Dadeus Grings

Behold Dadeus Grings.

What is it about these guys with the pointy hats? Does the mitre work like a lightning rod in reverse and draw all the intelligence right out of the brain?

This guy has concluded that society is pedophilic.

There. Now we can stop molesting the church. It's not the church. Not even individual clerics with their sexuality tied in a knot. It's society.

And boys are naturally homosexual because, after all, they prefer to play with other boys instead of girls unless they are properly taught.

This isn't some bumpkin who went straight from raising goats into the seminary, mind you. This is the friggin chancellor of the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil.

And what should we do about all those priests that have been abusing children?

Leave the police out of it, he says. Let the internal punishment be sufficient.

Has this guy ever read a newspaper? Turned on his TV set?

This guy is a bishop?

Man Ratzi, I knew you had some housecleaning to do, but you need more than Mr. Clean, fellah.

Gay rights? Ask old Dadeo whether gays should have rights and he slips right into that Slippery Slope song - you know, give them their rights and the next thing is we'll be giving rights to pedophiles.

This guy is positively wicked.

One good thing about him, from the church's point of view. He's a good Catholic. Always looking out for catholic interests.

Like when he pointed out that far more Catholics suffered in the Holocaust than Jews.

And why don't we all know that?

Ask him. He'll tell you.

"Because the Jews own the world's media."

The Dresden Frauenkirche

I grew up Protestant in a town that was 80% Catholic. Religious affiliation was the primary identity. From a Protestant perspective, I suffered from multiple personality disorder - Baptist, Congregational, Lutheran, Episcopal in turn. I prefer to say simply that I was “searching.” Others would say (they'd be wrong) I was simply climbing the social ladder.

I also went to mass every morning in lent with my Catholic friends before school, was fascinated by the Latin, and actually had the mass memorized at one time. I felt the switch to the vernacular as a personal attack, even though I had left organized religion behind by that time. Not so much a religious thing as an aesthetic one. Like replacing Meissen China with Melmac.

Religious differences were often discussed. We spoke of Baptists as people who wouldn’t have sex because somebody might see them and think they were dancing. Of Methodists as working class, Episcopalians as ruling class, Presbyterians as people who were Episcopalians from the waist up and Baptists from the waist down.

One of the things all the protestant denominations agreed on was that the papists were wrong wrong wrong about their worship of Mary. Catholics insisted they didn't "worship" Mary, they merely venerated her. But that explanation just didn’t fly. The Italian women I worked with in the factories of my home town would wear garlic around their neck and crawl under tables whenever we had one of those fierce New England summer storms, clutch their rosaries and whimper for Mary to save them.

"Our Lady" was a quintessentially catholic thingie. No Protestant worth his salt would have any part of it. Our Lady of Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima, the Black Madonna of Poland, Catholic examples of the corruption of Christianity all. There’s even a word for it: mariolatry, parallel with idolatry.

I kind of like the idea that you can get to a boy through his mother, but even as a kid, one of the reasons I couldn’t follow my friends into the Catholic Church despite wanting to wear gorgeous dresses and sniff the incense was a sermon I heard once by a priest who was telling kids how smart it was to get Mary to talk to Jesus for you. Curious, that. Is that because women are easier pushovers than men? What strange birds, these Mary worshippers.

If you grew up in a more cosmopolitan world, perhaps with Zoroastrians and Wiccans and worshipers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you may have more sophisticated ways to circle the wagons and create a “them” to disparage. But in our small cultural New England island all we had was Catholics and Protestants to work with. So we made the most of the distinction. And if all this is alien to you and you think I’m making it up, check out this book by a guy named G. P. Dwyer called Protestants and Our Lady. Evidence of Protestant aversion to the veneration of Mary is not hard to find. There’s the question, “Does concentrating on the Virgin Mary distract us from God and from Jesus?” on a defensive catholic site, for example, and the answer begins “This is a common complaint of Protestants, but…

And for those of you who like religious soap opera, there is this literary gem which illustrates how the veneration of Mary can convert Protestants.

I was in Dresden soon after the East opened up, sitting in a Starbuck’s – or maybe a McDonald’s, and looking out at a pile of rubble, directly across the street. I saw a sign saying that they were collecting money to rebuild the cathedral, something unthinkable in the days of the DDR. The rebuilding has an interesting history. Among its sponsors are the people of Coventry, in Britain, and the son of one of the British bombers responsible for the destruction of Dresden on February 13, 1945 made the gilded cross that went on top of the dome of the new cathedral. All this against tremendous opposition. Many argue the money would be better spent, in this now largely secular country, on other things.

The February 1 edition of The New Yorker has an article on Dresden by George Packer, who refers to Dresden as “the Blanche DuBois of German cities – violated, complicit in its violation, desperate to recover its innocence.” The Germans made a TV serial in 2005 called Dresden where the final scene in Part I takes place in the cathedral in Dresden. It’s a big deal, this rebuilding.

But, to get back to the Protestant/Catholic divide I grew up with, what do I find when reading about the reconstruction of the cathedral in Dresden? It's called the Frauenkirche - Church of Our Lady. A Lutheran church! How is that possible? And while I was looking for an answer, what should pop up but the fact that the also very Lutheran cathedral in Copenhagen is also called Vor Frue Kirke – the Church of Our Lady. And I learn that it's a "sister church" to the one in Dresden.

The explanation for the name “Our Lady” is simple. The church was built and named before the Reformation. The question is why the name wasn’t changed in the Reformation. All the information I can find on the subject was some comment in passing that “the name was retained.” No discussion of the theological implications.

This will mean nothing to modern people who couldn’t give a rodent’s posterior about the whole subject. As my friend Jerry once said, “Oh, look. The Catholics and the Protestants are getting back together now that it no longer matters.”

For me, it turns out, it's sort of like finding out Jesus was an African-American or Santa Claus was gay. Not a problem. But definitely a surprise.

I say again, not the most consequential issue in the world. Not even close. But a nice little illustration that new things pop up all the time and the learning goes on, even in these advanced years.

P.S.
If you’re still reading, click here for the German site Frauenkirche in Dresden and get a little Bach in your life. Plus a view of what was lost by the bombing of Dresden – and has now been regained.

And for a touristy view of the peculiar Dresden architectural style, click here.

Tough Love for Papa Razzi

There was an interesting article today in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Munich newspaper that is doing for the child abuse scandal in Germany these days what the Boston Globe did for the parallel scandal in the United States a decade ago – holding their feet to the fire and showing no mercy.

It’s working. The resignations are coming from all directions. People are leaving the church in droves. For someone like me, whose experiences with the church militant engendered a rage I have nurtured all my life, this turn of events has generated no small amount of satisfaction.

Anybody motivated by anger runs the risk of making highly unjust assessments, of course. To avoid that, despite my conviction that religion is bunk, I have tried to make a sharp distinction between those who “listen for the still small voice of God” and those for whom religion is a political instrument. In the Catholic Church, that means there are two kinds of folk, the Vatican I, authoritarian, types – those who center the church on the authority of an infallible pope – and the Vatican II, pastoral, types – those who would channel the energies of the hierarchy into care and compassion. It’s not hard to see where most catholics line up. The two German contemporaries, Hans Küng, and Josef Ratzinger, serve as illustrations. Küng has devoted his life to ecumenism – pulling first all Christians back together and ultimately all people of faith. Ratzinger has let it be known he’d rather have a small group of diehard conservatives in the church than too wide a tent.

I’ve never hidden where my rage against the church comes from. It is the insistence of authoritarian religion (obviously not just of the Roman Catholic variety) that homosexuality is a sin, and same-sex relationships are inherently disordered. Add to that the church’s recent insistence that a nine-year old girl must face excommunication if she aborted the baby she was carrying after being raped by her father – and her mother too, for helping her - and other similarly loathsome directives stemming from ideological certainty and, frankly, I don’t understand why everybody doesn’t want to beat the church with a stick.

As the abuse scandal rages on, and the bishops fall like bowling pins, the Süddeutsche Zeitung continues as the paper of record. Day after day we get facts to feed the view the church is corrupt, and quite possibly stupid. Certainly absurd. Definitely arrogant. Today, I was pleasantly surprised by a change of tone in an article by German historian (and regular SZ journalist) Gustav Seibt. Up till now, most people have framed this as a story about sexual abuse. Seen this way, one is led inexorably into discussions of celibacy and the church’s approach to sex as something to be avoided. Or at least rigidly channeled. I have argued this story should not be about sex at all, but about abuse of power. Any organization with hundreds of thousands of members is bound to have some bad apples. I have argued that what is really rotten is the role of the church as enabler. And I have seen this enabling as derivative of arrogance and love of power.

Seibt comes at this from another direction, and brings a refreshing reframing of the story – one I’ve heard before, but not so clearly articulated. His is the approach of a cultural anthropologist. He doesn’t write in the jargon of a cultural anthropologist, but he performs the work of one. He sets two cultural worlds side by side, each with their own attitudes, values and beliefs. One is medieval, hierarchical, patriarchal and authoritarian. The other is almost a mirror image with all the features in reverse – modern, non-hierarchical, non-patriarchal and non-authoritarian. One culture’s chief value is the salvation of souls. The only real offense is an offense against God. And if offending God is the only real sin, a child abuser can beg forgiveness and the offense against God goes away. The victim is not at fault and, as an innocent, is of no real concern to the church, whose only real function is the elimination of sin. With values such as these, exonerating priests, even moving them after sufficient penance to other locales with the admonition to go and sin no more, the church is acting out its cultural values exactly as one might predict.

Framed this way, the problem for those of us who share the values of the other culture becomes one of culture conflict. Do we allow the church to continue to function according to its otherworldly values? Or do we impose our own, those of a modern democratic society committed not to helping citizens gain entry into the next world, but keeping citizens protected in this one.

We don’t need to see the church as bad guys committed to selfish interests at the expense of children. We can embrace them as a culture committed to values which are at odds with modern values. This may seem like some kind of mindfuck, but only if you think putting yourself in another’s shoes creates illusions and not sympathy.

The German state has taken a stand with culture conflict recently. Turkish fathers in Germany who insist their daughters not go to school are told “Sorry, sir, but your daughter will not be deprived of an education as long as she lives among us.” And we make it happen without further ado.

The Church, too, needs to be told, “Sorry, folks. You can go on with your concern for the next world if you like, but you must stop now, once and for all, protecting abusers of children from the law of the state.”

That is slowly but surely what is coming to pass. What Seibt has done for me is he has given me a way to approach the church more as the anthropologist I am and less as the angry gay I can be.

I’m more gay than anthropologist, alas, so this is not a perfect cure.

But it’s a step in the right direction.

And when you separate the person from the screwed up values they hold, all sorts of good things can happen.

Yes, Johnny, I know you think that knife is fun to play with. But I’m going to take it away from you. Now brush your teeth and go to bed.

Yes, mugger, I understand your father beat you and made you what you are today. I’m willing to spend money to get you into treatment, a good home where people will love you, and a good school where you can build a better life. But I’m not going to let you mug me. I’ll jail your ass if I have to.

Tough love, I believe it’s called.

Time to give Papa Razzi some tough love.