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CounterPunch
January
18 / 19, 2003
The Vatican Hates Freedom!
Is the Pope
Part of the Axis of Evil?
By ANTHONY GANCARSKI
On January 24, 2002, Shelton Hull and I asked
Emmett "Bob" Tyrrell, of AMERICAN SPECTATOR fame, to
name what he thought would be the most surprising country that
the US would target in its War on Terror. This was at the tail-end
of a fifteen minute interview Hull was conducting for Folio Weekly,
and Tyrrell was taking the whole exercise none too seriously.
And so it was that we considered his response -- the Vatican
-- a throwaway line. Despite knowing a fair bit about the proxy
war the US led against Catholic operations in the 80s in Latin
America, it seemed just too implausible.
Fast forward a year, or thereabouts.
The American priesthood has been discredited, sex scandals seeping
into every parish if the media is to be believed. A brilliant
preemptive strike, intended to discredit the predictable antiwar,
anti-abortion program of the Catholic Church. Who, after all,
is going to ask child molesters for moral guidance? Unasked,
yet pertinent, that question loomed over the Church's public
utterances throughout the 2002 Holiday season. It's hard to damn
the warmongers when all the folks in the pews can picture is
a six year old boy going down on a man ten times his age.
But I digress. I'm sure some justification
of that practice as a very special sacrament has been circulated
within the Vatican already. And even if it hasn't, more people
than not see that as being more than possible. 2002 for the Roman
Church should permanently put to rest the notion that there is
no such thing as bad publicity. Anti-papists have had a field
day with such spectacles as Bernard Law sleazing it up in Boston
and the Pope seeming to wilt as he exchanged banalities with
Bush 58, or whatever his approval rating is this week.
Of course, the Pope's apparent wilting
may have just a bit to do with the Pope's history of losing battles
to the US government whenever a Bush is installed in the Executive
Branch. The aforementioned Jesuits got their asses kicked in
Latin America by "freedom fighters" and allies of our
cronies in the region. The Vatican's position in the soybean
market reportedly was undercut by collusion between Cargill,
Archer Daniels Midland, and the Chicago Board of Trade in 1989;
all this helped out Clinton pardonee Marc Rich, who himself was
keenly interested in soybean operations. At every turn during
the current papacy, Pope John Paul II has seen his Church's position
in America undercut, and its financial stance terminally compromised.
All this is bad news for the Church,
and its consequences will likely outlive the current Pope. In
a piece that appeared on the CounterPunch site on December 13,
I pointed out that the Roman Church needed to make itself relevant
in the only way possible: by branding itself as a force of opposition
to the current Empire, doing the honorable work of directly challenging
the US government. Nearly six weeks after my piece appeared,
the Catholic Church has made its first steps toward some sort
of reinvention. But will those steps be enough?
In a seventeen-page document entitled
"Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation
of Catholics in Political Life," the Holy See called "Catholic
politicians into line" and "turned the screws on Catholic
publications", if Reuters is to be believed. "Democracy
must be based on the true and solid foundation of non-negotiable
ethical principles, which are the underpinning of life in society.
. . Those who are directly involved in lawmaking bodies have
a grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that attacks human
life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote
such laws or to vote for them," proclaimed the Vatican's
doctrinal department, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith.
Sometimes I wonder if there are elements
in the Church hierarchy dedicated to bringing the organization
down. Considering that it took Rome the better part of a century
to address sexual abuse by its own clergy, the idea of the Roman
church issuing ultimatums to politicians of the faith is tantamount
to inviting a schism between the American Church and the Church
in Rome. The Church decrying Catholic politicians for not representing
Church values on issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion
shines with false, belated defiance. Why now, after the Kennedys,
the Cuomos, and other liberal Catholic politicians have both
risen and fallen, neither richer nor poorer for adopting positions
of "tolerance"? The Church taking such a stand twenty-five
years after it would be relevant is equivalent to the US government
upbraiding former client Saddam Hussein for gassing his own people.
It reads as a matter of convenience, a bold statement made only
after the payoffs stopped.
As I wrote last month, the Catholic Church
is a dying organism, its limbs gangrenous with decay. That there
are only 400 men in Jesuit seminaries suggests that either churches
will have to be closed or staffed with clergy from other countries
if Rome is going to continue to minister to stateside savages.
But if the Church is truly dying, perhaps it is best seen as
part of a natural course of events. Just as the tribal nations
were rendered obsolete by people purportedly serving God, the
Catholic Church in the US is being pushed to the margins by folks
who likewise claim God as their co-pilot. Never too far from
declaring a new crusade against one evildoer or another, they
don't seem willing to stop until 9/11 is a more important day
to most Americans than Christmas.
And it can be argued that much has already
come to pass. If so, it provides an important lesson to all men
of God who moonlight as courtiers to the State. Sooner or later,
you will be relegated to the dustbin of history. New myths arise
and supplant the old, and yesterday's heroes become villains.
The opposite is just as true, as US Catholics almost certainly
must attest. Perhaps the moral of the fall of the Catholic Church
in this country breaks down as simple as understanding that the
Devil rarely makes exclusive deals. Sooner or later, someone
else will come along, willing to debase spirituality even more
severely than the party who came before. Perhaps that is all
that is happening now, just another grisly rotation in the cycle
of death and rebirth. In that case, time to make book on what
beast is forthcoming.
Anthony Gancarski writes frequently for CounterPunch,
and accepts emails at Anthony.Gancarski@attbi.com.
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January 11
/ 12, 2003
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