“New atheists” Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are having a ball with the pedophile priest scandal — it seems to prove everything they’ve ever said about the evils of religion.
It’s disturbing enough that anyone at all is having a ball with this ghastly issue, though maybe that’s inevitable when the Hitchens-Dawkins style of atheism has all the hallmarks of being a religion of its own. But worse is that their call for the Pope to resign smacks more than a little of… well, to be kind, disingenuousness. To be less kind, hypocrisy.
If you don’t believe in medicine, you’re hardly going to call for a better doctor. If H and D really believe all they say about the evils of religion, then there’s no way they could imagine that a change of Pope could make any difference, especially when nobody in the upper reaches of Churchly hierarchy seems capable of plain human feeling — capable, that is, of expressing pure unadulterated outrage that such things have been done under the guise (literally) of priestly robes.
I don’t question H and D’s outrage, but while most of us are watching this unfold with horror, they can barely contain their glee.
I wish I could feel that glee, but I’m with Nick Kristof on the Op-Ed page of today’s New York Times, talking about “the other Catholic church.” This is the “grass-roots church” of nuns and priests working with the poor, the sick, and the needy both in the States and worldwide. “Their magnificence,” writes Kristof, “lies not in their vestments, but in their selflessness.”
Maybe H and D could learn just a bit from that selflessness. They’ve leapt on the bandwagon of scandal with no apparent purpose other than self-promotion.
Or maybe Hitchens is running for Pope?
Makes me think about the Catholic priests who used to come in and help us at Chicken Soup Brigade. CSB, as an AIDS charity, was filled with a lot of the alternative community. Yet Catholic Community Services used the same space for their meals on wheels, and there was a lot of crossover of help. We would regularly get Catholic groups- from adults to teenagers to nuns-in-training.
One of my most amusing memories was Valentines day, when someone hired “Leather Santa” to come and people got their pictures taken sitting on his lap. Leather Santa was a very fit young man in leather boots, leather G-string with a whip and a Santa cap. Meanwhile a group of travelling nuns show up to help in the warehouse just as one of the priests was getting his picture taken. There was a certain amount of blushing, but also a lot of laughing.
I can sympathize with the skepticism of religion, but not the heart of it. It’s too easy to mistake the bureaucracy of religion as its foundation.