Pope stuff

This is story from a couple of days about a 'media attack' on The Pope ago caught my eye:

"The treatment of the Pope over the child sex-scandal bedevilling the Catholic Church was compared last night to the Holocaust.

Father Raniero Cantalamessa, Pope Benedict's personal preacher, made the claim during a Good Friday address at St Peter's Basilica, in the Vatican. He said, as the Pope sat listening, that the attacks on the Pope and the Church were comparable to the persecution suffered by the Jews who "know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence" and are thus "quick to recognise the recurring symptoms"

Apparently the figure concerned has now had to apologize, unsurprisingly, but I think he expected that.

I think what's actually going here is that Father Raniero Cantalamessa was pointing a clear finger at where he sees the problem coming from.

Bishop Williamson returns to UK

Isn't it amazing ? I didn't follow up on this at the time and perhaps I should have, breathtaking really.

You can get someone kicked out of a country because they don't believe in the Holocaust.

Guardian: "A Roman Catholic bishop who questioned the truth of the Holocaust arrived in Britain today after being asked to leave Argentina.

Richard Williamson, who left Buenos Aires wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses yesterday, arrived at Heathrow airport dressed all in black and wearing a dog collar. Several police officers escorted him through a media scrum, and a photographer was manhandled by police during the jostling. The British-born bishop did not comment and was whisked away in a silver Land Rover.

Williamson had been at the St Pius X seminary in Buenos Aires for five years, but last week the Argentinian government gave him 10 days to leave the country."

"Argentinian government gave him 10 days to leave the country".

Whatever next.

The recent attack on the Catholic Church

I meant to get this done last night. I wanted to comment a little on this recent thing with the Bishop and the Pope and the Vatican , which I think has been conspicuous as perhaps of one of the more wanton attempts to attack the Catholic Church I've seen the media come up with.

There are sensitive topics buried in this for sure, but frankly it's also the height of vulgarity for the media as a whole, for Jewish groups, commentators and non-Jewish sympathisers, along with the likes of Angela Merkel to try to grandstand by creating a campaign out of the views of one man, against the recent backdrop of the horrors in Gaza at the hands of Israel, and the overall situation there for some time.

I think it's very conspicuous.

From the BBC, to the New York Times to the Times of London, what we have witnessed is nothing short of just another concerted vicious campaign of egregious drivel dressed up in the usual secular probity to needlessly whip up controversy using some guy nobody had even heard of, almost certainly set up to have exactly this effect, to preemptively attack the Church to make sure it doesn't step too out of line, and in particular to provide another wonderful distraction to the recent gutting of Gaza.

Of course this is all the while propagandizing the usual message to the hapless proles that the Church is secretly wicked, backward, and so on, and must demonstrate its commitment to all things we the media tell it are 'worthy' including its own castration.

Well that's what psychotic drivel is. While we understand people wanting to do what may seem like the right thing, I think it's incorrect to frame these issues around some bottomless pit of endless interfaith 'placation', and I'm kind of lost as to how the role of the Church is supposed to be demonstrated first and foremost as whatever the media tells it it should be.

It should just be itself.

And this all too familiar picture of having to pay sufficient reverence to the crimes of the Holocaust, is one that's become way outside of just basic decency, sympathy, understanding and good will. And it's not just the Holocaust, the structure of this is used over and over again.

I'm sorry to say, at least in what I've seen plucked out and presented by the media which I have no doubt could well be flawed, I can't help but be somewhat inquisitive with some of the things said or at least how their are framed, such as the Pope apparently having to express his "indisputable solidarity with Jews".

I'm no theologian but surely the Church has a indisputable solidarity to all mankind.

And why seriously was German Chancellor Angela Merkel telling the Pope what to do ? What serious explanation is there for this ? Enough of this crap already. This is silly. This is just not healthy.

Excuse my language, but Angela Merkel looks like a real f*cking joke. Even more of a f*cking joke and ridiculous puppet than she did, and that's truly saying something.

And really I find this use of the Holocaust to attack things that are inherently good, absolutely vile actually. It gets to a point of sickly awfulness.

You see there is a bottom rung of reality, and if we can't even meet that rung, what's the point ?

Now the Bishop has been sacked from his post, much to the delight of the global media establishment, despite him being almost irrelevant in this, just another ticked box on the list of things to quote Reuters of how the Pope has 'angered Jews'.

There's no polite way of saying this, but I suspect the Catholic Church should be 'angering Jews'. Not as a mission, but simply as part of its business of believing something different.

Look at the words 'ultra-traditionalist' in the BBC's version, as if that's something despicable.

Well you know what, I think that's a wonderful thing to be an' ultra-traditionalist'.

And that's after the Vatican demanded the Bishop recants, presumably after being told what to do by Angela Merkel.

So much for the Vatican secretly running the world.

And I'm going to say something else shocking now. Devastating though the crimes of WWII were, the world doesn't revolve around the Holocaust and being seen to pay it sufficient reverence in the form of tokens of appeasement and the whole thing played out like some ridiculous childish spectacle in the media.

This ghoulish fascination, this sickly surveillance to see who dares put a foot out of line, or can be coerced or provoked to put a foot out of line on the Holocaust and how that can be seized upon to attack institutions, has got to stop.

At some point it gets ridiculous and I think many good people out there who would normally be horrified and hungry for knowledge at many of the things that went on during World War II are now after being bombarded with this stream of nonsense, starting to say the Holocaust seems to be code for something else, and is that something else something I should care about ?

And the world is sick of these whining pages of drivel in the Times dedicated to demonstrating why some part of the Church is not sufficiently apologetic, acquiescent and philo-semitic enough.

The world is sick of hearing how 'good' 'Christians' worshiping at the fount of The War on Terror, Israel's sickening barbarism against Palestians and the moral, legislative and administritive deconstruction of their own societies and are 'real Christians', 'progressive Christians', 'moderate Christians'.

Frankly fuck off.

The problem for the media is (and I hate to be so sweeping but that's how it is) it's dug itself into a hole over this and tried to run with it in a million different sub-directions, tripping over itself to try to escalate the issue into some trend of not exactly 'pro Jewish' sentiment. Apparently the Vatican's has no other duties or concerns but to agree.

Personally I think the Vatican should be pro-Christian and pro-mankind, and the Pope should follow his own position, quoted in the Guardian back in August 2005 when :

"...Israel criticised Pope Benedict for not mentioning attacks on Israelis in a condemnation of terrorism. The Vatican responded with a terse statement asking Israel not to tell the Pope what to say"

But then again all of this whole sordid affair in the media shows how reasonable, and humble and gracious the Pope is, and frankly how unreasonable, vicious, hate-filled, nasty and childish and psychotic his enemies in the media and this particular campaign against him and the Catholic Church has been.

Stop Press: Catholic Church are behind the world's villainy!

It's struck me a number of times over the last year or so that there are a lot of basically good people out there who have acquired a kind of instinctive or reflex-like apathy, distrust or even repulsion toward religion but in particular Christianity, which, astonishingly is the main villain.

In America this is much worse where there appears to be a chunk of U.S society that has learned absolutely nothing from the last eight years and associates Christianity with Bush, and believes, amazingly, that Bush is the grand poobah mastermind behind the Iraq War and that the War in Iraq is some kind of Christian mission for Bush and Cheney.

I know it's amazing, and it's also the seeds of something potentially quite dangerous.

When you first see this it's so astonishing, it's so like a kind of 'backwardation' of thought, so tremendously saddening that's it's difficult to know exactly how to broach the topic, other than that you're dealing with some sometimes quite damaged and vulnerable people who want to believe something that suits them, and you when gently try to explain to them what's wrong, you can be met with a lot of anger, until reality starts to break through. And we're going to be talking more about that in detail soon.

And actually there are some interesting polls on this kind of thing, cited on a dreadful and almost otherwise worthless, but extremely revealing page on Wikipedia:

"David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Institute, and Gabe Lyons of the Fermi Project published a study of attitudes of 16-29 year old Americans towards Christianity. They found that about 38% of all those who did not regularly attend church had negative impressions of Christianity, and especially evangelical Christianity, associating it with conservative political activism, hypocrisy, anti-homosexuality, and judgmentalism.[5] About 17% had "very bad" perceptions of Christianity" (my emphasis -j)

Yeah we are gonna talk about this more directly at some point. Actually the Wikipedia article does a lot of the work for us.

And bringing this up to date there is little question that this height of irony, of letting 'Christianity' take the blame for the Iraq War has been allowed to fester in the minds of some vulnerable folks and go uncorrected in the dwindling months of the Bush presidency, if not outright brewed.

Christian fundamentalists/Christian Zionists in America are one thing, but the Catholic Church is also conspicuously regularly a subject of scorn, mistrust, ridicule, or spurious and inapplicable or juvenile moralising or even theorized as as some shadowy hand shaping events.

Most people have their own reasons about how they view religion that are personal to them, they may have had a religious upbringing, not all of them are exactly 'enamored' with every single experience of it, it's a mixed bag as it would be for everybody whatever the culture.

Others simply don't care for religion and so on. But then that brings up the question if they don't like religion and are not involved in it, where does the particular culture of dislike and scorn come from ?

As I said at the outset this can be a challenging topic for people new to it, but broadly radical hostility towards Christian institutions has a long history and irrespective of whether or not you feel about religion, in the 20th and 21st centuries the media has done a very effective job of setting up attitudes towards the Church, that are often distorted, skewed, provocative or Orwellian (note NYT's use of lanaguage) are just out and out attempts to demonize it.

And it's doing it constantly. Constantly the Catholic Church is framed and attacked (as is this extreme psychotic example) as a stuffy old villain or inanely being told it ought to be struggling with some crisis that is the fault of its own moral retardation.

And it's not lot like this stuff has gone unnoticed or something:

"The archbishop of Westminster declared that he feared contemporary society is increasingly marked by "secular dogmatism or cynicism" toward Christians. He stated: "So when Christians stand by their beliefs, they are intolerant dogmatists. When they sin, they are hypocrites. When they take the side of the poor, they are soft-headed liberals. When they seek to defend the family, they are right-wing reactionaries."

And it's funny that a lot of folks proudly claim they are 'freethinkers', and 'unencumbered' of institutional brainwashing, some even declare how they don't trust the media when it comes to something that Bush said about Iraq, or if it comes to the economy or crime statistics or this or that.

But when it comes to this they trust the media, and they trust the media's motives ?

And I've just linked to two examples, but the easiest way is just to carry on taking a look, and this is not exhaustive, this is a very very clumsy and crude quick glimpse at this:

But we are going to go with something a little different before we get back onto the mainstream, and it's something that was quite influential on me and a brilliant piece of alternative radio. Some people may say well Mr Jultra you're undermining the obvious point that you're making by choosing something like this. Well let's see.

There is a very famous debate in alternative news circles from May 16, 2006 between a fellow called Eric Jon Phelps who believes that the Vatican and the Black Pope and the Jesuits are controlling the world and perhaps one of the most interesting and perhaps one of the best non-mainstream serious political researchers and writers in the America, also a world expert on the JFK Assassination that's Michael Collins Piper.

And I should point out Mike Piper is 'controversial' as it were, and you may even find the topic of the debate they agreed to puerile or vulgar, but whatever you come away with you will not come away thinking the Vatican is behind all the bad stuff in the world and you will come away thinking Phelps probably shouldn't have come to that debate, and should be taking some medication.

The debate is fascinating listening and I think as far as we are talking about it's pretty well summarized when Mike says:

"The Civiltà Cattolica* which is a Vatican approved newspaper even went so far as to suggest that a lot of the newspaper over-emphasis on some of these sex scandals in the Vatican and in the Catholic Church which are rightly being reported I might add, they said that the over-emphasis on that was because of the mass media being disturbed about the fact the Vatican did not support the war against Iraq" (4:00+)

(* And I think I've got the name of this right, someone correct me if I haven't)

Let's look at something else, something more up to date, and bear in mind the above as we do so.

In Sunday's Guardian/Observer the Pope is reported as bringing back some bishops, one of which who held some controversial views on the Holocaust. Doesn't have to be the Guardian, Fox News has the same slant, which is far more extreme, perhaps the most extreme is the New York Times, which is almost beside itself with glee.

Of course he's not being welcomed back because of that, the fact of which may as well be a side issue or non-existent wherever this story appears, however it contains a very sensitive topic so lets have a look at some of the rhetoric from The Guardian:

"Shimon Samuels, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris, said he understood the German-born pope's desire for Christian unity but said Benedict could have excluded Williamson, whose return to the church will "cost" the Vatican politically."

and note this that's found it's way into the same article:

"Israeli officials recently protested when a senior cardinal said Israel's offensive in Gaza had turned it into a "big concentration camp"

A big concentration camp ? I think a lot of people would find that's a very polite and rather diplomatic understatement and it gives us a clue about what is being obscured here, after all it's not like the world doesn't understand the situation in Gaza, or that we need to look far for corroboration and we can just take out pick from anywhere. For example in 2006, special UN envoy John Dugard described the situation in Gaza as one where:

"Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into a prison for Palestinians
and have thrown away the key," adding that "in other countries this process might be described as ethnic cleansing" (ynet news)

More recently scholar and expert Norman Finkelstein, who last time I checked is not a Catholic described the situation in Gaza as a 'holocaust' and Israel a 'Satanic state' and goes on pithily:

" This state invaded in 1978, again in 1982, again in 1993, again in 1996, again in 2006, and 2008, and it always destroys, destroys and destroys. And then these satanic narcissistic people throw their hands up in the air and ask, “Why doesn’t anybody love us? Why don’t our neighbors want us to be here?” Why would they? "

So it's rather difficult to take that line of protestation by Israeli officials seriously when it comes to trying to aim it specifically at the Church.

Or try this for framing an issue also from the Guardian:

"The pope sparks controversy by defending heterosexuality!" Gosh what a monstrous thing to do. How evil and outrageous and wicked the Pope is I can't believe it. How dare heterosexuality be defended, it can't be right.

A few years ago such a headline would have been a spoof, and we'd all be laughing at it. Maybe we are supposed to be today ?

Or read some of the tone in this CNN obituary about Pope John Paul II, loaded with phrases like 'controversial', and 'moral opinions alienated many' (who? why ? Pope John Paul II was one of the popular Popes in modern times)

And this is not peculiarly about your view of religion. And it's not about trying to cover up where institutions have had people in them who have done immense wrong either. And if you want more conservative critique then here is an interview by Alex Jones with Hutton Gibson.

But there is no question media perpetuates an insidious culture of this which seems to be intended to become a cultural norm among the public, and certainly there is a chunk of the public that seems to go along with it, and yet declares they are enlightened in doing so, and it's little surprise because that's how it's sold to them.

And we could go on with examples all day long about this in the media. All of which seem to be designed to obscure and play down and attack the Church, its mission, its people, its works, its cultural influence and which politically has pitted it against the monstrous horrors of communism (CNN article again - don't be too happy with anti-communism), the atrocious crime of the Iraq War (take any pick), made Latin American Catholics the subjects of assassinations and attacks for delivering the liberation message of Christianity under a reign of state terror, received upon itself horrendous massacres and tortures of Catholics in Spain at the hands of communists, to something like today of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor fighting for all our basic freedoms (note the first comment on the article - is it a real person ?) and on and on and on.

No the Catholic Church are not a force for bad in the world. The Catholic Church are not 'bad' because they don't support abortion or homosexuality, because the media 'says' that's bad.

To put it simply the Catholic Church are rightly a hugely influential force for infinite good and reason and human dignity in the world and irrespective of individual faith, that's why they are demonized, marginalized and subject to ridiculous ongoing puerile critique in the media.