More Catholic fail in Brazil

[mirrorshard]

More Catholic Fail: nine-year-old rape victim pregnant with twins, has abortion, bishop excommunicates everyone who helped her, Vatican defends the bishop.

I wish this sort of thing was unexpected, but really, that's bishops for you. With a few honourable exceptions, who'd be decent noble human beings without any titles at all, all the ones we hear about are a bunch of authoritarian frock-wearing gay-hating child-killing paedophile-enabling Holocaust-denying weirdos.

The thing is... for once, I'm not going to condemn the bishop in question for moral cowardice, for being evil, or for having a moral compass so far out of whack it thinks Santa's living in Tunbridge Wells.

This particular episode, of all of them, is just plain stupid. No matter how you feel about abortion or teenage childhood pregnancy, none of the Bishop's response makes either moral or tactical sense.

There is no conceivable way that this girl could have become a mother. There was only one conceivable way that she could have survived the whole tragic episode, and she took it. Attempting to cram a pair of growing foetuses inside a nine-year-old girl just does not work. I like to think of early-stage pregnancies as the potential for a person, but barring a few centuries' worth of SFnal medical development those poor scraps of cells didn't even have that.

So what did the Bishop think he was trying to achieve? Even if pregnancy is supposed to be a good thing in itself, it's atomistic. Six months' worth isn't better than three. If sex isn't worth it unless you get a child out of it, then that should surely go nine times over for pregnancy.

Of course, that assumes he was trying to achieve something positive... he may be the kind of sub-Daily Mail scum who thinks an object lesson will teach all those disobedient nine-year-old girls that they'd jolly well better stop getting themselves raped if they know what's good for them.

Alternatively, of course, he might be some sort of anti-rational superstitious moron. Something bad happened - quick, make sure someone connected with it suffers in some baroquely unpleasant fashion, or it will happen again! This is cargo-cult thinking. They've seen justice happening, and they know it's a good thing, but they don't know how it works and can't reconstruct the chain of decisions and desired outcomes that lead to the end results.

On the gripping hand, he may just be a panicked authoritarian, who's made himself subject to the Peter Principle. Told that he's some sort of spiritual shepherd, responsible for peoples' souls, he worries and panics and starts going through pointless rituals of condemnation and casting-out to reassure himself that he still has a firm grip on his responsibilities. He's Doing Something, and responding vigorously to the evidence of sin. Never mind the niggling little details; the important thing is that it says, right here in the manual, that abortion is a sin and it must be stopped. If you just follow the manual, it'll all turn out OK, and WILL YOU JUST DO WHAT YOU'RE TOLD AND STOP QUESTIONING EVERY LITTLE THING I SAY!

Really quite sad. I almost pity him, except, well... he took up bishoping of his own free will, and Peter Principle or not he knew what was coming up.

Since I'm genuinely curious - what's the point of bishops? Why do we still have them? What do they do that any other priest can't?

Comments

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

My view, as previously stated, is that passing the buck by making this matter all about baby-killing does actually benefit the church in the sense that it distracts attention away from how the church deals with child abuse. If they do nothing/make no public statement, then they appear to be condoning it. If they condemn the abuser, then they are hypocrites for protecting the child abusers in the church. As much as any doctrinal reason, I think this is the practical reason why excommunicating the stepfather didn't happen (leaving aside some mealy-mouthed punts at how rape is bad but not as bad as murder, which have already been made by another Vatican aide, IIRC?)

I'm surprised that the business of the Petrine legacy amongst bishops hasn't come up. It's of utmost importance to the Catholic hierarchy that all their bishops are ordained by the laying-on of hands by someone who had hands laid on him by someone who had hands laid on him, all the way back to St Peter. Apostolic succession is a means by which the Catholic Church claims a spiritual and, arguably, magical authority. Anglicans have obvious episcopal privilege here in that the Anglican church was formed by properly ordained bishops blah blah, so they have apostolic succession (which is quite a big deal for some people), which pleases the Papist wing.

So, bishops *are* administrators, but arguably apostolic succession makes them a sort of guru/magician/Grand Wizard also.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

A very good point about child abuse. And yes, YDRC - I think that's covered in the second link in my OP, though I might be thinking of one of the non-BBC articles I saw while looking around.

I'm familiar with the apostolic-succession argument, I just can't really comment on it because it runs almost exactly counter to all of my Nonconformist ideas on spiritual authority and divine inspiration. Though I am tempted to ask fanwank-type questions about whether & how it remains unsullied by passing through some arguably corrupted and evil holders.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I'm not asking either of us to believe it, just accept that it is a state of being which enables (Catholics and Anglican) bishops to Do A Thing - which was the question I thought you were asking. I'm not necessarily saying the Thing is worthwhile, or even exists.

I suppose that the argument from someone who believed but didn't approve of the office-holders would be that the magic still works even if they are corrupt. It's the acts, not the actors, which are important. They're just conduits. And a bishops is still a bishop even if they were ordained by a bad bishop - A says the usual term is "valid but irregular". Note that there is some complexity about the validity of what happens after excommunication - I'm staying away from that whole morass of LeFevrists, Dutch Old Catholics and the impossibility of ordaining women, because it's just too late at night for that kind of thing.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Mm, yes, and I'm not sure it's possible to discuss that last in any sensible way at all.

Given that the official position is that they can Do Stuff because of Bishop Magic, one has to ask just how much that belief is real, and how much it's lip service to tradition and organizational resistance to change. Then again, that kind of transmission isn't exactly rare in non-religious contexts - Erdős numbers, for instance!

[arkady.livejournal.com]

And in other religions also; the lineage of ordination is also very important to certain paths of Wicca - Gardnerian, Alexandrian and Lycian, to cite three examples. Any "true" Gardnerian or Alexandrian Wiccan should be able to trace their line of succession back to their founder - Gerald Gardner in the case of the Gardnerians, Alex and Maxine Sanders in the case of Alexandrians, and Boniface in the case of the Lycians. Certain branches of Druidism have similar rules of succession.

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

I know from an ex of mine (who is now planning to acquire roman Catholic ordination) that a very similar principle applies in Hinduism as well; each guru is taught and initiated by his own guru, and so on back until you reach an avatar.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Quite. I'm not sure it's entirely useful even to think about it in terms of "real". I feel that, in a lot of instances, both are true for many. But I may be wrong.

I think it's possible to have sensible discussions about it (in terms of dissecting and analysing the various connected ideas), but whether there is much that is useful would no doubt depend on our positions. I can entirely see why you wouldn't find any of it useful at all. I find it somewhat useful, but mainly from the acquiring-pointless-knowledge perspective.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Mm, it's definitely something worth saving for some evening when I need a particularly chewy Star-Destroyer-vs-Enterprise argument.

From the focus I've got myself into at the moment, though, it just looks like a holdover which could profitably be routed around by refactoring the organization(s) according to desired outcomes rather than perpetuating current structures.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

it just looks like a holdover which could profitably be routed around by refactoring the organization(s) according to desired outcomes rather than perpetuating current structures

That would be fantastic, but don't you have to put the finishing touches on those pig wings first? ;-)

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Priorities. I fail at them.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

Several people have had that idea beforehand (Knox and Calvin, for instance). It tends to lead to religious wars.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Well, I agree that forking the project is one of the standard solutions to this problem, and that institutional resistance to change is particularly powerful.

I'd prefer an analogy with Fox and Naylor, though!

[sleetersoulfire.livejournal.com]

I know the current focus is on Catholic belief, but in the Mormon belief structure you can't actually use the magic given to you if you're not 'worthy' of it.

This extends to things like you being unable to baptise, bless, etc if you've sinned without going through the proper steps to gain forgiveness for your sins (Acknowledging you've done wrong, Being sorry you've done wrong, Confessing (to God or to your bishop) and correcting the wrong you've done, and not doing it again).

In the Mormon branch of christianity, finding out that an active member is a child molester would probably have a very serious knock-on effect of (a lot of/some) people's baptisms being nullified and a lot of people's sunday's having been wasted because the bread/water blessed by the individual would not actually have been blessed, and so would not have had the necessary magical properties.

Random info dump complete. Thank you for listenting! :D lol

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

Article XXVI (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Thirty-Nine_Articles) specifically covers (for Anglicans) the question of bad bishops and priests; their failings do not cause the sacraments to fail.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

Even the Romans admit that other churches exist, so it's not essential for a bishop to trace his lineage back to St Peter, as long as it goes back to one of the apostles. For instance, Coptic bishops trace their lineage back to St Mark. (For the avoidance of doubt, bishops tend to get ordained by several bishops all at once, often including one from another church, so in practice most bishops can probably trace their lineage back to all of the apostles.)

Unfortunately, the validity of Anglican orders is not as straightforward as you suggest. There's an extremely complicated controversy over it, which I'm afraid I can't possibly fit in a LiveJournal comment.