Gość: A.D.
IP: *.mco.bellsouth.net
17.10.03, 14:26
>> 'Guardian' zamiescil ciekawa analize 'dziela' Wojtyly. Po oskubaniu
piorek, niewiele pozostaje dla podziwu, a raczej przeraza kryminalanym
brakiem odpowiedzialnosci i odczucia czlowieka dla czlowieka....
>>www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1064740,00.html
False paeans to the Pope
Twenty-five years on, Karol Wojtyla's ultra-conservative Vatican deserves
far more censure than praise
Polly Toynbee
Friday October 17, 2003
The Guardian
The eulogies have begun already. Extraordinary things are being written
about the Pope for his 25th jubilee this week, yet these are mere aperitifs
for the great banquet of adulation undoubtedly to come when the pontiff
finally shuffles off his mortal mitre.
Extraordinary that even the sane and measured Financial Times comment page
yesterday offered a monumental paean of worship. Two popes, wrote Gerard
Baker, earned the soubriquet Great in the church's 2,000 year history: "For
his leadership and authority in these challenging times, how fitting it
would be if Karol Wojtyla, the humble Polish priest, came to be remembered
as John Paul the Great." This remarkable sentiment comes with the obligatory
sneer at his critics that "the Pope remains, even in his declining years,
one of the great hate figures of the self-appointed liberal elites".
Puzzling this conceit that liberals are "elites" while the Bishop of Rome
enthroned in his triple crown is just a humble priest - but yes, he is a
hate-figure and with good reason.
There will be beatifications and adulations for an ultra-conservative Pope
imbued with the narrow ethos of the Polish church, now unpleasantly
resurgent in all its old nationalism, anti-semitism and anti-feminism. John
Paul II will rightly be praised for his unbending opposition to communism
and his support for Lech Walesa. It has entered the growing historical
mythology that it was the boldness of the west's far right that single-
handedly demolished the iron curtain - the Reagan, Thatcher, Wojtyla axis -
usefully erasing the social democrats who opposed it just as vigorously.
An irreligious western Europe largely ignores the strange rituals and
beliefs still practised by a fast-declining minority. Aged congregations are
vanishing and priest recruitment is in crisis. The Vatican is little more
than a historic place of beauty, a quaint bygone alongside Japanese Shinto
temples or Maori tongue-wavers. It seems eccentric to bother getting hot
under the collar about a moribund faith, let alone "hating" it. But Steve
Bradshaw's brilliant Panorama this week came as a timely reminder.
Visiting the Philippines, Nicaragua and Kenya, he found the catastrophic
effect of the church's teaching on contraception causing widespread death
across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Everywhere he went he found the
church's iron grip. In a Kenyan village where a third of the people were
dying, the church had prevented any condoms being distributed. Not satisfied
with preaching, the church uses political muscle and, above all, the power
of myth. In all three continents, Catholic-dominated communities repeated
the Vatican lie that condoms have holes in them that let the Aids virus
through. The president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family,
Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, explained that the Vatican's scientific
committee had proved it was true - but despite promises, never produced the
committee's evidence. Meanwhile, the WHO struggles, and fails, to stamp out
this omnipresent untruth.
No one can compute how many people have died of Aids as a result of
Wojtyla's power, how many woman have died in childbirth needlessly, how many
children starved in families too large and poor to feed them. But it is
reasonable to suppose these silent, unseen, uncounted deaths at his hand
would match that of any self-respecting tyrant or dictator. It may be
through delusion rather than wickedness, but it hardly matters to the dead.
It makes the sickly homilies about his simple piety impossible to let pass
unchallenged. A largely admiring article on these pages failed to mention
Aids at all.
On Sunday he will beatify Mother Teresa. Many years ago, before she was
famous, I interviewed her when she was visiting her London convent and we
argued about contraception. Couldn't she see the effects of her teaching on
the Calcutta streets where babies were born to starve and die in misery? She
said that every baby that takes a breath is another soul to the glory of God
and that was all that mattered, the creation of souls. Suffering? We are all
born to suffer.
All this is dismissed by papal apologists as a sideline, an irritating
irrelevance seized on by liberals and feminists as an excuse for attacking
Catholics. In the FT, Mr Baker flicks away the question thus: "There are
doubtless excellent grounds for promoting birth control in Africa. But it is
no surprise that the head of the Catholic church declined to endorse them."
Failure to "endorse" birth control is not the same as aggressively
preventing it in the many lands where the church holds sway. The National
Secular Society is campaigning to have the Holy See removed from the UN,
where it is the only religious organisation represented.
Clashing against the modern world, religions founder on their sexual
fetishes. Their high spiritual ambitions are brought crashing to earth by
obsession with the filthy human body. Sex always means women, Eve for ever
responsible for Adam's lust, for ever in need of subjugation. All the Middle
Eastern religions define their identity through fixation with women's
bodies - ritual baths, churching, shaving heads, denying abortion and
contraception, purdah and keeping unclean women from the altar. This
perverted abhorrence of women destines religions to collide with modernity
everywhere, for to be modern is to set women free. In the end, Islam, too,
will modernise.
Any attempt to stop sex leads to extravagant hypocrisy. It is no secret that
a high proportion of both Catholic and CoE clergy are gay, and some of
the "celibate" are child abusers whose activities were shielded for years by
the same Vatican that makes sexual purity the impossible keystone of its
identity. It is an odd throw-back to find the temperate CoE tearing itself
apart over gay clergy.
To outsiders, it is funny that the Pope has canonised more saints than all
those created in the past four centuries. It is less amusing that he has
created 201 cardinals, all deep conservatives. Will this gross
gerrymandering ensure an ultra-conservative successor? Vatican watchers
observe that all popes try it, but the pendulum tends to swing from
conservative to liberal and back again. If so, it is possible to hope that a
liberal Pope could be as great an influence for good as Wojtyla has been for
harm.
Sometimes John Paul II offered tantalising hints of what a good Vatican
could do. He campaigned to end capital punishment, though hardly gave it a
high priority. He made powerful critiques of capitalism's naked greed, but
he sabotaged the popular liberation theology of the Latin American barefoot
priests and backed the sinister Opus Dei instead.
East European Catholics are fighting to have God included in the new EU
constitution, and ahead lies a major row about whether Europe is confined to
Christendom - keeping out the Islamic hordes of Turkey. But for many non-
religious EU citizens, the difference between the mullahs across the
Bosporous and the mullah in the Vatican might be hard to detect. What
matters is keeping private Gods out of the public realm.
p.toynbee@guardian.co.uk
