Religion

Just by the by, commenters on last week’s Exit, voice, loyalty thread who wanted to be deleted from the baptismal register of their churches may be interested in a 2003 ruling by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. A man contacted the parish priest asking to have his name removed from the baptismal register, saying he had been enrolled in the church against his will and did not want the church to keep any of his personal data.

The priest found no record of the baptism – the man was living in Holland and seems to have had bad information – but suggested that a reasonable solution would in any case be to add a note to the record saying the man no longer wished to be associated with the Catholic church. The Data Protection Commissioner agreed, finding the priest’s suggestion both appropriate and considerate, and noting that the register was a factual statement of an event. Which seems fair enough from the data protection point of view, but probably no consolation to people baptised as Catholics who do not wish to be counted as such.

As to myself, I figure I’m better off inside the tent, pissing in. I did perform an act of protest, though. The day after Benedict XVI’s election as pope, I took out my shortest skirt, pulled on my highest heeled FMBs, and flounced the mile and half to work. It was one just as (in)effective as anything else I could think of and made road-crossing surprisingly easy.

From a WP story about the conclave:

bq. Although the cardinals swore an oath of perpetual secrecy about what occurred in the conclave, many began to talk about it on Wednesday.

I know it’s impossible to properly conceive of eternity within the finitute of the human mind, but you’d think the Cardinals might have done better than “about 24 hours after the Conclave.” Still, the article is worth a read for its glimpse of the politics of the Church at its highest levels.

It’s a well-known fact that new Popes are always in need of advice. For instance, the late Pope John Paul II could have saved a terrific amount of theological confusion amongst under-twelves if, before his visit to Ireland in 1979, he’d been told to make sure everyone knew that the word “Suffer” in the phrase “Suffer little children to come unto me” actually means “Permit” or “Allow.”

What bit of advice should we give the new Pope, I wonder? On the Biblical side, I’m a fan of Micah 6:8, myself. (“And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”) But you may have a different ideas.

So, let’s assume for a moment that you had a real personal stake in who became next pope and are beyond horrified at the ‘election’ of Ratzinger. Let’s also assume you go to Mass on a fairly regular basis (though maybe you haven’t been to confession since you were a teenager…), and know that from now on, you’ll be asked every week to pray for his holiness, Pope Palpatine, sorry, Benedixt XVI. And that’s the easy bit.

I’ll take it that you know there is no way for a mere lay person, and a woman at that, to have any real voice in the doctrinal decisions of the church. And also that loyalty can only mean the lie of silent apostasy. Is exit the only option?

It's Ratzinger, as Benedict XVI. Oh boy.

Rabbi David Saperstein condemns Frist’s telecast in exactly the right terms – as an attack on religious freedom.

The telecast is scheduled to take place on the second night of the Passover holiday, when Jews around the world gather together to celebrate our religious freedom. It was in part for exactly such freedom that we fled Egypt. It was in part for exactly such freedom that so many of us came to this great land. And it is in very large part because of exactly such freedom that we and our neighbors here have built a nation uniquely welcoming to people of faith – of all faiths. We believe Senator Frist knows these things as well. His association with the scheduled telecast is, in a word, shameful.

I can only applaud. Via Atrios

Bill Frist’s telecast in which he appears with a clatter (right collective noun? would clangour be better?) of Republican-friendly fundamentalists to denounce filibusters of conservative judges as an attack on “people of faith” is unsurprisingly getting a lot of play in the left-blogosphere. But it strikes me that both this and the bungled Republican attempt to make political hay from the Terry Schiavo case provide open ground for a strong Democratic counter-attack. There’s good reason to believe that Frist’s move is a sign of weakness rather than of strength. If this Washington Post article is correct, Frist is pushing the nuclear option not because he thinks that this is a good issue for the Republicans, but because he fears that he won’t stand a chance of getting the Republican nomination in 2008 unless he has the religious conservatives on his side. Going to war over the filibuster is a very risky manoeuvre. The Republican party tried to use the Schiavo case to drum up public support in preparation for this fight, but it backfired. They now find themselves in the worst of both worlds – a general public which is suspicious of Republican efforts to rig the judicial system, and a conservative base which is fired up, and demanding that the Republicans ram through conservative judicial nominations to prevent anything like the Schiavo case from happening in future.

The way to fight back against this isn’t to make arguments about the corruption of the political process. This is the deeper problem – but it’s an abstract one, and unlikely to resonate. There’s a much more straightforward case against the Republicans. Their attempt to bend the judiciary to their will is really about building the foundations of a state-imposed religion. It’s an effort to impose religious norms on people’s private and family lives. More precisely: it aims to take complex decisions out of the realm of the family, and make them subject to the rule of judges who are expected to kowtow to the whims of lawmakers, regardless of their constitutional duties. The United States of America was founded by Dissenters, Unitarians and others who had fled from the tyranny of state-sponsored religion in Britain. As a result, one of the core American values is freedom of religion, and the maintenance of an open space in which people can pursue their own faiths and beliefs, free of interference from the state.

Every time that Republican legislators start talking about the attack on people of faith, Democrats should counter by saying that Republicans are trying to forcibly shove a state-sponsored set of religious values down people’s throats, and to prevent people from making their own decisions in the light of their own values and beliefs. They should point again and again to the outrageous statements made by DeLay, Cornyn and others during and after the Schiavo case – and use the Schiavo controversy as an example of the sort of decision that Republicans would like to take out of the hands of families, and hand over to judges. There’s a real argument to be made that it’s the Republicans rather than the Democrats who are attacking “people of faith,” by trying to impose a one-size-fits-all set of religious values through rigging the judicial system. It’s an argument that might even appeal to a few Christian fundamentalists, since they’ve been on the receiving end of similar treatment in the past. As Godfrey Hodgson tells us, the current resurgence of fundamentalism in American politics is in part a reaction against efforts by the state to ban home-schooling in an earlier era. The Democrats (I should note that I’m not a Democrat myself, but am on their side in this fight), should be hammering home this argument again, and again, and again.

I was thinking about Chris’ post on tactical voting and I was struck by the thought: Why hasn’t Labour introduced preferential (single transferable) voting in Britain? Readers will probably be struck by the alternative question, Why should Labour introduce preferential (single transferable) voting in Britain?

My first is that this would be an improvement in democracy, both for individual constituencies and for the country as a whole. Although no voting system is perfect, preferential voting is much more likely to produce an outcome that reflects the views of the majority of voters than is first-past-the-post.

I don’t suppose that an argument like this will cut much ice with the Blair government (or most incumbent governments), so let me move to the second point. Labour would almost certainly benefit from this shift, at the expense of the Tories. It seems pretty clear that Labour would get the bulk of LDP preferences, as well as those of the Greens and minor left parties. The Tories would pick up preferences from UKIP (but this group looks like a flash in the pan) and the far-right (but this is a small group, and there are disadvantages attached to such preferences, especially if, say, the BNP demands preferences in return).

It’s true of course that the biggest benefits would go to the Liberal Democrats, since their supporters would not have to worry about ‘wasted votes’. But even here, there’s a hidden benefit for Labour. Sooner or later, there will be a hung Parliament, and the price of LDP support will be full-scale proportional representation. If Labour introduced preferential voting without being forced to, it would not only cement LDP support but would greatly weaken the case for PR.

The remaining objection is that of additional complexity. This can be overcome, in large measure by adopting the optional preferential system, where voters can indicate as many or as few preferences as they choose.

I’m not sure if this is an occult link with the Zeitgeist, or just a manifestation of the reallocation of attention that leads new parents to notice other people’s babies, but a month ago, I finally got around to ordering “The Strange Death of Liberal England” (George Dangerfield) which arrived at Easter. In the ensuing couple of weeks I’ve seen not one but two uses of the same idea, with both Protestantism and Toryism dying strange deaths. Maybe this is happening all the time and I’ve just started noticing.

There’s been a lot of discussion of the late Pope, including whether he should be given the appellation “Great”. Historically, the honorific ‘Great’, when applied to monarchs, including Popes, has not meant “Good”. Rather it’s been applied to those who’ve been successful in extending their monarchical power. This is certainly true of Leo and Gregory, the popes currently regarded as Great. Although they’re both called saints, neither of seems particularly saintly to me: rather they were hardheaded and successful statesmen.

In this interpretation of the term, it’s hard to claim greatness for John Paul II. Since he was elected in the late 1970s, the church has lost ground throughout the developed world to secularism, and in Latin America to evangelical protestantism. Although there have been some modest gains in Africa and Asia, they’ve largely been in countries where the church had a strong presence dating back to colonial times.

Claims that the number of Catholics has risen greatly under JPII look dubious to me. This BBC file gives the basis of claims that there are more than 1 billion Catholics, and includes claims for more than 90 per cent of the population of Italy, Poland and Spain, based primarily on baptism. I suspect many of these are either nominal or lapsed.

If there has been growth, it’s largely due to natural increase in Catholic countries. To the extent that anti-contraception teaching has kept birth rates high, I suppose the Pope was partly responsible for this, but the same teaching contributed greatly to the collapse of the church in former strongholds like Ireland.

If you wanted to make a case for greatness for JPII it would be one of a fairly successful defensive action in unfavorable times.

In any case, judging by those who’ve been awarded the title by common consent, beginning with Alexander, Greatness is not a quality I admire much [1]. And if we’re going for Goodness, I think John XXIII would be a more appealing candidate.

fn1. Fielding has great fun with this in Jonathan Wild, the story of the infamous ‘Thieftaker-General’, who became the Godfather of early 18th-century London.

Lots of interesting argument about the relationship between religion and the left in the current issue of the Boston Review. I was particularly struck by Lew Daly’s densely argued and provocative article on how Bush’s “faith based initiative” borrows its vision of society from European Christian Democracy, but dumps the Christian and the democratic bits.

This post should probably be called The Pope in Ireland II, following Kieran’s post of a couple of days ago. But I’m not quite ready to finally delete the shreds of a posting I keep re-writing that keeps getting overtaken by other posts and events in the meantime.

Anyway, this morning Slugger O’Toole points to the most beautiful antidote to the dolorous (and, frankly, condescending) blanket coverage of the pope’s death by CNN. Slugger kindly reproduces in full Fintan O’Toole’s superb essay placing JPII’s reign in the context of Hobbes’ description of the papacy as “nothing other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof”.

If, like me, you can’t bear another moment of mock-mourningful journalists raking out endless and unseemly titbits of human interest and pointless kremlinology-like speculations about the next pope, read this. It’s a cracker.

An eye-rolling moment at Instapundit:

From the comments at Tim Blair’s:
Final score for the 20th century:
Ordinary Poles, 2.
German intellectuals, 0.
Heh.

Right. Some scenes from a life:

1938. Moves to Kracow, enrolls in the Faculty of Philosophy at Jagellonian University.

1939. Joins ‘Studio 38’ experimental theatre group. He would eventually write six plays.

1946. Ordained a priest. Studies at the Angelicum University..

1947. Receives his doctorate in philosophy. Thesis on “The Problems of Faith in the Works of St John of the Cross.” Returns to Poland to lecture in Philosophy and Social Ethics at Jagellonian University.

1953. Defends second doctorate, titled “Evaluation of the possibility of founding a Catholic ethic on the ethical system of Max Scheler” at the Catholic University of Lublin. (Max Scheler was one of those German Intellectuals, by the way.) During this period, publishes poetry in various Polish journals under the pseudonym, “Andrzej Jawien.”

1954. Untenured Professor of Philosophy at Lublin.

1956. Appointed to a the Chair of Moral Theology and Ethics at Lublin.

And so on. Always nice to see Professor Reynolds standing up for the value of the life of the mind.

Kieran’s post on Irish Catholic culture and Matt Yglesias’ recent writings on Archbishop Stepinac reminded me of the controversy surrounding Hubert Butler, whose essay on Stepinac, “The Sub-Prefect should have held his tongue,” is now happily online. Butler was a scion of the old Anglo-Irish aristocracy, a liberal of a thoroughly unconventional sort (sometimes a little reminiscent of Burke), and one of the best essayists of the twentieth century. His collection, The Children of Drancy, is especially fine. Butler also spent a substantial part of his career being ostracized by the community surrounding him, because he deviated from the Catholic consensus that Stepinac was a martyr to religious freedom. The story is recounted in “The Sub-Prefect.” Butler unwittingly began to present his views on Stepinac at a meeting where the Papal Nuncio was present, prompting the Nuncio to walk out. This led to Butler being condemned by local and national politicians for having ‘insulted’ the Church and being driven out of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society (which he had founded). If Butler hadn’t had independent means, he would have almost certainly lost his livelihood. It wasn’t a proud moment for Irish Catholicism.