Do you remember them? I dredged it up from my rather worryingly selective memory – a soap in the shape of a pope on a rope so you could hang it conveniently in the shower.
Reading some of the stuff about the imminent visit by Pope Benedict XVI to the UK later this week, you could be forgiven for thinking that lots of otherwise reasonable people would be quite happy to see the Pontiff suspended from a rope. The nature and degree of the personal venom directed against him raises other questions about what it is that fires such vindictiveness.
Cards on the table: this Pope is a PR disaster and, while being as brainy as one could hope for in a spiritual leader, seems to have little or no grasp of symbols or gestures or how these work in relationships or communications at any level. I disagree with some elements of his social ethics (contraception and condoms being the obvious target), but I do know how he gets there. I don’t like the way he has taken the Roman Catholic Church back towards a pre-Vatican II map in which Rome sits bang at the centre and everything else revolves around it.
But, on the other hand, I respect a man who refuses to go along with ‘contemporary’ cultural and ethical mores simply because he is expected to. Benedict has a brain. His arguments need to be heard and understood before a response is offered. What we are reading this week doesn’t show much of a rational grasp of what all this is about.
Sorry to pick an easy target, but the sheer sloppiness of Polly Toynbee‘s tirade (yes, another one) in today’s Guardian is breathtaking. Let’s be clear: a rational, reasonable, informed, credible critique of the Pope and his assumptions should be achievable and might even be welcomed by Christians (among others). Get the argument going. Tackle the philosophical and theological assumptions which then shape the Pope’s doctrine and ethics. Prove him to be flawed, stupid, wrong, misguided or dangerous – if that’s appropriate – but just to throw things at him from your pram is both inadequate and sad.
Here are some examples from Polly Toynbee’s piece (which seems to have been rather uncritically welcomed by many readers whose sentiments she articulates):
…sex lies at the poisoned heart of all that is wrong with just about every major faith.
Er… and at the heart of nothing else? Sex and how we handle it (so to speak) is a human issue, not just a religious issue. It is not self-evidently true that ‘sexual freedom’ sets us free and improves human relationships or well-being. Everyone wrestles with sex (if you see what I mean…).
Women’s bodies are the common battleground, symbols of all religions’ authority and identity. Cover them up with veil or burka, keep them from the altar, shave their heads, give them ritual baths, church them, make them walk a step behind, subject them to men’s authority, keep priests celibately free of women, unclean and unworthy. Eve is the cause of all temptation in Abrahamic faiths. Only by suppressing women can priests and imams hold down the power of sex, the flesh and the devil. The Church of England is on the point of schism over gay priests, women bishops and African homophobia. The secular world looks on in utter perplexity.
So, let’s pick on the worst elements of religious expression (which millions of religious people also find weird and/or dodgy), shall we, and ignore the rest? What response would I get if I used Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and the other usual suspects as the epitome of secular atheism? Like everything else in this world – the real one in which most of us live – religious institutions or movements comprise huge ranges of agreement and dispute with just about everything the institution or movement lays claim to. There is no objective monolith – not even when leaders pretend there is.
And, just to be really clear, (elements of) the secular world looks on with utter perplexity at all sorts of religious motivation, belief and behaviour: self-sacrifice, humility, generosity, etc. (There I go again – generalising…) The mere fact that ‘the secular world looks on with utter peplexity’ tells us nothing other than that some people are perplexed by other people – it says nothing about the subject of the perplexity itself.
But the Vatican still talks of a few bad apples requiring internal discipline, the pope refusing to hand rapists over to secular law.
The Vatican might not want me as its defender, but that is simply nonsense. But why let reality intrude into a good rant?
The other dominion the religions control is death. Were it not for the faiths with their grip on hospices and palliative care, the law on assisted dying would be reformed.
Good grief! Clearly the assumptions behind Polly Toynbee’s view on the ethics of assisted dying are self-evidently true and the development of palliative care through the hospice movement (which is also concerned with the whole person in the context of the whole family, etc) is clearly a destructive fraud on dying people. Oh, right. No need to argue that point, then.
Where once secularism and humanism were relics of a bygone religious age, its voice is important again. But pointing out the blindingly obvious need to keep faiths in their private sphere has united religious gunfire against secularists.
Now, that really is breathtaking. It seems ‘blindingly obvious’ to some of us that Polly Toynbee has not bothered to listen to any challenge to her root assumption that her world view is self-evidently true – and therefore needs to have privileged place in the public square – while that of religious people is self-evidently stupid and dangerous and needs to be confined to the private sphere where it can’t do any harm. This nonsense has been knocked on the head in the last twenty years even by atheists.
All atheists now tend to be called “militant”, yet we seek to silence none, to burn no books, to stop no masses or Friday prayers, impose no laws, asking only free choice over sex and death.
No, not all atheists are being called ‘militant’. That’s ridiculous. That’s like bleating that all religious people are being labelled ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘brain-dead’. It might apply to some, but not to all. Please give us the rational atheists (of which there are plenty) instead of this sort of unthinking tirade.
And, actually, you are ‘wanting to silence’… by insisting on religion being confined to the private sphere (like an unmentionable hobby or embarrassing habit). You can’t have it both ways.
Religion deserves its say, but only proportional to its numbers.
Really? We all know how to play with numbers and proportions. Add the membership of the National Secular Society and the British Humanist Society together and ask if they would have any voice anywhere in proportion to their ‘numbers’. And, if the argument is that many more people are secularists than belong to the formal societies, then the self-same argument can be made for religion. Which gets us nowhere.
No privileges, no special protection against feeling offended.
At last, I agree. But it is amazingly easy to offend those who object to the ease with which religious people are offended. Watch this space…
Anyway, there are reasons for objecting to the Pope’s visit and the basis on which it has been set up. But, Polly Toynbee’s argument isn’t one of them.
September 14, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Excellent and clinical dissection of Polly Toynbee’s article. Thankyou.
September 14, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Polly Toynbee says that sexual repression by religions has been responsible for “centuries of persecution, suffering, secrecy and breathtaking hypocrisy.” What a good thing that the 88% of the population she claims are “secular” have produced a society that is so at ease with its own physicality, sexually responsible and free from the exploitation of women.
September 14, 2010 at 12:54 pm
I think that at root the difficulty is that passionately held beliefs rarely give rise to dispassionate argument. Which is perhaps not surprising, as one is etymologically the inverse of the other. So with a pope and a papal visit that divides even Christians it’s yet even less likely that Christians and atheists, militant or otherwise, are going to find much common ground.
The real stumbling block for Christians and those of other faiths, the Abrahamic ones anyway, is that the accounts for the good they’ve done (generosity, self-sacrifice and the rest) seem so finely balanced with the palpable harm they’ve done (of which priestly paedophilia is merely the most topical). We have a real difficulty in arguing that Christianity’s net contribution is as clearly beneficial as we’d all wish it were.
September 14, 2010 at 12:55 pm
I have been reading some remarks by the American Educationalist Thomas Sowell, and one of his observations came to mind as you wrote about Polly Toynbee and her castigations of religious “intolerance”
“Some people seem to think that we live in more ‘liberated” times when all that has happened is that one set of taboos has been replaced by another and more intolerantly enforced set of taboos”.
He may be as old as the Pope but Thomas Sowell has a lot to teach contemporary Society.
September 14, 2010 at 12:57 pm
[...] Bishop Nick Baines takes Polly Toynbee’s Guardian anti-pope diatribe apart: Do you remember them? I dredged it [...]
September 14, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Nick,
You start by introducing the controversy over the pope’s visit to the UK, though without mentioning the child abusers he allegedly tried to protect whilst he was a Cardinal.
You regard his alleged crimes as a PR disaster.
Then you deflect our attention by attacking Polly Toynbee.
If you were not a Bishop, I would have to suspect you were a politician.
Personally, I do not want to see the pope suspended on a rope, nor burned at the stake (I do not believe in the death penalty).
I would like to see some of those child abusers in court though.
KK
September 14, 2010 at 3:02 pm
Kevin, I do not protect the Pope and I certianly do not ‘regard his alleged crimes as a PR disaster’. That is oyu making a link that is not there. Read it again.
September 14, 2010 at 4:32 pm
Thank you. I am no big fan of Benedict, for many of the reasons you give, but the sheer vituperation of Toynbee et al. not only towards him and this visit, but towards all religion everywhere almost beggars belief. You have done an excellent job of pulling apart what is becoming a rather cliched set of anti-religious arguments.
September 14, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Fundamentalists are the same everywhere, whether they’re Christian (from all traditions), Muslim or Atheist. This desperate need to be absolutely right and this strange inability to appreciate other people’s views without distorting them and then ridiculing the distortion.
The mystics of all faith and those you call measured atheists have much more in common with each other than with the fundamentalists of their own creed.
September 15, 2010 at 11:09 am
I’ve been a Guardian reader all my life. But it’s this sort of writing that makes me fling it across the room and buy the Telegraph.
September 15, 2010 at 2:26 pm
I think Polly needs to spend more down time in her Tuscan villa while the Pope’s in England. While she’s over there, she can write another righteous piece about the need to keep hoi polloi from spoiling the climate through unnecessary air travel. Maybe she can put the kettle on and invite Tony Blair over for a chinwag, since he likes free holidays in Tuscany and seems to know more about Catholicism than his Holy Father.
With Marin Sewell, I agree that Thomas Sowell is a great scholar and a very perceptive critic of socialism (in all its dimensions), one of the sacred cows of post-war Europe that is looking increasingly unwell in an aging continent. His book ‘A Conflict of Visions’ is a clear exposition of the roots of ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ thought. But I don’t think a conservative philosopher such as Sowell would support homosexual relationships, because he knows that ideas have consequences – and homsexual relations mean revisioning the family, gender and marriage – a conflict of visions indeed.
September 15, 2010 at 4:51 pm
I would like us to be careful as to how we ascribe blame/responsibility about historic responses to child abuse.
I have practiced as a Child Protection Lawyer since the 1970′s and have not only watched, but been part of, the evolving understanding. I recall the earlier assumptions across Society that “children make things up”, I recall the excuses of a “momentary lapse when under pressure”, and even that “she acted provocatively”. We have had to work through all these to reach our current understanding which even now are imperfect.
I would not wish the actions of a cleric, some distance from the cutting edge of these problems, to be judged by modern standards/ understandings about his actions in those days when I
know that senior advocates, Judges and even experts were nowhere near as alert to the issues that most of us are today.
It is fair to criticise him for any actions which post date our current understandings, but the past was a very different world. Not only the church failed to pick up the signs, or act with vigour, so did families, schools, police, and politicians, social services and Courts. We all headed towards a steep learning curve. Along the way we made some appalling errors the other way, such as the Cleveland debacle when one “expert” used an unsafe diagnostic technique that resulted in over 160 children being removed from their families overnight – only to be returned in later weeks and months.
Do people also remember the Shetland “Satanic Abuse” scandal when Social Workers acted in a fashion scarcely different from the Salem Witch trials?
Once we were very lax about shaken babies, and did not understand that some children have genetic reasons for broken bones- though now not as many as are claimed.
We have not finished yet. We had a fashion for “Munchausen By Proxy Syndrome” not that many years ago where junior Social Workers returned from courses and saw it everywhere. Eventually, we came to a a consensus that nobody could agree the features of the supposed “Syndrome” and the Courts now disallow the term entirely.
It sounds grim to say it, but there are fashions in Child Protection as there are in skirt lengths or theology, as last years radicalism becomes this years orthodoxy.
Sir Roy Miller went from leading expert to villain and back again for doing nothing more than answering a direct question about whether there was a contrary view to his own and when he quoted the orthodoxy of the American Paediatric Association this was what caught the headline and he was struck off for advancing a statistically faulty proposition.
I raise the points to illustrate that anyone who thinks that there has ever been a clear and easy way to deal with these cases does not understand the problems. Benedict was not a full time child protection lawyer – but he would hardly have been infallible had he been so.
September 15, 2010 at 8:55 pm
What does it matter if one columnist attacks the Pope or religion in general? The media have been taking pot shots at the Church for years. God promised that he would build His church and the gates of Hell would not prevail against it. So this Pope comes in for castigation as did John Paul and no doubt the next one will as well, the Church is bigger than a few critics. There are millions of faithful Catholics for whom the Pope is an important figure, how about asking some of them what they think instead of all the negative vibes from the media, of course that is not ‘news’ slanderous or critical, silly me!
September 16, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Nick you may not compare atheists to Hitler etc. But I know a man who does here’s what he said today in Scotland.
Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny” (Caritas in Veritate, 29).
September 16, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Nick thanks for the reply.
I did not intend to accuse you of protecting the pope, I apologise if my comments were misinterpreted. I try to keep my inputs to your blog succinct.
In the words of Bennie Benjamin et. al. , originally sung by Nina Simone and later by Eric Burden (The Animals) …. “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good; Oh Lord; please do not let me be misunderstood”.
I have re-read your article, particularly the first 4 paragraphs, i.e. those that deal with the pope, before your attack on Polly Toynbee. (I am not here to defend PT, she can defend herself.)
We can ignore paragraph 1 (pope, rope, soap)
Paragraph 2 states the problem, i.e. Why is this pope under attack from so many people?
Paragraph 4 I have no problem with. I too am a rebel. I do not unthinkingly accept authority, revelation, tradition.
In paragraph 3, you accuse the pope of being a PR disaster. You say he has no grasp of “symbols or gestures or how these work in relationships or communications at any level”.
(I have to admit, I do not understand what this latter sentence means, but I will assume it is just another way of saying that the pope is not good at PR)
You disagree with his policy on condoms, yet this is surely the policy of his predecessors?
My concern is that paragraph 4 does not answer the question posed in paragraph 2. Surely, the major criticism of this particular pope is his alleged role in protecting child abusers whilst he was a cardinal. Why did you not refer to this?
Other issues, condoms, homosexuality, etc. etc. ad infinitum are valid criticisms of the catholic church in general, not of this pope in particular.
KK
September 16, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Can anyone tell me who, or what institution, pens the eChurch Christian Blog? Because I followed the link no.5 [above]which pointed me to a beautifully written piece called “Echoes of God”. Just curious.
October 1, 2010 at 2:15 pm
“All atheists now tend to be called “militant”, yet we seek to silence none, to burn no books, to stop no masses or Friday prayers, impose no laws, asking only free choice over sex and death.”
But clearly they do seek to silence people – they think all Church Schools are the dangerous indoctrination of Children.
Basically, the position of the British Humanist Association is that the “indoctrination of Children” should be removed from State Education. However, while many people send their children to Faith schools for cynical reasons it does not follow that parents who have to send their kids to school by law should be denied the right to send those children to a school where education in a particular faith is part of the curriculum. Actually religion should be removed from state Education as its only function is to save the taxpayer money – but that is another arguement. You can argue that religion preys on the stupid but then so does the National Lottery. It still provides much needed government funding. It’s a remarkable lack of faith in the human individual to believe that everyone who’s taught nonsense as a child is “brianwashed”.
“At most 12% of the population regularly practises any faith in the secular UK” – that’s at least 7 and a half million people.
Also they did seem to wish to silence (rather than question or even just mock) the Pope who they object to visiting the UK on spurious public spending grounds because if the owned the truth – they dont like what he says – it would undermine their claim to be “liberal”. Clearly they do object to him. This is not wrong – many Catholics object to BenedictXVI – so why cloak it in so much sophistry?
As a scientist I am sick to death with the Humanists claims that all belief in the supernatural can be explained away by science. No one can test the existence of a being that is infinate and exists outside of time and space. He probably doesn’t exist but fallacy at the heart of all Dawkins literature that it is simply beacuse people dont understand science that they can think this is a fallacy. Science cannot prove or disprove the unobservable. Yet they carry on hectoring us as though if only we could understand that God didn’t exist (even though they cant by any of the logic of physics either prove or disprove this) everyone would stop being so gullible. I feel like someone is taking my trade and misrepresenting it for their own poisonous political agenda.
Condoms. Condoms. Condoms. The Pope’s position on Condoms is down to the conept of Natural Law.
The doctrine of Natual Law comes from Thomas Aquinas … pick holes in that. There are plenty but Tonybee and Co are too dumb to do even the most basic theological research.
PR. One of the political problems with the Catholic Church is how the pronouncements of Rome are driven mostly by political events in Italy and so are constantly out of step with the English Catholic Church. For example there is a big scandal in Italy about practicing gay priests … so the Pope puts out literature suggesting that there should be gayness tests and confusing gayness with peadoness and PR wise the roof falls in! Probably the most amusing (from a comedy point of view) is the battle between Quest (the Catholic Gay society – I always thought that was called the Priesthood) and Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice (the “orthodox” wing of the Catholic church) over the Soho Masses for Gay people. This has been going on quietly for years. Eventually a “compromise” was reached that masses specifically for gay people should be allowed so long as they collectively agreed not to question official doctrine. But it goes to show how even Catholicsm has to adapt because it is a business.
It is true the Papacy has been very loud in recent years – but then whatever it says is moved as far to the left as possible so maybe that’s the reason for all the hard right posturing. That said I think it is more a reflection of the Pope’s loss of direct political power. For example the doctrine of papal infalibility being declared almost exactly with the shrinking of the Papal States. The church already had the infalibility of the magisterium – so why did it need to be infalibile twice over…? Particularly given the Pope has only ever used this power once. As it’s political power and geopolitical influence wanes its literature becomes more and more hectoring and it becomes more and more obsessed with its own authority for a reason – it is because it lacks real politcal authority any more.
Still there have been worse PR disasters for Catholicism.
Pope Stephen VI for example.
You have to take it all with a healthy pinch of salt…
Although the Pope claims to be the direct successor of St Peter that’s a bit like the Queen saying that she’s the direct successor to William the Conqueror. On one level it’s true but if you look at it with more of an open mind you realise that this involves drawing a veil over several deposed monarchs, the Wars of the Roses, the Civil War, William of Orange and the Abdication Crisis.
In the years surrounding the Cadaver Synod (872–965) for example there were 24 popes.
Who knows if Benedict really is the “right one”…?
But he probably isn’t any worse than the Antipopes that died out in the Reformation.
Most Catholics just want to go to mass and recieve the sacraments – it’s only when the Pope does come to visit that they get any idea of what they’re actually supposed to believe in.
Of course the real irony of people like Ms Toynbee is that by constantly knocking religion they’re actually promoting it. If they left it alone it might well die out.
But then they wouldn’t have a job.
Funny though how Catholicism really hilarious episodes like Quest (the Catholic Gay society – I always thought that was called the Priesthood but there you go) and Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice (the “orthodox” wing of the Catholic church) over the Soho Masses for Gay people seem to pass by their radar.