New Values

So, Pope Jerkoff I is racing down the pike with his freakozoid dark emperor Dr Evil smile and a new plan - or should I say encyclical - to cauterize the church of its ills:

The new Pope faces his first controversy over the direction of the Catholic church after it was revealed that the Vatican has drawn up a religious instruction preventing gay men from being priests.

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The document expresses the church's belief that gay men should no longer be allowed to enter seminaries to study for the priesthood. Currently, as all priests take a vow of celibacy, their sexual orientation has not been considered a pressing concern.

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The instruction was drawn up as part of the Vatican's response to the sexual abuse scandal that surfaced in the American church three years ago, which has seen hundreds of priests launch lawsuits against superiors whom they accuse of abusing them.

As the former head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican body charged with looking into the abuse claims, Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was made acutely aware of the scale of the problem. He is thought to have made clearing up the scandal one of the key goals of his papacy.

Next month the Vatican will send investigators to the US to gauge the scale of the scandal. More than 100 bishops and seminary staff will visit 220 campuses. They will review documents provided by the schools and seminaries and may interview teachers, students and alumni, then report directly to the Vatican, which could choose to issue the instruction barring homosexuals from entering the priesthood as part of its response.

Studies show that a significant proportion of men who enter seminaries to train for the priesthood are gay. Any move signalling that homosexuals will not be allowed to join the seminaries, even one couched in the arcane language of the Vatican, could reduce the number of recruits to the priesthood.

Now, you know that's all well and good. The Catholic church does have a huge pedophilia problem involving homosexual priests and it's correct that this needs to be tackled. But this new-found initiative is about thirty years and 8 billion dollars in legal damages too late. The issue of homosexual priests in a celibate church is now ingrained. A vast proportion of the Catholic church - as much as 50% - is made up of gay priests. Are all of them pedophiles? Of course not. But the problem has been dealt with in such a ham-fisted, dishonest, counterproductive way that the line is forever blurred and distorted in the public's mind. That's just the way things are and no amount of dogma or newly-dusted encyclicals is going to fix it. In fact, the explicit exclusion of gay clergy this late in the game is just another step by the Catholic church to writing itself closer to insignificance. They have declared war on a vast proportion of the remaining foot soldiers in an army that's already rapidly diminishing. What's the answer? Well, there is no answer, not now.

The damage has been done by decades of fundamentalist dogma, willful ignorance and ostrich like sand burrowing. The time to fix this was decades ago, when the families of abused victims were pleading with Cardinal Ratzinger to take this problem seriously, to deal with it head on and cauterize the cancer that lay in his beloved institution. Well, he refused. He decided, as always with those who savour the taste of power and self-importance, to cast the victims, their families to the wind and to protect his own. Child fiddlers, liars and destroyers of lives who hunkered in grim self-importance beneath the roof of God. He believed the problem would go away. That the institution would outlive it. And now, decades later he finds himself trying to plug the dyke, the crumbling levee if you will, with a piece of paper that writes his clergy into insignificance.

When will these people learn? When will we learn? We live in an age of triumphant, bloated fundamentalism teetering beneath the suppurating weight of its own indignant self-righteousness. Whether its the paleo/theo/neo/everyman -for-himself-cons in the United States who've finally gotten the wish-list they've been salivating over since the Goldwater 60s - imperial war in the Middle East! Unending cycles of tax cuts for the topmost slither of superwealth! Total demonisation of the poor and the black! - whether it's the psycho-Islamist death worshippers of Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush eating dates and cheese in caves built by European engineers while mindfucked college students are sent off to self-immolate school busses in the name of a false God that exists only in the darkest hell of men's hearts.

Whether it's the spiritual leader of a church founded on brotherly love and communitarian values who places power beyond weakness, scrap dogma and the twisted foibles of his own centurions over the everyday struggle of his desperate flock. Whether it's Sharon, corrupt and corpulent, Cheney, Putin, or whoever else should weevil out of the woodwork these days the bad guys are in charge. They don't represenet conservatism, true bedrock values. They represent a self-perpetuating feedback loop. A mindset engendered by granite belief. Word of God, self-deification, it doesn't matter what you call it, it's the same - we're being guided by petty, spoilt little psychopaths. Gilded men - and they all seem to be men - gorging on the cheaply perfumed aroma of righteousness because it brings a lift to their pathtic corrupt wizened little hearts.

And yes, they are all the fucking same:

"When the Muslim College, a London-based center of Islamic learning, held a seminar for Muslim, Christian and Jewish conservatives, the participants had a shock of self-recognition, says Zaki Badawi, an Egyptian religious scholar who heads the college. Suddenly, they realized they shared attitudes and world views. Whatever their stripe, fundamentalists are absolutists at heart, says Badawi. 'They don t like to hear other ideas at all. They want to hear their own voice, and are suspicious of anyone else's.'"

The only thing to add is - fundamentalists aren't all religious. Fundamentalism is a state of mind. Knee-jerk, tunnel vision. A reduction of all things, all complexities - some of them no doubt frustrating and irrelevant - down to a monolithic, immovable truth that justifies everything at every level. Everything is permitted - if you're doing it in the name of... Whoever. And as we're all human, last time I checked, that irreversably reduces to a justification of one's own's actions. Not God's, the proletariat's, the innocent seal cubs on Baffin island. But whatever breathes in a human mind.