BroadSnark

I’ve been thinking a lot about how you determine whether or not something is worth saving/fixing/reforming – whatever.

What got me thinking about this was a book I read called A World Without Women. David Noble, the guy who wrote the book, wanted to examine why science was so inhospitable to women. What he found was that, contrary to our ideas about science and religion being in direct opposition to each other, science grew up within the Catholic Church. And science inherited the Church’s misogyny.

There is this idea that old institutions are simply a reflexion of old-fashioned values or of the culture of their time. Some institutions are just lagging behind a bit. But that idea is often false. Plenty of institutions get more unjust over time. More importantly, as in the case of the Catholic Church, some institutions created themselves in explicit opposition to more egalitarian organizations of their time.

Women were not barred from early Christianity. In fact, they had prominent roles in many of the early Christian sects. Early Christian services were frequently held in homes, where women had considerable influence. Clergy were typically married, their wives involved in the church. Wealthy women were church benefactors. And many early cloisters were double monasteries where men and women, sharing a belief that the soul has no gender, took vows of celibacy and studied together. These double monasteries were often led by an abbess.

The Catholic Church changed all of that. No longer were services held in homes, but the church became the house of god where elaborate, secretive, and exclusive displays of ceremony took place. The Church forbade clergy to marry in order to protect its property and to further distance the clergy from the lay people. Double monasteries were destroyed or emptied of women by Abbots, like Conrad of Marchtal, who made no secret of their contempt:

Recognizing that the wickedness of women is greater than all the other wickedness of the world, and that their is no anger like that of women, and that the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women, [we] have unanimously decreed for the safety of our souls, no less than for that of our bodies and goods, that we will on no account receive any more sisters to the increase of our perdition, but will avoid them like poisonous animals.

Women were piece by piece removed from the life of the church until it became a completely male institution, modeled in large part on the Roman army. Church leaders began to impose hierarchies and rules. They invented and defined heresy.  And they defined heresy as woman.  Women, they claimed, were responsible for original sin.  Women were a corrupting influence.  Women were witches.  Religious men weren’t just ordered not to marry women.  They were ordered not to have any contact with them at all.

In his Institutes Cassian himself warned future monks that ‘where the Devil, with subtle cunning, has insinuated into our hearts the memory of a woman, beginning with our mother, our sisters, or certain pious women, we should as quickly as possible expel these memories for fear that, if we linger on them too long, the tempter may seize the opportunity to lead us unwittingly to think about other women.

So given all of that, given how the Catholic Church was born in hatred of women, how could any woman actually be a part of it? And how could women actually think that there is any possibility of reforming an institution where more than a quarter of the canons are expressly directed against women? It boggles my mind.

That is really the fundamental conservative vs. radical tension, is it not? Even “progressive” conservatives want to save the institution. They think reform can work, no matter how evil the institution, no matter what bloodbath it might have been formed in. But radicals are willing to dying to smash those institutions and start over.

Are all institutions worth saving? If not, how do we decide which ones are? Aren’t we kidding ourselves to think that an institution born to oppress a group of people can be saved? Wouldn’t that apply to genocidal countries as much as misogynist religious institutions?

I really liked this post over at Reconcile.  It’s time we start talking about higher education.  We shouldn’t just accept “get an education” as an answer to all our social ills.

And speaking of school, sometimes (just for a moment) I forget the horror that it was to be a teenager.  Then I read an article like this and that feeling of being strangled by socialization comes flooding back.

May as well stay on the subject of being oppressed in school.  I’m still livid about those Innocence Project kids being targeted by the prosecutors office.  I don’t know how she sleeps at night.

Finally, if you hadn’t heard, the DC Catholic Archdiocese says they will stop providing social services in DC if DC passes the same-sex marriage law (which also requires them not to discriminate).  So typical.

There are a lot of things that piss me off about the catholic church, but the worst has to be the church’s attitude toward contraception.

One of the main reasons the church gives for their position on contraception is natural law. As they explain it on the Catholic Answers website, “contraception is wrong because it’s a deliberate violation of the design God built into the human race, often referred to as ‘natural law.’ The natural law purpose of sex is procreation.”

So, by that logic, you might think the church would be against anything unnatural. Yet they aren’t.

Aren’t houses unnatural protection against the elements, an elemental prophylactic of sorts? Yet the pope lives in a house, a rather large one.

Aren’t cars unnatural? Yet, the pope has his own specially designed one.

Isn’t medical care unnatural? Yet the pope sees a doctor. When John Paul was shot they didn’t just let nature take its course.

Tsunamis are natural. Plagues are natural. Dying from poisonous snake bites or peanut allergies is natural. Should we do nothing to protect ourselves? Should we let nature rule no matter what the consequences?

The catholic church apparently thinks so when it comes to sex. If children are brought into this world to starve to death, so be it. If people do not use condoms and die from AIDS, so be it.

Thankfully, despite the catholic church’s (and other anti-abortion religious group’s) position on contraception, most practitioners take a more logical approach. Lets hope they can have some influence.

Today, in his Christmas address, the pope asked for people to work together to solve our problems “in a spirit of authentic solidarity.”

I thought about using this post to rant about someone who would call for authentic solidarity out of one side of his mouth while vilifying large swaths of humanity by talking about the evil dangers of homosexuality out of the other.

I thought about marveling at the shear audacity of someone who can add the accumulation of wealth to the deadly sins that will take you straight to hell, all the while sitting in the midst of thousands of years of accumulated riches.

I thought about a little diatribe on how many human beings have died of aids because they won’t use a condom, as the pope thinks birth control is a sin. Or perhaps on how many women have died because of back alley abortions or because a doctor in Nicaragua suspected a miscarriage might have been an abortion and didn’t want to risk prison.

I thought about recounting the history of Catholicism in the world. I thought about the crusades, the inquisition, forcible conversions, decimation of indigenous culture, appeasement of nazis, priests abusing children and concealment of their crimes…

But then I thought, who gives a damn what the pope thinks? The pope looks like what he is, a decrepit relic.

Catholicism is on the decline all over. In the United States, Catholic numbers have held somewhat steady due to an influx of immigrants from places like Mexico, but native-born Americans are dropping the religion. And with anti-immigrant hysteria and a declining economy keeping immigrants away, that number is bound to decline further.

Spain, once a bastion of Catholicism, is going the way of the rest of Europe and leaving the church behind. Latin America has been hemorrhaging Catholics. The number of nuns and monks in the world is on decline. The number of Catholic priests is on decline. And Catholic school enrollment is down. The drop-off in the United States has been precipitous, causing all sorts of ogeda in the conservative community. In fact, according to the Vatican themselves, Islam has now overtaken Catholicism as the worlds most practiced religion.

So who really cares what the pope thinks. Not even practicing Catholics pay much attention his dictates anymore.

You would think 1,000 years of intolerant rule would be enough, but the Catholic church continues to interfere in matters of state all around the world.

It has come out that it was the Archbishop in San Francisco who requested and received help from the Mormon church to pass California’s Proposition 8 (defining marriage as between a man and a woman). The Mormon church then sent a call out to its members to raise money and donate time to make sure the measure passed.

In Nicaragua, it was a Catholic church led movement that enacted a complete ban on all abortions. The ban, a violation of international law, imposes harsh criminal penalties on doctors who perform abortions and has made the medical community afraid to treat women who have miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies. Within a year, the ban had cost at least 80 women their lives.

The Catholic church tells people who to vote for. They rarely say outright the candidate by name, as that will get them into some hot water. However, they tell their followers to vote based on one issue and one issue only – abortion. If Hitler were against abortion, and his opponent for it, they would say vote for Hitler.

The fact that our current anti-abortion president is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands in war doesn’t matter. Whether or not the next leader’s policies will help save some of the tens of thousands who die every day of starvation doesn’t matter.

The Catholic church has almost always been on the wrong side of human rights – from the inquisition to appeasement of Hitler to the continuous subjugation of women. And they – the people who brought us an epidemic of horrific and concealed sex abuse – want to dictate the morals of our governments?

How dare they.