Letter to a Suffering Church VIII: Have We Been Here Before?

Chapter 3 is titled, “We Have Been Here Before” and is going to be Barron’s attempt to reassure us that the Catholic church has been through scandals prior to this and still survived. Before getting into his examples I assure you that no, it has not been “here” before. Sure, it has had its scandals, but that was then, when the church wielded considerably more political power and was not the subject of numerous lawsuits. Prior to this current problem the scandals were effectively non-issues because if the church was not the state it had enough authority in the state that everyone had to just grin and bear it.

He begins quoting 2 Corinthians 4:7: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels” noting that the grace of Christ is within us and human beings are deeply flawed. It’s a nice sentiment but just because we are wordly beings does not mean that it’s an excuse for truly vile behavior. You don’t get a pass just because we are capable of doing wrong. Now this isn’t a problem unique to Christianity or even to Catholicism. All religions do this, they excuse the mistakes of their members by claiming, “hey we’re all just human but it’s the message that matters.” The problem with this is that it is the religion that allows them to get away with the crimes in the first place. Lucretius writes, “so potent was Superstition in persuading men to evil deeds (De Rerum Natura 1:101).” The point our Roman was trying to make was that without religion people would not feel justified in the crimes they commit, the authority of divinity gives them their justification. As all religions lament the existence of flawed humans for not being the divine, mistakes are forgiven and the most terrible crimes are encouraged to be excused because only the divine is perfect.

This is probably not what Barron means, but I only hear this kind of discussion when situations like this are presented. Criticize a religious authority and the response is, “look, we’re all flawed but god(s) is/are on our side, we can’t live up to perfection but we are trying our best.” Governments do not have this excuse, corporations do not, regular people do not, but those of the cloth and their institutions have it. If it is not what Barron means, then he should be a bit more clear because in context it looks like he’s saying that yes people are bad but the institution is good because it holds the key of St. Peter.

Barron moves to Napolean, whom he addresses with the title “Emperor.” Which, while correct, is odd. I’ve never really heard/read that aside from the Count of Monte Cristo.

Anyway, the story is that Emperor Napoleon threatened to burn the church to the ground, and by church he means the entire Catholic church. The person he was threatening, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi replied, “Oh my little man, you think you’re going to succeed in accomplishing what centuries of priests and bishops have tried and failed to do?”

First off, this is a good story, but is it true? I doubt it simply because of the phrase “little man.” Napoleon was not short, for his time in France he was tall, the whole myth comes from a mistake in assuming that he was measured using the British foot rather than the French foot before measurements were standardized. Still, good story and nice rejoinder–even if it didn’t happen.

Secondly, what’s the point of this story? Barron seems to think that there is some will that keeps the church alive despite the corruption, incompetence, and negligence of the members of the church. That much is true. However, it’s not a divine will that allows this, it’s that the church has convinced its people that there is one. It’s because if you are raised from birth believing that this organization has the will of god behind it, you are willing to excuse anything it does. If Starbucks had engaged in a century long criminal conspiracy to hide child molesters, shuffling them from café to café, in order to avoid criminal prosecution there isn’t a jurisdiction in the country that wouldn’t shut that business down despite most people’s crippling caffeine addiction (this writer included).

He then quotes Hilaire Belloc, an ultra orthodox Catholic writer, who writes that “but for unbelievers a proof of its divnity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.” Belloc is a good example of my position: someone so orthodox, so zealous, that literally nothing could dissuade them from their belief. The only possible reason that this could be the case is that it’s a religion and not anything else. This isn’t proof of divinity to an unbeliever like me, this is proof of the folly of human adherence to superstition. It’s just like Asimov is reported to have said, “the bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived,” because no one would believe a word of that book if they weren’t told it was the word of god first.

The continuing existence of the church is not a proof of anything other than the height of what people will excuse when they are told that the perpetrators hold the will of god. Voltaire believed that the Lucretius line I cited above would outlast the human race. He’s probably right but only because people refuse to listen to it.

Letter to a Suffering Church VIII: The New Testament

So we’re done with the Old Testament, which is good, as it isn’t really making the case that Barron needs it to. Sure, it sometimes condemns people for behaving badly but it either condemns the wrong person or it condemns the right person for the wrong reason. Sons of Eli were abusing their position by having sex with the women waiting outside the temple, but not because they were abusing their position but because they were imparting dishonor to them. Right people, but wrong reason.

The entire delve into the OT was supposed to be about proving that the God character approves of human sexuality–and he really doesn’t. It’s only for the purposes of reproduction that he seems to approve. Barron could point out the numerous concubines that both king David and King Solomon have as being approval for fun sex, but for some reason he shies away from that. I feel for Barron in trying to make this case, he’s got to fight the current of 2000 years of Catholic doctrine as well as the entire Abrahamic tradition which isn’t sexually positive. So, we skip the New Testament.

In the New Testament he’s got to ditch this motive entirely. There isn’t anything about human sexuality in the New Testament that is going to make his point for him. So adjusting tack he’s going to focus on how children are the favorites of god. The reason is that in Matthew 18:1-5, Jesus tells his disciples that children are the favorites of god as opposed to some king, soldier, or priest. Ok, that makes sense, they’re too young to have done anything wrong…as long as you do not count the sin of Adam that they “earned” by virtue of being born. You know what I’m going to give this a pass though, because it is one of the few good things that we can get without having to draw up some weird hoop jumping to justify (except that part about original sin).

I’m always amazed when people like Barron–a Catholic Bishop–who has no children talk about the innocence and purity of them. They are only innocent because they have no guilt, no reticence, and when they don’t like you–they are not shy about it. Children, as opposed to what Jesus says in Matt 18:4 are not humble. They are very confident in their crazy ramblings no matter what is coming out of their mouths. Jesus never had kids either so his experience with them was tangential at best. Have a kid bro, then you’ll doubt that whole innocent and humble thing. Barron writes, “In short, the child–humble, simple, self-effacing–functions as a sort of iconic representation of the divine Child of the divine Father.”

Children only seem simple because they don’t know anything. Trust me as the father of three equally spaced five years apart crafty little super villains. The waft and weft of their minds is only hampered by what they haven’t been able to figure out yet. It’s not a trait of simplicity, because they apply their knowledge very quickly when they learn it. Their minds are, in the words of Dr. Banner, bags of cats.

Children aren’t self-effacing either. I’ve never encountered a kid that would poke fun at himself as a sign of humility. They either know they can do something or they don’t want to do it (which means they might think they cannot). There’s not really an other option. They don’t have the self-awareness for self-reflective effacement. This is what happens when you idolize the children without actually having one–ignorance. I love my little goblins, but I don’t trust their wiles.

We move from Matthew to Mark, where again Jesus holds up a child telling his followers that taking care of the children is akin to taking care of him and has earned heavenly reward. I have no problem with this, who would? Aside from anti-immigration MAGA types who think they’re Christian but haven’t read their own damn book.

My only issue with this part, and the rest of this chapter, is that we don’t need an argument that says “here’s why raping children is bad”–because as rational people we all understand that it’s bad. My good Bishop, you don’t need to convince us that the physical crimes were sinful/evil, we already know this. We also know that crimes against children are especially bad because they cannot defend themselves against people that they were taught are authority figures. We already know all of this.

Barron concludes the chapter by saying, “The central tragedy of the sexual abuse scandal is that those who were ordained to act in the very person of Christ became, in the most dramatic way, obstacles to Christ.”

No.

The central tragedy is that those who claimed moral authority over billions, hid the most heinous crimes allowing them to continue for decades. Leave the Jesus out of it because whether or not that’s real is irrelevant. The Boy Scouts of America are going through a similar problem but they don’t get the same shield that the church did. Further nothing stopped the victims from being Christian or Catholic, their rapists didn’t rob them of that. What happened to them was horrible but perhaps if the organization to which they belonged and from whence they derived their authority didn’t cover it up they might still have more allegiance to it. The further implication that Barron is imparting is that the victims are somehow impure, because otherwise, what’s the obstacle?

The kids, the victims, are still innocent. Even as adults, because they didn’t do anything wrong. They haven’t committed a sin in this situation. It’s only religion that causes anyone to doubt such a thing.

Letter to a Suffering Church VII: Asymmetry

In my dissertation I explain a concept that skeptics are pretty familiar with: the bullshit asymmetry theory. First coined by Alberto Brandolini it states that the amount of information required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that used to create it. It will take me 100 words to refute bullshit in ten words. This is appropriate because I’m writing over a thousand words for every page and a half that Barron is throwing out (when he’s not quoting). By all accounts I should have stopped writing this series by now it’s not a long book (103 pages total), but since this book is supposed to somehow convince people that they should stay Catholic even though the church has done nothing in response to, what can be best described as, stopping an ongoing criminal conspiracy to coverup child sexual assault I think it’s important that we continue forward. When we last left off Barron was digging through the Bible to find instances in which good sexual behavior was rewarded and bad sexual behavior was punished.

We last left off with the book of Samuel and how the sons of Eli were using their position to get laid. We now turn to the hero of the Bible, the biblical source of my name, King David of Israel. About eight years ago, I chronicled my turn from religious person to atheism. One story I never mentioned, is that I began to doubt the Bible in grade school because of the origin story of David. There’s a conflicting narrative with regard to Saul and David. First Saul knows who he is, then he doesn’t. Saul fears David but offers his daughter to him in marriage, welches on that deal, then gives him the second daughter. It never made sense to me but I was told to not question these types of things in the word of God. Fun. I questioned anyway.

Most people know David as the slayer of the giant Goliath. If you know anything more it’s probably David as a king and general, but letch? That usually gets ignored. Jesus is alleged to have descended from house of David via Joseph (even though Joseph had nothing to do with the bloodline), but let me say this: David’s house has a lot of rooms.

Barron tells the story of the peeping tom David. The story comes from 2 Sam 11:1-5. David arises in the evening, sees Bathsheba bathing, sends some messengers, “lays” with her, and she becomes pregnant. Barron recounts this story mostly as it is, noting that David used to ask god for direction but now does not. He has become self-directing which is bad…apparently. Well here it is, but let’s not be so quick to blame him: as Barron recounts, “the Biblical author is likely aware of Bathsheba’s own cooperation with the affair–does she just happen to be bathing within easy eyeshot of the king?”

Who cares where she’s bathing? That’s not her fault that someone watched her clean herself. She’s cooperating with him by being naked in her own bath? I wasn’t taught this interpretation at all.

The story continues in Samuel that David has Bathsheba’s husband killed then marries her to “coverup the crime.” I’m not quite certain what the crime is here. Is it adultery? Is it rape?

Bathsheba “lays” with David, but that’s because he’s king and she pretty much has to. She’s just the wife of a soldier, and not a particularly well known one. As I said in the last post, she can say no, but saying no isn’t something that comes without punishment…or at least that is a definite implication. David has Uriah killed by having his general place Uriah in a vanguard unit that will bear the brunt of the fighting and Uriah dies. So god disapproves? Is that the message of this section? That sounds good, don’t abuse your power to force women to sleep with you and then have their significant others killed. The Lord will be displeased.

What is the Lord’s response: kill a baby. Seriously. God kills a baby. This is the chain: David sleeps with a man’s wife, gets her pregnant, has him killed (indirectly but still murder), marries the widow, and God’s response is to murder a baby. From the Bible, “And the LORD struck the child that Uriah’s wife bare unto David, and it was very sick. (2 Sam 12:15)” Further, God will raise the armies surrounding David’s kingdom against him and he will fight battles after battle. Which, given the time period was probably going to happen anyway. Let’s be clear, that David has killed a whole bunch of people at this point. In 2 Sam 1, he commits the great sin of the ancient world and kills a messenger who, at Saul’s command, euthanized Saul. His armies have murdered cities full of people but that one time he spied a naked woman…that’s what earned god’s wrath. The wrath was so intense that God didn’t even punish the guy who sinned directly. He just killed a baby that was his son, and then made it so he had to do the thing he liked best: kill other people in order to defend his kingdom. I’m not sure of the lesson here.

Further let’s look a bit more at David. For a god that only approves of “normal” sexuality David is an interesting hero. He’s got at least seven wives, counting Bathsheba: Anihoam, Abigail, Maacah, Habith, Abital, and Eglah. I don’t personally want seven wives, but it’s nice to know that god would approve if I so desired.

I suppose Barron’s point is that David did wrong and God was displeased. But that displeasure is just the same as Eli’s with his sons (last post). It’s not like God did anything to David as punishment. So this god person doesn’t seem to mind, really. He’ll just kill a baby once in awhile because at the very best OT god is arbitrary.

This wraps up the Old testament look at sexuality. And now Barron has to move to the New Testament. Which, is also going to be a bad idea for him.

Letter to a Suffering Church VI: Oops

We now return to our narrative where Bishop Barron is trying to find the words of scripture to shed light on the sexual abuse conspiracy scandal. As I said in part 3 and last week; Barron probably doesn’t want to go down this road. The Bible is not what people think it is: it’s full of terrible people who are the protagonists, the “God” character is spiteful and arbitrary punishing people for the wrong crimes, and the good stories are so far and in between that one really has to be an expert cherry picker to find their points. This is especially true in the Old Testament.

We ignore the rest of Genesis and skip seven books to 1 Samuel for the next of how god is all about sex and punishing those who misuse it. Samuel begins with the conception of Samuel. Which is weird–I wouldn’t write my story beginning with my conception–but whatever. Barron recounts this because the high priest Eli finds Hannah in the temple muttering to herself. Instead of assuming that she’s praying he assumes she’s drunk, and when she clears that up Eli tells her to continue. She’s praying for a baby, and eventually gets pregnant. I would not be telling this part of the story if not for the fact that Barron tells this part of the story because it shows that Eli has “not an ounce of pastoral sensitivity.”

The only reason that I think he’s bringing this non-sequitur part of the story up, is because it displays his willingness to criticize a character, a hero really, of the Bible in Eli. I’m assuming though, I really have no idea. Nevertheless Hannah’s pregnancy is seen as a miracle. However, we have too little information to make this judgment. We don’t know how old she is, or whether she has some kind of illness that prevents her from conceiving. Her husband and her have some sex later and she gets pregnant. I wouldn’t say “miracle” fits here.

Unless we look at the parts of the story that Barron is skipping in order to make his criticism. The reason she’s desperate to have a son is because her husband’s other wife Peninnah has a bunch of his children (1 Sam 1:2). That’s right bigamy, why isn’t Barron bringing that up–or why is he bringing this up at all? The second real problem is that the reason Hannah can’t have children is because, “the Lord had shut up her womb. (1 Sam 1:5).” When Hannah prays to the Lord for a baby the answer must have been something like, “Oh right, that’s on me. Bang! There’s a baby in your belly now.” Like I said, this “God” character in the bible is pretty arbitrary.

We set aside the story of Hannah, because it does not factor into the plot anymore (though it is odd that Hannah gets a name) and move on to Eli’s kids. Eli, the high priest, has two unnamed sons. They are not with the Lord but with Belial. Belial is a word that Hebrew scholars translate as “worthless” but is commonly understood to be a demon or devil. In other words Eli’s sons are some real pieces of shit. They behave like spoiled children of the high priests. Their first sin is that they steal the meat being sacrificed on the altar (1 Samuel 2:11-17). Though I question the word “steal” as Barron puts it because the meat is supposed to be for the high priest. It seems from reading the biblical passage the real crimes is that they didn’t want to wait for the fat to burn, so the crime is impatience(?).

The further crime that the two sons commit is that according to Barron “they were sexually abusing the women who worked at the entry of the meeting tent.” In the Bible it says “they lay with the women that assembled at the door of the Tabernacle of the congregation (1 Samuel 2:25).” There’s a couple of differences here, the first is that we don’t know how consensual the sons’ actions were with the women. Now, that’s going to be a problematic question in that the power differential in a theocratic society is going to make consent a questionable prospect no matter what. The sons are basically princes and control the wills of those beneath them. Secondly, we aren’t told the ages of the women either, and considering that they are considered chattle in the Bible the real crime may be in robbing them of their “purity.” “Rape” isn’t an enumerated sin in the Bible. Thirdly, the Bible says, “ye make the Lord’s people to transgress (1 Sam 2:24)” in other words, it’s not the sons that are sinning but their actions are imparting a sin to the women, i.e. fornication.

Eli hears the crimes of his sons, remonstrates them for it, but then does nothing. Finally, finally, Barron gets it…sort of. God tells Eli through Samuel that he is going to curse Eli’s house and kill them all. Not just because of the crimes of Eli’s sons but because Eli didn’t do enough to stop them. That’s Barron’s reading and he’s mostly not wrong. God says, “For I have told him that I will judge his house for ever for the iniquity which he knoweth; because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not (1 Samuel 3:13).” Interestingly, Barron’s Bible quote of 3:13 has God saying that they blasphemed against him, while the KJV has the crime as being “made themselves vile.” I point it out because the Barron quotes a crime that is not against the people who were the sons’ victims but rather because they were priests and thus with god. They have harmed not the individuals themselves but the reputation of the priest class and god himself. The KJV version has the crime as being about the transgressors. I think he should have stuck with the KJV for that one.

I said Barron gets it and here’s how: he writes that the story is familiar because we have priests abusing their power financially and sexually (though again, rape is sexual only in the act itself not in any other way), the superior does nothing but offer a few words but nothing else and now the church is in peril. This is unexpected and good. Perhaps the good Bishop really does understand that the problem is the inaction on the part of the church authorities.

He’s got the ball…but then he fumbles it at the end, “At the height of the troubles, in the early 2000s, many Catholics in America were dismayed at the frank anti-Catholicism on display in many of the newspapers, journals, and television stations that covered the scandal.”

The “height of the troubles” refers to the coverage. This is wrong because the “trouble” is the actual crime and coverup not the fact that we, as a society, became aware of it. It’s trouble for the church now, but it’s been a trouble for the victims for at least a century. This “frank anti-Catholicism” is what? The pointing out of these horrible crimes and the conspiracy of silence that surrounded it? Is it anti-Catholic to point out what the Catholic church did? In his mind, apparently yes. The initial Spotlight report from the Boston Globe was not anti-Catholic because it reported what the priests did and what the church did to hide them. It’s not anti-Catholic to point out that the silence amounts to a criminal conspiracy, that’s just a statement of fact. Sure, someone like Christopher Hitchens’ opinion on the matter could be considered anti-Catholic but he’s been that since before the we became aware of the crimes. What amounts to “anti-Catholic coverage” here seems to be covering what they did. You were so close Bishop, so very close.

Letter to a Suffering Church V: Interlude

We had a two week break there and I couldn’t let this go unattended a third week. The first week was because I had lots of grading to do. The second was because of Christmas day and my three little goblins were not going to let me sneak away to write a blog. There were things to put together and open. I was also really sick.

The rest of this chapter is going to be Barron’s interpretation of the Bible’s view on sexuality. He’s going to go through about six more of these tales and then explain that, yes, the Bible thinks what the pedophile priests did was wrong. This is a problem for two reasons: 1–and again, he’s missing the point (so far, I have not read ahead) that the problem isn’t just the rape of children it’s the coverup and facilitation of these crimes. I’ve repeated this many times and will continue to do so I imagine, so I will not explain any more about it.

The second problem is that Barron is going to rely on something that every single religious person who has confronted me about not being in their specific religion commits–that we haven’t read the stories ourselves.

I pointed this out last week with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. People know of the destruction of Sodom, they assume the crime was homosexuality (not incorrectly, it’s just not consistent in the Bible), and then they assume that the story is over. As I explained there is much more to the story, Lot is the good guy who offers his daughters to the crowd, in context of the entire Bible he is considered noble and virtuous.

Barron is speaking to a primarily Catholic audience. This is important to keep in mind because Catholics, like most religious people, haven’t read the Bible either. They have however listened to stories in it from their weekly services. They’ve read the stories as well. The problem is that in understanding how the Catholic missal works.

During church services Catholics are given a little book that has all of the readings for that service’s particular day. There are three: one old testament, one epistle (New Testament), and one Gospel (Jesus story from the New Testament). They are about five to ten paragraphs long (though the latter is rare) and are supposed to communicate something important. For instance, you won’t find any of the boring genealogy charts in the Old Testament readings.

These readings aren’t picked randomly either. They’re carefully selected and curated. The end of the Lot story, where he is given wine until he passes out by his daughters and then sexually assaulted by them isn’t a reading I would ever expect to have given to a church service (I did the readings for my school’s church services). I was never going to read the story of Jesus wilting a tree because it didn’t give him a fruit that day (Mk 11:12-14), nor will I have read Moses commanding his troops to murder an entire city and enslave the virgin women (Numbers 31: 7-18). Everything that you hear is going to be the good side of things and not the entire story.

Most of the stories in the bible are like this: when you read a good one, just keep reading for a few more paragraphs, and it will get weird…at best. When the evangelists try to speak to me about the “prince of peace” I like to toss them Matt 10:21 where Jesus explains that he will divide families and that he’s comes to bring not peace but a sword (Matt 10:34). They are usually taken aback by this, because in their understanding the only people that aren’t Christians (and their version of Christianity) are those that have never heard of it. The best retort is to use their own book against them, it never gets that far though, just tossing some information back at them usually sends them running.

In context, I’m curious to see if Barron’s stories can justify the position that he’s trying to take. I doubt it, but we’ll see next week.