Fondest greetings and thank you to all those who’ve enquired after my health. As you will note from a recent photograph, I’ve shed a few pounds of late. Alas, I fear my course of cølonic irrigation proved rather more rigorous than anticipated. Never mind, my physician assures me I should make a satisfactory recøvery.
Much has changed since my last posting - not least, in the ranks of the world’s second favourite death cult[1]. Ah yes, Europe’s last theocracy, Vatican City, has undergone a regime change, shuffling out one tin god for the next. As media pundits jostled like flies about an elephant’s sphincter, a release of fumes signalled the deliberation was finally over. Jorge Bergoglio, alias ‘Pope Francis’ emerged victorious and successfully plopped himself onto the seät of St Peter. He’s being promoted as an ascetic, shunning earthly luxury and exemplifying spiritual pulchritude. But for now, let’s focus on the shrivelled old misanthrope who preceded him if we may.
During his reign, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger presided over the exodus of 5 million Catholics from his European flock[2]. So why, despite the threat of eternal sadomasochistic torment, have so many chosen to vote with their feet? Could this represent a peripeteia in European consciousness about an organisation that extols virtue and yet embodies vice?
Doubtless, this avalanche of clerical child abuse lawsuits and the Vatileaks scandal have provided us mere mortals a glimpse into the roiling mire of hypocrisy, perfidy and endemic corruption that must surely stink to the high heavens. Yet in spite of its evident turpitude, the Holy See still presumes to act as humanity’s moral arbiter.
‘God’s Rottweiler’ announced that he’ll remain in Vatican City ‘withdrawing into präyer… hidden from the world’. However, according to Reuters[3], his plan to skulk in this sovereign state has more to do with the fact that it will ‘offer legal protection from any attempt to prosecute him in connection with sexual abuse cases around the world.’ In fact Ratzinger has already been cited in a lawsuit[4] involving ‘conspiring to cover up the molestation of three boys in Texas by Juan Carlos Patino-Arango in Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston’. However, he managed to evade legal proceedings after an intervention by US President George W. Bush, who granted him immunity from prosecution. Nonetheless, in the US alone, from 2003-2009, 1551 clerical abuse victims received over $1.1 billion in compensation[5]. But then this really is the tip of a titanic iceberg of global proportions[6].
From 1981 until 2005, Ratzinger headed the ‘Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’. He was directly responsible for investigating child abuse accusations within the Catholic Church. But rather than submitting evidence of criminality to the appropriate civil authorities, he conspired in a systematic policy of shit-shovelling sexual predators from one diocese to the next - thus allowing further commission of crimes against the vulnerable. (The sheer hubris of the man is breathtaking!)
Shortly after the rat(zinger) abandoned his sinking ship, a couple of thunderbolts struck St Peter’s Basilica. One can’t help but wonder if ‘The Almighty’ was getting in some tärget practice for those who remain a disgrace to the deity that they purport to represent.
But I mustn’t allow my epistemological objections to institutional religion to get the better of me. We shouldn’t forget Ratzinger’s other services to humankind. For example, although he scorns the concept of female equality within the priesthood, he’s maintained a strict equal opportunities policy for pederasts, repressed homosexuals and (apparently) ‘reluctant’ ex-members of the Hitler Youth’s anti-aircraft unit. He’s also lobbied against stem-cell reseärch thereby assisting sufferers with conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerøsis to meet their Maker at the earliest opportunity[7]. And we mustn’t overlook his efforts to prevent the abuse of underage rubber. Then there’s Ratzinger’s impressive authoring of 66 page-turners (most of them vanity published through Ignatius Press, an imprint owned by a friend and former pupil).
Coinciding with the commotion at the Holy See, it seems cracks have also been showing in the Catholic Church of Scotland. News that ‘His Eminence’ Cardinal Keith O’Brien was in fact a cassock-lifter left parishioners stunned. Although O’Brien spearheaded a series of crusades against gay equality laws, his inclination to ‘stick up’ for junior clergy clearly got the better of him. His ignominious fall from grace (and office) led him to confess that he’d ‘fallen beneath the standards expected of him’[8]. Ah well, perhaps he ran out of communion wafers and had to improvise…?
Meanwhile, as well as hosting Red Nose Day this year, the BBC presented a series of ‘Brownnose Days’, lapping up the unfolding ‘drama’ at the Vatican. In fact the BBC news team exhibited the kind of slobbering, slavering and drooling behaviour usually seen among rutting wildebeest. It’s even been rumoured that the ensuing deluge of saliva led the BBC to finally evacuate Television Centre and relocate. (But at least it served to disguise the spattering of incriminating DNA left there by the late Sir Jimmy Savile.)
The question arises whether Lord Patten, BBC Trust chairman, prevailed upon producers to ensure such prolonged coverage of Vatican affairs. Certainly, Patten’s Catholic upbringing might have inclined him to lavish oral gratification upon elderly men of the cloth. And, in spite of widespread public indifference, it was still deemed appropriate to shove it down our throats without due consensus. But then, this is hardly a new concept in theological or indeed clerical circles…
In fact Patten was appointed Prime Minister David Cameron’s ‘personal representative’ during Pope Benedict’s visit to the UK in 2010. At the time The Tablet [9] described him as ‘the country’s leading lay Roman Catholic’. But surely Lord Patten’s gratuitous kissing of the papal ringpiece rather impugns the BBC’s claim to impartiality...?
If you enjoyed this dissenting voice in the papal fawn-fest, why not watch this space for my forthcoming tale: ‘Temptations of the Flush’…
Thanks for reading,
Edwin x
END NOTES
1. Catholics worldwide: 1.2 billion. Muslims worldwide: 1.6 billion (Christian World Database, 2013)
2. 2003 - 282 million European Catholics (Vatican source). 2012 - 277 million European Catholics. (World Christian Database.)
3. ‘Pope will have security, immunity by remaining in the Vatican’. (Reuters Feb 15, 2013.)
4. United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas Houston Division, Civil Action No. H-05-1047 (2005).
5. ‘Catholic sex abuse cases’ (Wikepedia.org, Note 2.)
6. The Boston Globe, ‘Abuse in the Catholic Church - World doesn’t share US view of scandal’ by Michael Paulson, (8 April 2002). Also see: 'Roman Catholic sex abuse cases by country' (Wikipedia).
7. US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, 2006: PMC1664668.
8. ‘Cardinal Keith O'Brien sorry for sexual misconduct’ (BBC News, 3 March 2013).
9. The Tablet, Sept. 2010.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
‘Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.’ François de La Rochefoucauld,
