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Pope Goes The Weasel

Posted March 1st, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

That headline isn’t mine — it’s courtesy of Stephen Colbert, the Comedy Central host of The Colbert Report, and a practicing Catholic.  His word for Ratzinger/Benedict’s resignation: “popectomy.”

I find myself in the same bind as Colbert.  It seems like I should have all sorts of incredibly pertinent things to say about Ratzi’s helicoptering off into the twilight, but the papacy has become so impertinent that the only real question that concerns me is this:

What happens to the nifty red shoes?

redshoesPrada shoes, they say.  Ratzi’s favorites.  To be left behind as he he now declares himself just “a humble pilgrim.”  (Gagging sounds heard offstage.)

How humble?  Well, since he’s said he’ll live out his remaining days “hidden from the world,” I’m assuming he means “hidden” in the same sense as the Mahdi, the messiah figure of Shiism, who disappeared into a cave twelve centuries ago and who will return at the end of days.

Of course Ratzi has to give up the red shoes.  Who could hide in red shoes?

Especially since he has such a lot to hide from.

What’s really puzzling is that anyone still takes the papacy seriously.  The media are hyping up the election of a new pope for obvious reasons.  Men in fancy dress, an electoral race, cloaked ambition, secret balloting, colored smoke — it all makes for good theater.  The fact that so many of those involved in all this are deeply corrupt gives an extra thrill to it all.  Whether it’s actual pedophilia or “merely” covering it up;  closet homosexuality by public homophobes;  unveiled misogyny displayed in the inquisition of nuns;  plummeting numbers of priests unable to marry a woman, let alone a man;  and now, a secret report on a sex and blackmail scandal within the Vatican walls — how could the media resist such a totally sick soap opera?

What we’re seeing is a huge fundamentalist institution deep into the process of self-destruction.  It’s imploding right in front of us.  The weasel has definitely popped, and the infallible is about as fallible as it can get.

If the Roman Catholic church doesn’t undergo thorough reform, right now, predicts the famed Swiss theologian Hans Kung, it will “fall into a new ice age and run the danger of shrinking into an increasingly irrelevant sect.”  He cites a recent poll in Germany showing that 85% of Catholics support marriage for priests, and 75% support ordination of women.

Religious historian Garry Wills’ new book Why Priests? – A Failed Tradition goes further and advocates abolishing the priesthood altogether.  Not only did Christianity begin without a priesthood, he points out, but it actively opposed it.  And rank-and-file priests are speaking up too, like Tony Flannery in Dublin, suspended by the Vatican for refusing to adhere to church orthodoxy on contraception and homosexuality, or Roy Bourgeois in the US, who was excommunicated for supporting the ordination of women.

But all this is far too pertinent.  So let’s take refuge in the impertinent and get back to the issue at hand:  what’ll happen to those hand-made red shoes?  Will they be bronzed like baby booties?  Will they be displayed in an air-conditioned glass relics case?   Will they be auctioned off on eBay?

Fundamentalists of all religious stripes, take note:  this is how imposed orthodoxy ends — not with a bang, but with a red-bootied whimper.

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File under: Christianity, fundamentalism | Tagged: Tags: Garry Wills, Hans Kung, Pope Benedict, Ratzinger, Roman Catholic Church, Roy Bourgeois, Stephen Colbert, Tony Flannery, Vatican | 11 Comments
  1. Saimã Abbasi says:
    March 1, 2013 at 12:28 pm

    Fundamentalists of all religious stripes, take note: this is how imposed orthodoxy ends — not with a bang, but with a red-bootied whimper…
    Love this line. Very well written.

  2. Nancy McClelland says:
    March 1, 2013 at 3:43 pm

    Lesley, I believe I once said that I’d listen to you read aloud from the phone book, you have such a great voice and style of delivery. Well, I just realized that I am an incredibly lucky woman, because in my head, I can hear your voice reading your own work as these blog posts flow from the page/screen. And your own work is WAY more interesting than the phone book.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 1, 2013 at 5:28 pm

      I’ll take being more interesting than the phone book as a compliment, Nancy! Seriously, you’re the best. And thanks for the reminder — I haven’t yet posted this KUOW audio of my reading from ‘The First Muslim’ at Town Hall Seattle: http://www.kuow.org/post/muhammads-extraordinary-life-author-lesley-hazleton

  3. BeffaOmmaya WyldeMoon says:
    March 1, 2013 at 5:01 pm

    You’ve gone and done it again, Hazleton! I’m still chuckling…WyldeMoon

  4. Karla Goethe says:
    March 1, 2013 at 7:40 pm

    Lesley Hazleton, your post gives me sanity in an insane world. Thank you so much. Karla Goethe

  5. Gustav Hellthaler says:
    March 2, 2013 at 9:54 am

    I believe that Dorothy has the red shoes and that Toto has already pulled back the curtain of the meta-reality of religion.
    Gus

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 2, 2013 at 10:23 am

      I can see a doctoral thesis here: “The Theology of Oz.”

  6. Jerry M says:
    March 5, 2013 at 12:39 pm

    As a former Catholic I find the current state of the church amusing. They had a real chance to reform the church 50 years ago, but like most powerful and self-blind institutions they didn’t take that opportunity. They could have embraced change, I was in a Catholic high school when the then pope, Paul VI, published his encyclical on birth control. At that time the priest who taught religion in my high school assumed that the birth control ruling was going to change. It didn’t and that was the public end of any attempts at reform. In the last few years we have all learned about so many scandals regarding how the church treated the powerless that the pedophile scandal is just one of many. What is sad that those in power would rather protect power than help those who they have wronged.

    Ratzinger was a cipher. He was elected to do nothing (given his age I am assuming he was supposed to be an interim pope), and he did nothing. I don’t understand why any news agency is covering this. It is barely important. Given the number of Catholics I suppose it does merit a line or two, but that is all.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 5, 2013 at 3:12 pm

      The question being whether another John XXIII is even possible. Naive question, probably…

  7. Jerry M says:
    March 13, 2013 at 3:06 pm

    Oh well, they kicked the can down the road again. They voted on an elderly Argentinian bishop. I don’t know anything negative but he is hardly going to be strong enough to fix anything.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 13, 2013 at 3:53 pm

      The Catholic Reporter says he’s a “staunch opponent” of contraception, abortion, and marriage equality. How exactly this jibes with his avowed passion for social justice must presumably be considered one of the mysteries of the Church…

The Church Goes to Battle — Against Nuns

Posted May 26th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Even as the Catholic Church shields and panders to child rapists masquerading as priests (I use the word “panders” advisedly, since so many of the children are altar boys),  it’s gone to battle against its own nuns.

The Apostolic Visitation currently in progress is not a new take on the Annunciation.   It’s an investigation of convents and women’s orders in the U.S. inspired by the well-founded suspicion that they’re not all Vatican-kosher.   Essentially, it’s a form of Inquisition.   And yet another sign of how firmly the Church has its finger on the self-destruct button.

Not so long ago, outrage was restricted to feminist Catholics like Mary Hunt, whose article here pulls no punches.   A brief extract:

God knows Catholicism has a gender problem. But the structures of power are so perverse as to be dangerous. More than mandatory celibacy, homosexuality, all-male priesthood, and other reasons floated to explain why so many priests abuse children and why so many bishops cover up for them, the monarchical model of power is, to my mind, the major reason why crimes went unchecked and criminals remained in ministry. In a monarchy, there are no checks and balances against power at the highest levels. There is no way to vote the bums out or force them with threats of removal to run institutions in a transparent, indeed legal, way.

Now the outrage is spreading within the Church itself.  Earlier this year, the bishop bums created a ton more of it by censuring the dozens of leaders of women’s Catholic orders (representing tens of thousands of nuns) who signed a letter to Congress supporting the health-care bill.   And then news broke of a critically ill pregnant mother of four told by her doctors in a Catholic hospital in Phoenix  that the only way to save her life was to terminate her 11-week pregnancy.   Sister Margaret McBride, the hospital administrator on duty, convened the Ethics Committee and with the patient’s agreement, approved the procedure.  By doing so, she ensured that the woman lived, that four children still had a mother, and that her Church dug itself still deeper into an apparently bottomless moral cesspool.

It excommunicated her.

So here are two faces of Catholicism:   on the left, the nun who faced what for her was an agonizing choice (reportedly a strong right-to-life advocate, she indeed opted, though not in any way she expected,  for life over death):

And on the right,  the bishop, Thomas Olmsted, who ordered both Sister McBride and her patient to be excommunicated, and threatened to remove recognition (and thus funding) of the hospital as a Catholic institution.

The excommunication seems to be up in the air since it was publicized, though Sister McBride has been “reassigned” within the hospital.   Maybe she’s swabbing floors as punishment.  But what’s needed, as Mary Hunt so cogently advocates, is far more than a clean-up of the Church by women, “as though, being women, they will flap their white veils and make all things new.”   What’s needed isn’t women as bishops, or even, as Maureen Dowd argued in the New York Times, a woman as Pope.  What’s needed is “a new model of church without a pope or anyone else on top…  A democratic, participatory, egalitarian church.”

The irony is that that’s exactly how the church began in the first and second centuries, before power, wealth, and hierarchy took over.   Before it incorporated.   That’s when the Jesus movement was still about liberation and social justice, Mary Magdalene was still the apostle to the apostles, and the least relevant thing about Jesus’ mother was whether she had an intact hymen.

(Postscript:  the day after I posted this, Nick Kristof wrote an op-ed in the NYT with a title I wish I’d thought of:  “Sister Margaret’s Choice.“)

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File under: Christianity, feminism | Tagged: Tags: abortion, Apostolic Visitation, Bishop Thomas Olmsted, child abuse, excommunication, Mary Hunt, nuns, Pope, rape, Roman Catholic Church, Sister Margaret McBride | 3 Comments
  1. Bruce Saunders says:
    May 26, 2010 at 4:36 pm

    Let me add a few morsels to the plates of the lions and lambs on either side of this issue.

    For the lions, I would add to Lesley’s and Mary Hunt’s killing bites these documented facts: Bishop Olmsted did refuse Communion to a ten year old child because the child was autistic and could not swallow.

    Bishop Olmsted did try to shield his diocese from clerical sex-abuse suits by incorporating local parishes individually (thereby significantly reducing the diocese’s assets).

    Bishop Olmsted did send no Roman Catholic Clergy to a recent ecumenical gathering in support of meaningful and humane immigration reform… even though half his diocese is Hispanic and presumably many of these Catholics are illegals.

    And Bishop Olmsted has neither publicly criticized nor made any public effort to change the behavior of Maricopa Sheriff Arpaio, a blunt and brutal office holder, who is Roman Catholic.

    Now for the lambs’ plate, I put these morsels:

    The majority of facts about the event in question are deliberately kept private — for the privacy of the patient, whose identity is unknown.

    We do know that the mother was eleven weeks pregnant, was diagnosed with acute pulmonary hypertension and was at risk of dying.

    We also know that hospital policy, in accordance with Canon Law, forbade abortion — even to save the mother’s life, but did not disallow orthodox treatment of a potentially fatal condition for the mother even if that treatment risked the fetus’s life or well-being.

    We know the hospital ethics committee voted to approve the procedure … but we don’t know what the approved procedure was. D&C? Suction? Drugs? Another procedure?

    We know also that Sister McBride voted with the committee majority to proceed.

    We know that Sister McBride was informed privately, by letter, that she had incurred automatic excommunication for voting as she had, per canon 1398 of the Code of Canon Law. Presumably others involved also received the same letter or a similar letter citing a different canon.

    We know if a direct abortion occurred and Sister McBride is implicated as merely an accomplice, for failing to vote against the procedure in the ethics meeting, by canon 1329 she is automatically excommunicated.

    However, if she ‘procured a completed abortion,’ she is automatically excommunicated per canon 1398. For further explanation, see Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae (BV 62).

    Either way, she is automatically excommunicated by canon law.

    We know by his appointment, training and administrative experience Bishop Omsted is a canonist … a person who accepts responsibility for upholding canon law.

    We know too that Bishop Olmsted’s public statement was prompted by an incendiary newspaper report that ignited the controversy and the Bishop’s public statement did not mention Sister McBride directly — or any person.

    We know that at least one knowledgeable commentator has written that the Bishop wanted to deal with the matter privately, with a desire to protect the reputations and privacy of those involved. His public statement was meant only to acknowledge than an abortion contrary to Canon Law had in fact taken place in a Catholic hospital.

    (It is not inconceivable that the sent letter(s) were matters of form and could have been allowed to disappear into files if the situation had not been made public and escalated.)

    We know too, if we have read Bishop Olmsted’s ‘columns,’ that he deeply agrees with the Church’s position on the essentiality of all human life. In his piece, “Why We Won’t Remain Silent,” he wrote that when it is lawful to destroy human life, “Those who don’t oppose a culture of deaths may find themselves resorting to death as a solution.” As a church leader who believes in The Gospel of Life,’ Olmsted is willing to stand up every time life is threatened. {words from John Paul II’s encyclical are borrowed here)

    What about the Bishop as a person? What about his other beliefs? A person interested in this topic might do well to look into the beliefs of the Jesus Caritas Frtaternity of Priests to which he belongs, and to the writings and morality exhibited in the life of the fraternity’s hero and founder, Charles de Foucauld. A Nazi-minded lot this isn’t.

    Whose right then? The lambs or the lions at this table?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 26, 2010 at 7:01 pm

      You mean the bishop’s complaining that they left him no choice? That’s rich. In fact he should be down on his knees in gratitude to McBride. If the hospital had ingored medical advice and let the patient die, they’d be facing a murder charge now.

  2. Nancy McClelland says:
    May 27, 2010 at 7:42 pm

    “Before it incorporated…. when the Jesus movement was still about liberation and social justice, Mary Magdalene was still the apostle to the apostles,” — I love reading your blog!

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