For the same reason that it opposes assisted dying. Suppose that you had made a claim that every statement coming from your mouth is the absolute truth, and suppose, further, that this claim is not only known by practically everyone in the world, but that millions, perhaps billions of people, believe you, and stake their lives on this belief. Now, suppose that you finally came to your senses, and realised that no one can make such a claim in good faith, and that you, like everyone else, is liable to error, to making judgements in haste and on poor evidence, and that some of your statements – statements that your followers have taken with the utmost gravity, and defended, basing their entire lives on them – seem now, in retrospect, to have consequences that you can no longer defend. What should you do?
While you’re thinking about that problem, remember all those people who trusted you, and genuinely believed that your claims, and the claims made on your behalf, that you could not err, were valid for all time; remember that their lives will suddenly be without the firm foundation upon which they believed they stood, that everything that they believed, everything they had ever published, all the protest movements in which they had participated, and all the shrill condemnations that they had uttered in your name, will be nullified in a second if you suddenly lose your nerve, and say that, after all, you were wrong.
But still, remember, if you will, that the consequences of your claims, and the claims made on your behalf, are not insignificant. Not only have many of your erstwhile followers concluded long ago that you were wrong, but believing that you were right all along has caused much distress. Many people have died in misery, because of your belief that helping them to die was opposed to all that was true and noble and good. Women, who might have lived full, happy lives, have died in misery, simply because you denied them the right to control their reproductivity, and in desperation have resorted to all sorts ineffective, dangerous and often illegal means for ending their pregnancies. Many of their children, growing up in overpopulated cities with few opportunities, died before reaching their teens. People with diseases known to end in misery, have been forced to live through that misery without the option of controlling their own dying as they have controlled their own lives. Who, you may wonder, should you stand with? Those who have trusted you, and believed in your vaunted claims to infallibility? Or those who keep pointing out that no one can be infallible, that all of us are finite, no matter what may have been claimed on our behalf by tradition or councils composed of fallible men.
It’s a difficult decision. Indeed, there is all the pomp and circumstance that surrounds such a claim, all the power and routine acts of frenzied busyness that go to defend and buttress that claim against its detractors, all the lobbying that has been done, all the political leaders that have been threatened and suborned, all the organisations that have not only accepted the claim, but have defended it by fair means or foul. If you decide that, after all, the claim itself is and must be invalid, because no one is preserved from all error, and you can see for yourself what has happened as a result of making such an inflated claim, the organisation that you lead will be left rudderless, maybe even a laughingstock to be ridiculed and scorned, and, as a result, an organisation that was believed to be founded in truth and preserved in truth for millennia will founder and shatter into a thousand warring sects and claimants to your supposed importance and infallibility. Dare you act in such a way as to precipitate such an outcome?
The answer, so far, is no. Whether or not you think that the man who placed you in this fix – the man who claimed, and got people to agree, that anyone holding your office must be infallible — was in error or mentally unbalanced, the damage has been done, and you simply have to accept that you are stuck with the claims that have been made, and everything you do must be aimed at continuing to uphold the claim. But you must do much more than that. You cannot just simply claim that this man was right. You have to deepen and strengthen the claim, and commit yourself to it with more insistence than the author of your predicament, who established the claim at a time when the consequences of making it were unclear to many, perhaps even to the man who sought it. At the time it seemed limited to certain exceptional and strictly circumscribed occasions, but eventually it became obvious that it could not be restricted in that way, that the claim to infallibility, ascribed to exceptional cases, would simply bleed into everything that was said by you, your predecessors, and your successors.
The “indefectibility” that was once ascribed to your organisation, that meant that, in the end, the truth would prevail, no matter into what errors the organisation might in the course of history be led, came to be ascribed to a succession of individuals in such a way that a single error in judgement could never be corrected, without it becoming clear that “indefectibility” cannot be ascribed to individuals, because it is precisely individuals who err, and saying of an individual that, in the end, the truth will prevail, is a very different proposition than the claim that, in the end, the organisation will be preserved from error. Individuals err all the time, and sometimes they correct their mistakes, but if someone who is infallible errs, then he is not infallible after all, no matter how many times you say that he has corrected an error in judgement, or that he is sorry. The indefectibility of the church — and of course that is what we are talking about — permits individuals the latitude and freedom of thought to say that, on this or that occasion, the church was wrong; but the infallibility of the pope does not permit for this kind of latitude of thought or expression, because the pope is infallible at the time you are ascribing error to him. And the pope must uphold in the present the infallibility of popes in the past, otherwise his own infallibility is immediately called into question.
This means — changing the “you” of the above discussion to the pope and the church — that the church cannot allow the pope to be questioned, and that any statement that calls the truth of the church’s teaching into question is immediately seen to be anti-Catholic, because the Catholic Church is defined simply in terms of the infallibility of its leader and the Magisterium (the teaching authority) over which he presides. Therefore it is necessary for the church to oppose any claims that run contrary to those teachings, and to use all the power at its command in order to do so. That is probably why, in an article on the London Summit on Family Planning (sponsored jointly by the UK government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), the Guardian Social Affairs editor, Tracy McVeigh, in her article “Melinda Gates hits out at ‘war on women’ on eve of summit“, mentions the Catholic Church only in the context of saying that Melinda Gates is a practicing Catholic. Other than that she speaks only in general terms about Melinda Gates being
targeted by religious groups, which have described her mission as a “blatant attack on morality” and an elitist effort at population control. [my italics]
Certainly, there may be religious groups other than the Catholic Church or Catholic organisations that are targeting Melinda Gates, but at the forefront of these religious groups the Catholic Church must be, as it has been for many years when it came to issues of birth control, abortion, and women’s reproductive health, somewhere leading the pack.
This is evident from a report in the (so-called) Canadian Free Press on the London Family Planning Summit, which quotes from none other than Wendy Wright (interim director of C-fam — and the annoying opponent of Richard Dawkins in the video clip in my recent post on evolution), to this effect:
This is a new chapter in the population control movement. Elite billionaires and powerful governments use the guise of ‘helping poor women’ to extract permanent funding for abortion-promoting and population control groups. Contraception will have a higher priority than education, basic health care, infrastructure, and economic improvements – diverting funding from measures that empower women and communities. None of the contraception programs help pregnant women or newborns.
Notice the unsupported claim that contraception will be given a higher priority than education, basic health care, and other important things. This is simply thrown in opportunistically, to raise the emotional temperature for the Catholic opposition to any form of family planning. For, while it is nowhere spelt out in the article, C-fam is the acronym of a Catholic organisation (which has duplicates with different names in many countries) the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (this link will take you to C-fam’s propaganda against the London Summit).
What Wendy Wright neglects to point out is the number of women who die every year as a result of complications due to pregnancy, especially pregnancy at very early ages. According to the World Health Organisation’s Global Health Observatory:
Every day in 2010, about 800 women died due to complications of pregnancy and child birth, including severe bleeding after childbirth, infections, hypertensive disorders, and unsafe abortions. Out of the 800, 440 deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa and 230 in Southern Asia, compared to five in high-income countries.
C-fam’s motto is Defending Sovereignty and Human Dignity at International Insitutions, but not only is human dignity defined in terms of the Catholic Church’s ban on birth control, it makes every effort to frame issues in terms of its own predilections. For instance, its pdf “4 Problems with the London Family Planning Summit Goals” (linked above), states bluntly that “Current family planning funding in the developing world is $4 billion,” and links the reader to a Intrahealth document on global family planning initiatives. This document does include the figure of $4 billion for family planning, but it also includes the following statement:
The current level of contraceptive care in the developing world costs about $4 billion annually but saves $5.6 billion in maternal and newborn health service costs.
And despite all this expenditure, remember, 800 women a day die from complications due to pregnancy. As Stephen Mumford says in his book, The Life and Death of NSSM 200:
It is institutional survival that governs the behavior of he Catholic hierarchy in all matters. The claim that “morality” governs its behavior in the matters of family planning and abortion is fraudulent. The hierarchy has a long history of determining which position is in the best interest of the Papacy … and then framing that position as the moral position. Father Arthur McCormack was for 23 years the Vatican consultant to the UN on development and population, leaving that post in 1979. In 1982 he went public with his conclusion that the Vatican position on family planning and population control is immoral. [127]
But it is the framing of the issue, and the language that is used in doing so, that is of the greatest interest to the Catholic Church in its many bishops conferences and agencies that take the lead in opposing everything that opposes what has been “infallibly” defined as immoral, contrary to human dignity, and other permutations on positive descriptors of what they stand for.
This is important, and it is clear that this was understood from the start of the Church’s campaign against birth control, abortion and euthanasia. According to a 1971 article — recall that Pope Montini’s (Paul VI) encyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) was issued in 1968 — by Jesuit priest, Virgil Blum (Virgil C. Blum, “Public Policy Making: Why the Churches Strike Out,” America, 6 March 1971, pp. 224-28), founder and first president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights (now led by Bill Donahue),
[c]rucial to influencing public opinion is getting the people to define the issue in your way. Since language not only defines the situation but also shapes attitudes, a group’s cause has an almost insurmountable handicap if it permits opposing forces to define the terms of the discussion. [quoted in Mumford, 157]
That is why the Catholic Church continues to use words like ‘kill’, ‘murder’, ‘infanticide’, with all their negative connotations intact, when describing acts that could as easily be called acts of mercy and compassion. That is why Pope Wojtyła (JP II) spoke with such passion in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae of the modern “culture of death,” when speaking of everything from birth control to euthanasia. That is why Melinda Gates, in the Guardian report on the upcoming London Summit on family planning is said to have been opposed by “religious groups,” and uses the word ‘catholic’ only when identifying Ms. Gates as a “practicing Catholic,” because, as Blum concluded, “if the Catholic leadership is to succeed, it must make their efforts look non-Catholic.” (in Mumford’s words, 159) That’s why Bill Donahue and his Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights continues to attack anyone who dares to criticise the Catholic Church, and why, when Pope Wojtyła’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae appeared in 1995, the American press was silent, even though criticism in Italy was widespread.
Why does the Catholic Church oppose family planning? Because to do anything else would be to expose the lie at the heart of Catholicism, that one person, and one person only at a time, is protected from all error on matters of faith and morals — a sure recipe for mounting error upon error until the structure of the papacy and the church comes tumbling down. But, like the present Archbishop of Canterbury, who seemed to say, against all his best instincts, that the Anglican Communion would not come unstuck while he sat on the throne of St. Augustine (of Canterbury), any papal resident of the Vatican cannot allow that one of his predecessors made a mistake, though the heavens should fall. Such is the power of religious dogmatism.
When considering any utterance from the Catholic Church, it is essential to understand that everything that they say is self serving. These people are completely indifferent to any suffering that they cause, they are interested only in preserving their power and privilage. The puzzle that needs solving is how to inform millions of ordinary Catholics that their faith is being exploited and abused, when it is a message that they really do not want to hear.
So, I would say that the dilema that you describe is no dilema at all to them, they will simply go on wrecking ordinary people’s lives for as long as it takes for everyone on earth to convert to the one true faith
Melinda Gates is a “practicing Catholic”? She should start practicing being not-Catholic! It is very difficult to take Melinda Gates seriously. She says “giving women better access to contraception had become her lifetime’s work” and “the lack of family planning available to 210 million women [is] ‘a crime.’” However, she is a member of the Catholic Church, an organization that prevents women from getting better access to contraception and family planning. If Melinda Gates wants to help women, she should take advantage of all the media attention she is receiving and publicly renounce the Catholic Church.
A quick check with Wikipedia reveals that Gates has “donated over 10 million dollars to her high school Ursuline Academy of Dallas,” which is a Catholic college preparatory high school for girls. This is schizophrenic behaviour: giving money to a Catholic school and raising money and awareness to bring contraception to millions of women and girls in the developing world.
But those who believe in an all-powerful God don’t have to take responsibility for ANY mistakes. If God had not wanted our mistakes to be made, he would have prevented them. He did not; therefore even our mistakes are good in the eyes of God. Thus the church can live with its own rotting conscience and go on making mistakes with a free hand.
God is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card.
American Catholics use birth control at the same rate as the general public. The American nuns over whom the Vatican is lately attempting to assert control, and those in Africa who are passing out condoms to try to stem the spread of AIDS, are arguably doing more good than harm. The institution is the issue, not the individuals.
I find it alarming that you could go on and on about “infallibility” and get the doctrine so wrong, Catholic doctrine does not assert the pope is infallible “normally.” He is only infallible under certain very rare and specific circumstances–something Popes have only done once, on a theological question about Mary, since infalliblity was declared in the 19th century,
You make some interesting points above, and some with which I’m sympathetic, but your repeated, heckling wrongness on this point is very disconcerting. You could have cleared this up quickly with a minute or two of Google searching. Yet you appear to have never even considered the notion that your idea about infallibility—an idea which, historically, is a Protestant smear—could be wrong.
I’m sorry to note that your presuppositions about papal infallibility claims are grossly wrong. Either (i) you knew that and deliberately chose to deceive people, or (ii) you didn’t know and based your arguments on shaky premises. Well done.
Tim Spalding. How can you say this? I say very clearly that it was intended to refer only to exceptional occasions, but that it bleeds — as it does — into other things that popes say. No one has said that Casti Connubii or Humanae Vitae were ex cathedra pronouncements, and yet the unwillingness to change on birth control despite the overhwelming support for change of the papal commission, shows that the pope’s so-called infallibility (which is nonsense anyway, even if restricted rigidly to ex cathedra pronouncements) has simply bled into everything that popes have said with gravity about doctrinal or moral matters.
FF. If you had read carefully, you would see that I have made neither mistake. But then, of course, you didn’t, did you?
Tim Spalding
You say, “You could have cleared this up quickly with a minute or two of Google searching.”
However, a Google search yields conflicting information on papal infallibility. On your Twitter account you say, “He is only infallible under certain very specific and defined circumstances–2x since 1900.” According to http://www.catholicbible101.com/papalinfallibility.htm , you are wrong:
“There have been 3 instances of an officially declared Papal Infallible doctrine. The first was in 1854, when Pope Pius IX declared the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception (The blessed Virgin Mary was conceived in St. Anne’s womb free from original sin), then in 1870 at the first Vatican Council when the doctrine of Papal Infalliblity was officially declared to be true, and then in 1950 by Pope Pius XII when he declared the doctrine of the Assumption (the blessed Virgin Mary was assumed body and soul into Heaven).”
However, most devout, practicing Catholics are so ignorant about Catholic teaching that they believe everything a pope says is gospel (pardon the pun).
I would like to write my own post on papal infallibility, but it would take more than “a minute or two” or the 10 seconds you claim on your Twitter account. It would be a waste of time; papal infallibility is crap.
Stonyground @#1
The Church is not indifferent at all to the suffering that they cause. As the geeks say, It’s a feature, not a bug.
Look at the medieval saints, what do they have in common? Axes in their heads, bodies full of arrows, skin flayed from living bodies and my favourite, St Lawrence, usually depicted with a barbecue grill. Just because they can no longer enjoy torturing people directly doesn’t mean that they can’t enjoy the suffering that they have indirectly caused.
You may have seen a recent video of the execution of a woman by the Taliban for the crime of being raped by two Taliban commanders. The important part is the crowd of laughing men who watched. We had, not long ago, party crowds like this at lynchings. Are they depraved? No, they’re just human and humans are predatory animals like the cats who torture mice or the dogs who tear up rabbit warrens for fun.
We usually think that religion comes from the scriptures but I don’t think so. I think it comes from looking into the deepest part of our souls (metaphorically speaking) and finding god there. Don’t forget that the deepest part is an animal one.
If one looks down from the lofty throne of St Peter and feels pleasure at god’s handiwork as he directs through our agency then that pleasure must be gods reward for one’s piety.
Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of our Nature, tells the story of the human race rising above our instinctive cruelty with the Church fighting a rearguard action the whole way.
Kevin Alexander
You say,
“If one looks down from the lofty throne of St Peter and feels pleasure at god’s handiwork as he directs through our agency then that pleasure must be gods reward for one’s piety.”
Please let us know when you get the chance to look “down from the lofty throne of St Peter”; we will all be waiting for your eyewitness account.
To compare human evil in reductionistic terms to predators like cats and dogs, having a bit of fun with cruelty, is misleading, and I would go one further calling it a case of self-deception. Human evil is complex and fascinating, and is certainly a product of the human imagination.
Veronica, I got a little histrionic there, sorry
My point is that I don’t believe that the men who make the rules are indifferent to or regret the suffering that their rules cause. I grew up in a Catholic home and went to Catholic school but I don’t consider myself a lapsed Catholic. I was never a Catholic in the first place precisely because I couldn’t accept that any loving god could allow suffering much less inspire it.
On the other hand, I don’t have to imagine cruelty in men. It’s everywhere you look.
Egbert, I’m just going to disagree.
I know that the idea of evolutionary psychology is very distasteful to many but it’s still the best explanation for many behaviours.
@Tim Spalding & FF
It’s like a game of vatican wack-a-mole, trying to pin down what the catholic church position is on any matter.
What with the plethora of lunatic organizations attached to the church like barnacles attached to a sunken ship, the church can make any number of plausibly deniable statements through it’s deluded and ignorant stooges and claim that oh well we never meant that when confronted on their immoral stance on any number of issues that affect human well being.
What is “alarming” and “disconcerting” is that you would deliberately misrepresent what the average catholic knows about rcc dogma. They have little or no understanding of it, they claim to believe what they are told to believe and that’s the end of it.
And really FF, have you no sense of irony what so ever ? The hubris of accusing Eric MacDonald of deliberately deceiving people when you belong to an organization that is based on deceit.
The late Christopher Hitchens used to conduct this experiment on a regular basis to test the level of knowledge of catholics in their deranged dogma:
@Kevin Alexander,
To follow natural science as an ideology, or scientism, and ignore the human realm, and the social sciences, and all the other psychological theories seems a bit silly to me.
Kevin, I guess I have to ask why you disagree with Egbert. You have compared human cruelty to animal predation, but surely the fact that so much human cruelty is con-specific, and not directed as predation to other species, means that it is likely culturally specific, and possessed of cultural meaning. It seems reasonable to suppose that human violence is related to our evolutionary past, but it seems a bit hasty to suggest that it is all derived from that past. And this doesn’t mean that I find evolutionary psychology distasteful; it just means that we need to be very careful when we do it that we do not oversimplify, and attribute causation where there may well be none. The fact that blood, to take but one example, has so many different layers of cultural/historical meaning, suggests that the acts that produce blood are deeply invested in the history of that meaning. This, I take it, is part of the reason that Steven Pinker says that, despite the alllure of group selection, many things that are attributed by group selectionists to evolutionary causation may be more aptly accounted for by historical, rather than biological explanation.
For example, in his chapter on the pacification process, in The Better Angels of our Nature, Pinker describes warfare amongst the 19th century aborigines of Australia, using a quote from an escaped convict William Buckley wo found refuge amongst them. First the attack is described, and then this:
Whatever we think of Buckley’s squeamish Victorian moralism, surely there is more involved here than just predation.
Veronica (#3). I agree completely. How can Melinda Gates be a practicing Catholic when she opposes fundamental Catholic doctrine? I keep asking Catholic friends the same thing. A young man recently killed himself because his Huntington’s Chorea had advanced to the point where he could no longer drive or do many of the things that made life meaningful for him, and he knew that complete mental debility was not far away in time. His mother had suffered and died of Huntington’s disease, so he knew what was going to happen to him (if he remained alive). An acquaintance of mine who happens to be a “practicing Catholic” (I assume that means they haven’t quite got the hang of it yet!) said that she thought that it should be possible for people like him to receive help to die. So I wagged my finger at her and said, “It is principally your church that opposes and makes the legalisation of assisted dying impossible in this country. How can you continue to support the church if you disagree so strongly with its stand on assisted dying?” She made a few “tut, tut” comments, as though it was wrong of me to criticise her church, and yet she herself said that she doesn’t always agree with what the church says. Interestingly, in this connexion, the percentage of Catholic women having abortions to the number of abortions in the US is greater than the percentage of Catholic women in the US population, something like 31% have abortions, and only 26% of the female US population is Catholic.
One bible verse. “Be fruitful and multiply.” That’s it. One bible verse. Genesis 1:28.
Quite possibly the only biblical injunction that has ever been successfully fulfilled by mankind.
If there was a god, he’d amend the verse to say, “not quite so many has you have right now, OK? Have you heard of the term ‘carrying capacity’?”
Eric (#19)
I tried to pun the word “practicing” but was not as effective as you were.
Steve Oberski (#16)
I conduct the same experiment as Hitchens did. The concept of Mary’s immaculate conception is my favourite, especially since for many people the opposite of immaculate is dirty: therefore, sex is dirty.
“To follow natural science as an ideology, or scientism, and ignore the human realm, and the social sciences, and all the other psychological theories seems a bit silly to me.”
Egbert, I completely agree. I see the whole of the human situation as a magnificently complex structure designed and built by countless architects. However, I still see the foundation as biological. I just don’t get how they are mutually exclusive.
Eric, you are right, I was being too simplistic. To base the idea of violence simply on predation is going too far back. A lot has happened since but a lot of that can still be explained biologically.
I am not a group selectionist. Gene selection is enough. Go back before culture to where violence couldn’t be learned from the culture. A gene for violence will still get the lions share of resources and win over it’s competitors. An organism with that gene, if it were aware, would feel pleasure in responding to that genes influence just as we feel pleasure in doing anything else that enhances our survival.
Little boys in nursery schools are spontaneously violent. You have to teach them not to be. You don’t have to teach them to throw rocks at the other kids, you have to teach them not to.
As an aside, humans do eat each other or did very recently. They just go outside the tribe for that.
I see the Church of England failed to convince women clergy it was acting in good faith in its attempt to appease the anti-woman mob. the bishops deemed it was necessary for some parishes to have male clergy, but not sufficient. Why was it not sufficient? These parishes not only want male priests, but also male priests not ordained by women or by male bishops who have ordained women. Cooties are easily spread and from long distance too.
The thing about religious doctrines generally, is that they are not so much concerned with people’s bodies or suffering. Those are temporary things. Religious doctrines are concerned with sin and having a healthy soul. These days, especially in the west, that’s not very popular. Mostly because western society is very individualist and materialist. Those last things have their good points and bad points, obviously.
Now if one assumes that the Pope is purely evil and entirely preoccupied with destroying peoples lives, then getting as far away from the church seems rational. But if you take a different view, that the church like any organization is fallible, but still see value in the idea of god/soul, then its a much more difficult decision. Not all priests are pedophiles, like any group of people, some are trying to do the right thing. Even if they are wrong.
Here is Giles Fraser’s take on the revised amendment to protect “deep theological convection” as the house of bishops referred to the antis stand on women bishops.
Money quote:
BD #24 said
I’m sorry — and which planet did you just come from? Consider the religions and suffering and the body — practically nonstop concern. One of the concerns of this blog is to say that the suffering that some people undergo as they die is so horrific that they must be allowed to choose assistance in dying, but the churches will have none of that. The Church of England report on euthanasia says that suffering is a vital part of becoming human — even for those who are dying! Or, just think about what Michael Fugate is telling us about: about the Church of England which has a problem with women’s bodies — at least some of them do — that’s why they can’t agree on women bishops. And then, don’t forget that in most of the church they can’t be priests either. And, as for suffering, the church goes on and on about the importance of accepting your suffering at the hands of god and to share it with Christ’s suffering on the cross. Then of course there are the bodies of people and what they can can cannot do with them. Or the bodies of women and men and what they may and may not do with them, who they may have sex with, and even whether they can enjoy sex by themselves. And this goes on and on. It is simply not true that religious doctrines generally are not concerned with people’s bodies and suffering, because it is. The church is concerned about bodies and suffering because this is the fabric of human life, and it strives to direct as much of it as it can. Indeed, most sin is in some way involved with the body and what you may or may not do with it.
BD just wrote a load of moral relativism, as some kind of defense of religion.
@Michael Fugate “deep theological convection”
That brings a great image to mind, a rube goldbergesque engine transporting evidence and rationality into the depths and churning up irrational dogma and revelation.
All jealously guarded by a coutier of shamans and witch doctors ensuring that nobody can examine the inner workings of this infernal device.
Typos can be useful for unintended meanings……
To give you some idea of the devastation the Catholic church, among others, is having in Africa, see this report:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/better-contraception-could-save-100000-lives-7931885.html
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The inability to say “we have a problem” or “we were wrong” are really at the heart of the child sex abuse coverup in the Church. Even after they acknowledged it was happening, they needed to place blame on “secular culture” or “Woodstock values”. At all costs, the Church will never admit a mistake, because ultimately, they believe the authority of the Church is more important than anything else.
Daniel, this is precisely the point, and the authority of the church is more important than anything else because, if they admit that they were wrong, their credibility — this is the underlying assumption — will plummet. Whether that is true or not — and I think it may be true — this seems to be the presupposition underlying the church’s actions. Blaming secular culture, or relativism, or other things for the church’s problems is really saying that the church itself has no problems. So, when Catholics look at the cost of contraception, for example (see Wendy Wright’s silly calculations), they emphasise the cost of contraception, and see this as being subtracted from other necessary programmmes. The outcome is that they see a net loss to education, healthcare, etc. But they look at things in isolation, because, to include things together would immediately call all their calculations into question. If we look at the report kindly linked by Egbert in the Independent, where 100,000 lives might be saved by accessibility to information and means for family planning — and think of all the health care costs involved in the deaths of all those women — plus all their earnings potential, social contribution, etc., we see that isolating things in the way that they do, Catholics are really convincing themselves and others by using deception. Of course, this seems clear, but why is it not obvious to more people? Well, perhaps it is, and perhaps this explains why so many ignore the church’s teachings and why so many others are simply abandoning the church. The answer seems to be to keep pressing the point home, but at the same time — and here I do have some concerns — we need to be providing people with alternative means to achieve community, to explore meaning and purpose, etc. But at the heart of it all, as you notice, is the inability to say, “We were wrong.” Amazing!
It is interesting that the LDS church was able to use new “revelations” to jettison polygamy to gain statehood for Utah and allow nonwhites to become bishops. I think the pope doesn’t overturn the birth control ban because it is in his best interest not to do so; more Catholic babies means more Catholics….
We also see new evidence of abuse in the US Legion of Christ schools – LC has been praised by popes including the current one.
http://www.49weeks.blogspot.com/
re Melinda Gates and her ‘Catholicism’, I made similar observations about Cherie Blair too, who also has a pick and mix approach to her faith. Why on earth don’t they leave this hateful institution? Maybe it’s an identification of their family roots, rituals and identity with the Church that they cannot jettison; I know in my own family the older members still have a deep connection with their Catholic faith. Still, I applaud Gates and Blair in these sorts of efforts, and they are at least acting to counteract the evil perpetrated by their faith, while many are perpetuating it.
For example, here’s a cleric using infallibility to buttress the teaching on contraception. The new Bishop of Portsmouth, Mgr Philip Egan says that Humanae Vitae is infallible. Or rather, this is what he says:
(http://spuc-director.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/new-portsmouth-bishop-argues-that.html)
I mean, what are we supposed to make of this? “[I]t seems to me that there is a persuasive case”? Does the Church and its representatives not know when the doctrine is infallible, or what? Is it possible they encourage confusion so they can adopt this pseudo-authority when they can, but will wriggle out of it when a doctrine becomes untenable and an existential threat to them?
Thank you, Mark, for that (#34). This is basically the point I make about infallibility, and I think the “It seems to me that there is a persuasive case ….” is further confirmation. The notion of “ex cathedra” pronouncements is nowhere clearly defined, so that the notion tends to be uneasily extended to practically everything that pope’s say with any gravity, and it doesn’t get more grave than an encyclical — so Humanae Vitae becomes, by default, treated as infallible, because it is not quite clear where the borderline between infallible and fallible lies. In any event, restricting infallibility to the great three occasions — (i) infallibility, (ii) immaculate conception and (iii) assumption of Mary — makes infallibility into a laughingstock, since these three are perhaps the most dubious claims made by popes in the last couple centuries. The problem with infallibility, as Sajanas makes clear in a comment on another post (http://choiceindying.com/2012/07/10/the-fundamental-problem-with-religious-belief/#comment-16125), is that it was arguably used by Pius IX as a consolation prize for losing the papal states (that’s not how Sajanas puts it). In other words, it was a political move in a game of power played with Garibaldi and the Resorgimento — a political/military movement which ultimately succeeded in unifying Italy and reducing the Pope’s hold on temporal power to the Vatican rump. Infallibility was his consolation prize. That interpretation has a lot to commend it, but he could not have known how stultifying the doctrine would become, making it impossible for the church to adapt to changing circumstances, and turning everything into a fight to the finish, which constantly threatens papal power — instead of the reverse.
“…makes infallibility into a laughingstock, since these three are perhaps the most dubious claims made by popes in the last couple centuries.”
I couldn’t agree more. It seems to me that if they can make a reasoned case for some policy then they would make that case without resorting to blunt authoritarianism. What I call pulling it out of the Anus Dei.