Thursday, March 03, 2005
FROM NORTHERN IRELAND
Suzanne Breen critiques the state of health of the Pope, making a comparison to the English monarchy that doesn't entirely hold up given the difference between temporal and spiritual authority.
She concludes her article with an argument for democracy to replace what she considers an arcane method of election. One gets the impression she has little use for Catholicism apart from using it to make what she thinks is a stinging editorial.
Well, she's from Northern Ireland, so what would we expect?
But in the mid-point she does make some observations that ring true.
Regard the Pope with his head slumped forward, unable to speak, in his wheelchair.
Is this the image the Catholic Church wants to portray to the world?
It's a fair question. He doesn't fit the image of a powerful political leader. But then he isn't a political leader. What, exactly, are the criteria for a powerful spiritual leader?
In the last days the image of the Pope and the image of Terri Schiavo tend to jump into the mind's eye together, mostly because both are dealing with the potential or reality of a feeding tube. If we demand the power image in a Pope and ask him to step down, we would also unintentionally be making a statement about Terri. Either all life is valuable, or only productive life is valuable; and mostly by "productive" we mean "economic." Do we really want the Pope to demonstrate to us that only the latter has validity, knowing what it is going to say to us about the value of childhood, motherhood, retirement? That doesn't even begin to address the value of handicapped life. The call for the resignation or replacement of a spiritual leader is dangerous in its implications for every human who will live a diminished life at some point. And that means all of us, because unless we die young all of us will have one inadequacy or another to bear before we leave this earth.
Imagine if the Queen was in a similar state? Wouldn't there be calls for her to step down? Wouldn't she become a figure of ridicule?
The answer is "yes" she would become a figure of ridicule, just as this commentary of Ms. Breen is making of the Pope a figure of ridicule. It's doing something else as well. It's exposing the values Ms. Breen holds and is willing to voice--that old age is ridiculous. I don't look forward to the glances of the Ms. Breens of this world when my time comes. It's something I think about. Too often. Mostly because this world is getting more callous, more mean-spirited, more intolerant with each passing day. The idea that you make your own reality is permeating the culture. With enough Ms. Breens in the world Western philosophy will shift in her favor. With Christianity no longer standing in the gap, the disposal of all imperfect life will be inevitable. It might be my grandchild who is disposed of. It might be yours.
Ironically, a man who made his name championing the fight against communism, now resembles all those previous ageing Soviet presidents, barely alive but wheeled out every now and then for show.
In other words, as much as I dislike communism, they did get something right.
The sexual shenanigans of the Windsors are well documented but at least they don't cost lives; the Catholic Church's sexual politics do.
In Kenya, where a fifth of the population is HIV-positive, the Church has sponsored condom burnings and prevents doctors distributing a piece of rubber which could save millions of lives.
She seems to overlook the fact that the Catholic Church's policies are that sexual contact is to be reserved for the state of married life between a man and a woman. Had the Catholic Church's policies been the world's policies, and had they been adhered to, we would not have to use the letters A, I, D, and S to conujure up an image of debilitating disease. One wonders if Ms. Breen would be willing to demand that AIDS patients be scuttled off into invisibility?
The ban on contraception ensures thousands of women in developing countries die in childbirth needlessly, and thousands of children starve to death in families too large and poor to feed them.
With good medical practice, those thousands of dying women would live to raise their babies. Poverty, not the ban on contraception, is what ensures thousands of women die in childbirth. How about donating a month of your salary, Ms. Breen, to help insure that those women will live? Ditto for starving children.
What contraception does insure is that Western democracies are now finding that their population is decreasing, and that to keep the society running smoothly, workers must be imported from those countries where contraception is not practiced. One tends to suspect, however, that Ms. Breen has cast those workers into invisibility as well, since she doesn't seem to be able to acknowledge them.
It does seem that Ms. Breen, "the pride of Northern Ireland," is not all she is cracked up to be. Don't be fooled.
