Enter the Enforcer

This article was first published in G&LH in Summer 2005. However, in light of Pope Ratzinger’s recent comments to the effect that homosexual relations are as big a threat to mankind as the destruction of the rainforests, it is as relevant now as it was then.

Enter the Enforcer

The Pope is dead – long live the bigotry. In 2005, after the death of Pope John Paul II, Matthew Thompson asked why Catholics’ hang-ups with sex continued, in spite of the lack of corresponding edicts in the gospels.

One point proved by the recent, frankly tedious, grief-fest following the death of John Paul the Second was that Abraham Lincoln was at least partly right. Yes, you can fool some of the people all of the time. Humanism disproves the last part of the statement: where religion is concerned, you can’t fool all the people all the time.

The entire affair wasn’t just overdone, but had its own grotesque features. For a start, exaggerated respect to the departed pontiff was accorded by a number of heads of state who have pledged help for the sufferings of Africa. Yet it’s Catholicism’s absolutely rigid stance on contraception and the fallacious claims that condoms do nothing to prevent HIV/AIDS that have brought about much of the poverty and illness, usually fatal, that are largely responsible for many of these disastrous problems in the first place. Even freely donated loads of condoms have, on religious instructions, been destroyed.

Dubya:

verging on the
Monty Python?

Adding to the surreal aspect of the whole affair was the sight of President Bush, a member of a rigid Protestant sect, taking a seat at a Roman Catholic service close by heads of states, abused in the American press, that opposed the Iraq conflict, and even representatives of states that he condemned recently as belonging to the notorious “axis of evil”. Time after time, the sight verged on the Monty Python standard.

Not a little “previous”

There was nothing at all humorous, however, about the pontiff’s successor, a man with, as it’s said, not a little “previous”. He had been, under the previous pope, his enforcer on strict observance of doctrine (a Vatican department once known as the Inquisition). There was little doubt of his election, following the ultra-conservative John Paul, to whom he was close in any case.

Catholicism isn’t typically given to sudden change, to say the least of it. Nonetheless, he left nothing to doubt. His religious service before deliberations over a successor even began was a bare-faced setting out of his metaphorical stall. An entire basket-load of assorted -isms was condemned, named and shamed, at least in his eyes.

Let’s take a look at a few of these issues that he finds so displeasing. One is secular humanism, which he finds to be spreading widely over Europe (unlike, for some reason, the USA and Africa, which are heading in the opposite direction). That means nothing more than a concern with the here and now, the observable everyday world, rather than some claimed, but unprovable, afterlife, the path to which is (of course) prescribed by religion.

The dying days of John Paul II.

If, for example, the use of contraception is likely to guard against illness, rational humanism gives the go-ahead, while Catholicism, on obscure grounds and rulings, holds out a forbidding hand, despite the probable consequences. Humanism and religion, green light and red light; it’s really as simple as that, in this area and more. We can have rationalism or we can have faith. We can stop and think or we can blindly believe. The religious response, beloved by President Bush’s supporters too, is just to insist on abstinence. But humans, like other forms of life, are naturally sexual beings, and a genuine, complete celibate is a very rare find – or a convincing liar.

The law of Christ

Believers treated the now Benedict XVI’s election with great joy, seeing him largely as an unwavering upholder of the true faith. In a broadcast interview, one such believer, himself a cleric, was pressed on two points in particular: the discrimination regularly practised against those Catholics who have been involved in divorce and that against those who happen to be gay (not to mention same-sex unions), but who prefer, for whatever reason, to remain believers. It was regrettable, the cleric replied, but it was in accordance with the law of Christ, a law that had to be observed regardless.

At the risk of appearing impolite, I am reasonably familiar with the original Gospels too. I’m not aware of any instructions there to discriminate against divorced or gay people. If anything, tolerance of others is the more humane injunction. These groups, the divorced and the gays, are scarcely even mentioned, and certainly not the latter.

Holy hate:

Natzinger works the crowd.

So how can discrimination against these be the law of any Christ there may (or may not) have been? In reality, it’s a far later development: in effect, Christ didn’t actually say this, but surely, someone said, he would have, if he had only had the time. That someone would have been one of the already sex-hating (at least nominally) clique who went on to form so much of Christianity. The original Gospels scarcely mention sex. We’re left wondering, therefore, why it occupied so much of later thinkers’ comments, almost to the point of obsession.

It begins early, with the misogynistic, not to say misanthropic, grumblings of St Paul, who, of course, never so much as met Christ, and it continues to our own day. A number of religious figures seem to think, and speak, of little else. Favourite targets of these zealots are, time and again, gay people, not least in the US.

The Roman Catholic view on contraception tells us much about the church’s attitude to sex and sexuality generally. Every sexual act, it insists, must have at least the possibility of procreation. This is bad news, obviously, for those who marry late in life or when any female partner has passed childbearing age. So are these marriages invalid?

Wedding cancelled

But marriage, in Catholicism, is permanent, a lifelong arrangement. The same problem arises, surely, when either partner is known to be sterile. Must they remain celibate for that reason? Must older people, women in particular? It’s quite a dilemma. And definitely ruled out is anyone who is impotent. At least one case of this kind occurred some years ago with a serviceman injured in action.

He found his prearranged church wedding promptly cancelled – since his injuries had left him impotent. The situation was resolved only when a caring cleric made the case before his superiors that some treatment might just become available in future.

A Jesuitical (appropriate term) argument certainly, but it did have the desired effect. And so genuine charity was demonstrated, as was the Catholic lack of it, again on sexual grounds. The thought of highly placed clerics earnestly discussing a private’s privates has to raise at least a smile, albeit a wry one.

But there’s more, much more. Contraception is prohibited, in the interests of life. Yet IVF, to produce birth in otherwise childless couples, isn’t allowed. To obtain male semen for that purpose would evidently require masturbation, branded for whatever reason a “grave sin”. Likewise embryonic-stem-cell research is viewed with disfavour, despite its real promise in improvement of medical conditions now untreatable.

The reason? Life, in Catholic belief, begins at conception. This is belief, scarcely provable fact, for how do you define life? According to American advisers (including clerics) to President Bush, conception is also when the soul (be that what it may) enters the body. Because of this quibble, many embryos are regularly disposed of, not used to a valuable purpose – prolonging human life and improving the quality of that life.

It’s not quite true that Catholics are forbidden to practise contraception. In fact, in principle at least, a Catholic may even use a condom – but with one proviso. It must have a hole in it first, rather like a Polo mint. That leaves open the possibility at least of procreation, as required. What goes ignored is that there’s a strong chance too that it would permit the transfer of possibly even life-threatening illness or of conditions that could lead to sterility, such as chlamydia.

Contraception can be permissible

Or there’s the infamous “safe period” method (also known as “rhythm and blues”), for married couples only. This is notoriously unreliable and is in practice widely ignored. Its unreliability is probably its only reason for clerical acceptance: there might just be the patter of little feet after all, more often than wanted and more than is good for female health. To a celibate, male-only clergy, this doesn’t seem to matter. However, this leaves open a failing in Catholic logic.

The use of the “safe period”, however unreliable, establishes the principle that contraception can be permissible. There seems to be no obvious reason that other methods, such as condoms, to achieve the same should be treated as unthinkable.

Holey peppermints:

Catholic contraception would not be in mint condition.

Contraception is something else not found in the Gospels, so that there’s no divine rule to observe in that respect either. Practically the only method known of contraception at around 30 ce was that attributed to Egyptian prostitutes, who, we’re told, used crocodile excrement for the purpose. This would be, even now, an ideal disincentive to illicit (or any other) sex.

Roman Catholic teaching on sexuality alone – impossible even to outline in a single article – bristles with razor-wire terms like “deviant behaviour”, “grave depravity” and “objectively evil”. Descriptions of this sort are used of homosexuality and masturbation. Yet it can’t be because it’s the law of Christ, for Christ never mentioned either.

As for masturbation, a virtually universal practice for male and female at one time or another, it’s hard to know how Christ could have mentioned it. The language of the Gospels is Greek. No one knows what the Greek word for masturbation at the time was. Only lately, the Church was dragged grumbling into something like the modern world by admitting the existence of homosexual people (there is, incidentally, no known biblical Greek word for “homosexual” either). These, it conceded, weren’t to be treated less fairly than others.

In 2003, however, a Vatican edict insisted that even the parents of gay children should seek psychiatric help, and an attempt by the United Nations to outlaw anti-gay discrimination was deliberately spiked, thanks not least to the Church. What was that about fair and considerate treatment again? Holy man speak with forked tongue.

This entire labyrinth of paradoxes, contradictions and confusions in the Roman Catholic attitude to sexuality can be traced back to a teaching received by every young person unfortunate enough to attend a Catholic school. The “sacred seed” (sperm) mustn’t be wasted – it’s far too precious for that.

Need more sperm:

The sacred seed, it mustn’t be wasted.

This is the ancient, pre-Christian notion that sperm exists in only very limited quantities in the male body. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, so it must be used wisely. But this isn’t the truth of the matter. The male body regularly has to remove vast quantities of the sperm that it produces, so as to maximise the chances of fertilising the female ova, and each sperm has only limited life.

“Disordered behaviour”

The rest of the world knows this simple fact, and we needn’t imagine the Vatican doesn’t. Yet, even so, it continues to preach the same old message, as if telling believers that trimmed fingernails never grow back again. It isn’t scientific, it isn’t even religious – it’s just taboo. Nonetheless, stern-faced clerical grandees continue to cling to their fallacies.

And the prime target, as ever, in the papal cross-hairs was homosexuality. By its very nature, of course, homosexual behaviour can’t produce children. There’s not the slightest possibility of procreation, upon which the Vatican insists (despite, strangely, having a nominally celibate clergy.) The one exception – IVF for a lesbian couple – is ruled out as “disordered behaviour” (as is their being together in the first place). The theological underwear is distinctly twisted, on this issue above all, and on the basis of what the alleged founder, Christ, never in any case said in any known document.

There was one final fish in the barrel, awaiting the pontiff’s hook. This is the detested “moral relativism”, to which a few of our political figures allude, too, when on a moralistic high. What is it exactly? It appears to be the notion that certain basic rules must be considered unaffected by the times, the environment or the circumstances.

Come again:

Rocco Buttiglione, forced out for saying silly things

In other words: this is the rule, ask no questions. But what is the source of the rules in the first place? They have to be functions of the times and the circumstances, or we’d all be still living in Old Testament times. How would we reconcile sacrificing a slain ox with the Clean Air Act, say? Should we still stone the adulterers among us? If you observe the Commandment forbidding you to kill, how can you go to war in the Middle East?

An illustration of this evident nonsense was given, unthinkingly, by the rejected Rocco Buttiglione, forced last year from his EU appointment because of his views on women’s place in the home and homosexuality (which he branded a sin). Western civilisation, he said in a broadcast interview, rested on two pillars: the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the teachings of Socrates.

I have no quarrel at all with the latter, for Socrates is someone I’ve greatly admired since I first read about him. There’s just one problem, however. We still have a full transcript of Socrates’ trial (in 399 bce), with Jeremy-Paxman-style discussion as the defendant argued his own case, only to be executed later. Mr Buttiglione appears to have forgotten that the principal charge against Socrates was actually heresy, questioning established religion and values, and encouraging others to do likewise.

Or, as we might call it now, moral relativism – against which our moralists (Mr Buttiglione included) and churchmen fulminate as a threat to society. Perhaps nothing illustrates better than such a self-contradiction the crazy entanglement into which Catholicism and other fundamentalisms in particular seem intent to bury themselves time and again. And so often their problem is sex.

I’d say that perhaps the poor souls don’t get enough of it but for one thing that didn’t, scandalously, make the new pope’s hate list: clerical child abuse. Before a large number of American believers, the service for his predecessor was taken by none other than a prelate who allegedly did not a little to keep that particular scandal quiet. Yet, strangely, unlike homosexuality, child abuse is something that the Gospels do actually condemn, in especially virulent terms.

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