A "radical humanist" and atheist defends the Pope and the Church against...

... what he calls "deeply problematic" reactions to the scandals—reactions that are, he says, "informed more by prejudice and illiberalism than by anything resembling a principled secularism, and one which also threatens to harm individuals, families, society and liberty."

He is Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked! Online, which is based in Britain and identifies itself as "an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms." O'Neill, who has been described as "libertarian" and "Marxist," was raised Catholic but left the Church at age seventeen to become atheist, is not a fan of Catholic doctrine or practice (as you'll see below). But he also not a fan of witch hunts or sensationalism or media manipulation. Because of that, his perspective is very much worth mulling over. He writes:

When considering the problem of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, it is important to distinguish between the incidents themselves, some of which were of course horrific, and the way in which those incidents are understood in today’s political and cultural climate. The acts of sexual abuse themselves were no doubt a product of various problematic factors: the Catholic Church’s culture of celibacy, its strange views on sex, the fact that in some institutions priests were given ultimate authority over young boys and girls. But the way in which those acts are understood today – as supremely damaging to individuals and the inevitable consequence of people ‘deciding it is a good thing to abandon any commitment to fact and instead act on faith’ – is powerfully informed by two problematic contemporary trends: the backward cult of victimhood and the dominant ‘new atheist’ prejudice against any institution with strong beliefs.

With all the current claims about Pope Benedict XVI himself being involved in a cover-up of child abuse by an American priest and a German priest, and newspaper reports using terms like ‘stuff of nightmares’, the ‘stench of evil’, and ‘systematic rape and torture’, anyone who tries to inject a bit of perspective into this debate is unlikely to be thanked. But perspective is what we need. Someone has to point out that for all the problems with the Catholic Church’s doctrines and style of organisation – and I experienced some of those problems, having been raised a Catholic before becoming an atheist at 17 – the fact is that sexual abuse by priests is a relatively rare phenomenon.

He analyzes some of the data and then makes some provocative arguments and observations, of which I'll excerpt a couple of sections:

The discussion of a relatively rare phenomenon as a ‘great evil’ of our age shows that child abuse in Catholic churches has been turned into a morality tale – about the dangers of belief and of hierarchical institutions and the need for more state and other forms of intervention into religious institutions and even religious families. The first contemporary trend that has turned incidences of sexual abuse into a powerful symbol of evil is the cult of the victim, where today individuals are invited not only to reveal every misfortune that has befallen them – which of course is a sensible thing to do if you have been raped – but also to define themselves by those misfortunes, to look upon themselves as the end-products of having being emotionally, physically or sexually abused. This is why very public revelations of Catholic abuse started in America and Ireland before more recently spreading to other parts of Western Europe: because the politics of victimhood, the cult of revelation and redefinition of the self as survivor, is more pronounced and developed in America and Ireland than it is in continental Europe.

And:

The second contemporary trend that has elevated something quite rare into a social disaster is the rise of the ‘new atheism’. Now the dominant liberal outlook of our age – in particular in the media outlets that have most keenly focused on the Catholic abuse scandals: the New York Times, the Irish Times, and the UK Guardian – the new atheism differs from the atheism of earlier free-thinking humanists in that its main aim is not to enlighten, but to scaremonger about the impact of religion on society. For these thinkers and opinion-formers, the drip-drip of revelations of abuse in Catholic institutions offers an opportunity to demonise the religious as backward and people who possess strong beliefs as suspect.

Many contemporary opinion-formers are not concerned with getting to the truth of how widespread Catholic sexual abuse was, or what were the specific circumstances in which it occurred; rather they want to milk incidents of abuse and make them into an indictment of religion itself. They frequently flit between discussing priests who abuse children and the profound stupidity of people who believe in God. One commentator wildly refers to the Vatican’s ‘international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists’ and says most ordinary Catholics turn a blind eye to this because ‘people behave in bizarre ways when they decide it is a good thing to abandon any commitment to fact and instead act on faith’.

His conclusion is, I think, quite excellent:

Whatever you think of the Catholic Church, you should be concerned about today’s abuse-obsession. Events of the (sometimes distant) past which nobody can change are being used to justify dangerous trends in the present. A new kind of society is being solidified on the back of exposing abusive priests, one in which scaremongering supersedes facts, where people redefine themselves as permanently damaged victims, where freedom of thought is problematised, and where parents are considered suspect for not adhering to the superior values of the atheistic elite. Seriously, radical humanists should fight back against this.

Read the entire piece.

Comments

[Brian J. Schuettler]

I thought of that great champion of the Church, as he is persecuted by cowards and traitors, His Holiness Benedict XVI:

As fire when thrown into water is cooled down and put out, so also a false accusation when brought against a man of the purest and holiest character, boils over and is at once dissipated, and vanishes and threats of heaven and sea, himself standing unmoved.

M.T. Cicero

[Gail F]

Another scary thing he doesn't mentioned is the eagerness to abandon statutes of limitation. It is the most egregious example, but there are others. These statutes exist for a reason, and if they start to go for Church cases (as they have) they will go for others, too. I find this an extremely worrisome trend.

[Telemachus]

A great article, except for where O'Neill blithely assumes that the Church's "strange views on sex" and her "culture of celibacy" are causes of sexual abuse. Erm... evidence?

Also, if all O'Neill knows about the Church is from when he was a teenager in England, well... I think he's got some studying to do.

He's also a global-warming doubter, so he's obviously insane. :-D

[LJ]

The news outlets are all a-flutter over the little grenade that Fr. Cantalamessa tossed into the works in his homily today. The knee-jerk reactions from various Jewish organizations caused some back-tracking;

"The Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, later contacted The Associated Press and said Cantalamessa wasn't speaking as a Vatican official when he compared "attacks'" on the pope to "collective" violence against Jews." Foxnews

To O'Neill's point, Fr. Canatalamessa's Jewish friend was right that the precursor to such crimes as the Holocaust was a collective demonization of an identifiable group, in that case the Jews of Europe, in particular Germany. That is how it begins, and the demonization of the Catholic Church is what is happening in full force right now, the principle and obvious target being Pope Benedict XVI. Oh, how they wish they could hang him for some of this. What a coup that would be. Reading some of the articles and commentary to which O'Neill refers, it would seem some of the wolves are positively salivating at the prospect.