A member of Britain’s Foreign Office, in response to what to do with the Pope during his September visit, suggested such activities as opening an abortion clinic and blessing a gay marriage. The young employee, only 23, is being allowed to keep his job, but his superior has been “transferred.” One hopes the word transfer is not in any way akin to the Vatican’s quaintly named Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or, in common parlance, Inquisition.
It is, therefore, doubly laughable that a senior Vatican source was quoted in The Daily Mail as saying, “There are clearly dark forces within the British Government. While some are very eager for the visit to go well, there are others who are opposing it. This runs the risk of the trip being remembered for the memo and nothing else.”
I doubt that. The trip might well be remembered as Benny the Rat trying to shift attention from his egregious cover-ups of pedophilia in the church, all over the church, it seems.
It might be Benny the Rat trying to make the world forget that he rejected US President Barack Obama’s first choice for ambassador to the Vatican, Kathleen Kennedy. Why? Because he didn’t like her sexual politics or, in other words, she favors a woman’s choice.
Senior aides to Benny the Rat said the Foreign Office had been too lenient, and they worried about repercussions that might cancel the visit entirely. They pointed out that the Pope had visited Muslim nations without incident. And why not? As I recall, the Muslims WON the Crusades, so Muslim nations had no particular reason to despise a man who has nothing at all to do with the religion practiced by most of the citizens of those nations.
On the other hand, Britain has several reasons to dislike this pope, or any pope, because of various unsavory portions of its national history.
First, of course, Christianity supplanted the perfectly serviceable religion of the British Isles, Druidry. English scholars have even made a good case for Joseph of Arimathea having brought the young Joshua of Nazareth to study at Glastonbury, among accomplished Druids. And indeed, the teachings of the man who became Jesus were a lot more like the gentle ways of Druid life and worship than they are like the militant, rigid, unforgiving pronouncements of the Roman Church as we know it now, and as we have known it for close on to the entire 2000 years of its nominal existence.
Second, Catholicism produced some mighty aberrations in various monarchs of England. Anyone recall Bloody Mary? The half-sister of Queen Elizabeth I, she murdered anyone who wanted to practice the religion of her father Henry VIII, that is, the burgeoning Anglicanism. Speaking of which…the Pope’s intense desire, at the time, to keep all the kingdoms of Europe lined up as he liked them (under his thrall) is the real reason he denied Hank yet another annulment and sent the syphilitic king on a quest to justify his behavior that resulted in a religious schism. That’s a schism, actually, that many Britons quite like, as do some transplanted Yanks. An American Anglican, that is Episcopalian, I always liked the fact that our own Archbishop of Canterbury, and not the Italian-Polish-German pope, decided on matters of doctrine. Within the Anglican Communion, there is wide latitude for each nation’s church to develop its own way of being.
Third, this is a German Pope. One might recall how intensely the British people suffered at the hands of another German who was easily offended and also thought he ought to be revered in all of Europe and the British Isles. It wouldn’t be surprising if, below the surface, there was a stream of anti-German sentiment bound up in both what the Foreign Office employee wrote, and in feelings across the land generally.
It is difficult for those not brainwashed into the faith to pump up much love for a church that has systematically reduced women to the level of chattel, stopping just short of shrouding them live as the Muslims do. Among the followers of Jesus were many women preachers, in fact; the hierarchy and bureaucracy, not to mention militarism, of the Roman Catholic Church disenfranchised them from the major spiritual role.
It is difficult to feel any admiration for a man who embraced Holocaust deniers among his own clergy. It is difficult to desire to cooperate with a man who only belatedly and only after intense international criticism deigned to acknowledge a problem with pedophilia throughout the Roman Catholic Church.
It is difficult even to understand a Church that could produce the Magdalene Sisters, all the while keeping the true believers in Ireland convinced that the slightest nod toward human sexuality was such a heinous sin that one’s life was, in one way or another, immediately forfeit.
It is difficult to respect a Church that, when its leader is subjecting a sovereign nation already in a recession to bearing the immense public cost of his visit, takes umbrage at an attempt at humor about it by a young employee and calls for his head.
One might not expect a Roman patriarch to be able to take a joke, although it seems that Pope John Paul would have been a bit more laid back about it. Even from a rigid and doctrinaire pontiff, though, one might hope for a more balanced response and a modicum of forgiveness.
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