A BIBLICAL NUMBER

114/227. My Book pp. 160-161. Post No. 1393.

MY COMMENT :

Back in business, earlier than expected. After two consecutive prostate-stints in the hospital, I came home yesterday, feeling no pain and rarin’ to go. This post, like the previous 113, was written more than a decade ago. I am now approaching fifty years as an atheist and have never regretted my decision to abandon both the priesthood and the illusions of faith.

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Forty winks, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the forty immortals of the French Academy, forty days of quarantine, the forty days of Noah’s Deluge, the Israelites’ forty years in the desert, Jesus fasting for forty days and forty nights. And it was, in 2008, exactly forty years since I checked in my capuche and my chasuble.

Numerologists and biblical exegetes could tell us what is so special for me about the number (or better, figure). But I can tell you what has been so special for me about the last four decades.

My papal dispensation from the priesthood, my marriage, our children (my divorce is another story), living in the States for ten years and in France for the last thirty (at time of writing). But those forty years – more than half my life – as a layman, after sixteen years as a Franciscan, including seven as a Catholic priest, have been literally a second life for me, beginning with ten years as a lay-theologian and the last thirty as an atheist. I keep quoting the Gospel text because it sums up my liberation : “The truth will make you free”. Forty years of freedom from meaningless celibacy, including thirty years of freedom from the illusions of faith.

RIDENDA RELIGIO

STAINS ON THE ALB

113/227. My Book pp. 159-160. Post No. 1392.

MY COMMENT :

We never imagined that priests we know could be put in prison. We know that many priests were alcoholics, but had no idea that so many were pedophiles. It is hard to imagine that Bishops, aware of their priests’ crimes, contented themselves with buying the silence of their victims and tranfering the culprits to another parish. Some stains are indelible.

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Napoleon Bonaparte, after his Waterloo, was exiled to Saint Helena, the British island-prison in the Southern Atlantic. Dr Barry Edward O’Meara, his Irish personal physician and surgeon, noted everything the Emperor told him during the three years they were together on St Helena, until he was sent back to London for having become a tad too francophile. He published “A Voice from St Helena. Napoleon in Exile” after the Emperor’s death in 1821. Napoleon’s official biographer however was the Count de Las Cases. Among the facts, reflections, opinions, personal and political experiences Napoleon dictated to the Count were his feelings of guilt and perhaps repentance at what he called “the stain on his uniform” : the criminal, unjustifiable execution in 1804 of the Royal Prince, the Duke of Enghien.

The Catholic clergy has recently had to admit, after initial attempts at cover-up and the purchasing of silence, the fact of priestly pedophilia. Dioceses have been bankrupted by the lawsuits they lost. Hundreds of priests are in prison for the crime of pedophilia. Pope Benedict XVI finally (2008, St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney) admitted his “shame” and that of the whole Church, in face of this stain on the alb of so many priests.

Lawyers, businessmen, surgeons, teachers, Boy Scout leaders, athletic coaches are never castigated as a group for this crime which some of them have no doubt committed. Priests are particularly vulnerable. After all, their vocation, status and pretensions of moral leadership set them apart from other professions. But to say that “pedophile priests” is a pleonasm is not only cruel but unjust. The vast majority of priests are irreproachable in this domain, and suffer almost as much as the victims, from the scandal caused by their criminal confreres.

Christ said something terribly severe about those who cause scandal : the gentle Jesus, who had adready whipped the money-changers out of the Temple, proclaimed that scandal-mongers deserved the Al Capone treatment : capital punishment by mill-stone-assisted drowning (the Capo di tutti Capi preferred boots-in-concrete). I have, of course, to wonder what Jesus would have proposed as punishment for the scandal which is my apostasy – and the publication of this book. Luckily He is definitively dead, and His divine “Father” never existed.

The law has put the pedophiliac priests in prison. Bishops, aware of their clergy’s failings, had contented themselves with transferring them to another parish. Truth, however, will out. And today priests will now, literally, not lay a finger on an altar-boy or Catholic school-girl, for fear of accusation.

Father, whether or not you are hetero or homo-sexual, whether or not your confessor in the seminary should have advised you to get the hell out of there, whether or not celibacy were abolished and you were allowed to marry, the fact is you have been put – or put yourself – on a pedestal where pederasty has no place. “Alb” means white. The slightest stain on it can be seen from afar. But surely your motivation is beyond the danger of being caught . . .

RIDENDA RELIGIO

HONORING THE BREACH

112/227. My Book p. 159. Post No. 1391.

MY COMMENT :

A mini-reflection on my decision to abandon not only the priesthood but religious faith itself.

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Many misunderstand the expression, but when Hamlet, “to the manner (of Danish drunken revelry) born”, voiced his objection to the practice as “more honor’d in the breach than the observance”, he meant that it is sometimes more honorable to break with traditional practices than to observe them. My decision to abandon not only the Franciscan Order and the priesthood, but Catholic belief and practice, was, I believe, as honorable as it was difficult. Thanks be to Whatever, I somehow found the lucidity and the courage to be true to mine own self.

RIDENDA RELIGIO

AMADEUS AND SALIERI’S CONFESSION

111/227. My Book pp. 158-159. Post No. 1390.

MY COMMENT :

The story of Salieri’s confession made me think of my own experience as a confessor. I find now not only the credulity of my penitents, but my own as their vehicle of God’s forgiveness, embarrassingly over the top.

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During my seven years as a priest, I heard many confessions. I never heard one like Salieri’s. I, like the confessor in the movie, was a young, inexperienced, naïve priest, with no experience of the real world, having been kept out of it since the age of sixteen. Now, ten years later (at time of writing), I was expected to hear confessions from children, young adults, married men and women, old people, Nuns, Brothers and Priests much older than I – in a word, anyone who knelt on the other side of my Confessional Box.

Salieri would have been too much for me, as he was for the poor priest in the movie. The confessions I heard never contained the dramatic circumstances of the murderous hatred and jealousy that Salieri bore towards the “divinely” talented Mozart.

But it continues to amaze me that I could have for so long accepted the myth that God had commissioned me, in His stead, to forgive my naïve penitents. Does anyone still believe that a priest can forgive sin ? That the pathetic cleric, called to hear Salieri’s confession, could have absolved him from the sins that destroyed the genius that was Amadeus ? Does anyone believe anymore in sin, in the priestly power of forgiveness, or even in . . . God. I don’t.

RIDENDA RELIGIO

” THE APOSTLE “

110/227. My Book p. 158. Post No. 1389.

MY COMMENT :

This is about a movie which tells the very human story of a Pentecostal preacher whose personal conviction developed into total intolerance of anyone daring to question the faith.

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The vast majority of priests, pastors, preachers and even some televangelists are not psychotic, pedophiliac, crazy, deranged or dangerous. They are, for the most part, respectable men and women, sane, sincere, dedicated, true believers in what they say and preach.

Robert Duvall’s 1997 movie, “The Apostle”, which he directed and in which he starred, reveals however a pathological case of a Protestant Pentecostal preacher, doing the Lord’s work since the age of twelve, confronted with the adultery of his wife, the loss of his children and the betrayal of his congregation. Enough to send anyone dangerously round the bend, especially in the Southern states of the U.S. where just about everyone carries a loaded gun.

He survived the crisis and went on to build his new country church and assemble a new congregation. The flashing neon sign on the front of the church, “One-Way Road to Heaven”, had an arrow, pointing upwards. He always looked up as he prayed (God is Up There). His church succeeded, thanks to his charismatic preaching, the distribution of goodies, free bus services, baptism by immersion in the local river, and the support of a local religious radio station. At one point he confronted a dissident and beat the hell out of him. The film ends with the preacher, the “Apostle”, arrested for first-degree murder.

Such members of the clergy, happily remain the exception. Atheists may not appreciate the credulity of church-members and the promotion by their leaders of the delusion of an imagined deity, but they continue to hope that one day some, at least, of these “apostles” will discover the truth.

RIDENDA RELIGIO

ANTI – CLERICALISM

109/227. My Book pp. 156-158. Post No. 1388.

MY COMMENT :

Compared with its past history, the Catholic Church neither enjoys its former power and prestige nor suffers the prejudice and persecution it once knew. The world is today largely indifferent to the Church, its aging clergy and diminishing congregations. Priests are no longer revered shepherds of their flocks but often ignored relics of a past age. They are misfits, victims of the credulity that once attracted them to the priesthood. They deserve our pity rather than scorn. We should not shoot at ambulances.

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The clergy, both Christian and Jewish, has long been opposed by anti-clericals. Buddhism is not a religion; it does not worship a God. It has monks, begging bonzes and the Dalai-Lama, but does not claim to have a clergy. And Buddhists still believe that the D.L. is going to be replaced by a (necessarily) Tibetan infant, who will recognize his predecessor’s personal effects, and therefore be declared his legitimate reincarnation. Even mainline religions’ superstitions fall short of this supreme example of credulity. Muslims also hesitate to call their imams clergy. So let’s settle for a broad definition : clergy are people who have been chosen, accepted, consecrated, ordained for a professional life dedicated to the propagation and liturgical celebration of their faith. (As a lay Director of Religious Education, formerly ordained as a priest, I did not, after my dispensation from the priesthood, belong any longer to the clergy. But the distinction is, shall we say, for a Religious Education Director, more sacramental than real . . . ).

The point is that professional promoters of religion expose themselves to often vicious, sometimes fatal, opposition. The revolutionary French are no doubt the classic examples – though later Communists became serious rivals. Beyond 1789 there is the expulsion from France of religious orders at the beginning of the 20th century. The anglosaxon world is still scandalized by this on-going and traditional, though less violent, Gallic anti-clericalism. Americans, Australians and Brits (along with German and Alsatian French) tend still to pay respect and reverence, and often tax-breaks, to the Reverends of the different faiths of established religion. “Father”, “Rabbi”, “Reverend”, “Pastor” are titles of honor. In France, “Monsieur le Curé”, “mon Père”, “Monseigneur”, “Votre Eminence” are titles used today only by the minuscule “faithful remnant”, less than 10% of France’s Catholics.

Why are some people so anti-clerical ? The first and most obvious reason is that people who believe that God does not exist cannot accept a subsidized, indolent community of clergy, who promote, and make a living at promoting, belief in and allegiance to a non-existent deity.

As an ex-priest, I believe we should try to understand the clergy’s point of view. Many of them are good men, gentle-men, generous men (and occasionally women), sincere believers in their faith and vocation. Many dedicate themselves to offering disinterested help to people in need – spiritual, psychological and even financial need. They deserve our respect, even if we must regret that in spite of their education – or because of it – they continue to believe and promote belief in a God who never existed.

Of course, some of them are given to gluttony, sloth and the cowardice and hypocrisy of admitting that they do not (any longer) believe what they continue to preach. The implications of such an admission would be more than most of them would want, or be able, to endure. “To dig I am not able, to beg I am ashamed”. The lot of the ex-priest, over-educated but devoid of marketable skills, is not an enviable one.

A minority are also criminals, pedophiles. But the clerical profession has no monopoly on this particular vice. The problem is, of course, that as someone said, a stain on a priest’s alb is more visible than the same stain on the suit of a businessman, a professional, a teacher, or the uniform of a scout-master.

Many non-believers are often unfair to the clergy. I like to hope that my itinerary and reflections might invite my fellow-atheists to think through their reasons for anti-clericalism, and put, as the French say, a little water in the wine of their outright condemnation of often well-meaning but deluded religious leaders.

RIDENDA RELIGIO

FORTY YEARS IN THE PRIESTHOOD

108/227. My Book pp. 154-156. Post No. 1387.

MY COMMENT :

An open letter to my contemporaries still stuck in the priesthood. They deserve our pity. I checked in my chasuble at age 31. They are all too old to do that now. They have become totally dependent on the Church they served and continue to serve. Can they admit, at least to themselves, that they should have done what I did ? Even if they do, they are prisoners of their pusillanimity. It would be cruel of us to put salt into their open sore, and unpardonable of me to gloat.

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Dear Reverend Father,

You have been wandering in the desert for the last four decades. You’re lost, and you don’t even have a Moses to guide, encourage and lead you out. Forty years ago (time of writing) I abandoned the priesthood. The final step – atheism – took me another ten long years. It is no doubt too late for you, dear colleague, ordained like me in the sixties, to put the last forty years behind you, and achieve like me freedom from the illusions of a supposed, divinely inspired sacerdotal vocation.

None of us will live much longer. I think four score and ten is a reasonable limit for most of us (if I make eighty, I’ll accept your congratulations). But seriously (I was going to say “honest to God”), before you die, how do you feel about having stuck with it so long ? I could have been in your mocassins, Franciscan sandals or sacerdotal shoes. I got out when I was thirty-one (OK, the final break was at forty-one, when I “abandoned the faith”.) You are too old now. You cannot survive financially without the pension, health-care and retirement-lodging provided by your employer, the Church. You cannot afford, after all those years, to throw away the privileges you have acquired. You need the Diocese (or your Order) and its protection. You cannot count on your parishioners, who are as old as you are. You can count only on diocesan funds (or those of your religious order) to look after you till you die.

But before you settle into a more or less comfortable, secure, medically supported environment, have you the courage to ask whether your last forty years make any sense ? You don’t have to tell anyone. You don’t need to write a book, even an article, or a letter to the “Catholic Weekly” or even a Parish Bulletin. But to respect the honesty you spent your life preaching, can you, at least “sub rosa”, confidentially, between you and me and the gate-post, admit to yourself that you should have hung up your chasuble years ago ?

Meantime, don’t do anything rash. You missed the bus, that’s all. I was one of the ten thousand lucky priests to have been able, forty years ago, to give myself a life as a layman, a husband and a father, Father. I would thank God for it, if He happened to exist.

Dear Father – it’s a bit odd that I should continue to address you like that, but we both come from a long (if not always New Testament-approved) tradition . . . All this might sound to you like “schadenfreude”, gloating over my good luck, lording it over you for your blindness and lack of courage. I must admit, in your place, I would not much appreciate what you have just read. Let sleeping dogs lie. “Primum non nocere”. In France we say you should not shoot at ambulances. Your life has been difficult and these last decades frustrating enough, not to have to listen to a former priest declare that you have wasted the last forty years of your life.

I could have omitted this Reflection. But its raison d’être, Father, is not really you. Your future, like mine, is behind you. Your life and mine are what we have made them. Thousands of parishioners are grateful to you for your unselfish service, for reinforcing their faith, for giving them reasons for living and hoping, for providing them with meaning for their lives and even their death. (We may not agree that all this is, in my view, “sine fundamento in re” (“without any foundation in reality”), as we used to say in the seminary. You continued to proclaim myths. I decided to tell the truth. These are intimately personal perceptions, personal decisions. I respect yours. I hope you respect mine.) You fed the poor, you helped the needy, you visited the sick, you offered a vision to the living and consolation to those grieving the loss of their loved ones. You have been a servant of God and of His people.

No, Father, I do not want to plunge you into despair. I simply want to warn future generations not to make the mistake you and I made. If this Reflection gives pause for thought to even one young man who imagines he has a “vocation” to the priesthood, it will have been worth the effort, if not the unfortunate cost and regrettable collateral damage to you. We are – or should be – the Last of the Mohicans. We owe it to young candidates for the priesthood to help them to wake up before it is too late. I don’t expect you to accept or even understand all this. In a way, so much the better – for you. I will perhaps have succeeded in dissuading some of those tempted to follow us into the dead-end street which is the sexless, meaningless priesthood, but not in destroying your illusions. Meantime, enjoy your retirement. You deserve it.

RIDENDA RELIGIO

THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

107/227. My Book pp. 153-154. Post No. 1386.

MY COMMENT :

Foreseeing the future is largely guesswork. Our track-record has been far from accurate. Few pundits foresaw how quickly after Vatican 2 the Catholic Church seemed to contract a terminal illness. This has created an existential challenge for its aging clergy.

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Futurology has to be the most inexact of the inexact sciences. I saw a documentary once, made about the time I was born (1937). It purported to reveal what the world would be like ages later, in . . . 1960 ! (Predictions are safest when there is at least a twenty-year gap.) But seeing the movie in 1970 confirmed my view, that as others have said before me, the future is written nowhere. The fantasies of the futurist film were laughable exaggerations of scientific progress, predicted to revolutionize communication, travel and the quality of life in ways that still do not exist.

No one in 1937 foresaw, after the imminent Second World War, phenomena like the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism in 1989. But no one imagined either the creation of the Internet or of the Information Technology on which we have become totally dependent. No one foresaw the birth of religious terrorism or the ecological disaster which may destroy us all. No one foresaw either, up till 1968, the beginning of the end of traditional Christianity, or at least of Catholicism. No one in the Catholic Church expected religious orders in the Western world to have no novices, the clergy to join the list of endangered, soon to be extinct, species, and churches to be transformed into discotheques and seminaries, convents and monasteries into luxury hotels, appartment blocks and management training centers.

An aging clergy lingers on. Catholic diocesan financial priorities, when they are not concerned with (covert or overt, court-ordered) payments to the victims of clerical pedophilia, have become retirement plans for the moribund clergy. Religious orders like the Franciscans, devoid of indigenous novices, place their hope in “vocations” from countries like Poland, Vietnam and Brazil, less exposed to the theological tsunami that has virtually demolished traditional Christian belief and practice in much of the West.

It is a tough time for the clergy. So many septuagenarians, like me (at the time of writing), gave their lives to the practice and propagation of their faith, but, different from me, are still members of the clergy, committed, if not condemned, to seeing their choice through to the bitter end. Let us spare a thought for them in their plight. Most of them feel it is too late. They have no choice but to stay with their commitment. How on earth they can make sense of it beats me. Many of them have, no doubt, stopped trying.

Pity is not a noble sentiment. But I pity my former confreres, stuck in the clerical web, knowing that they are the Last of the Mohicans. Small consolation that, in the future, there could be a Christian religious renaissance to rival in vitality the present vigor of Islamic faith. In the meantime, their last lonely years will put their faith to the test. If ever they read this book, they might just discover that, however belated, their liberation (at least in what they call “the internal forum”) is still possible. Many are called, but few are likely to “come out” and manifest their unbelief.

Father, if you still believe, fine. If you don’t, do yourself a favor, and admit it – at least to yourself.

RIDENDA RELIGIO

HOW COULD YOU ?

106/227. My Book pp. 152-153. Post No. 1385.

MY COMMENT :

Many defrocked priests retain and continue to practise their faith. I did, for a full ten years, before honesty compelled me to recognize the illusions of religious credulity and to dedicate my life to sharing the illumination of atheism.

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I heard the question in 1968. How could I dare betray my vocation ? How could I dare renounce my vows ? How could I dare bring shame on my family, friends, confreres and the “faithful” whom I had served as a priest for seven years ? Some well-meaning believers thought to destabilize me with their convoluted logic : we are married; divorce for us as Catholics is unthinkable. How can you dare to divorce . . . God ? (!!)

It was a different world then (forty years ago – time of writing), both in the Church and out of it. After all, I was simply, humbly, respectfully asking for a papal dispensation and the “privilege” of getting married. I was not trying to rock the boat, Peter’s barque or anyone else’s. I even wanted to continue my career within the Church as a religious educator.

Ten years later, it was a different story. I abandoned ship entirely. I did not, however, declare war on the Church, God or religion in general. “A low profile” would best describe my attitude at that time. I had to face the challenges of physical and financial survival for me and my family. Somehow I managed. And it is only relatively recently that I have decided to “come out”. A self-confessed heterosexual who tries hard to accept the different sexual innate orientations recognized by contemporary society (difficult to shake off past indoctrination), my “coming out” is a declaration of atheism and the rejection of religion and all it stands for.

You ask, “How could you ?” My friends, how could I not ?

RIDENDA RELIGIO

CHAPTER ELEVEN : PRIESTHOOD AND MINISTRY

CABBAGES, KINGS AND CLERICAL HOMOSEXUALITY

105/227. My Book pp. 151-152. Post No. 1384.

MY COMMENT :

The principal Christian churches, Catholicism and Anglicanism, spend an inordinate amount of time discussing homosexuality and notably that of their own clergy, rather than sensitizing their flocks to the ecological, economic and existential challenges facing mankind.

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Among the vast number of subjects of mind-boggling unimportance reported in the Press, surely the debate raging in the Anglican Church about homosexual priests and bishops – the cover-story in TIME, June 18, 2007 – must take first prize. Catholic – and other – clerical pedophilia is another story. Enlightened societies have long since recognized that homosexuality is neither a crime nor a reason for social apartheid. Pedophilia, on the other hand, a scandalous euphemism for the sexual violation of children, is a criminal act if not a crime against humanity.

While traditional Catholics, Anglicans and Protestants may have difficulty accepting the option of the practice of sodomy between married or unmarried heterosexuals or homosexuals – in view of their Bible’s forthright condemnation, curiously denied by His Grace, the Archbishop of Canterbury – in the long run it simply does not matter whether their clergy men and clergy women are actively practising homosexuals or not.

The Churches have been notorious for their hang-ups on sex. Ever since moral evaluations of male masturbation and “coitus interruptus” (“interrupted intercourse”) have been based on the supposed “homunculi”, the “little men”, in sperm, and the condemnation of contraception based on the benighted view of the primary and secondary ends of marriage (the God-given, never to be impeded, purpose of each and every act of intercourse is procreation; pleasure is, at best – it was once roundly condemned – a secondary, tolerated by-product), Christian sexual Moral Theology has been a permanent anachronism, not to say absurdity.

So, really, does it matter whether the clergy is forbidden sexual relations, period ! (Catholic clerical celibacy), allowed to marry a member of the opposite sex (Anglican and Protestant mainline practice), or have intimate relationships with member of their own sex ?

Rowan Williams needs a modern Alexander the Great to sever the Gordian knot his Communion has created. The debate will continue, schism will ensue, and we all don’t give a damn. Let them continue to sing their hymns, celebrate their sumptuous liturgy, lull the credulous into belief in their contradictory “moral” principles and illusions about an after-life. The rest of us have more serious concerns : how to save the planet from our reckless indifference and irresponsible pollution, how to end, or at least reduce, hunger, war, poverty, inequality,disease and injustice, how to ensure a human existence for humankind. Let the clergy continue to debate whether vaginal or anal intercourse is approved by a non-existent deity. Such surrealistic ideas deserve our respect and tolerance as much as those of the Flat Earth Society.

RIDENDA  RELIGIO