emerged that the acts of abuse byPrince had not been limited to a single isolated incident but had gone on for an extended period and that he had abused other children as well.
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University report in their paper titled Preachers who are not believers that as a result of their scholarly education, the priests they interviewed and many of their fellow priests just cannot take the tenets of their faith seriously anymore. As one said of his peers: “They’re very liberal. They’ve been de-mythologized, I’ll say that. They don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead literally. They don’t believe Jesus was born of a virgin. They don’t believe all those things that would cause a big stir in their churches. But that’s not uncommon in mainline denominations, or even in the Catholic Church.” Another said, in an undoubted overstatement, “Oh, you can’t go through seminary and come out believing in God!”

The churches probably suspect that there is a considerable amount of apostasy among their clergy because it rarely asks prospective clergy to affirm their beliefs. Part of this is because the churches themselves no longer seem certain about what doctrines people should believe. Over time, as scientific knowledge has advanced and made traditional beliefs untenable for any thinking person, the churches have retained their creeds which lay down very specific statements of beliefs that one must in theory hold, while in practice adopting a policy of ‘anything goes’ (well, almost) that gives people a lot of wiggle room as to what they can actually believe in. As Dennett and LaScola write:

The ambiguity about who is a believer and who is an unbeliever follows inexorably from the pluralism that has been assiduously fostered by many religious leaders for a century and more: God is many different things to different people, and since we can’t know if one of these conceptions is the right one, we should honor them all. This counsel of tolerance creates a gentle fog that shrouds the question of belief in God in so much indeterminacy that if asked whether they believed in God, many people could sincerely say that they don’t know what they are being asked.

The five clergy were never asked point blank at their ordination if they believed in god or the virgin birth. If the subject is broached in some way, they adopt the strategy of talking about the concept of god instead of god itself, and this rhetorical ploy is accepted as a way of avoiding direct statements of belief or unbelief.

R. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary says that this is a disturbing trend: “In other words, some theologians and denominations have embraced a theology so fluid and indeterminate that even an atheist cannot tell the believers and unbelievers apart.”

The disbelieving clergy find themselves in a very tough situation that is almost unparalleled. I cannot think of any other profession where what one believes is tied so integrally to the work one does and where one is routinely required to profess statements of belief. You can see how it can wear you down if you do not believe the things you have to keep saying. As Dennett and LaScola say:

We all find ourselves committed to little white lies, half-truths and convenient forgettings, knowing tacitly which topics not to raise with which of our loved ones and friends. But these pastors—and who knows how many others—are caught in a larger web of diplomatic, tactical, and, finally, ethical concealment. In no other profession, surely, is one so isolated from one’s fellow human beings, so cut off from the fresh air of candor, never knowing the relief of getting things off one’s chest. (my italics)

These are brave individuals who are still trying to figure out how to live with the decisions they made many years ago, when they decided, full of devotion and hope, to give their lives to a God they no longer find by their sides.

But not everyone sees these clergy as brave people struggling with their personal demons of doubt and disbelief. Some view them as hypocrites who have no place in the church. Mohler thinks that unbelieving priests “are a curse upon the church” and that “If they will not remove themselves from the ministry, they must be removed. If they lack the integrity to resign their pulpits, the churches must muster the integrity to eject them. If they will not “out” themselves, it is the duty of faithful Christians to “out” them.”

I think the priests are well aware that this may be the reaction from many of the people around them if they are honest. And so they keep quiet.

Next: The loneliness of the unbelieving priest.

POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on the Catholic Church atrocities

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Over four years ago, I speculated that the percentage of atheists among clergy and theologians may be much higher than in the general population, that it became even more likely the higher one rose in the hierarchy, and that as a result even the pope could well be an atheist. I gave two reasons for making that case.

The first is that members of the clergy encounter on a daily basis many of the kinds of personal tragedies of sickness, death, and violence than can make lay people question their faith, and hence they are more likely to find it hard to believe in a benevolent god. Since no one wants to believe in an evil god (though that would explain things a lot better), disbelief becomes an increasingly plausible option.

The second reason is that those clergy who belong to religious institutions that require years of study in theological colleges before ordination will quickly learn as part of their curriculum that their religious texts are products of human beings and that they have a dubious history that makes it very unlikely that they were divinely created. All the many contradictions make it hard to believe that the religious books were divinely inspired either, unless you believe in a god who is really sloppy and was too cheap to get himself a good editor. Most lay people have little idea of the origins of their texts and thus can more easily believe that they were divinely inspired or created.

Now even the Vatican’s chief exorcist has conceded that apostasy is more common in the upper ranks of the church than people might think, speaking of “cardinals who do not believe in Jesus.”

Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University have recently published a paper titled Preachers who are not believers that seems to provide support for my speculative suggestions. They describe five case studies of Christian priests who are still working but were willing to confide in confidence that they do not believe in the tenets of their faith. Three of the priests were from liberal denominations (whom they called “the liberals”) and two were from conservative denominations (“the literals”).

These priests spoke of how hard it is to live a lie and how they would like to be open and change their lives but they stick with it because they have no other means of making a living.

The loneliness of non-believing pastors is extreme. They have no trusted confidantes to reassure them, to reflect their own musings back to them, to provide reality checks. As their profiles reveal, even their spouses are often unaware of their turmoil. Why don’t they resign their posts and find a new life? They are caught in a trap, cunningly designed to harness both their best intentions and their basest fears to the task of immobilizing them in their predicament. Their salaries are modest and the economic incentive is to stay in place, to hang on by their fingernails and wait for retirement when they get their pension.
…
Confiding their difficulties to a superior is not an appealing option: although it would be unlikely to lead swiftly and directly to an involuntary unfrocking. No denomination has a surplus of qualified clergy, and the last thing an administrator wants to hear is that one of the front line preachers is teetering on the edge of default. More likely, such an acknowledgment of doubt would put them on the list of problematic clergy and secure for them the not very helpful advice to soldier on and work through their crises of faith. Speaking in confidence with fellow clergy is also a course fraught with danger, in spite of the fact that some of them are firmly convinced that many, and perhaps most, of their fellow clergy share their lack of belief. (my italics)

What gives them this impression that they are far from alone, and how did this strange and sorrowful state of affairs arise? The answer seems to lie in the seminary experience shared by all our pastors, liberals and literals alike. Even some conservative seminaries staff their courses on the Bible with professors who are trained in textual criticism, the historical methods of biblical scholarship, and what is taught in those courses is not what the young seminarians learned in Sunday school, even in the more liberal churches. In seminary they were introduced to many of the details that have been gleaned by centuries of painstaking research about how various ancient texts came to be written, copied, translated, and, after considerable jockeying and logrolling, eventually assembled into the Bible we read today. It is hard if not impossible to square these new facts with the idea that the Bible is in all its particulars a true account of actual events, let alone the inerrant word of God. It is interesting that all our pastors report the same pattern of response among their fellow students: some were fascinated, but others angrily rejected what their professors tried to teach them.

John Shelby Spong, former Episcopal bishop of Newark describes some of the things you learn from biblical scholarship:

Miracles do not enter the Christian story until the 8th decade; the Virgin Birth and understanding the Resurrection as the physical resuscitation of a deceased body enters Christianity in the 9th decade, the story of the Ascension of Jesus is a 10th decade addition.

Should it be surprising that these things can shake the faith of believers, including priests, and are thus kept from the general public?

POST SCRIPT: The War on Easter

Now that atheists have won the war on Christmas, isn’t it time to start wars on all the other holidays of all the religions?

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

The Catholic Church is battling the widespread perception that it is rotten to the core. Even the Chief Exorcist of the Catholic Church says that all this abuse and cover-ups by high officials of the church are signs that “the Devil is at work inside the Vatican.” (Yes, there actually is such a post as ‘Chief Exorcist’, if you can imagine it. If anyone had any doubts that the church is still an institution with medieval sensibilities, this news should surely settle it. He claims that he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession in his 25 years on the job. That’s almost eight every day, including weekends and holidays! Give that man a raise.)
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

The way that defenseless children were treated in some Catholic orphanages or other homes for children is remarkable for its cruelty. The children were subjected to abominable treatment. In addition to the sexual abuse, physical and psychological abuse was also widespread. Stories are emerging that a bishop who is pope Ratzinger’s friend routinely slapped, punched, and beat with a carpet beater children who lived in a church-run home in order ‘to drive Satan out of them’. The gripping film The Magdalene Sisters, based on a true story about an actual home for ‘wayward’ girls run by the church in Ireland, details one such institution. You cannot see that film and not be horrified at what was done to those young women.
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

The recent revelations of the depths to which the Catholic Church hierarchy has sunk in covering up the disgusting actions of priests who have abused children has stunned even someone like me who is quite cynical about organized religion.

To provide some context for the current scandal and remind us of its history, Pat Condell provides a brief but informative recounting of the appalling history of the Catholic Church, with all its swindles, perversions, anti-Semitism, and anti-science craziness. I was unaware of (or had forgotten) some of these appalling things. (Thanks to Machines Like Us.)

The church has been flailing around trying to divert attention away from its sordid role in child abuse. Initially it defended itself by saying that abuse cases were localized to the US and that the problem was not with the church but with America, that its sex-sodden culture had corrupted everything in its domain, so that even some of its godliest people (i.e., priests) had succumbed to temptation. But now that it is clear that the problem is worldwide (and getting more widespread all the time), they have had to find new scapegoats.

Matt Taibbi points to an incredible statement by Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, who now blames the media for focusing on the abuse within the church and ignoring similar abuse by other institutions. Taibbi has some choice words for the institution he once belonged to:

[T]he archbishop’s incredibly pompous and self-pitying rant is some of the most depraved horses*** I’ve ever seen on the internet, which is saying a lot.

One expects professional slimeballs like the public relations department of Goldman Sachs to pull out the “Well, we weren’t the only thieves!” argument when accused of financial malfeasance. But I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I read through Dolan’s retort and it dawned on me that he was actually going to use the “We weren’t the only child molesters!” excuse.
…
But even worse — what does Dolan’s whiny deflecting and excuse-making say about the church as an arbiter of ethical values? These pompous a******* run around in their poofy robes and dresses shaking smoke-filled decanters with important expressions on their faces and pretending to great insight about grace and humility, but here we have the head of the largest Diocese in America teaching his entire congregation that when caught committing a terrible sin, the appropriate response is to blame the media and pull the “All the other kids were doing it, too!” stunt!

Taiibi goes on to suggest that we should perhaps start considering the Catholic Church to be a criminal organization and broken up using anti-racketeering statutes like RICO, originally designed to go after mobsters. There have been rising calls elsewhere as well for putting the pope in the dock.

William Donohue, the media-loving Catholic apologist who, as head of an outfit called the Catholic League, makes his living whining about how everyone is mean to Catholics, tries to defend the church by blaming the parents of the 200 abused deaf children in Wisconsin for not complaining sooner.

It does not seem to strike him that parents may be silent because the church is so good at laying a guilt trip on its followers and brainwashing them into thinking that they are no-good, filthy sinners, meanwhile elevating its priests to be thought of as being pure and direct agents of god, who actually have the power to forgive you your sins. Just imagine that for a minute. Whatever evil act you do, you can go into the confessional and the priest has the awesome power, given to him by god, to say that everything is now fine and your conscience is clear. As singer Sinead O’Connor says about the immense aura of power that the church cultivated, “When I was a child, Ireland was a Catholic theocracy. If a bishop came walking down the street, people would move to make a path for him. If a bishop attended a national sporting event, the team would kneel to kiss his ring.”

Should it be any surprise that the first instinct of abused people is to think that they themselves must have been at fault somehow, that it was their actions that triggered the abuse, and that the priest shouldn’t be blamed?

Furthermore, abusive priests, like serial abusers and conmen in general, can often be charming and have superficially genial and avuncular personalities, which is what enables them to be so successful in their predatory pursuits. Parents who accuse priests of abuse know that they risk being disbelieved and can find themselves the targets of hate from other parishioners who cannot bring themselves to think that their beloved parish priest could be so evil. Furthermore, the police and other authorities are often religious themselves and so cowed by awe of the church and the ‘respect for religion’ trope that they tend to not want to investigate priests and would turn a blind eye to any allegations against them if they could.

Should it be any surprise that the victims and their families suppress their anger and hide their shame until it becomes too much to bear or enough time has lapsed that they feel it is safe to speak out?

The dawning realization by priest abuse victims that they are not alone and their allegations are more likely to be believed will likely result in more abusive priests being brought to justice. The process is already beginning. In Germany a hotline for reporting abuse complaints reported being overwhelmed with more than 4,500 calls on the very first day.

As I will discuss in the next post, the church clearly has decided that it is going to tough it out and can ride out this scandal the way it has previous ones.

POST SCRIPT: Oprah or the Catholic Church?

Tbogg shares his vision of what Easter Sunday was like at the Vatican.

Meanwhile, Louis Black moderates a debate to see who is more evil.