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| Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne |
I’ve been listening to debates (
here,
here,
here and
here) on German television over the
scandal that ensued when two Catholic hospitals turned away a woman who had
been raped. It’s complicated and
the actual facts of the story are often mangled, but essentially, people were
afraid of treating the woman because they feared they might be going against
the guidelines of the local cardinal, Cardinal Meisner.
The story gets super complicated because it turns out the
Cardinal should be following that rule from the top that the morning-after pill
is forbidden because it’s an abortifacient and that means baby-killer in church
talk. Only the pill in question is
probably not an abortifacient. Or
maybe it is, if taken in high doses.
And then again maybe not.
And the Cardinal, turns out, is saying if it’s not an abortifacient,
it’s OK. Which means the Cardinal
is saying birth control is OK. And
that’s not OK, actually.
So the good Cardinal is taking a giant leap forward. Maybe. Birth control OK?
Wow.
Meanwhile, most good German folk, Catholics as well as
non-Catholics, are outraged that a Catholic hospital should turn away a woman
in need of care. You can’t really
blame the hospital staff.
They know they work in a Catholic hospital and they know the official
church position on birth control and on abortion. What were they supposed to do? They might have lost their jobs.
This took place in Cologne, where most people are Catholic,
so these questions are on everybody’s mind. Many will tell you outright that the baby in the womb after
a rape is a living being, according to Roman doctrine. So hands off. And even if you’re not sure if there is a baby in the womb,
hands off there, too. The church
teaches us we need to err on the side of caution.
What this means in practical terms is this. OK, so you’ve been raped. We will pray for you. But your troubles are not over. If you get pregnant, you will have to carry this baby to
term. If you don’t, your soul is in mortal danger.
Moreover, don’t look to us for help in getting rid of this
little gift from God placed in your body.
We’re a hospital, and you’ve been beaten up, but we have our
principles. We’ll help you find
another hospital, though, because God wants us to be generous and loving and
kind. What you do with your body
once you get there is up to you.
Our hands will be clean.
Now that, it seems to me, is some seriously fucked-up
thinking.
What’s that line Hobbes used to describe the human
condition? Nasty, brutish and
short?
You have to wonder if he got his training at a Catholic
hospital.
I could, of course, look at the bright side. If you live in a primitive place
where the only hospitals are Catholic, and the right of an anti-abortion
ideology takes precedence over a human rights ideology, then you’re
screwed. But most of us now live
in big cities and in secular societies and we have laws protecting women
against religious abuse such as the one I’m talking about. Women can get help from other sources,
even Catholic women, and make their own choices about what happens to their
bodies. Not only that, the
church has lost its fangs for the most part and now only scolds – you’ll go to
hell, you’ll go to hell – and no longer ties you to the rack or passes laws
effectively shutting down abortion clinics.
What’s that, you say?
They do still use their power and influence to pass laws like that?
I look to Germany as a more enlightened place than this
country in so many ways. They
don’t have snake handler churches. Or
guns in churches. They have lots more women in political positions. They have a gay mayor in Berlin. Had one in Hamburg, too. Have had a foreign minister who is gay. They are much much less likely to be
governed by the prejudices of a cherry-picking church group like the Catholics
or fundamentalist Southern Baptists.
Or so I thought.
Turns out I’ve been giving them way too much credit.
I thought Germany, like other European countries, with a
greater inclination toward taking care of the entire community with their
social resources, would never fall into the trap we fell into with George W.
Bush’s insidious “faith-based” initiative. I was seriously mistaken about that. Turns out, the Germans did it first,
and in a much bigger way.
Faith-based social services have a long history in Germany.
The right wing in America pushes the view that the free
market should prevail against government involvement in one’s everyday
life. Corporate boards make better
managers than government agencies.
Big government is bad, the less government the better, yada yada.
There is a concept widely known and accepted in Germany of
“subsidiarity.” Subsidiarity means
essentially that small is better, that local government is superior to and more
efficient than centralized government, because it’s more in touch with local
values. According to the principle
of subsidiarity, things begin with the individual and each larger unit is
“subsidiary” (secondary in importance) to the smaller unit before it. The notion has broad appeal to
progressives and conservatives alike, and was articulated and embraced not only
as early as 1885, by Pope Pius XI, but by Calvinists before him, and is
exemplified by the notion that “God helps those who help themselves.”
Problem is, like all fundamentally sound ideas and
instruments, it can be abused. The
church realized that by casting doubt on the wisdom of using the state to solve
problems, solutions would fall to the churches, as the best organized of
non-governmental units. Once
church schools and hospitals become an everyday reality, it does not require
much imagination to see how “what is” comes to be seen as “what should
be.” It becomes the default
condition. What began with charity
– the caring of the sick and the vulnerable – ends up being a bureaucratic
practice, something done for practical reasons and not just charitable
ones. Just leave it to us here in
the church. We’ll take care of it.
The two leading conservative parties in Germany both have
“Christian” in their names – the Christian Socialist Union (CSU) in Bavaria and
the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the rest of the country. In 1961, the CDU introduced the
“subsidiarity principle,” and the
stage was set for the nation’s welfare
agencies to be religious organizations.
An apparently innocent, practical move. But over time, more and more services fell under one
or the other of the two major providers of social services, one Catholic
(Caritas) and one Protestant (the Diakonisches Werk). In the early 70s, Caritas had 137,496 employees. By 2003, that number had increased by
263% to 499,313 employees.
In a similar time period, Diakonisches Werk went from 175,000 to 452,244
employees, an increase of 160%, and what this means is that nearly one million
people are now employed in the health services of one of the two German churches. If you add in the kindergartens and day care centers and old folks homes, the number goes to 1.3 million, making the churches the largest single employer in the country.
Even that increase would appear to be innocent. If it were not for Paragraph 10 of the
Federal Social Welfare Act, the Bundessozialhilfegesetz/BSHG, which stipulated that
In implementing this law the social welfare
agencies shall work together with churches and religious organisations that are
public corporations, as well as with private charities, whilst respecting their
self-sufficiency in setting their own goals and carrying out their functions.
What this meant, in effect, would turn out to have stunning
consequences. It meant, first of
all, that charities could set up organizations as it suited them, take the ones
that were profitable and leave the rest to the state. Secondly, all this could be done with taxpayer money.
Thirty years later, the same Christian Democratic government
expanded the subsidiarity principle, effectively putting church organizations
in charge of nursing care and end-of-life hospice care and writing in
priorities for themselves over non-church agencies.
Over time, hardliners within the church began to assert
themselves. When the wall came
down, and the Diakonisches Werk expanded in East Germany, where most people
were Protestant, many people of no religious faith were hired by the DW. Recently, however, they began to insist
on active church membership for employment. On the Catholic side, Caritas offered what is called “counselling about pregnancy
conflicts,” after which a certificate would be issued which would permit a
woman to apply for an abortion.
Then, suddenly, those certificates would become unavailable.
The two church-affiliated agencies have their own labor
laws, not subject to state control.
Workers are not allowed to strike and must adhere to strict agency
“loyalty guidelines” which include the following:
- An
employee must not marry a divorced person, and must not marry again if
divorced.
- An employee
must not engage in homosexual practices.
- An
employee must be a member of the church. If the employee leaves the church his/her employment
may be terminated.
In August of 2006, Germany passed an anti-discrimination law
(Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz/AGG), which reads, in Section 1:
The aim of this law is to reduce
or remove discrimination on grounds of race or ethnic origin, of sex, of
religion or worldview, of disability, of age or of sexual identity.
That’s Section 1.
But when you get to Section 9, you read:
1) Notwithstanding §8 (Unequal
treatment because of occupational requirements) unequal treatment because of religion or worldview in the course of
employment by religious communities, by facilities attached to them whatever
their legal status, or by associations which have as their task the common
fostering of a religion or worldview, is also permissible when a particular religion or worldview adduces, in
consideration of the self-image of that religious community or association for their
right to self-determination or, depending on the kind of function, a
justifiable occupational requirement.
If you think that’s muddy, you should see the
original German. Just note the
subject and predicate, which I have put in bold face and italics.
Subsection 2 is even more delicious:
(2) The prohibition of unequal
treatment because of religion or worldview does not affect the rights of the
religious communities mentioned in paragraph 1, of facilities attached to them
whatever their legal status, or of associations which have as their task the
common fostering of a religion or worldview, to be able to require from their
employees loyal and upright behaviour in the sense of their particular
self-images.
Loyal and upright behaviour.
Written right into the law. The right to determine another’s loyalty and to label his or
her behavior as other than upright.
Today, as people are leaving the church in droves, those who
stay include many who defend the church on the grounds that “they do so much
good.” They are apparently
unaware that, in Germany, at least, only 1.8% of the cost of running Caritas
and DK is paid for by
church funds.
All the rest comes from the taxpayers.
Furthermore, if you are a Muslim, a Sikh, twice-married, or
gay, you pay your taxes like every other German citizen. 44.5 billion euros is what it takes to
run social services. You can pay
your taxes. You just can’t work
there.
And if you’re a doctor who wants to help a pregnant woman
abort a pregnancy, you’ll have to find a hospital not run by the church. Good luck with that.
In the U.S., only about 1 in 6 patients are treated at
Catholic hospitals each year. In
Germany, where religious affiliation historically was based on geography, there are many
places, particularly rural ones, where the only hospital available is a
Catholic one.
This is not to ignore, I hasten to add, the fact that many
of these people owe their lives to the doctors and nurses of Catholic
hospitals. One must be careful not
to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But it’s time to stop defending Mussolini because he made the trains run
on time. It’s time to get rid of
the illusion that you can leave things up to the church and remain true to
humanist principles of equality.
The official church thinks there is something wrong with
homosexuality. It believes it
knows the will of God and God wants women to live out their lives subordinate
to men. Things are slowly getting better, we are told. The church no longer tortures; it no
longer teaches that Jews killed Christ and deserve to be run out of town. It no longer supports dictatorships in
Latin America to the same degree it once did. There are lots of improvements.
But let’s not forget, as the Roman church transitions from
one hardliner pope to the next (at least that’s what most people are
predicting), that it still actually believes it is doing good by holding out
against full dignity for gay people, and the full exercise of rights for
women. It is and remains a
retrograde force.
I’m not faulting the church for the child abuse
scandals. That arrogance, bad as
it is, will pass in time, and they are already paying for their hubris by
having to watch people leave the church in droves.
I’m talking about the fundamental belief system, the one
that defines Catholicism to the core in the eyes of the official church. The one the pope and the cardinals and
most bishops insist is essential to the very nature of the Roman Church.
There are good catholics struggling valiantly against this
attempt to hold on to the right to define the nature of Catholicism. They vastly outnumber the hardliners.
But the hardliners still hold the keys. And although much of the church would
like to see a more pastoral, inclusive approach on the part of the hierarchy,
most Catholics also tend to accept the authority of the pope as part of the
nature of things. They protest the
rigidity, but seek a comfort zone in the center and become enablers. Just as non-European Catholics vastly
outnumber Europeans, the Europeans have the control and will likely capture the
papacy yet again when Benedict XVI resigns at the end of the month. Hardliners who are the hierarchy
are also vastly outnumbered. But
they too are still in firm control, to the chagrin of those who see no reason
for the church and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be at odds.
There is no compromise. One chooses human rights or one chooses the man with the
pointy hat who claims to speak for God.
And tells you how much he loves you if you’re gay.
And then takes your job away.
There are changes in the works. You can tell because the church is ratcheting up the rhetoric. Even the allegedly liberal Cardinal Meisner of Cologne (the one who appears to have spoken out in favor of birth control) went on the offensive recently. The church, he says, is up against a “Catholic
phobia.” The media, he says, show
“malice.”
Phobia and malice are Meisner’s choice of words,
apparently. Archbishop Gerhard
Ludwig Müller, who represents the Vatican, has another. What we’re dealing with, says Müller
,
is a “
Pogromstimmung.” A
pogrom-like atmosphere.
No kidding.
Pogrom.
Hard to beat rhetoric like that.
Not that the pope isn’t trying.
“Christians are the most persecuted people on earth,” he
says.
No wonder he's tired and calling it a day.
