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April 21, 2002
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
April 20, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Drowning in a Sea of Apathy
Kristen
Schurr
Leaving
Nablus
Bernard Weiner
Israel and the Intifada
for Dummies
Jean-Guy
Allard
A
Coup Signed by Otto Reich
Chris Floyd
The "Grandeur" That Was Rome:
A Letter from the Front
April 19, 2002
Eric Flint
Free
the Books!
David Krieger
A Peace Proposal:
Bring in the Children
Jeff Paterson
Advice
to Recruits from
a Gulf War Vet
Jeffrey St. Clair
From Sen. "Lunkhead" to
Bush Energy Czar: A Year in the Life of Spencer Abraham
April 18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Latin
America's Dilemma:
The Propaganda of Otto Reich
Sam Bahour
Bush is Playing Russian
Roulette with Palestinians
M. Shahid
Alam
A
Colonizing Project
Built on Lies
Alexander Cockburn
Austin Cultural Limits:
Willie Nelson, Film and BBQ
April 17, 2002
Norman
Finkelstein
Behind
the Carnage in Palestine
Kristen Schurr
With the Wounded
and the Homeless in Nablus
Norman
Madarasz
Undoing
Chavez:
The View from South America
Brian Wood
Combing The Ruins of Jenin
George
Monbiot
Chemical
Coup: The CIA's Attempt to Undermine the UN's Weapon Inspector
for Iraq
Robert Fisk
Fear and Learning in America
April 16, 2002
Todd May
US
Should End Aid to Israel
Gabriel Ash
The Oilman, the General
and the Coup that Failed
Ron Jacobs
Wake
Up Some Mornin',
Find Your Own Self Dead:
The Chavez Coup
Brian Wood
Inside Jenin: Rubble and Decomposing
Bodies
Jack McCarthy
Citizen
Coup: The Times,
The Post and the Coup Plotters
Dave Marsh
Hymns: How I Got Through
Last Week
April 15, 2002
Susi Abeles
A
Field Trip to Jenin
Breyten Breytenbach
A Letter to Ariel Sharon:
"You Won't Break Them"
Gregory
Wilpert
CounterCoup
in Venezuela
Kristen Schurr
Amid the Rubble of Nablus
Jordy
Cummings
An
Open Letter to Abe Foxman
Christopher Reilly
The Media, the CIA
and the Chavez Coup
James
T. Phillips
"Homicide"
Bombers
April 14, 2002
William Blum
The CIA and Venezuela
David
Vest
A
Good Old-Fashion "Incursion"
Ralph Nader
General Motors:
Stuck in Reverse
M. Junaid
Alam
From
the Ashes: Palestinian Struggle for Freedom
Sam Bahour
Palestinians and Americans
April 13, 2002
Beth Daoud
Life
in the Ruins of Nablus
Patrick Cockburn
Bulldozing History:
The End Nears for Stalin's
Most Monstrous Hotel
Gregory
Wilpert
The
Coup in Venezuela:
an Eye-Witness Account
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Thoughts on Our War
Against Terrorism
Anne Winkler-Morey
Why
I Didn't Organize
a Passover Seder This Year
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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April 21, 2002
Sex and Power In Catholicism
By C.G. Estabrook
It seems difficult to deny that the current scandals
about child molestation by clergy in the catholic church are
connected with the discipline of celibacy. The requirement, in
place for half of the church's history, that office in the church
be limited to unmarried males, seems today to be attracting sexually
immature candidates to this ecclesiastical cadre.
The present situation results at least
in part from long-term historical changes that have made the
practice of celibacy the anomaly that is, limited within christianity
to the catholic churches of the west (that is, those originating
in western Europe -- there are of course today catholic churches,
in union with Rome, that originate in eastern Europe and western
Asia, where clergy are permitted to marry). Celibacy was made
the rule in the western church in the course of the 11th century
in a struggle for the independence of the christian movement
from feudalism, the political and social system that followed
the collapse of the Roman order in Europe.
Feudalism rebuilt society according to
family relations, natural and artificial: a vassal was a son
to his lord, and obligations were respectively filial and paternal.
To our eyes the feudal order collapsed the distinction between
public and private; it produced an entire society -- which lasted
a thousand years, roughly from the 8th through the 18th centuries
-- structured like the mafia.
The church sought to throw off control
by the new lords of Europe by celibacy, which ended the natural
family ties, and by what came to be known as "the investiture
controversy," which cut the artificial ones. The uniqueness
of the church order that grew from feudalism is due in part to
the uniqueness of feudalism itself -- a polity that finds a parallel
only in pre-modern Japan (where christianity was officially suppressed).
Christianity should of course be subversive
to every political order. In general, whenever the term "the
world" is used in the New Testament, it means not the physical
world but the present political set-up. Thus Jesus is quoted
as saying that his kingdom is "not of this world":
it is opposed to the Roman order -- which recognizes the challenge
and kills him. The cross, paradoxically adopted as a christian
symbol, was a Roman instrument of capital punishment, used particularly
for political dissidents and terrorists. Crucifixion was an official
lynching, which killed by slow suffocation -- the weight of the
body hanging from the arms eventually made it impossible to fill
the lungs. It was a public display of the weakness and humiliation
of those temerarious enough to question the world order. Had
Jesus lived in the time of a later empire, christians would adorn
their churches with nooses or electric chairs -- or perhaps the
syringes used for lethal injections.
Of course there is a tradition of celibacy
in christianity before the 11th century, but it is not particularly
associated with the clergy in the church's first thousand years.
Celibacy -- abstention from marriage -- is regarded, like fasting,
as withdrawal from things good in themselves for the purposes
of the kingdom of God, where, it was thought, all good things
would be found, and forever. This stance was explicitly political
in that it meant a minimization of engagement with the social
nexus by people who thought that they could take the meaning
of their lives not just from the structures of this world but
from the world to come. Settling for the present arrangements
meant, christians thought, not wanting happiness enough.
This asceticism is associated with the
rise of the monastic movement in the late Roman empire, where
monasticism is seen as political protest, in the name of the
coming kingdom of God, against the oppression of the Roman civic
order. "If cities were christian, monasteries would be unnecessary,"
wrote a 4th-century bishop of Constantinople in a letter to a
rich man. It was a revived monasticism that initiated the 11th-century
struggle with feudalism.
In the 16th century the new protestant
churches begin a complex course of adaptation to the budding
capitalist order and jettison celibacy in the process, while
catholicism freezes into its anti-feudal posture. Against this
background, it's easy to argue that celibacy as a requirement
for the catholic clergy has outlived its usefulness. There are
of course some more general scandals -- notably the exclusion
of women -- about what should be the leadership of a revolutionary
movement, dedicated to overcoming the world.
Bodiliness is hardly irrelevant to christianity.
Its central symbol is the resurrection of the body (christians
would say, much more than a symbol), not the "immortality
of the soul," a philosophical concept not mentioned in the
classic christian creeds. Christianity has insisted that our
link with the divine is material, in our flesh and God's flesh.
It has been opposed to all spiritualisms -- and in its history
it has opposed some powerful ones, like gnosticism and manicheanism
-- that view our connection with God as a non-bodily or "mental"
one. Its preaching of Jesus' resurrection is not that he performed
some magical trick, a resuscitation, but that he entered the
kingdom of God as just "the first-born from among the dead."
"As he is so shall we be." And it was central to the
preaching of Jesus that the kingdom of God, to be fulfilled in
the future, is nevertheless mysteriously present and available
to us now. Happy Easter.
Carl Estabrook,
a frequent CounterPunch contributer, teaches at the University
of Illinois. He is running for congress on the Green Party ticket.
He can be reached at: galliher@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
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