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The Catholic Church should put its own house in order

By BETTY CAPLAN
Posted Thursday, March 26 2009 at 18:46

Pope Benedict XVI has now left the continent having preached to thousands in Angola and Cameroon. But doesn’t the epithet that “those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” apply to him?

Scientists have agreed that it was nothing short of irresponsible for him to claim that condom use actually increases the rate of HIV infection. It encourages promiscuity, the church believes.

This stance is immoral on two levels: first because it is plainly untrue, and goes against the advice of trained personnel. The church must recognise that it has failed in this mission.

SECONDLY, BECAUSE IT contradicts the kind of philosophy that has due regard for the health of our ailing planet. On the day the Pope arrived in Africa, the Nation featured a picture of dozens of beautiful children, all in the care of the police, their parents unwilling or unable to claim them.

The church fathers are stuck in a time warp; living in medieval times; they are totally out of touch, especially with youth.

Not only does the Vatican refuse to admit that its policies have not worked, but it will also not face the immorality which continues to fester in its own ranks.

Cases of sexual abuse of minors have been reported in countries as far apart as Australia and Mexico. The Pope himself suppressed publication of a report which revealed the extent of this exploitation.

In 2007, child sex abuse cases cost the church $615 million (Sh49 billion), an increase of 54 per cent over the previous year, most of which went towards settling in court. Therapy for the victims and the accused took care of $23 million.

New allegations of abuse in 2007 totalled 689, most of the sufferers being young males between the ages of 10 and 14 when the abuse began.

A Charter for the Protection of Children has done better at protecting clergy from exposure.

In 2007, on his first visit to the USA, the Pope avoided Boston for fear of the protests about sex abuse scandals there.

The numbers of men in the West willing to repress their sexual needs and become priests has been decreasing rapidly; calls for the obligation to remain celibate have gone unheard.

But Africa, as in colonial times, is unfortunately ripe for conversion: only here is the church growing — an “opiate” as Marx called of desperately poor “masses” whose lives are made bearable by the unprovable belief that the next world is better than this one.

One cannot avoid the suspicion that underneath this pattern of behaviour is a fear and dislike of women who are particularly disadvantaged in the Catholic Church and prevented from holding high office.

Compare to the Anglican Church, which has tried hard to move with the times and accept homosexuals as being as worthy of love and respect as all men and women.

OR WITH HINDUS OR BUDDHISTS. The Catholic ideal is a Virgin, painted in centuries of European art as a (lily-white) maiden flying high in the clouds, well away from the grasp of men whereas she would have looked much more like an Arab or a Swahili.

Is a female to be nothing but a vessel for a man’s sperm?

Witness the shocking case of the nine-year-old girl in Brazil whose family and doctors were ex-communicated because the foetus was aborted.

No compassion was shown for the girl, traumatised and subjected to incest, yet meant to bring up another child though not past childhood herself.

“Abortion is a greater crime than rape,” declared the church, defying years of worldwide struggle for equal rights, and minimising the effect of sexual violence on young people who have placed all their trust in adults who are in loco parentis.

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Copyright 2009 Nation Media Group (NMG) Limited

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A consistent but harsh Catholic Church

A Brazilian excommunication case stirs worldwide indignation.

Editorial
March 25, 2009

When a 9-year-old girl in Brazil was recently found to be pregnant with twins, doctors performed an abortion. In Brazil, the procedure is legal only in cases of rape or to save the mother's life, and doctors determined that both applied to the girl -- her stepfather was jailed on rape charges, and the 80-pound child was too physically immature to carry twins to term.

In response to this tragedy, a Brazilian archbishop pronounced the doctors and the girl's mother excommunicated from the Catholic Church, a decree met with incredulity around the world. Further fueling the outrage, the head of the Vatican's Congregation for Bishops added that the "real problem" was abortion, not the endangered life of the girl. Just days later, en route to AIDS-ravaged Africa, Pope Benedict XVI openly doubted the efficacy of condoms in halting HIV transmission. In both cases, it seemed that church policy trumped not only effective public health measures but compassion.

In Brazil, the church's actions suggested that the suffering of a young girl was of little concern compared with consistency on abortion. And ultimately, Rome acknowledged that the episode was badly handled. Writing in L'Osservatore Romano, Archbishop Rino Fisichella said the excommunications, which by church law are incurred automatically when abortion is procured or performed by adults, did not have to be blared to the world. Instead, the child "should have been defended, hugged and held tenderly to help her feel that we were all on her side."

And there are "sides." Brazil is in a tussle with Rome over abortion, contraception and HIV/AIDS prevention, and sympathy for the girl's plight threatened to shift public sentiment away from church decree. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva favors loosening restrictions on abortion and promotes sex education, deploring that 30% of girls ages 15 to 17 drop out of school pregnant. The government gives away billions of condoms yearly, and Lula once called for a "national day against hypocrisy" regarding HIV/AIDS. The truth is, Brazilian women have abortions; they simply risk their lives to do so. Health officials say that each year about 200,000 women are hospitalized after botched procedures, and about 1 million terminate pregnancies.

Fisichella's point, however, was one of emphasis, not policy; the church, he lamented, seemed heartless. The haste and subsequent hue and cry, Fisichella wrote, "impacted the credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of many as insensitive, incomprehensible and devoid of mercy." Well said. After all, the one person whose behavior did not expel him from the Catholic community was the girl's alleged rapist.

Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-brazil25-2009mar25,0,6397374.story