Our New Atheist friends, Dawkins, Robertson, Fry, Goldacre et al come a humiliating cropper when they threatened to have Pope Benedict arrested on his visit to Britain in 2010.
How I loved that! What a humiliation! And Geoffrey Robertson just after he had received a papal blessing at a general audience with the Pope in St Peter's Square. How they fell on their faces. Their pathetic protest was brushed aside in the tide of affection and goodwill towards Pope Benedict. Wonderful days! They took it so badly. Dawkins went into a right sulk and blamed everybody but himself.
Richard Dawkins ... he went into a proper sulk
Geoffrey Robertson was just as bad. He went into a lot of twaddle about how he just happened to be in St Peter's Square and just happened to be there when the Pope arrived and just happened to be there when the Pope gave a blessing. Pathetic! He then denied that he had suggested having the Pope arrested - although he had stood shoulder to shoulder with Dawkins, Goldacre, Fry et al. Pathetic!
Geoffrey Robertson ... Pathetic!
(Christopher Hitchens had also been campaigning with this lot, but I will pass over that as he has now gone to meet the God he claimed did not exist. I'm sure God will be merciful to him.)
Christopher Hitchens ... now gone to meet the God he claimed did not exist
I started a thread about this on the TES Opinion Forum. It ran to almost 2,000 posts. How I made the clique squirm! It was another episode of "C'mon clique. Make my day."
Although Richard Dawkins is the best popular science writer of our times, he is also quite often an outstandingly unpleasant man.
ReplyDeleteAll the same, he doesn't deserve to be lied about by an intellectual performing flea like Gene Vincent. Mr Dawkins did NOT threaten to arrest Joseph Ratzinger.
The article below makes his position quite clear, and no matter how much Gene Vincent tries to gainsay Mr Dawkins he is, as usual talking pernicious bollocks about threatened arrests. From The Guardian, April 13th 2010:
THE POPE SHOULD STAND TRIAL
Richard Dawkins
Sexual abuse of children is not unique to the Roman Catholic church, and Joseph Ratzinger is not one of those priests who raped altar boys while in a position of dominance and trust. But as so often it is the subsequent cover-ups, even more than the original crimes, that do most to discredit an institution, and here the pope is in real trouble.
Pope Benedict XVI is the head of the institution as a whole, but we can't blame the present head for what was done before his watch. Except that in his particular case, as archbishop of Munich and as Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (what used to be called the Inquisition), the very least you can say is that there is a case for him to answer.
The latest smoking gun is the 1985 letter obtained by the Associated Press, signed by the then Cardinal Ratzinger to the diocese of Oakland about the case of Father Stephen Kiesle.
Lashing out in desperation, church spokesmen are now blaming everybody but themselves for their current dire plight, which one official spokesman likens to the worst aspects of antisemitism (what are the best ones, I wonder?). Suggested culprits include the media, the Jews, and even Satan. The church is hiding behind a seemingly endless stream of excuses for having failed in its legal and moral obligation to report serious crimes to the appropriate civil authorities.
But it was Cardinal Ratzinger's official responsibility to determine the church's response to allegations of child sex abuse, and his letter in the Kiesle case makes the real motivation devastatingly explicit. Here are his actual words, translated from the Latin.
"This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favour of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the universal church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ's faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner."
"The young age of the petitioner" refers to Kiesle, then aged 38, not the age of any of the boys he tied up and raped (11 and 13). It is completely clear that, together with a nod to the welfare of the "young" priest, Ratzinger's primary concern, and the reason he refused to unfrock Kiesle (who went on to re-offend) was "the good of the universal church".
This pattern of putting church PR over and above the welfare of the children in its care (and what an understatement that is) is repeated over and over again in the cover-ups that are now coming to light, all over the world. And Ratzinger himself expressed it with damning clarity in this smoking gun letter.
In this case he was refusing the strong request of the local bishop that Kiesle should be unfrocked. Vatican standing orders were to refer such cases not to the civil authorities but to the church itself. The current campaign to call the church to account can take credit for the fact that this standing order has just changed, as of Monday 12 April 2010. Better late than never, as Galileo might have remarked in 1979, when the Vatican finally got around to a posthumous pardon.
[continued]
PART II
ReplyDeleteSuppose the British secretary of state for schools received, from a local education authority, a reliable report of a teacher tying up his pupils and raping them. Imagine that, instead of turning the matter over to the police, he had simply moved the offender from school to school, where he repeatedly raped other children. That would be bad enough. But now suppose that he justified his decision in terms such as these:
"Although I regard the arguments in favour of prosecution, presented by the local education authority, as of grave significance, I nevertheless deem it necessary to consider the good of the government and the party, together with that of the offending teacher. And I am also unable to make light of the detriment that prosecuting the offender can provoke among voters, particularly regarding the young age of the offender."
The analogy breaks down, only in that we aren't talking about a single offending priest, but many thousands, all over the world.
Why is the church allowed to get away with it, when any government minister who was caught writing such a letter would immediately have to resign in ignominy, and face prosecution himself? A religious leader, such as the pope, should be no different. That is why, along with Christopher Hitchens, I am supporting the current investigation of the pope's criminal complicity by Geoffrey Robertson QC and Mark Stephens.
These excellent lawyers believe that, for a start, they have a persuasive case against the Vatican's status as a sovereign state, on the basis that it was just an ad hoc concoction driven by internal Italian politics under Mussolini, and was never given full status at the UN. If they succeed in this initial argument, the pope could not claim diplomatic immunity as a head of state, and could be arrested if he steps on British soil.
Why is anyone surprised, much less shocked, when Christopher Hitchens and I call for the prosecution of the pope, if he goes ahead with his proposed visit to Britain? The only strange thing about our proposal is that it had to come from us: where have the world's governments been all this time? Where is their moral fibre? Where is their commitment to treating everyone equally under the law? The UK government, far from standing up for justice for the innocent victims of the Roman Catholic church, is preparing to welcome this grotesquely tainted man on an official visit to the UK so that he can "dispense moral guidance". Read that again: dispense moral guidance!
Unfortunately I must end in bathos, with a necessary correction of a damaging error in another newspaper. The Sunday Times of 11 April, on its front page, printed the headline,
"Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI."
This conjures up – as was doubtless intended – a ludicrous image of me ambushing the pontiff with a pair of handcuffs and marching him off in a half Nelson. Blood out of a stone, but I finally managed to persuade that Murdoch paper to change the headline in the online edition.
Never mind headlines invented by foolish sub-editors, we are serious. It should be for a court to decide – a civil court, not a whitewashing ecclesiastical court – whether the case against Ratzinger is as damning as it looks. If he is innocent, let him have the opportunity to demonstrate it in court. If he is guilty, let him face justice. Just like anybody else.
Once again, Gene has been outed for talking bollocks.
ReplyDelete"a reliable report of a teacher tying up his pupils and raping them."
ReplyDeleteHa! Ha! Ha! It's the way you tell 'em!
"Suppose the British secretary of state for schools received, from a local education authority, a reliable report of a teacher tying up his pupils and raping them. Imagine that, instead of turning the matter over to the police, he had simply moved the offender from school to school, where he repeatedly raped other children. That would be bad enough. But now suppose that he justified his decision in terms such as these..."
DeleteHe's making a hypothetical analogy between Ratzinger's concealment of and connivance at paedophilia among his clergy as archbishop and pope, and what would happen should similar instances in schools be concealed, excused and connived at by the Secretary of State for Education.
The word "suppose" is the giveaway, you stupid bastard.
And the fact that you think any aspect of paedophilia is funny speaks volumes about what sort of a stupid bastard you are. You can tell a man by the company he keeps.
Detterling did you watch the Channel 4 documentary 'The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax' this week? That's the mad territory we are entering.
ReplyDeleteThe New Atheists never recovered from the Benedict XVI humiliation.
I can't be bothered to watch nonsense like that: and the paedophile scandal in the Catholic Church, abetted, concealed, excused and hence objectively connived at by Joseph Ratzinger both as archbishop and also as Pope is not "mad territory". It is disgraceful, sordid and criminal fact, and that you can defend the man who would do as he did fully justifies my description of you as emotionally paedophilic.
DeleteAs for the "humiliation of the New Atheists", that IS fantasy: a lie is still a lie, no matter how often you tell it. Mr Dawkins and his colleagues did NOT attempt to have Ratzinger arrested: but they did make out a water-tight case as to why he should have been made to answer for his actions in a civil court. I notice you make no attempt to refute Mr Dawkins's contention [you probably didn''t bother to read it being lazy as well as thick],for the simple reason that you couldn't if you tried.
Another victory tor common-sense, reason and logic.