Apologies for posting twice in one day, but I saw this image and couldn’t resist. Unfortunately, I have not had the time to stay as current as I would like on the Pope’s alleged complicity, when he was a cardinal, in the Church’s covering up and possibly enabling of the sexual abuse of boys by priests in Germany and the United States, and so I have not been able to write about it in an informed way. Neither the sexual abuse of children nor its being swept under the rug such that perpetrators are able to continue abusing children is unique to the Catholic Church, of course, but, as a survivor of such abuse myself, it is impossible for me not to identify with the anger contained in this cartoon, which I found on Cagle Blogs.
Cross posted on It’s All Connected.
ETA 4/2/10: As Robert pointed out to me below, the image of the priest on the right conforms to negative stereotypes of both priests and gay men and by posting this image without commenting on that fact I implicitly endorsed that stereotype. So let me say here that while I continue to identify with the anger in this cartoon, I think it is unfortunate that the anger found expression in such a stereotypical image. Clearly the same point could have been made with a different image. <
This post is so hateful and offensive, I had to do a double-take when I saw it appear on my RSS feed.
Is this really what Alas has succumbed to publishing days before the holiest remembrances of Christianity? Would Mr. Newman publish cartoons that are as denigrating of Islam, Judaism or any other religion?
Yes, many Catholic authorities have committed the most indecent and abhorrent of acts. But focusing the criticism not on the wrongdoers, but on making a mockery of a religion many of us follow is lower than low.
Shame on you, Mr. Newman.
It’s worth emphasizing that the current pope has aided and abetted the rape of children.
If you’re upset about anyone making a mockery of the religion you follow, maybe you ought to start there.
—Myca
Zelda,
What Myca said. But also: consider that the cartoon attacks not Catholicism itself, but rather the Pope’s ability to be taken seriously as the leader of that faith given that he has been implicated in an institutional cover-up that enabled priests who were known to be child abusers and rapists to continue raping and abusing children.
And, for the record, were a similar institutional situation to emerge in either Judaism or Islam–or Buddhism or Hinduism or Jainism of Wiccan, for that matter–I would have no problem posting the analogous cartoon. (The emphasis on institutional is important; we are not talking merely about the isolated acts of individual priests and other officials within the Church; we are talking about institutional behavior.)
Hm. Well, there have been plenty of innocent people blown to pieces in the name of Islam with the complicity and even encouragement of numerous Islamic clerics. They have reputedly even used mentally handicapped people as unwitting tools in this effort. Then there’s the widespread abuse of women in various fashions in Islam’s name that is at least ignored and at best encouraged by Islam’s highest levels.
I have to say as a preacher, the really hateful and offensive thing is that the subject of the cartoon has a long history of turning a blind eye to the exploitation of the people that priests are supposed to be taking care of.
It’s not “hate speech” if it happens to be true. Go ahead, debate me on that. Explain how hate speech can be directed at serial child abusers for example. I’m dying to hear it, I can use a laugh.
1. The prissy, lipsticked priest seems to be a rather direct “priests are feminine/faggy” attack. Not necessarily a factually inaccurate attack, it probably isn’t staunch heterosexual priests having sex with hundreds of teenage boys – but one that I’m surprised to see you endorse.
2. Saying you’d critique Jews and Muslims and Wiccans if their institutions were doing what the Catholics were doing is rather disingenuous. The Jews don’t have a Pope. Islam does not have a central church.
The institutions which Islam does maintain are generally national in scope – and those institutions do, in fact, have a long track record of appalling actions that harm the people within their ambit. I don’t remember you posting cartoons about the constant stream of Islamic court judgments sending girls off to marry their rapists, etc. – but simple demographics would seem to indicate that the oppression of women and children that are written into the black-letter law of Sharia courts at least equals, if it does not swamp, the violations that have occurred in contradiction to Christianity’s explicit ethical teachings.
3. The current Pope’s responsibility may indeed be severe; I really don’t know. I do know that I am reluctant to trust either mainstream reporting on the subject, or the Church’s own press pronouncements. All of these people have agendas, many of them are hidden or dishonest agendas, and in any event I am strongly inclined to concentrate my fire (and blame) on the people who abused, more than the institutional structures that surrounded them.
More later.
Riffing off the other thread:
1) See? Offensive isn’t always bad…
2) …which is as usual a lot simpler to claim if you’re on the “offender” side than it is to hear if you’re on the “offended” side…
3) …and which can seen pretty damn untrue if you’re on the “offended” side rather than the “offendee” side…
4)…so let’s all remember that next time that we switch sides, ya?
(continued)
4. I was molested by a priest as a teenager. When I eventually reported it to the church (ten years later), there was a discreet but vigorous investigation. The church offered me counseling (which I didn’t take) and in general seemed concerned with both persuading me against a lawsuit (sensible) and with ensuring the priest in question did not work with children any more (also sensible). They took it extremely seriously, which I found heartening. Presented here for full disclosure; I think the handling of my case was on the high end of the curve, not that it was representative.
5. The clerical abuse crisis, it should be noted, is largely a crisis of the past. Not to minimize what happened, but the actual curve of reporting (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/the-pattern-of-priestly-sex-abuse/) makes it pretty clear that a once very severe problem has been greatly mitigated. The kind of response that I got to my report has gone from being an exception to being much more the norm; victim believed, help offered, offender marked and quarantined or turned over to civil authority, not shielded and sheltered. Good.
6. Some people say that the crisis is indicative of a structural problem of patriarchy/hierarchy/the mean old grumpy white men. This is emotionally attractive but data-contradicted. You can’t cut the incident of something by 15-fold with simple policy changes if the “something” is woven into the fabric of the organization. I think that people wanting to make the case that the church’s patriarchal woman-hating is the source of the problem have to explain how we get from 750 reported molestation incidents in a year to 50, while the values in question haven’t changed. Not that this is necessarily your view, Richard, I’m just rambling.
An article on this was published in The Catholic Herald, a United Kingdom publication. I won’t pretend that they are an unbiased source, but they do set forth the case that the Pope was uninvolved and has a number of links both to the reports on the case in the New York Times and elsewhere and to reports purporting to refute certain points of those stories.
I’m not taking a position myself, I’d have to put a lot more effort into reading up on it. I’m not Catholic, either, so I don’t have any direct interest. But for those of you who are interested in both sides of the story this seems to be a source for such information.
He needs to resign. I found the Canon Law (Canon 332.2) saying he officially and legally may do so. The law was originally enacted by Pope Boniface VIII about 8 centuries ago. Other popes have done it, but the last was in 1400 or something.
And as Pope, he is qualified to pass Canon Law himself. He needs to pass CANON LAW that no one may be priest, bishop, cardinal or Pope if they have participated in pedophilia-rape …including cover-ups. That can help prevent it from happening in the future, if one may be instantly removed simply for knowing about such activities.
Zelda, shame on us, not shame on Richard. Shame on CARDINAL RATZINGER most of all.
I say, get rid of him. I wish the liberals in the Church were not so intimidated by Ratzinger’s Kommandant routine, but it has been ever thus. Now is the time to get rid of the conservatives!
The sorry-ass fact that so many liberals are standing around with their thumbs up their asses while Ratzinger is down, is utterly infuriating to me. Woody Hayes would know what to do! INTO THE ENDZONE!!!!
Can you say “learned helplessness”? ((sigh))
Robert, what you have described is the AMERICAN Catholic Church’s response to the crisis, which was pretty swift compared to the rest of the world. That is because the American Catholic Church is the most liberal in the world and the most concerned with children’s rights. The fact is that this is now a worldwide scandal, and other Catholic jurisdictions did not even listen to the boys, period.
Also, I think John Paul II hated secrecy and loved transparency, as a survivor of Soviet repression in Poland. He didn’t want the Curia to act like the KGB. By contrast, Benedict doesn’t believe in that modernist stuff, and even actively discouraged much of JPII’s openness.
My deepest sympathies regarding your experience. :(
Now is the time to get rid of the conservatives!
I’m sure you’ll forgive me if as a conservative I decline to endorse my own purging. ;)
Robert:
I don’t endorse it, but I do identify with the anger that produced it.
I wasn’t being disingenuous. Had I been more of a blogger at the time, I very likely would have posted the cartoons critical of Islam that were published in–damn! I forget whether it was Holland or Denmark–that caused such problem a while back. One reason, aside from the freedom of the press issues, is that–as I remember them, and I might be wrong about this–they did not imply that all Muslims were Arab. Rather, they were critical, or at least some of them were critical, of particular behaviors, such as suicide bombings, that were at the time engaged in pretty much exclusively by Arab men.
To put a slightly different spin on this: Show me a satirical cartoon dealing with the features of Islam that you refer to that that does not implicitly equate Islam and Arab, which is both Islamophobic and racist, and that does not imply–precisely because Islam does not have a Vatican or a Pope–that whatever feature referred to in the cartoon “speaks” for all Muslims, and I will be happy to post it. (NB: I am speaking here very broadly for the sake of argument; I do not endorse the view of Islam that is implicit in Robert’s and RonF’s comments.)
The cartoon I posted does not, as I read it, imply that either the Catholic faith or the Church as a an institution endorses the sexual abuse of children. Rather it suggests that the institution, through its behavior, enables the abuse, a behavior which it quite explicitly condemns.
RonF made a similar point, and I have to say that I find this reaction troubling, not because there are not Muslim countries where these things happen, and certainly not because I think Islam ought to be immune to the kinds of critique made in the cartoon I posted, but, first, because the situations you and RonF refer to in Muslim countries and the one referred in the cartoon are quite different and so the comparison is more of a distraction–because its point is to call my personal standards into question–than anything else and, second, because assumptions like the one I have put in boldface are more self-serving than they are factual, at the very least because they are ahistorical.
Precisely because I think the Church is no different than any other social institution in terms of the fact that sexual abuse occurs within its boundaries, I don’t think it ought to be singled out for the fact that there are abusers within those boundaries. I do think that, however, that in terms of the institutional response to that abuse, it is reasonable to hold the Church to a higher standard than other institutions, because it is after all the Church. That being said, I don’t disagree with your point about people having their own agendas, which is why I limited my response to the cartoon to saying that it is hard for me not to identify with the anger it expresses.
I will try to return to clarify some of this later; I pressed Submit by accident and have been editing in the Ajax Edit Comments utility, and so I am not sure I have been as clear I as I want to be.
I don’t endorse it, but I do identify with the anger that produced it.
Well, I identify with the anger too.
But you can’t not endorse it. You published the cartoon, saying you couldn’t resist it. This isn’t the publication of something interesting that you object to, this is you pushing “Share on Facebook” and clicking the “Like” button.
On the Islam issue, I probably shouldn’t have brought it up.
It’s true that other mayor religions do not have an equivalent of the pope. And yes, this means that there is no one jew or muslim or buddhist or hindi religious leader whose actions have such an influence on how people view that religion. So yes, it is true that a cartoon exactly like this could not be drawn about any of those other religions.
But you know what? This is not the fault of those other religions. Catholics chose to be part of a religious organisation that is headed by one person. This is the structure that the catholic church chose. You can not have one “holy father” whose word is law, and then get mad when people critizise that leader and the strict hirarchial organisation. You can not declare that one person is the leader of the church and then get mad when people hold that leader responsible for his actions or inactions.
I am not saying that all catholics believe in everything the pope does and says. I am catholic myself, and I certainly don’t. But when people see every critizism of the pope as an attack on their believes, than these people seem to think that being the religious leader makes him above reproach. And a belief that says it is ok to cover up abuse, a belief that there is nothing wrong with putting the public image of the organisation over the well being of the victims- that is not a belief that needs to be respected and protected and exempt from criticism.
We need to hold our leaders- worldly and religious- to stricter standards, not loser ones. They have more power to do harm, and preventing that harm is only possible when we watch them carefully. And pointing out when they screw up, and how badly they screw up, and how many people are hurt by it- that is our duty, if we don’t want to be complicit ourselves.
Robert:
I will accept that I could have been more clear in the text I wrote when I shared it on Facebook and when I posted it elsewhere–and I will, later, edit the post here and on my blog to correct this–but publishing it does not mean that I endorse everything about it.
This is why I love small blogs and their threads. They always follow this same pattern, it seems. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a religious, political, social or fan blog either, it cuts across all barriers in my experience.
ORIGINAL POST
“I have an opinion about X”
REPLY BY FIRST RESPONSE
“I decline to notice your opinion, only how you expressed it. I choose to call you a “no good bastard” based on HOW you expressed your opinion, in one word/sentence/aspect of the drawing representing a small aspect of X or your opinion of X.”
RANDOM ASSORTMENT OF REPLY POSTERS 1-5
“Yeah, OP is a “no good bastard” based upon that one word/sentence/aspect of the drawing representing a small aspect of X or your opinion of X. I have nothing NEW to point out, but someone notice that I’m also displeased.”
ORIGINAL POSTER
“Yeah, OK, fine. that one word/sentence/aspect of the drawing representing a small aspect of X or my opinion of X could have been more politically correct/culturally sensitive/artfully done. Anyone have anything meaningful to say about my actual over all point, theme, idea or emotional reaction?
ALL FOLLOWING REPLIES BY ANYONE NOT THE OP (increasingly strident, often in all caps in some boards.)
“NO, BUT YOU’RE STILL A “NO GOOD BASTARD, for expressing yourself in a way that isn’t EXACTLY to my liking. I have nothing to contribute concerning your original opinion, observation or comment about X. I will however free associate about Y & Z, which relate to X in only some tangential point.”
OP INEVITABLE REPLY
“Well pardon me all over the place.”
Pingback: Richard Jeffrey Newman - Anger Needs a Voice
CALLED IT! I TOTALLY CALLED IT!
And Richard, hopefully someone will answer your original meaning to a post SOME time, either here or in another blog. In 10 years no one ever has to ME, which is why I am only an original poster on my own blog, which has comments turned OFF.
BTW, you raised good points, I’ll have to hunt up your other OPs.
What original point do you think has gone unaddressed, Brian? Richard posted a cartoon. He said, I wish I knew enough about the current facts to have an informed opinion, but in the meantime, this cartoon captures how I feel. People have responded to that.
It isn’t as though there’s a 50-page disquisition on hierarchy, religion, and sexual abuse encoded in Richard’s three-sentence original post.
Robert, I am so sorry.
Robert, thank you for proving my point. You earned a cookie.
Wow, cookies, and sympathy. Thanks.
Brian, I understand your point, but I also think further discussion of it would be too wildly off-topic. How about you post a response to Richard’s (according to you) heretofore unaddressed point?
Robert:
1) I agree, the drawing of the top right priest is homophobic.
2) What Lauren says in comment #15. Insofar as Catholicism is an organization, it’s fair to critique what that organization does. The idea that anyone is obliged to criticize Judaism as if it had an equivalent organization holds no water.
3) It makes sense to criticize both the criminals and the institution (and institutional actors) that apparently covered up for them and their crimes. If it turned out that Democratic party officials had covered up hundreds of acts of child molestation, I doubt you’d say that we should go after the molesters but not criticize the Democratic party’s actions.
4) That really sucks. I’m sorry. But I’m glad you were treated decently once you reported.
5) Agreed, it is good.
6) I think this is a little oversimplistic. The policy changes came in response to widespread revulsion and criticism, and they seem to have made a difference. But I’m not convinced that a church that was less patriarchal in the first place would have had the same scandal in the first place.
ETA: To make it clearer:
Patriarchal org + no revulsion = Widespread abuse.
Patriarchal org + much revulsion + policy changes = Reduced abuse.
You shouldn’t conclude from that, that the patriarchal aspects of the org had nothing to do with the problem.
Do we all agree that dark lips = coding for lipstick?
It’s not the fact that the lips are dark, it’s the “pucker” shape that’s clearly (based on the rest of the mouth) drawn over the lips with lipstick. If the only thing was the pucker shape, it could be just shading and puckered lips. If the only thing was the smile, it could be just shading and a smile. But you can’t smile and pucker at the same time, so it’s the combination that makes it clear.
“But you can’t smile and pucker at the same time, so it’s the combination that makes it clear.”
I don’t know that I read the art style as being that realistic.
But if the consensus is that it’s homophobic, then I guess I’m just reading incorrectly. It just seems like it’s riffing off of older, non-homophobic art, rather than making a modern commentary about lipstick.
Brian,
I too am curious what point of mine you think has gone unresponded to. The fact that I agree with Robert’s reading of the priest on the right–and for me it’s not just the lips, but something about the eyes and the shape of the head in combination with the lips and the smile–as homophobic and priest-bashing, and that I choose to acknowledge that I didn’t acknowledge this in my original post, doesn’t take away from my initial response, which is that I can’t help but identify with the anger. Nor–and I will admit that I didn’t think this fully through my feelings when I posted the cartoon; and there is more to unpack in this than I am doing here–does it take away from the fact that I think there is value in people being confronted with that anger, having to deal with it, even if/when it spills over into homophobia, etc.
Equally, I think it is important that people be confronted with satire that dares to cross lines that are not crossed in “polite” company, and I think there is courage in drawing and publishing an image such as this one precisely because it is satire that dares/risks an awful lot. Again, though, just because I think the anger is a righteous anger, and just because I think people ought to deal with it even when it spills over into homophobia, etc., and just because I value this kind of satire, does not make it okay that I didn’t call out the homophobia in the cartoon in the first place. Nor does being that angry, even for good reason, and especially in a published image that, no doubt, the cartoonist revised–meaning that he had time to consider the implications of what he drew, or to fail to see the implications–inoculate one against the responsibility not to be homophobic, etc.
That’s what I’ve been thinking, Mandolin. I thought that I was the only one. Were you thinking of older depictions of the depraved elite? I recall that those depictions were often of clerics, too. I never thought of those as homophobic so much as emphasizing the ill-gotten luxury while others suffer.
Although I agree that if the consensus is that it’s homophobic that I will not dispute it. I think it’s possible for it to be both.
Jake:
I think I know the kind of images you are talking about, but, as I remember them, those depictions often ascribed a kind of depraved effeminacy to their subjects, and so those images also seemed to me homophobic.
ETA: I was just listening to NPR and according to the report I heard, the Pope’s “personal preacher” (this was the phrase NPR used; I have no idea what precisely it means) compared the attacks on the Pope and the Church in the aftermath of the recent sexual abuse scandals to the worst expressions of antisemitism. Anyone else heard this? I don’t have time to look it up. I am wondering what people think?
Here you go.
From that article:
My first response is, “Fuck you.” After that I move to wondering how the guy has no shame. I mean, the Catholic Church has a history of working against anti-semitism, right? Yeah. This is just like blood libel.
I stand by my, “Fuck you,” response.
ETA: It’s also really, really classy to equate victims of abuse by Catholic clergy to anti-semites. I don’t know that that is necessarily going all Godwin…
I can understand that. Those depictions have always struck me as something other than that, but I see what you mean.
The preacher’s remarks struck enough people as outrageous that that story is the top headline in the news section when I log into my yahoo mail. And my reaction is about the same as Jake’s. Apparently the Vatican is trying to distance itself from the remarks, saying the preacher does not represent the official Church position.
Re: whether the images are homophobic
… I remember them, those depictions often ascribed a kind of depraved effeminacy to their subjects…
This strikes me as right. Like Mandolin, I read the images as referring to older art styles (1920s? I’m pretty ignorant about this kind of stuff). That style has not always jumped out at me as homophobic, and without looking through a catalogue, I’ll say some of it may not be, but it’s also quite possible that some of it has slipped under my radar. The connection is probably jumping out more at some of the commenters because the context of the criticism is same-sex sexual abuse.
Here’s a link to the AP story.
It includes a lot of reaction from Jewish groups here and in Germany. Here’s some reaction from a representative of abuse survivors and a Vatican observer at Georgetown.
1) Yes, the priest depiction is trading in effeminate stereotypes – I see the “vintage” look that is being hearkened back to, but that was steeped in depictions of the hoi polloi as rarefied and prissy, aka not real men.
2) I heard the comparison to blood libel while I was driving to the gas station and nearly ran my car up onto the curb. Given the Catholic Church’s less-than-stellar record on responding to the Holocaust, you would think they would at LEAST have the good sense not to invoke a specious comparison of themselves to Jews, you know? I guess there wasn’t an obvious metaphor to slavery, so they needed to reach for something else that was blockheaded and shockingly offensive?
Well, and damn it, but isn’t the point that nobody here is denying that priests raped children, and were then reassigned to other districts where they continued to have contact with children rather than turned over to answer for their crimes?
I mean, it’s only libel (blood or otherwise) if it’s untrue.
I’m betting there would be a lot less complaint about blood libel in the Jewish community if there was an actual history of them drinking the blood of Christian infants, too.
—Myca
I think the point of the (horrible) comparison, Myca, seems to be “it is unfair to hold a whole group of people responsible for the actions of some of its members”; in other words, holding the Pope and bishops responsible for priests who molested children is just like holding every Jewish person responsible for the death of Christ (which is what I thought “blood libel” referred to, but apparently it’s about human sacrifice? Wow, an anti-Semitic trope that didn’t penetrate to my Midwestern upbringing…). I think that’s what “the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt” is meant to evoke.
Never mind that, as has been observed elsewhere, there is no single hierarchical structure in Judaism like there is in Catholicism. In fact, comparing pinning culpability on someone who had supervisory authority over a person committing a crime, versus pinning it on an average guy-in-the-street who had no influence on the decisions of authority figures even if he was contemporaneous to them, never mind living hundreds or thousands of years later, is just sloppy logic even before you get to the wholly offensive part of the equation.
Jake and Chingona, thanks.
Elusis, I am curious where you heard that Cantalamessa drew a comparison to the blood libel. Or, rather, what the attribution was for what you heard reported on the radio. I ask because National Catholic Register has a translation of Cantalamessa’s talk, and I don’t see such a specific reference anywhere in the section where he talks about the Jews. Maybe it’s elsewhere in the sermon, which I will admit to scanning only quickly, but here is the relevant passage:
I think it’s important to acknowledge, for the sake of accuracy, that Cantalamessa did not draw the comparison between antisemitism and attacks on and scrutiny of the Pope and the Church out of the blue; and also to acknowledge that this final passage in the sermon comes after much talk against violence, specifically violence against women. His statement about what the Jews know about being the victims of collective violence, in other words, is also referring back to what he says about violence against women and the fact that men ought to be asking women’s forgiveness; it is not a bald comparison equating the “victimization” of the Pope and the Church because of the child sex abuse scandal to the victimization of the Jews.
Not that this excuses or in any way makes less offensive his willingness to use the words of his Jewish friend as a way of discrediting those who are scrutinizing the Pope, but reading his words in context at least makes clear that the point of the sermon was not purely the self-serving, self-indulgent defense of the Pope and the Church that some of the reactions I have been reading suggested it was.
I was also struck by this, one of the concluding paragraphs in an article about Cantalamessa’s talk in the New York Times:
Doesn’t matter what it is, someone somewhere will find a way to blame the Jews. Here, by the way, is a link to the La Republica article. It’s in Italian so I can’t read it, but I wonder if it says what the Times article says it says.
Anger in its rawest, most potent form really IS the only response one can have to some sins.
The excuses made by the guilty to avoid any responsibility will only add to that anger in anyone with a functioning sense of right and wrong. I admit that I start to tune out on those as soon as I can tell what broad category those excuses will turn into.
Once I can tell if the person will use “The victim was asking for it,” or “I had a right to do what I did,” or “While I did that, it’s the fault of my enemies for making such a big deal about it” I can tell that admission of guilt, repentance and atonement are NOT on the agenda.
And isn’t it rare and refreshing when someone does something evil, and says to the world, “Wow, that was just so wrong of me. I admit it, punish me how you see fit, and I will do what I can to somehow make up for it after my punishment.”
Instead we get responses like this;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/01/boy-scouts-of-america-por_n_522667.html
“The president of the Boy Scouts council for the Portland metro area has testified he believes the parents of some Scouts were negligent and even criminal for allowing sleepovers that led to sex abuse.”
As with the Catholic Church’s officials replies for the last 40 years, no hint of “I’m sorry, that was horrible, how can we make it up to you.”
Instead we get the sort of reply that seeks to “cover our own asses” that inevitably turns any organization doing so into a quasi-criminal enterprise where anyone not actively involved in the cover-up is either AWARE it’s going on or deliberately turning a blind eye to it, or so far out of the loop that it takes serious effort.
It is thus with some grim amusement I call your collective attention to this.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7056689.ece
And since you all may have been expecting it from me “Why is no one offended yet that the Pope’s cap it drawn as being off kilter? That is so CLEARLY showing a bias against people with odd shaped heads and I am OFFENDED.”
Well, and let’s not forget the extensive and very expensive lawsuits.
I’m not sure that I follow you on this. Let me explain my impression of the homily.
It seems to me as if his comparison of anti-semitism to criticism of the Pope does come out of the blue. The connection between the letter from his “Jewish friend” and the previous section on the need of men to ask forgiveness from women is tenuous at best. At worst, it’s an attempt, out of the blue, to somehow imply that criticism of and scrutiny on the Pope is something for which the criticizers and scrutinizers must ask forgiveness.
Sure the final passage comes after talk about violence but it transposes the violence against the victims of clergy sexual abuse to violence against the Pope. This is offensive to me.
I don’t see how the final section is related to the penultimate section except by means of asserting a false equivalency.
Where I do agree with you 100% is in the inexcusability of, as you wrote, “… his willingness to use the words of his Jewish friend as a way of discrediting those who are scrutinizing the Pope.”
What connection are you seeing between those final two sections that I am not?
Jake,
I did not write clearly, and when I look back at my comment now, I am not 100% sure of what I meant by the phrase “out of the blue.” My intent was simply to say that the comments about what the Jews know about being the objects of violence do exist in a context that is not pure and unadulterated self-indulgent, deflecting defensiveness, which was the impression that I got from the accounts I was reading. As I said, I don’t think that at all excuses or ameliorates what he does with the letter from his Jewish friend, but I do think it makes a difference in the level of cynicism I would attribute to him. Because I do see an associative connection between the penultimate section and the paragraphs in the last section that precede the quote from the letter. He could have done something very different with those two paragraphs if he’d chosen. Anyway, my point is, I suppose, that it’s one thing to tack on at the end of a sermon what he tacked on; it is quite something else, and something far more cynical and horrifying to devote an entire sermon to using the oppression of the Jews as a defensive screen.
Am I the only one wondering if this Jewish friend actually exists?
Chingona, anything is possible.
And now I feel rather abashed, like I got taken for a ride. tristero suggests that perhaps the outrage was deliberately manufactured to distract media attention from more abuse revelations. Yes, that’s getting really cynical, but I found his post plausible, at the very least.
Chingona:
One of my first reactions when I read the text Cantalamessa quoted from his Jewish friend’s letter was that the text of the letter seemed too perfectly fitted–even retrofitted–to the point Cantalamessa was trying to make, and it struck me, too, as not a little convenient for such a letter to appear at just this time, but while tristero’s account sounds plausible, you don’t need to decide that the letter was manufactured for that plausibility still to hold. It is entirely possible that the letter came from someone who knows both Cantalamessa and the Pope personally and just “can’t believe,” on a personal, emotional level, that the Pope would have been complicit in the way he has been accused of being complicit. You can still end up with the scenario tristero lays out; and Cantalamessa’s use of the letter is just as cynical and calculating. I guess I just don’t see the value in accusing the Vatican of manufacturing the letter, especially for a sermon having to do with such a (for them) holy day as Easter.
And I also wonder about the degree to which the translation–which makes the letter read a little awkwardly–contributes to the feeling that it might have been manufactured.
Fair enough, Richard. Though just to be clear, my comments at 43 and 45 are two separate thoughts. 43 is something I’ve been wondering since I first read it, but you are certainly right that it’s entirely possible that a personal friend might try to give them comfort this way. 45 is questioning how something so obviously offensive ended up in this sermon, which was, as you and others have noted, not particularly related, and that question is not really dependent on the letter being fake. What would argue against tristero’s hypothesis is that this is far from the first time that this pope and the people around him have said something that was extremely offensive to a lot of people and then had this “What? That? Who? Us?” reaction. It just might be, as in the Reese quote, that they have a very poor understanding of how things appear to people outside the Vatican.
But I am, nonetheless, thinking about the amount of time I’ve spent this weekend thinking how outrageous such a sentiment is (certainly not all my time, but I’ve had several conversations in real life about it, as well as here), and wondering if some people hoped that in all that outrage, we’d forget about the victims.
It has worked the other way around for me, Chingona. It’s made me focus even more on the callous disregard the Catholic Church has for the victims of sexual abuse by their clergy. I hadn’t even considered the idea until you mentioned it and I can only hope that more people (and news outlets) have my reaction than yours.
chingona @43: no, you’re not. And Richard, before you wag a finger at chingona for being mean to the Church hierachry on Easter, pause for a moment and consider the enormous cyncism of using anti-Semitism as a club on behalf of the Pope during Passover.
I can only hope that more people (and news outlets) have my reaction than yours.
Okay. More clarification. My outrage was not primarily as a Jew or on behalf of Jews, and I am/was quite aware that the comparison not only casts the scrutiny the Church is under as somehow similar to the persecution of the Jews but also casts those engaging in the scrutiny – abuse victims and their advocates – as similar to those engaging in anti-Semitic violence. It insults the Jews by minimizing the consequences of anti-Semitism, but it really insults the abuse victims. I’ve never lost sight of that.
I will say that the media coverage I have read has primarily looked to the Jewish community for reaction, and I heard on the radio today that Cantalamessa apologized for hurting the sensitivities of Jews. No word on whether he apologized to abuse victims.
So in terms of media reaction, I think it has been more focused on the Jewish aspect of this, though not exclusively.
In terms of my own reaction, I think it has not been MORE focused on the Jewish aspect and I don’t think I have forgotten the victims at all, but it has been more focused on offensive words than the deeds that have lead to the current state of affairs. I read tristero as calling for us to remain focused on the deeds even as we criticize the offensive words – that is, not shift the criticism but expand the criticism.
In antisemitism, people take a general “Judaism is bad” view and from that, conclude that individual Jews are also bad.
In this case, people are taking the actions of specific individuals and from that are concluding that the supervising organization and the supervising individual are bad.
So comparing them isn’t just offensive, it’s wrong from a logical perspective. They simply aren’t equivalent; one goes up the specificity chain and the other goes down.
It’s like a company: If the boss is an asshole, that doesn’t mean the workers are assholes. But if enough of the workers are assholes–and if the boss knows about it and hires/keeps them anyway–you can probably bet the boss is an asshole, too.