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No Vat
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Invitation to a monster
A man who has colluded
in protecting priests who have abused
children, who has been responsible for the
deaths of many in Africa and elsewhere who
might have benefited from the use of condoms
to stave off disease, who has probably
contributed to the suicides of many gay
people and who wants to dictate to the UK
how it should frame its equality laws is to
be a guest of honour in the United Kingdom
this coming autumn. But there are many who
oppose his visit, including the London for a
Secular Europe campaign.
Andy
Armitage reports.
This is to be not just
any old guest of honour, but a guest of
honour who will have all the benefits of a
state visit. And it could cost the British
taxpayer tens of millions of pounds.
It’s hardly surprising
that a lot of people are very annoyed by the
red carpet that will greet the jackboots of
this 82-year-old monster, the man who used
to head the Vatican’s Inquisition. Petitions
have been set up against the visit (see
links below), and at one point the number of
signatories on one of them grew
dramatically.
It’s my guess – well,
it’s an inevitability – that websites and
blogs will continue to buzz with protest
over the next few months before Pope Joseph
Ratzinger arrives at an estimated cost of
£20 million to the British taxpayer.
It’s not known exactly
how much will be paid (figures are bandied
about), or what proportion of the total cost
will be met by the taxpayer, but there was a
parliamentary question about this early in
February, to which the government replied,
“The forthcoming visit of the Pope to
the UK will be a Papal visit. As a Papal
visit it will have status equivalent to a
State Visit. The costs of the visit have not
yet been determined; as with State Visits,
certain elements will be borne by public
funds.”
What can be said is that
a state visit to Australia by Ratzinger in
2008 cost that country, according to figures
given by Britain’s National Secular Society,
around A$200 million, which is about
£115 million.
Other papal visits have
also cost buttock-clenchingly large
fortunes, as a glance at
Concordat Watch will demonstrate.
This web page lists several visits,
including the Australian one, an outing to
France, also in 2008, a jolly to Brazil in
2007 and one to Ratzinger’s home country,
Germany, in 2006.
Concordat Watch
comments,
“Of course, in the end both the
Australian and the German taxpayers can
afford to subsidise the pope. But
unfortunately, papal trips are not confined
to lands like these. The much-travelled John
Paul II visited 129 different countries, few
of them as wealthy as Australia and Germany.”
What has got right up the
noses of many is that Ratzinger has accepted
the invitation to the party but is being
very sniffy about how the hosts conduct
themselves. He could have just politely said
no.
“Natural law”
But no sooner had
Ratzinger accepted the invitation to conduct
a state visit than he was urging British
bishops to oppose the Equality Bill with
“missionary zeal”, according to a story on
the BBC website at the beginning of
February.
The legislation – which
seeks to ensure fairness and equality in
employment laws –
“violates natural law”, he
reckons.
He told a bunch of
Catholic bishops gathered in Rome,
“Your
country is well known for its firm
commitment to equality of opportunity for
all members of society. Yet, as you have
rightly pointed out, the effect of some of
the legislation designed to achieve this
goal has been to impose unjust limitations
on the freedom of religious communities to
act in accordance with their beliefs.
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Evil frunt |
“In some respects,” he
continued,
“it actually violates the natural law
upon which the equality of all human beings
is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.”
If he’s talking about
procreation, then a man who chooses celibacy
– you might say unnaturally – is hardly the
person to be handing out sage advice on the
subject of what comes naturally. But we’ll
let that go for the moment.
“Save us from the Pope”
Last September, before
the visit became official, a delightfully
hard-hitting piece appeared under the name
of Tanya Gold in Britain’s Guardian.
“Save us, O Lord, save us
all,” she pleaded.
“Save us from the Pope.
Joseph Ratzinger is coming to Britain.
Gordon Brown is ‘delighted’. David Cameron
is ‘delighted’. I am ‘repelled’. Let him
come: I applaud freedom of speech. But no
red carpets, please. No biscuits. No Queen.”
But her plea will fall on
deaf ears, because pusillanimous politicians
of all stripes will not have the testicular
fortitude to say no – no, we don’t want him.
His homophobia apart, let
us look at his record on child abuse. When
he had the fancy title of Prefect of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith –
the Congregation being the modern name for
the Inquisition – in that play world they
call the Holy See, Ratzinger had the job of
investigating the scandal that tore through
the Catholic Church as case after case
emerged of children assaulted and abused by
Catholic priests.
What did Ratzinger do?
Tanya Gold’s article sums it up:
In May 2001, he wrote
a confidential letter to Catholic
bishops, ordering them not to notify the
police – or anyone else – about the
allegations, on pain of excommunication.
He referred to a previous (confidential)
Vatican document that ordered that
investigations should be handled
“in the
most secretive way . . . restrained by a
perpetual silence”.
While to most people the
idea of excommunication is no more than a
joke, she explained,
“to a Catholic it means
exclusion and perhaps hellfire – for trying
to protect a child”.
Then there was the case o f
Mexican Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder
of the worldwide movement
known as the Legion of Christ, who was up to
his knicker elastic in allegations of child
abuse.
Ratzinger’s response,
while he was still the Grand Inquisitor?
“One can’t put on trial such a close
friend of the Pope as Marcial Maciel.” So
being a close friend absolves one from
blame?
Suffering – the little
children
Eventually, however, the
clamour for some sort of justice became too
much to ignore, and
Maciel’s
“punishment” was
to be sent off to
“a life
of prayer and penitence”.
Ratzinger’s comment at
the time was that it was a period of
“great
suffering for the church”, adding,
“and for
me personally”.
And the suffering of the
little children, Herr Ratzinger? Was that
not an issue, too? Would it not have been
prudent to forget the
“suffering” of the
church for just this one press release, and
concentrate on the victims of this monstrous
behaviour on the parts of your foot
soldiers?
Ratzinger added
[writes Gold] that he believed the
Catholic church had been the victim of a
“planned” media campaign. By whom? By
gays? By Jews? By Jedi? He instructed
that prayers be said in perpetuity for
the victims – thanks, I feel better now!
– along with a push to ensure that men
“with deep-seated homosexual tendencies”
do not enter the priesthood, thereby
turning all responsibility for the
scandal into – the laps of the evil
gays!
So it was men with
“deep-seated homosexual tendencies” who
fiddled with little girls, too? And men with
“deep-seated homosexual tendencies” are more
likely to commit assault against children
because they are men with
“deep-seated
homosexual tendencies”?
You may have heard of
Liberation Theology. This is the movement
that insists that the core of Christianity
should be social justice. How does this go
down with Pope Ratzinger?
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Gustavo
Gutiérrez Merino:
regarded as
the founder of Liberation Theology |
Well, as you would
expect, the idea of social justice seemed to
repel him, and he thought the movement
“a
fundamental threat to the faith of the
Church”. (Come to think of it, he’s probably
right: social justice would
constitute a threat to a church such as
his.)
Then there’s Africa, AIDS
and condoms. The Catholic Church isn’t too
fond of the idea of condoms. In spite of a
planet whose finite resources are groaning
under the weight of a rapidly rising
population with its growing demand on
nonrenewable resources, it believes that
everything that can be done to
produce more children should be done.
And the idea of having
condoms as a barrier to disease transmission
is, of course, anathema to the Catholic
Church, as presided over by Ratzinger.
Intrinsic moral evil
“In El Salvador the
church got a law passed,” Gold writes,
“ensuring that condoms were only sold with a
warning stating they did not protect the
user from AIDS. In Kenya, Cardinal Maurice Otunga staged public burnings of condoms.
The former Archbishop of Nairobi, Raphael
Ndingi Mwana a’Nzeki, told his flock that
condoms, far from protecting them,
contribute to the spread of the disease.
Well, God is love.”
And of course there’s
homosexuality. The church Ratzinger presides
over believes it a deviation, an intrinsic
moral evil. Even some Catholics have tried
to soften this view emanating from Rome, but
Ratzinger would have none of it. In 1986,
while he was still the Grand Inquisitor, he
sent out a letter saying that,
“Even within the Church, [people] are
bringing enormous pressure to bear . . . to
accept the homosexual condition as though it
were not disordered.”
Then there are the
suicide statistics for teenage gays. Tanya
Gold says they are
“four times more likely
to attempt suicide than their heterosexual
fellows. In 1998, a 39-year-old gay man
called Alfredo
Ormando
set fire to himself in St Peter’s Square, in
protest at your [Ratzinger’s] policies. He
died.”
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Rev. Mel White |
Gold is not the only one
concerned about how Vatican attitudes
towards gay people cause suicides. Nearly
two years ago, our sister publication, the
Pink Triangle blog cited the Rev. Mel
White, founder of a US organisation called
Soulforce,
who – after years of writing for the
Christian right before coming out as gay,
said,
“I can’t tell you how many gay
Catholic kids I’ve buried who killed
themselves because they didn’t believe God
loved them.” (See the link below.)
What, then, of women?
Well, Pope Ratzinger doesn’t like them to
have any control over their reproductive
functions, and one of his henchmen
demonstrated this with horrific consequences
in March 2009, when, according to the BBC
website,
“A Brazilian archbishop says all
those who helped a child rape victim secure
an abortion are to be excommunicated from
the Catholic Church.” The story continued:
The girl, aged nine,
who lives in the north-eastern state of
Pernambuco, became pregnant with twins.
It is alleged that
she had been sexually assaulted over a
number of years by her stepfather.
The excommunication
applies to the child’s mother and the
doctors involved in the procedure.
And recall the quote
earlier from Tanya Gold, who was referring
to another case when she said,
“to a
Catholic [excommunication] means exclusion
and perhaps hellfire – for trying to protect
a child”.
Yes, hellfire. I was
forgetting about that, so numerous are the
sins of this organisation. With Ratzinger’s
(and, of course, his predecessors’)
blessing, the Catholic Church teaches this
kind of scary stuff, leaving gay teenagers
and others who believe it thinking perhaps
that hellfire is better than a hell on
earth, and so top themselves.
Adolf
Hitler
And this is the man our
Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and our
sovereign, Elizabeth II, will be welcoming
into the UK in the autumn as though he had
not a stain on his virgin-white frock, which
there probably won’t be, since he’s more
pampered than a Hollywood starlet.
There will be no stain on
his conscience, either, because, as with so
many atrocities and so much evil, these
things are committed out of a sense of total
sincerity. In that respect, is Ratzinger any
different from Adolf Hitler?
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