I have unpopular positions

I first ran into this while defending the late Pope John Paul II. The person with whom I was having the dialogue clearly felt, as does Christopher Hitchens, that the legacy of the late pontiff was less positive than the glowing eulogies in the various dailies would have us believe.

True, the Pope opposed birth control in Africa at a time when a few words on the topic might have saved lives that are now forfeit due to AIDS. He refused to back down on the teachings of the Church on various sundry other sexual matters—masturbation, fornication, homosexuality, the list goes on. He received in audience some people who were to say the least morally touchy, and canonized fascists.

To which it is necessary to say “Yeah, so?”

Since I left the church when I discovered sex (and the fact that the cool people weren’t as devout as I was, let’s be honest, but mostly sex) and have since had a lot of time to reflect on the choices I made and my reasons for making them, I feel I’m qualified to comment.

The Pope is not the Supreme Commander in the Catholic Church. This may surprise people. But not only is he technically not in charge, he is the heir to the pronouncements of a hundred popes before him. And most of those guys were positively medieval in their thinking (even when it was avant-garde to be medieval).

At the heart of this is the fundamental flaw, as some see it, in Church thinking, subscribed to in greater or lesser degree by all religions: The Holy Mother Church is infallible. Not only can God never make a mistake, but since His chosen servant on Earth, the Pope, is directed by Him, neither can he. If you follow.

Don’t make that noise. If theological contortion disgusts you I invite you to consider the way Muslims and Jews deal with the financial charges that are a necessary part of borrowing and lending in the modern business world, all without quite calling it “interest”, and without violating the strictures of their several faiths on usury.

Anyway, back to our muttons : This doctrine of infallibility means that Church reform is a slow process, occasionally requiring some serious parsing and theological wrangling in order to drag the thinking forward. During Vatican II there were enormous fights about whether, for example, priests should be allowed to marry (some already were and are—such as in the Greek Orthodox tradition). Marrying on the part of priests had first been banned around AD 900, and such is the weight of theological argument, tradition, and precedent that here we are 1100 years later and nothing has changed.

And the Second Vatican Council, including the most modern-minded Catholic prelates of 1962-65, didn’t change it. They managed to get masses said in the vernacular, instead of Latin. But even that was regarded as heresy by some.

So the Pope, whoever he may be (and one thing I know of popes is that the next one is unlikely to be a woman, see the paragraphs above for why) inherits the burden of two thousand years of history which has undergone formatting and formalisation at a glacial rate, hardening the doctrine into something like granite and backed by a dogma that says that even popes who sat by as the Holocaust raged didn’t make any mistakes ‘cos it was really God doing it.

I came the long way around to show that all JPII did was back up his beliefs. Yeah, condoms would have saved lives in the AIDS epidemic. So would strict obedience to chastity outside marriage.

“Oh come on,” quoth my reader “that’s just unreasonable—it’s too much to expect from people”. This is a very North American illusion. Many mystics of Eastern traditions are held celibate, and the scandals that plagued the Catholic Church in the US and Canada don’t seem to have erupted in say, the Philippines—possibly the largest Catholic country on Earth. How many Buddhist monks have been indicted?

Once again, to my point: The Pope was backing up what he believed, and what the Church required of believers. Non-believers were free to use as many condoms as they liked. I’d bet that there aren’t many cases of AIDS among virgins.

Consider homosexuality, another topic of contention. The Church’s position is a thorny one: Essentially the dogma on this says that God creates gay men and women, but that they aren’t allowed to have sex with one another (you know what I mean). The Pope spoke on a number of occasions on homosexuality, and roundly condemned changing civil law to keep up with modern thought on the subject.

Well, duh. But a number of countries, especially “modern” and civilised ones, brought forward legal reforms anyway. And hopefully ours will shortly be giving gays the same freedom to marry enjoyed by, for example, all races, creeds, and colours except gay people.

So yeah, the Pope, out of personal persuasion and organizational fossilization, supported positions that many modern, hip young thinkers, including me, thought were out-of-date.

Dammit, that was his job.

He also supported heroism, constancy, justice (as he understood it), faithfulness and peace.

Outmoded concepts, all.



 In related research: You have to love and respect a journal where the advertisement at the top reads “Imagine: No more heartbreak with women, ever . . .” and “Men: Don’t chase women, attract them”. There’s more funny adverts on the left and right. But especially on the Right, it appears. Note: the ads vary, and if you're really eager to see it you might have to refresh the page a time or a dozen.

 Another late-breaking sport of the willful ignorant.

 Hmm. Did you know that MS-Word’s spell-check dislikes the word “quoth”?

 The Hebrew word for usury is “neshek”—“a bite”. The Spanish word used in Mexico and other countries to describe bribes paid to officials is “la mordita”—“the bite”. Just an observation that themes abound in human thinking.

 Gotta love this.