I’m sure that right now, Americans are looking at the Catholic churches being shut down because all the money is going into pedophilia lawsuits and thinking, “This is the organization I want running my country. What was the last big confessional Catholic country? Franco’s Spain? Yeah, gimme more of that.”

I know that the upper ranks of the Catholic hierarchy have had problems with Democracy for a couple of centuries now. We could talk about Pope Leo XIII and the error of “Americanism”, and we could talk about the tensions between John Coutney Murray and Alfredo Ottaviani.

We could also talk about Pope Pius IX and his Syllabus of Errors, which was a heavy broadside against the separation of Church and State, freedom of religion and democracy. But let’s be fair: Pope Pius IX was -- and I say this with all due respect -- batshit crazy. This was the man who had Edgardo Mortara kidnapped. He was not on speaking terms with sanity.

But I’ve always thought that these arguments were largely confined to the hierarchy and the academics. My impression had always been that the rank-and-file Catholic priests and the laity just ignored it. After Vatican II, I figured no one outside the ivory towers in Rome would be talking about it.

I know we’ve got a lot of lapsed Catholics in the audience. Is this sort of argument common?

[Edit: The original video was taken down recently. I suspect it was the post from PZ that did it. Thanks to richarddawkins.net for the mirror.]

For anybody who’s never seen Monkey Dust, it was an animated sketch show on BBC4 that was…. Well, it was edgy. I always used to prefer to watch it on my own because I felt like people were judging me for laughing at some of it.

Needless to say, this is NOT SAFE FOR WORK (despite being quite mild by Monkey Dust standards).

Enjoy :-)

Priest drowns baby during baptism:

Police are investigating Father Valentin for accidential homicide after witnesses at the ceremony said the priest did not cover the baby’s mouth during the ritual, The Sun newspaper reports.

Father Valentin had denied being responsible for the baby’s death during the baptism in Moldova.

The six-week-old baby died on the way to hospital and an autopsy found he had drowned, the baby’s dad Dumitru Gaidau told Romania’s Publica TV.

Mr Gaidau, 36, said his son was clearly in distress during the ceremony.

“He couldn’t inhale, his face turned blue and he was foaming at the mouth. He [the priest] said we should not interrupt this their ritual,” he said.

“We couldn’t believe it that he just put his hand over his belly and over the head and submerged him three times in the water.”

Water was found in the baby’s lungs.

Very sad — death by superstition.

(I like John Cole’s summary better: “Hitchens may have cancer, but he can still kick Braveheart’s ass.”)

We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.

[...]

Yet I still saw a report the other day about a fan site where the members were just beginning to ask, “What’s with him?” Why is there this reluctance to call something by its right name? It’s not as if Gibson was issuing a cry for help. On the contrary, what he is issuing is the distilled violence, cruelty, and bigotry—and sexual hypocrisy—that stretches from the Crusades through the Inquisition to the “concordats” between the church and Hitler and Mussolini. Yet he’s still reporting for work. When will Hollywood, and the wider society, finally decide to shun and spurn him utterly, both for what he is and for what he represents?

My guess is that Hitchens thinks that this in another case of the deference shown to religion; many people are unwilling to blame the schismatic sect of Gibson’s father for instilling Gibson with his paranoia, anti-semitism and racism.

But part of me is wondering if this isn’t another case of the “Polanski effect.” Is it maybe that people are unwilling to call out the “genius” behind the Passion of Christ for being a racist, the same way they’re unwilling to just admit that Polanski is a rapist on the run from justice? And if so, why?

After attacking King Leopold’s memory, I probably ought to leave Belgium alone. But this came down a few days back, and I’m not sure how I feel about it:

Vatican Criticizes Raid on Belgian Church Offices

The Vatican expressed “shock” on Friday at the raid on Thursday by the Belgian police of church offices in their search for hidden evidence of child sex abuse by priests. It also voiced its “indignation” at what it called the “violation” of two cardinals’ tombs in the search.
Related

In a bold and provocative assertion of state over church as anger rises in Europe over abuse by priests, the police not only detained the members of the Belgian Bishops’ Conference for nine hours on Thursday while searching for documents related to sex abuse cases, they also drilled into the tombs of two cardinals in the Brussels Cathedral.

Given the grudging response of the Catholic hierarchy to government demands for accountability in the pedophile scandal, I’ve been hoping that some country would take a more aggressive response. I cheer the Belgian attempts to force the Church to give up its incriminating document, and I hope that other countries follow suit. But some of this seems excessive. Drilling tombs? Based on what evidence?

In another example, the government confiscated some confidential files from a child psychologist, which may cause collateral damage.

A panel set up by the Catholic Church in Belgium to investigate sex abuse by priests is disbanding after a police raid last week that confiscated documents the panel says were confidential.

Members of he Andriaenssens Commission, named after its president, child psychiatrist Peter Andrianssens, met today and announced they would be resigning because of the breach of confidentiality.

Raid the Church, surely. But raiding related groups that were (I presume) trying to aid the victims seems like a step too far.

(via)

(via)

During the interview, which was then published by L’Osservatore Romano, Father Crepy made several distinctions. “First of all, it must be noted that sexuality is not limited to the genital dimension, and thus the emotional life is much vaster than the sexual life, although the latter is of obvious importance.”

– Father Luc Crepy, Celibacy does not deny priests their sexuality or freedom, asserts French seminary rector

This seems disingenuous, since the Church has frowned on very intimate emotional relationships among priests, for fear that they might enter “the genital dimension.” (great band name, BTW)

I’m guessing that Father Crepy is thinking of Abelard and Heloise.

(via The Teapot Atheist)

The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives.

As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy — or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution — one of the wealthiest on earth — that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority, and grants them privileged access to children.

Finally, consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock, and their unwed mothers vilified, wherever Church teaching holds sway — leading boys and girls by the thousands to be abandoned to Church-run orphanages only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here, in this ghoulish machinery set to whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord. [...]

The evidence suggests that the misery of these children was facilitated and concealed by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at every level, up to and including the prefrontal cortex of the current Pope. In his former capacity as Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict personally oversaw the Vatican’s response to reports of sexual abuse in the Church. What did this wise and compassionate man do upon learning that his employees were raping children by the thousands? Did he immediately alert the police and ensure that the victims would be protected from further torments? One still dares to imagine such an effulgence of basic human sanity might have been possible, even within the Church.

On the contrary, repeated and increasingly desperate complaints of abuse were set aside, witnesses were pressured into silence, bishops were praised for their defiance of secular authority, and offending priests were relocated only to destroy fresh lives in unsuspecting parishes. It is no exaggeration to say that for decades (if not centuries) the Vatican has met the formal definition of a criminal organization, devoted not to gambling, prostitution, drugs, or any other venial sin, but to the sexual enslavement of children. [...]

Here, I would like to announce that Project Reason, the foundation that my wife and I started to spread scientific thinking and secular values, has joined Hitchens and Dawkins (both of whom sit on our advisory board) in an effort to end the “diplomatic immunity” which the Vatican claims protects the Pope from any responsibility.

(via)

(From ABC’s Hungry Beast…. which is a really weird name, btw.)

This Great Apostle of Murder

John Knox was a pivotal leader of the Reformation. The vastly important changes he made in liturgy and worship included abandoning the idolatrous tradition of kneeling during the Eucharist. He was also concerned with such substantial issues as what type of garments the clergy should wear. Knox was a priest who became a Protestant around 1545. He is praised for standing tall for religious freedom. But as today, “religious liberty” was a thinly veiled privilege extended only to the advocate’s religion, not to any other faiths. Knox rallied for the punishment and execution for those who wished to continue with Catholic styles of worship.

Knox endorsed death for all who differed from his personal interpretation of The Word, for which historian W.E.H. Lecky called him “this great apostle of murder.” “His law most streatly commandeth idolaters and fals prophetes to be punished with death,” Knox wrote. (Thanks to positiveatheism.org for this reference.) He openly proclaimed that any Protestant man had the right to slaughter any Catholic. He rejoiced publicly at the murder of Cardinal Beaton, who had burned one of Knox’s mentors at the stake, gleefully endorsing the brutality with which the cardinal was dragged from his bed, mutilated, and stabbed. For his role in the murder conspiracy, Knox was captured and imprisoned for two years to work in a ship galley.

Famous for two-to-three hour sermons, Knox wrote continually, including The History of the Reformation. He spoke bits of Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French and more. For his scholarship and for preaching against “the synagogue of Satan,” Knox is revered today alongside John Calvin and John Wesley.

The Monstrous Regiment

The presence of Mary may be what Knox detested most, even above inappropriate vestments. Knox burned with something much stronger than the love of the Lord — his whole life was fuelled by hatred of women. When forced to kiss an image of the Virgin Mary, Knox flung her into the ocean. “Let our Lady learn to swim!” he allegedly declared. Of course, had the male God been flung out, he would have walked to shore upon the waves.

Knox’s countless writings against the queens of his time are heralded as bravery, for said queens were adulteresses not fit to rule over men. The book The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was written to defy the corrupt Mary Tudor, Mary of Guise, and Mary Queen of Scots. It was filled with reprehensible venom towards women shocking even in the 1500s.

The 1558 treatise made it clear that “woman in her greatest perfection was made to serve and obey man.” Speaking for God, Knox wrote that He would say, “Your free will has brought yourself and mankind into the bondage of Satan, I therefore will bring you in bondage to man…because you have deceived your man, you shall therefore be no longer mistress over your own appetites, over your own will or desires. For in you there is neither reason nor discretion… [Man] shall be lord and governor, not only over your body, but even over your appetites and will.”

The idea of women’s equality or rule is “detestable,” “repugnant to nature,” and “treason and conspiracy committed against God.” Women are “weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish; and experience has declared them to be inconstant, variable, cruel, lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment.”

And what of those learned men who disagreed with Knox and saw women as equals? Why, off with their heads, of course! “If any presume to defend that impiety… the sentence of death.”

Doomed to Repeat

There are no easy answers to the bloodbath of religious history at the end of the Medieval Age. The Mother Church was steeped in just as much hatred and superstitious nonsense as the new church. Warring faiths and interfaith tyranny had been going on since kingdom come.

Indeed, we have still not achieved a separation of church and state. While it is impossible to revise history with the fuzzy peacenik sentiments I espouse, it is reprehensible to erase history and present figures like Calvin and Knox as “godly men.” If we don’t tell it like it is, how will we learn from our mistakes?

Today, Bishop Malone, I am demanding that you excommunicate me. I cannot in good conscience belong to your church anymore; I do not want to be counted with the 200,000 Catholics in Maine, or the 68,115,001 Catholics in the United States of America, or the 1.1 billion Catholics in the world.

I have been watching the events of the last few weeks with horror. The pope (an ex–Hitler Youth whom your fellow bishops used to refer to, lovingly, as “God’s rottweiler”) whined during a Palm Sunday homily about what he called “petty gossip.” That “petty gossip” is a tsunami of reports of child rape perpetrated by Catholic priests across the globe and attempts by bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and the pope himself to cover up that child rape by moving ordained rapists to new parishes where they could, and did, rape again. That “petty gossip” includes one case in which the pope halted an internal investigation of a Catholic priest in Wisconsin who is alleged to have raped more than 200 deaf boys.

And then, on March 30, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights placed an ad in the New York Times dismissively accusing the Times of “looking for dirt” that “occurred a half-century ago” and saying that the church’s “pedophilia crisis” has “all along” been a “homosexual crisis.” He accused the Times of flogging this story to further a progressive agenda that includes “abortion, gay marriage, and women’s ordination.”

I demand to be excommunicated because I do not believe women are second-class citizens. I demand to be excommunicated because your missionaries are informing impoverished citizens of third-world countries that birth control is a sin when it is in fact the single most important thing they could do to gain some small amount of control over their economic situation and health. I demand to be excommunicated because your church has become a hate group as virulent as any this world has ever seen, one that is unnaturally obsessed with the sex lives of good men and women across the planet. I demand to be excommunicated because I do not condone child rape or the concealment of child rape.

The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases. [...]

Benedict will be in Britain between September 16 and 19, visiting London, Glasgow and Coventry, where he will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman, the 19th-century theologian.

Dawkins and Hitchens believe the Pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because, although his tour is categorised as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations. [...]

Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: “This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.”

Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, said: “This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment.”

Do you think they are going too far, or should the Pope be arrested and forced to resign as Pope?

Update: Dawkins clarifies:

What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me out of the blue, and I repeat it here, is that I am whole-heartedly behind the initiative by Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to mount a legal challenge to the Pope’s proposed visit to Britain. Beyond that, I declined to comment to Marc Horne, other than to refer him to my ‘Ratzinger is the Perfect Pope’ article [...]

Here is what really happened. Christopher Hitchens first proposed the legal challenge idea to me on March 14th. I responded enthusiastically, and suggested the name of a high profile human rights lawyer whom I know. I had lost her address, however, and set about tracking her down. Meanwhile, Christopher made the brilliant suggestion of Geoffrey Robertson. He approached him, and Mr Robertson’s subsequent ‘Put the Pope in the Dock’ article in The Guardian shows him to be ideal [...]

The case is obviously in good hands, with him and Mark Stephens. I am especially intrigued by the proposed challenge to the legality of the Vatican as a sovereign state whose head can claim diplomatic immunity.

Even if the Pope doesn’t end up in the dock, and even if the Vatican doesn’t cancel the visit, I am optimistic that we shall raise public consciousness to the point where the British government will find it very awkward indeed to go ahead with the Pope’s visit, let alone pay for it.