Kids, killers and the Catholic Church

I’m waiting for a Catholic bishop somewhere in America to deny communion to a Republican member of Congress of Catholic faith, for their role in the killing of nineteen children in Uvalde Texas. There are sixty-two Catholic legislators to choose from, ten in the Senate, fifty-two in the House of Representives.

This unlikely thought occurs to me only because this is how the Archbishop of San Francisco, the Most Reverend Salvatore Cordeolene, has chosen to punish Nancy Pelosi for opposing the criminalizing of abortion. I have no idea if Pelosi actually fears losing her place in Heaven, but the archbishop must intend to deny her the means of salvation. This is a lot worse than being blackballed at the club.

Of course none of those sixty-two Republican politicians have shot any children. They have merely failed to take action to reduce the supply of assault weapons to psychopaths. But Pelosi is not being excommunicated for having had an abortion herself or for performing one, merely for championing the rights of women in America, eighty percent of whom are not Catholics, to decide to have one without anyone calling the police.

Naively, I continue to be shocked whenever a Catholic spokesman claims the moral high ground on any issue relating to the care of children, born or unborn. Given the role played by so many princes of the Church, for longer than anyone can remember, in overseeing and enabling the abuse of children, I feel they should all take a vow of silence on questions of motherhood and the nurturing of infants. But of course the moral high ground is their natural habitat. For the Catholic Church, privileged access to eternal truths is the unique selling point. No one ever said it was a democracy.

To this extent, in preaching to America the archbishop is on more solid ground than Justice Clarence Thomas.

Speaking at a Judicial Conference in Atlanta, Thomas said that the Supreme Court ‘can't be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want.’ Commenting on the angry response to the overturning of Roe v Wade, he warned that ‘We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don't like.’ 

Strangely, he sees the desire for popular freedoms as a form of 'addiction' and, in spite of his own enormous power, experiences democratic pressure as 'bullying'. One of six practising Catholics among the nine Justices, Thomas seems to have deluded himself into thinking that he is a member of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to pass down to the ignorant laity the divinely inspired word.  

The exploiting of Charlie Gard

In a double-page banner headline, the Daily Mail calls Charlie Gard “the baby boy who moved the world”. I find myself drawn back 20 years to the summer of 1997 when I was thrown out of a tea shop in Monmouth for speaking of the late Princess Diana with insufficient reverence. My mild-mannered head of department and I were sitting, apparently alone, enjoying a cup of tea after a day of pre-term preparation. Tony Blair had spoken of waking up to a kinder, gentler Britain. But on my way through town I had seen people queuing in the square to sign the book of remembrance and the notice in the Oxfam shop opposite that read, ‘Closed for lack of volunteers’. I mentioned this to my colleague as an illustration of the self-indulgent sentimentality of the national response to Diana’s death. He murmured his agreement. A moment later, the proprietor appeared from the kitchen. “If you two are going to talk like that,” she said, “you can finish your tea and get out.”

I thought the country had gone slightly mad and perhaps I was slightly mad too, to mind so much. I was offended by what I experienced as a disproportionate outpouring of grief. But Diana was at least a public figure of constitutional significance. And there were legitimate targets of public anger – the Royal Family that had exploited, neglected and finally closed ranks against her, and the paid stalkers we had learned to call the paparazzi.

In the case of Charlie Gard, the grief expressed by those outside the family circle is more disturbing, and the anger is wildly misdirected. Great Ormond Street Hospital is not the enemy. It hasn’t imprisoned Charlie nor imposed a death sentence on him. Stories about experimental treatments not funded or approved by the NHS but available in America come round regularly. The right wing tabloids present them as heroic battles – the little guy against the system – but they serve the larger purpose of chipping away at our confidence in public healthcare.

Prominent US politicians have made this project explicit. For Vice-President Mike Pence, Charlie Gard’s desperate condition illustrates the dangers of the “single-payer” system favoured by progressives : “the American people oughta reflect on the fact that,” Pence said. “This is where it takes us.” Trump’s message of sympathy and support for Charlie’s parents rises from the same well of ignorance. Meanwhile the ongoing Republican attempts to repeal the moderate Affordable Care Act would put even the most basic health cover beyond the reach of tens of millions of US citizens.

Dr Hirano, who was heralded by the tabloids as a saviour – a lone ranger in a white coat – eagerly accepted his role in the narrative that socialized medicine is a dire fate from which British patients are occasionally fortunate enough to be rescued. Until this week, he was offering a 10% chance of improvement. It was never clear what this meant. If he had treated 100 patients in Charlie’s state and with Charlie’s condition and helped 10 of them he would have had a 10% success rate. But what if he had only treated 18 with a related but different condition and helped half of them but none of were as bad to begin with? Where did he get his 10% from? Let’s just say that with no clinical knowledge of Charlie Gard’s case and no experience with his particular condition he was willing to gamble that he had a slim chance of doing more good than harm.

The fact that Dr Hirano has a financial interest in the drug he’s offering is the kind of abuse that a joined up health service helps to guard against. But the entrepreneurial motive to recruit patients is equally dangerous. (I've written about these things before.)

The doctor was Charlie’s second high-profile American visitor. The Reverend Patrick Mahoney, who flew in to pray at the bedside, came to champion the God-given right of parents to decide the fate of their children. But civilized societies have long recognised that children have rights of their own and that the courts must occasionally intervene to determine what is in the best interests of children who are unable to speak for themselves.   

More surprising was the Pope’s intervention.  The Catholic Church, which tends to go off the deep end on sexual questions, takes a sane view of death. While forbidding euthanasia and assisted suicide, the Church makes a persuasive distinction between “ordinary” and “extraordinary” treatment. Withdrawing food and water to shorten the life of a terminally ill patient is not allowed, even if sustenance must be intravenously delivered. But otherwise keeping a patient alive artificially is not required. According to one account of the official teaching, “When a person has an underlying terminal disease, or their heart, or some other organ, cannot work without mechanical assistance, or a therapy being proposed is dangerous, or has little chance of success, then not using that machine or that therapy results in the person dying from the disease or organ failure they already have. The omission allows nature to takes its course” (The Global Catholic Network).

Even for Catholics, who believe in the sanctity of human life, turning off the machine is sometimes the right thing to do. 

In the summer of 1997 I chose to distance myself from the national mood, but I see now that the wave of grief for Diana was genuine, widespread and largely benign. The feelings the Mail reports and encourages are more divisive, more dependent on the manipulations of the tabloid editors and social media trolls, and considerably more sinister in their political significance.  

Redefining marriage? What's so new about that?

The US Supreme Court is currently debating whether to uphold or overturn the 1996 Defence of Marriage Act, an attempt by Congress to obstruct the spread of same-sex marriage across individual states. On this issue American politicians are still divided largely on party lines. 

Here in Britain the Conservatives have seen the benefits of indulging popular support for same-sex marriage, an inexpensive way of shedding their image as the nasty party while continuing to grind the faces of the poor. Opposition is left to backbench traditionalists and church leaders, most vocally the Catholics and of course, standing precariously on their established status, the Anglicans.

In Britain, the state got into the business of regulating marriage in 1753, while leaving the Church of England largely in control. Oddly, the legislation established some kind of exemption for Jews and Quakers, though not for Catholics, who had to continue being married by clergymen whose status they didn’t recognise. 

In 1836 the Church lost its monopoly, when parliament introduced civil marriage. Now, like any other religious organisation, the Anglicans can refuse to preside over a wedding ceremony, but have no power beyond that to decide who may or may not marry. On the question of same-sex marriage, they’re entitled to their opinion but it really isn’t up to them.

I’ve got some tangled history with this subject. I was raised Catholic but at 16, prompted by a wildly rebellious urge, joined the local Anglican choir. I learnt to sight-read hymns in four-part harmony and acquired the knack (an Anglican peculiarity) of reading the words of a psalm from one book and the music from another. For this I will always be grateful. I also discovered to my surprise that the vicar thought highly of historical figures I’d been taught to think of as villains, such as Thomas Cranmer. Not many years later, no longer considering myself a Catholic, I got married in an Anglican Church.

After I was divorced (a humane solution beneficial to both parties) I went out for a while with a nice Catholic girl, until she told me she’d have to break it off because I was a married man. Young and naïve as I was, and something of a literalist, I consulted a Catholic priest. After some questioning he told me that my marriage needed no annulment being null from day one, since, while still technically a Catholic, I had neglected to seek the permission of a Catholic bishop, permission that would have been granted on condition that my fiancée and I undergo a course of training on the significance of marriage.

(The vicar who married us had, in fact, delivered his own, very Anglican, version of marriage preparation. I remember a meeting in the vicarage during which he blushed and stammered, said ‘You’re clearly both intelligent people’ and handed us a pamphlet which instructed us that sex was ‘very, very pleasant’.)

I immediately told the nice Catholic girl that it was OK, I wasn’t married after all. I saw to my dismay that she wasn’t as thrilled with this news as I had been. I would later be told often enough that ‘It isn’t you, it’s me,’ but would never again be dumped with the line, ‘It isn’t me, it’s the Pope.’  

By the time I was ready to get married again (to Leni Wildflower) I’d lost interest in organised religion, but Leni had spiritual inclinations and was quite keen to be married in the eyes of some god or other. So I approached a friend who happened to be an Anglican priest of a fairly liberal kind. He turned us down because of that first marriage, which he told me remained sound as far as the Church of England was concerned whatever the Catholics might think.

So Leni asked a rabbi, a professional colleague in California, who said, ‘I don’t do mixed marriages’. Since the rabbi was female this hair-raising response could not be blamed on a strict adherence to orthodoxy.

In the end we settled for a California Methodist who allowed us to stamp on wine glasses to cries of mazel tov, and to say whatever we wanted about God, Vishnu or the cosmos.  

Papa don't preach

I’m thinking of a Catholic boy, coming of age in 1950s Scotland, having been raised in a culture that conflates sexuality with sin and does its best to keep the lid on both. Unfortunately, for a boy at this time and place, it’s not girls he finds himself attracted to. The practices that invade his imagination are not only associated with profound social shame, they are also punishable by imprisonment. What tempts him is categorised by his own church as one of the 'four sins crying to heaven for vengeance'.

He throws himself into academic work and is eventually drawn to the priesthood. By the time parliament decriminalises homosexual acts between consenting adults in private, he has been ordained and has put that whole complicated issue behind him, taking refuge in a life of celibacy.  He serves as a curate, a teacher, a parish priest. He’s good at his job.

In mid-life he is put in charge of the spiritual development of young men training for the priesthood. Beyond the walls of the seminary it’s a hedonistic time. There are pockets of wild liberation where gay men are indulging their sexual appetites, no longer fearful of judicial punishment and untroubled by thoughts of hell. Is he influenced by this? Or by the knowledge that his life is half over and half his nature lies dormant? Denied the normal comforts and companionship of marriage to which most people eventually aspire, does he find loneliness creeping up on him? Or does his position of unquestioned authority provide an opportunity he simply can’t resist? In the language of his Church, has his job become one continuous ‘occasion of sin’?

Is this a true story, or an outline for a novel by Colm Tóibín?

How about this one? A senior cleric approaching the end of a distinguished and respected career, about to fulfil the sacred duty of voting for the next pope, faces accusations that thirty years ago he made inappropriate advances to four seminarians, accusations that he denies. Now we’re in Philip Roth territory. In The Human Stain, Coleman Silk, a professor of Classics charged with showing prejudice towards two black students, could clear his name by revealing his own deepest secret that he is himself (in a certain ethno-cultural sense) black, though sufficiently light-skinned to pass as white. What if, like Coleman, our senior cleric has it in his power to replace one scandal with another by revealing a long-standing secret – a relationship, for example, consensual and mutually beneficial, with a woman of his own age? In a strange twist, he surprises his conservative supporters by suggesting that the Church should consider allowing priests to marry, a coded intimation of his desire to normalise his private life and finally assert his long-obscured identity.

Perhaps the truth is even more implausible – something Dan Brown might have dreamt up. The whole thing is a conspiracy led by a villainous Italian cardinal with papal ambitions. Our hero is a tough, plain-talking Scot with the rugged good looks of a rugby player, who has made a name for himself by standing up to politicians cravenly seeking popularity with their liberalising agendas, particularly their plans for gay marriage, 'a grotesque subversion' as he sees it. True to form, he opposes the worldly Italian. Whether politically motivated or bribed with promises of advancement, his accusers, like the four assassins of Thomas à Becket, set out to rid their master of this turbulent priest, to neutralise him, at least, for as long as the Cardinals sit in conclave.  

But enough of fantasies and speculations. The important story is of an institution so blind to its own failings that it projects them out into the secular world, condemning the rest of us for our self-indulgence while it covers up its own crimes, a body so damaged by scandal that no one is much surprised by one more accusation, or much impressed by a heated denial or a half-hearted apology. Perhaps some of these many charges are false. But the credibility of the Church is so damaged in this area that, for someone accused, to be a member of its hierarchy makes guilt seem more likely rather than less.

It’s exactly fifty years since the death of the great reformer, John XXIII, who did his best during his brief papacy to bring daylight into the Catholic Church. I wonder if there are enough cardinals interested in renewing that interrupted process. I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile the Church might concentrate on its strong suits, such as concern for the poor, and leave questions of sexual ethics to ordinary people.