THE DEATH – BLOW TO SACRAMENTAL CONFESSION ?

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Archbishop Hart, Australian Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse, Seal of Confession

“The report recommends there be no exception, excuse, protection or privilege from the offence granted to clergy for failing to report information disclosed in connection with a religious confession.”

This is one of 85 recommendations made by the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (Sydney Morning Herald, August 15, 2017 –  page one !).  It would make failing to report information about child sexual abuse disclosed in confession a criminal offence.  Not surprisingly, Archbishop Hart, president of the Australian Bishops’ Conference, said religious confessions should remain protected.

Does this cover murder ?  Readers may remember my story about the young priest revealing that his first penitent had confessed murdering someone, while in the pub nearby a man at the bar was telling his mates that he had been the new curate’s first penitent . . .

More seriously, priests never felt obliged to “break the seal of confession” by reporting to the authorities ANYTHING they had heard while administering the Sacrament of Penance.  “Bless me, Father, for I am a serial killer and feel impelled to murder a ninth victim”.  Would  a confessor report that to the police ?  Never in a million years !  So why expect that forcing revelation to police of the identity of a pedophile penitent (presuming the priest knew or could acquire his/her identity) could be accepted by the Church ?  Would Rome or Catholics anywhere accept legal condemnation of a confessor discovered to have covered up such crimes ?  And if a law were made to oblige confessors to reveal the crime of pederasty – as the laws in certain countries oblige the medical profession to do – why not murder, theft, embezzlement, tax-evasion, wife-beating, burglary ? – just about every crime in the book.  Only confessors absolving penitents for impure thoughts or telling white lies would be off the hook.

There is, however, a positive side to all  this.  As it is hard to imagine that a criminal guilty of any crime would willingly confess it to a priest if he knew that the Law obliged the latter to report it to the police – unless he were already in prison or perhaps on death-row – many people might think twice before going to confession.  How solid is that seal of confession ?

The demise of the illusion that priests can forgive us in the name of a non-existent God is a consummation devoutly to be wished.  The Catholic Church, unique among the world’s religions, has for too long made this arrogant and absurd claim.  I am embarrassed to have to admit that for seven years I never questioned that claim as I ended each confession I heard with the Latin of “I absolve thee in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost”.  And people thought that God, through me, had wiped their slate clean !  I was naïve enough to believe it myself.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

 

“HIDDEN UNDER A BUSHEL”

An anonymous, and of course unidentifiable, reader has just posted a comment (the 10th) on “The Unreachable Stars”, published on October 5, 2016.  As it is likely to pass entirely unnoticed, I am taking the liberty and first-time initiative of drawing your attention to it.  Readers do not read only the latest posts but obviously roam through the other 640 posts previously published.  Whether comments on them are favorable or unfavorable, it would be a pity if they are never read.  So from now on, I will draw your attention – using this same title – to such comments on previous posts.  This one is particularly interesting and well-written.  Thank you, Fazal !

” O’MEARA INVEIGLED ME “

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"A Voice from St Helena", "Longwood", "Napoleon's Last Island", "The Briars", Barry Edward O'Meara, Betsy Balcombe, Booker Prize, Napoleon, St Helena, Tom Keneally

The quotation is from the preface of a recent book by Australia’s most famous contemporary author, Booker Prize winner (“Schindler’s List”), Tom Keneally.  The book, described by “The Australian” as “one of the most enjoyable, high-spirited and technically accomplished works of a long career” – its author lauded by “The Guardian” (“With his trademark verve and impishness, few can match him as a storyteller”) – “Napoleon’s Last Island” is a fictionalized insight into the six-year terminal imprisonment of the Emperor (“General Bonaparte” . . .) on the island of St Helena, where for the first three years Barry Edward O’Meara was his personal physician.

Betsy Balcombe was a daughter in a family that lived in “The Briars”, where Napoleon stayed while “Longwood” was being remodelled to house him and his suite.  Now a young married woman who as an adolescent had befriended “the Ogre”, she is the fictional author of this inside story of the final years of the imperial prisoner on his “last island”.

Dr Barry O’Meara is a major figure in her account.  Keneally read Barry’s best-selling two-volume work, “A Voice from St Helena”, and admits he was “inveigled” by the Irish doctor to write as though he were himself the young woman, formerly the brash thirteen-year old friend and frequent visitor of Napoleon at Longwood, where they actually played blindman’s buff together !

I don’t think that I, a distant relative of Dr O’Meara, have ever inveigled anyone into doing anything.  But I have been, more than once, accused of trying to do so – and worse.  I am, after all, a militant atheist committed to converting Believers on the Brink to enjoy liberation from their illusions of religious belief.  But there has never been anything in my book or my blog that could honestly be described as “inveigling”.  I have no converts who have ever complained that I conned them out of their faith.  In fact, it remains to be proven that I have any converts at all . . .

But I am determined to keep on keeping on proclaiming “Ridenda Religio” and trying to get people who have already had serious doubts about their own credulity, to go the whole hog and recognize that religious beliefs, rules and rituals are total nonsense.  I have been called a “sledge-hammer”, an outrageous cynic and a dangerous, disrespectful destroyer of the faith that offers meaning, comfort and hope to believers.  To all this I plead guilty, but NOT to inveigling anybody.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO      

ANTICIPATION

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"A Kid from Kogarah", "Great Expectations", Blue Mountains, Carss Park, Faithful Remnant, Fear of Flying, Great Ocean Road, Kogarah Bay, Manly, Pearly Gates

The day after tomorrow will be a big day for me.  Every two years I return to visit family and friends in Australia.  This is the third time I will be accompanied by a granddaughter and her family, to celebrate her tenth birthday.  My first trip home, after an absence of seventeen years, was in 1981.  Will this be, at age 80, thirty-six years later, my last ?  The question augments the anticipation and excitement for what may be my final flight.

No, I am not afraid of flying.  Have had a scare or three in my time, but my job as a trainer of managers in a multinational corporation took me to the U.S., countries all over Europe and some in Asia, so often, that even the long haul Down Under, twenty hours in the air, does not make me wonder whether my plane will crash but what latest movies it is offering.

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder”.  “Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure”.  The clichés apply.  I do wonder whether this trip will live up to my Great Expectations.  Biennial family reunions imply encounter with the phenomenon of growing up – and growing older.  Some of the younguns will now share the champagne, as we fête the arrival of newborn Anabella, the latest addition to the clan of which I have become patriarch-in-waiting (my brother-in-law is a nicely-preserved nonagenarian).  All three of my brothers and one of my sisters, present at previous parousias, will not be attending this one.  Equally absent from other gatherings will be schoolmates and confreres no longer available to share nourishment and nostalgia at our Sans Souci luncheons and Franciscan Chapters of Mat(e)s (exegesis on request).  Catching up on news from survivors and the Faithful Remnant will involve surprises,  pleasant and unpleasant.  It will be no surprise for family and friends to discover that I have not improved since last time.

We look forward to events like these.  Some others we dread.  Anything, we say, could happen and probably will.  I will be discovering places I’ve never seen before, like Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, and revisiting places I have known and loved since I was a Kid from Kogarah in the forties and fifties, like N.S.W.’s Blue Mountains and above all the ‘Arbour, the Quai, the Bridge, the ferries and Manly, seven miles from Sydney and a thousand miles from care.

For all sorts of reasons, this could be my last trip home (though I have a strong feeling it won’t).  It is certain at least that I won’t need all the fingers on one of my hands to count the maximum.  I am resigned to the fact of both the end of my career as a traveler – and as a pilgrim and stranger on this earth.  When I first left Australia in 1964 to study Theology in Paris, I had no idea what the future would hold.  I did know – surprise, surprise ! – that one day I would die.  The difference now is that I now know that when I do, that will be it !  I no longer anticipate meeting Peter at the Pearly Gates.  I will settle for meeting Anabella at Carss Park on Kogarah Bay.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

 

IT’S ABOUT TIME !

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"Bull-in-a-china-shop", Bastille Day, Cardinal Pell, Casey Affleck, Euthanasia, Luck, Movie "A Ghost Story", President Trump, Teletransportation

This week’s (July 24) TIME magazine carries major articles on North Korea, the G-20, Hong Kong and China, Mosul in Irak, the new Irish P.M., the Trials of Trump, Obamacare, Physical Fitness, as well as the usual  book and movie reviews and celebrity interviews.  But this week I was struck by a number of minor items – which we speak of in this Blog.  I don’t mean to brag but Blog-material in TIME would indicate that “Blind Faith : Blind Folly” is no stranger to current affairs, some of which are discussed in the Blog … before TIME !  Here are a baker’s half-dozen items which readers of this Blog will immediately recognize :

1. Cardinal Pell goes on trial for pederasty on July 26 in Melbourne.  (page 6)
2. Chinese scientists have proven that teletransportation works.  (page 11)
3. The winner of two  $1 million dollar prizes and another of $50,000 in a state lottery during one month in 2014 called his luck “a blessing from the Lord”.  (page 11)
4. Parents and physicians and facing the quandary of euthanasia for an incurable eleven-month old baby who cannot breathe on his own, hear or move his arms or legs and who suffers from seizures that require medication to control.  (page 19)
5. “The surprisingly peaceful origins of Bastille Day” reveals what you read in the post of July 16.  (page 21)
6. The six-page article on Trump concludes with reference to the President’s “bull-in-a-china-shop style”, recalling my July 10 (!) suggestion that the cliché may soon morph into a “Trump-in-the-Oval-Office”.  (page 31)
7. Casey Affleck’s movie, “A Ghost Story”, makes the reviewer wonder : “Who knows if there is life after death ?” – a constant theme in our Blog.        RIDENDA      RELIGIO

IS RELIGIOUS FAITH MADNESS ?

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"Mens sana in corpore sano", "The God Delusion", Al-Qaida, Bertrand Russell, DAECH, Divine Inspiration, Inerrancy, Jehovah Witnesses, Jim Jones, Real Presence, Richard Dawkins, Robert Pirsig, William Harwood

 

Some of us are a little too quick on the draw when we say some people are mad.  We usually mean “eccentric”, “irresponsible”, “outrageous” – but not “mentally ill”.  It is common enough, however, for atheists to consider religious faith true madness.  After all, it fits the definitions.  The title of Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” was deliberately chosen by the author, for whom a delusion is a persistent false belief in the face of strong contradictory evidence (or, I would suggest with Bertrand Russell, lack of sufficient evidence).  Dawkins seems to agree with Robert Pirsig’s statement in “Lila” (1991) : “When one suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity.  When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion”.  He would no doubt also agree with William Harwood who said :  “The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence, whereas insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence”.

We atheists, but also non-atheists, members of mainline Christian churches, agree that the world is full of religious nutters.  Pentecostal snake-handlers, tent-revival enthusiasts conned by charismatic, “miracle”-working preachers like Jim Jones and his credulous congregation of nine hundred willing consumers of poisoned Kool-Aid, the “martyrs” of Daech and Al-Qaida – their name is Legion.  But we all know people who believe in the “Real Presence” of Jesus in a wafer of bread, in the divine inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible and the Koran, in the reality of life after death – people who otherwise are as rational as we are.  We seem to make an exception for them.  The vast majority of mankind has some sort of religious belief.  Maybe Robert Pirsig was right . . .

Whether or not we consider believers mad, there is clearly no point in broadcasting the fact.  It is a perfect dialogue-stopper.  Trading insults never won arguments and succeeds only in perpetuating a dialogue of the deaf.  It is far more effective when talking to a Jehovah Witness who refuses a blood-transfusion for his child because God forbids it, to ask “How do you know that ?”  The question has, in fact, universal application : the inspiration of Scriptures, the Resurrection of Jesus, the infallibility of Scripture and even of the Pope – the question applied to all such beliefs puts the monkey on the believer’s back.  We don’t have to disprove such beliefs, including belief in the existence of God; the burden of proof is on the non-atheist.

Accusing believers of insanity is water on a duck’s back.  I was one (a believer, not a duck) for fully half my life.  I would never have admitted that I was nuts.  I may right now be on my way to precocious senescent dementia, Alzheimer’s, but I’m not there yet.  I’ve always had a “mens sana”, though not necessarily in a “corpore sano”.  I guess the reason believers dismiss the accusation of insanity is that there are billions of perfectly normal people like them.  They can’t all be nut-cases.  Objectively, their beliefs are unfounded and irrational.  We have to help them realize that.  It won’t happen by telling them they’re crazy.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

 

L’AUSTRALIE : MA PATRIE ; LA FRANCE : MA LIBERTE

I am writing this on July 14, France’s national holiday, chosen in 1880 not only in commemoration of the Fall of the Bastille in 1789 but also as the Feast of the Federation, the 1790 first birthday of the Republic.  The annual military parade and display of force have long overshadowed this second, celebratory, forgotten dimension of what is now simply called la Fête Nationale.

This year all stops were pulled out to mark the centenary of the intervention of the U.S. in 1917, which contributed significantly – with heavy cost in American lives – to the victory of 1918.  Donald Trump was guest of honor, and proudly saluted the ancient trucks and antique tanks, as well as a symbolic contingent of U.S. troops, including five in World War One uniforms.

Two weeks from today I will begin my biennial visit to Australia, accompanied by members of my French family.  My children were all born in the U.S., where we lived for ten years.  At 80 years of age I look back at my initial 27 years in Australia and my 43 years in France, separated by a full decade Stateside, and sum up my life in the words of this post’s title, with the addition of “Entretemps, l’Unique Amérique”, “In Between, America the Unique”.

Australia is, literally, my fatherland, the country where I, and my parents, were born.  France, of which I have become a citizen, is my country of adoption.  Above all, it is the country where I discovered the liberty of a libre-penseur, a free-thinker, expressed in my atheism.  In between the two, America, so different from both Australia and France, a fascinating kaleidoscope of extremes I was lucky enough to experience first-hand.

Today I feel proud to be French, do not regret leaving the States, and remain viscerally attached to Down Under.  It is, I suppose, ironic that I was sent as a priest to France to do post-graduate studies in Theology, which served my ten-year career as a lay-theologian, professor of Theology and Religious Education Director in the U.S., before returning to France – an atheist – to begin, at age 41, a business-career of 23 years, and, after retirement 16 years ago, the active promotion of atheism through my book and this blog.

“Non, rien de rien; je ne regrette rien”.  That is no more true for me than it was for Edith Piaf in her signature song.  But, in spite of some hardships and very few regrets, I have been very fortunate.  It makes no sense to wonder what I would do if I had my life to live over again.  But I can honestly say that I consider myself lucky to have had the experiences I have had – not only living in three different countries for significant lengths of time, but in the education I received, the religious faith I inherited and later rejected, the experience as a Franciscan for fifteen years – seven of them as a priest – and the opportunity I have had to share my questioning of faith and its illusions with Believers on the Brink.  I do not deserve the luxury of having been happily married for more than twenty years, being the father of three marvelous children and grandfather of their Fabulous Five, of having had a satisfying professional career and continuing to have an intellectually invigorating retirement living in France and maintaining a French Connection with Australia.

I would thank God, if He existed, instead of which I thank all those who made this life of mine possible.  “God” sure as Hell didn’t.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

 

BONES , ASHES , GENES , MEMORIES

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Death

Though I think and talk about it a lot, I am not morbidly obsessed with death – including my own.  As a fact of life even more difficult to think, let alone talk, about than the others, it seems to me normal that we acknowledge and accept this inevitable last act of our life, which will have no sequel.

The title of this post is short-hand for what will be left of our lives after the fatal day.  Famous people are “immortalized” in the statues, street-names and anniversaries honoring them.  Entrepreneurs leave different monuments behind them in the form of corporations and businesses; engineers and architects are remembered for the bridges and other constructions they designed and built.  Doctors, teachers and sometimes even lawyers are remembered with gratitude and affection by those they helped.  Scientists, politicians, authors and artists have often made memorable contributions to human welfare, progress and culture.  The rest of us will continue to exist in coffins and urns, but also hopefully in descendants and perhaps in the memories of people who loved or hated us.

I hope to continue to exist after my death in what I have written.  I will know nothing of future readers’ reactions to my book and to my blog.  To judge from the reactions I get at  present, they will be a mixed bag, including, I hope, an occasional “like”.  There is, inevitably, a certain measure of satisfaction if not arrogance in imagining such post-mortem intellectual survival.  But I like to think that what I have written will continue to help at least some people to enjoy life – as I have for at least half of mine – free of religious illusions.  It’s what keeps me writing posts like this.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

 

 

STORM – ALERT !

I just read in the paper that a massive storm is raging on . . . the planet Jupiter.  I could not resist wondering out loud why on earth (?) God would have created this enormous planet, composed of gas, and made storms happen there.  Not the most profound thought I ever had, but as no one else seems to be reacting theologically to the planetary weather report, I thought I should.  The next post will have more meat and potatoes.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

 

METAMORPHOSIS

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"Coming Out", "Home Alone", 666, Book of the Apocalypse, The Beast of the Apocalypse, The Devil

I have kept the secret for fourteen years.  I remember the exact day when I discovered that I was finally becoming physically what I had been becoming ontologically for the previous quarter-century : June 6, 2003; I was 66.  On Friday, the sixth day of the week in the sixth month of the year, I discovered that I incarnated the Beast of the Apocalypse, whose number is 666.

The first thing I noticed, in the shower at six minutes past six that morning, were the two tiny excroissances on my shoulders and the more visible ones on either side of my forehead.  But it was my feet that shocked me the most : they were turning into cloven hoofs !

It’s not easy to hide morphological modifications like these.  But I had time to get ready to adapt to what I could see would soon be the body of a demon.  My face and hands remained unchanged, though both bear the signs of the four score I now have behind me.  When I’m Home Alone, I kick off my oversized shoes and doff the crazy hat and cloak I wear in public.  When I’m writing a post for my Blog, I need to be comfortable . . .

This is not the sort of thing one brags about.  I mean for my family and (few) friends, it is hard enough obliging them to put up with my anti-social, public atheism.  They would keel over if they saw me in all my diabolical glory.

So why am I Coming Out like this now ?  The reason is simple.  I have written the above to string alone those arch-enemies of me and my Blog, who, reading this up to this point, have been rejoicing in this revelation of my true identity, which, be it said in passing, confirms what they have believed all along : a Franciscan priest could not morph into a militant atheist unless he were possessed by the Devil.  And if the Devil exists, then so does God.  Q.E.D.

Sorry, chaps, but the Devil, the Father of Lies, made me do it !  I have neither wings nor horns nor cloven hoofs.  I’m just an ordinary Joe, like you, who had the good fortune to discover forty years ago that the myths of the world’s religions are as outrageously incredible as the one I just invented.  On s’amuse comme on peut : people get their jollies in the weirdest ways.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO