The title words come from an article exploring the Roman Catholic Church’s campaign to change defeat at the polls (for its favoured idiocies), to success in imposing its will on people, no matter how unwilling, by buying up hospitals, and merging secular hospitals with Roman Catholic health care operations, particularly (in this instance) in Washington State. It’s a feature story in The Stranger entitled “Faith Healers,” and provides an alarming account of the way in which the Roman Catholic Church is actively buying up or merging its operations with hospitals run by secular organisations (such as local municipal authorities), or by other churches that do not have the draconian rules about women’s health issues that the Roman Catholic Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs) impose on all Roman Catholic health care services, with the understanding that the annexed institutions will observe the Roman Catholic bishops’ ERDs. The title words themselves were spoken by a physician (who agreed to speak to the reporter on the condition that he/she could speak anonymously). Let’s put them in context:

The physcians who agreed to meet me for coffee talked about the mindfuck of being raised Catholic, turning to atheism, and excelling in medicine — only to wake up one day with the church as your boss. The first physician joked grimly about the religious directives being “medieval torture porn.” He talked about the struggle of trying to balance his duty to patients with the edicts of a Catholic hospital.

This would be frightening enough, if Roman Catholic hospitals were private institutions run with Roman Catholic resources for Roman Catholics, but this is not the case, apparently, in the United States. No. These are hospitals funded by government, for which individual tax payers are (through their taxes) partly responsible, whether or not they support Roman Catholic torture porn. They are taxed without the option, and the Roman Catholic Church is actively seeking to buy up or merge with even more hospitals in order to spread their torture porn as widely as possible. There are parts of Washington state, apparently, where people would have to drive hundreds of miles to find a non-Roman Catholic hospital to access abortion services even for an ectopic pregnancy. As for Washington’s right-to-die legislation, this is completely out of the question for people “served” by a Roman Catholic health (or “health”) centre. As one activist, opposing the church’s gobbling up of Washington state’s health facilities, Monica Henderson, says:

We’re essentially paying a Catholic institution to deny us care. … It isn’t right.

Indeed, it is not right, but then, why should we expect justice or right from an institution that, world-wide, has been trampling on children’s rights with an abandon that in any other circumstances would be called a rampage. And it is this rampageous organisation that presumes to teach others their duty.

One of the odds-on favourites to be elected pope in the coming conclave — it’s a joke, really, all this solemnity over the latest occupant of the throne of one of the most corrupt courts in Europe (and one of the last) – is, apparently, Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, whose vision for the church, we are assured, is unique. Well, there is doubtless uniqueness and uniqueness. In what way is this unique?

[Turkson told] The Daily Telegraph Tuesday that his biggest challenge, should he be elected, would be to maintain an orthodox Catholic doctrine while “at the same time knowing how to apply it so that you do not become irrelevant in a world that has continuous changes”.

Of course, the vision is not new at all. What Turkson would be looking for is new ways to sell the old message. The Telegraph interview goes on:

“We need to find ways of dealing with the challenges coming up from society and culture,” he said, adding that the Church needed to “evangelise”, or convert, those who had embraced “alternative lifestyles, trends or gender issues”. He added: “We cannot fail in our task of providing guidance.”

You see? Same old story. What is needed is to convert, to evangelise, to guide, to steer people clear of alternative lifestyles, trends, gender issues. It’s relativism, all over again. Indeed, says the cardinal, according to Huffington Post, sexual abuse in Africa is less likely than in Europe, because, you see, in Africa

African traditional systems kind of protect or have protected its population against this tendency.

Because in several communities, in several cultures in Africa homosexuality or for that matter any affair between two sexes of the same kind, are not countenanced in our society.

So that cultural taboo, that tradition has been there. It has served to keep it out.

So, Turkson has fallen for the Vatican lie, and has a few of his own to tell, that sexual abuse and homosexuality go hand in hand, and that Africa is largely immune to such abuse. And this is a man with vision?! There can be no vision in a church that says, as Turkson does, that

We need to be true and faithful to the faith, and we need to be relevant to the society to which we preach our faith.

We may not sacrifice one for the other. We seek to be relevant to society and meet the needs of humankind, we also need to be mindful of what it is that a church believes.

Reading the words it is obvious why this man was made an archbishop and then a cardinal. Because he’s a carbon copy of Ratzinger and Wojtyła. They’ve perfected the system in the Vatican. It’s a bit like a photocopier, except that it copies minds and their dogmatic contents. Turkson is clearly one of the prototypes.

Back, then, to the medieval torture porn where the church takes aim at the most vulnerable. It’s hard to forget Savita Halappanavar, the woman who died needlessly in Ireland, the victim of Roman Catholic torture doctors and nurses, so afraid of being excommunicated from the church that they refused to save a woman’s life. Notwithstanding the directives from Rome or from the bishops, doctors have a responsibility to their patients. Take this directive, for instance, number 48 in the ERDs:

In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion.

This is straightforward nonsense, and to have it as one of the ethical guidelines which all employees of Roman Catholic health care facilities (or their satellites) must understand and punctiliously observe is simply to abandon the fundamental obligations between of physician and patient, who must both know and not know (see below) that it is nonsense. Their first responsibility is not towards their church, and if they abandon their patients in a bizarre attempt to keep their hands clean before their god, they are guilty four times over. They mistake the humanly constructed ethics of an effete medieval monarchy for a divinely ordained order of things. They mistake their patients as those upon whom a god is acting out his purposes; and they ignore the purposes, the hopes and fears of their patients, their life plans and projects, because of this mistake. They forget that their primary responsibility is to their patients, not to a god, whether imagined or not, whose will they cannot conceivably know.

Savita Halappanavar could have been saved, but was denied her life by a self-serving bunch of fools gulled by the apparent majesty of Roman Catholic ideology, an ideology designed for the purpose of controlling people and preserving papal power, that spreads itself around the world masquerading as the natural law (of a god), but is in truth a terrible miasma that penetrates the most deeply personal and intimate parts of people’s lives. This miasma has its centre in Rome, in a pretended state, founded by Mussolini. And this pretended state will continue to spread its contagion around, whether by challenging governments, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops continues to do, or by subterfuge, as it is doing (according to Cienna Madrid’s article in The Stranger) in Washington state, and probably in many other places as well. It matters not at all to the residents of the Vatican, and many bishop’s palaces, whether people suffer, whether they die, like Savita Halappanavar, for want of appropriate medical care, or whether they die, as so many people are now doing despairingly, in many individual acts of desperation and love, ridding themselves of intolerable lives in secret, ghastly rituals of death, instead of being helped to do so by those who could make their deaths peaceful and dignified. The Roman Catholic Church has much to be ashamed of, but mainly it has to do with medieval torture porn, the victimisation of women, the abuse of children, the sanctification of suffering. Wherever there are vulnerable people, the church is there like a carrion beast, feeding on the carcase.

It is important to recognise that the Vatican and its minions in every diocese throughout the world, have absolutely no respect for the law, if the law does not support its purposes or its mission. They will cover up, and apply church law to crimes that have caused,  and will go on causing, enormous harm. They will maintain a medieval monarchy, when all other monarchs in Europe are either gone altogether, or have become titular sovereigns, like the kings and queens of the United Kingdom, and the press will still go gaga at the sight men in white dresses and red Prada shoes, as though they really were holy men, and really did speak, not only in the name of, but for a god. The world will still wait, as though something of great significance is taking place, waiting for a puff of smoke announcing the election, from amongst a clutch of aging ”virgins,” the one who is to go on marching its people backwards into darkness.

As Stephen Mumford says in his little book The Pope and the New Apocalypse:

• The Roman Catholic Church will stop at nothing within its power, quite literally I’m convinced, to impose its pro-natalist agenda on the American people and their government
• If the destruction of U.S. Constitutional and representative democracy is found by the Vatican to be necessary to achieve its goals, the Church will not hesitate to attempt this.
• Indeed it is not hesitating to venture in this direction, because its hierarchy believes that the imposition of its will on the issue of population and family planning is essential to the survival of the Church in its present, potent form. [4]

They know about the sexual misdoings too, and have known it all along, while they pretend to holiness and celibacy. They know about all the petty intrigues and the jostling for power. Even the so-called ”servant of the servants of god” knows that he is really first in the kingdom, that servanthood is a pose, that he has immense power, and that he can, with a word, despose a bishop, or cover up a sinkhole of abuse in the name of the holiness of his church. And anyone who thinks a new pope is going to change things has forgotten that Ratzi will be living on the grounds, unable to escape, because of impending legal threats should he venture far beyond the walls of his prison house; and that he will undoubtedly keep a watching brief on the church that he has kicked into good medieval shape over the last thirty years.

But for all of its moral and dogmatic certainties, which it delights to impose on the vulnerable, the Vatican has become a refuge for those who are in danger of being indicted for various offences should they leave the precincts of their fascist state, not excluding the just resigned pope, Ratzinger, who, outside the Vatican, might well be arrested and shipped off to The Hague for trial on the charge of crimes against humanity. When we are reflecting on the church’s moral certitude it is well to remember this, that many of its leaders have blundered their way through life, riding along on a sea of strange rituals, supposed mystery and outmoded certainties, that depend, as one prescient observer of the Vatican scene points out, on

knowing and not knowing all at the same time, keeping an illusion separate from the truth. We know that the bread and wine, for example, were literally and actually changed into the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ by the priest at Mass, and, at the same time, we must have known that this was not the case, that, really, they remained just bread and wine. [see Colm Tóibín, "Among the Flutterers"]

Those who can know and not know at the same time will not change, for change would mean seeing what they have avoided seeing for centuries, which they shore up regularly by reasserting them, making false claims about them, filling the heads of their devotees with them, and, like Turkson, creating new ones just to suit the moment. Turkson must both know and not know that homosexuality is part of the African scene, and that suppressing it by draconian laws and cultural intolerances will not make it simply go away. It’s like knowing that your clergy are up to no good, but shifting them around so they can keep doing it without tarnishing the church’s “good” name. Turkson is the victim of this essentially conflicted nature of his faith.

Let us return, then, once again, to the medieval torture porn about which the anonymous physician spoke. Here is directive number 61 from the American ERDs:

Patients should be kept as free of pain as possible so that they may die comfortably and with dignity, and in the place where they wish to die. Since a person has the right to prepare for his or her death while fully conscious, he or she should not be deprived of consciousness without a compelling reason. Medicines capable of alleviating or suppressing pain may be given to a dying person, even if this therapy may indirectly shorten the person’s life so long as the intent is not to hasten death. Patients experiencing suffering that cannot be alleviated should be helped to appreciate the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering. [my emphasis]

Fuck the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering! Only fools who believe that long ago a man in far off Judea died for their sins can believe in redemptive suffering. By what right does anyone say, least of all a physician, to a suffering patient, that that person should learn to appreciate the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering? By what right does anyone force such a person to continue to undergo suffering that is resistant to any method of alleviation except death itself? Governments, so far, under the mystic gaze of the Vatican, continue to argue that this is necessary in order to preserve the sanctity of human life. But there is no evidence that forbidding people to die as they would wish would endanger our respect for life. Indeed, in worlds convulsed by war, when life seems to be worth nothing, even soldiers manage to show respect for life. Why should we think that this ability will simply flee away when the purpose of helping someone to die is, in fact, to respect that person and their desire to die in a way that is consistent with their own understanding of what makes life valuable to them? When it is done out of respect for life, and with compassion for those who suffer, why should we respect life less? There is no reason to think this.

And if it be argued (as it regularly is) that such people may be put under pressure by relatives or hospital administrators or governments, does anyone have a right to deny someone a right just because others may be placed under some pressure? This is what the Archbishop of Canterbury (Rowan Williams) told me about Elizabeth. While expressing his sympathy he thought it much more important that those who are afraid that they will be placed under pressure to die have more right to relief from such pressure, than those who are suffering intolerably have a right to relief from suffering. This is the mindlessness of theology at work. And such is the mind of Christians that they do not see the absurdity of their arguments. They have been told always to have an answer (as the first letter of Peter demands) for the hope that is in them, but forget meanwhile that they have no right to speak for others, and that their answers are only their own. Let them have their answers. Let others have theirs. I am fed up with the pretences of theologians. I have often suggested that theologians have provided a sustained and sometimes useful study of the nature of being human, and I stand by that claim; but theologians have not been able to ground what they have learned about being human in theology, in their belief in a god, or in the stories of that god’s doings with us. Theology is just the paper on which they write; and the belief in transcendent beings is just an ignus fatuis of the mind. It is just a pretence, at once knowing and unknowing, for there is, after all, almost certainly no god. Theologians will only ground their beliefs by returning to humanity, and becoming human again. Some theology does this, but it is almost universally despised by those who are sure.