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

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Oh, administrative stuff, I see. Conflating HR and line management, which is never really a good idea.

[emperor]

No, I think you misunderstand somewhat. this book might be helpful (and you can read it all online).

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

That does look helpful, thank you! On the other hand, I can't find the entire version - that link only shows me most of the book up to page 63, and the relevant parts seem to start after that.

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

Yes and no. 'Episkopos', the Greek word from which we get the word 'bishop' and its cousins in pretty much every language, literally means 'overseer'/'supervisor'. (It has that same 'skopos' stem in it that gives us telescope, periscope, etc, along with the epi- prefix found in epidermis and epidemic.) There's a strong argument that when this word is used in the New Testament, it means exactly an HR type of role, and not a super-priest at all. But then it's not clear from the NT that there should be three orders; it looks awfully as though there are deacons and bishops, and the priest/elder role is something that either of them might do.

In practical terms, it's different in the RC and the Anglican churches. In the RCC, the bishops are the overall managers, and run the show. In the Anglican church, they're the priests' line managers, but there's a separate non-clerical HR and finance department. (Indeed, there are two, one regional and one national.)

I don't know how the Orthodox arrange things. Some other churches (eg German Lutherans) have people they call bishops, who really are just overseers and have no special clerical role at all.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting, thank you - I hadn't connected the etymology.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

I understand that priests were a post-biblical development, which evolved once Christian communities grew sufficiently large that one man couldn't plausible say mass for and minister to all of them, so the bishops delegated certain of their responsibilities to priests. So it is the bishop of London who has the oversight of my soul, but he's delegated it to the vicar of Holy Trinity (and confusingly, he's also introduced an intermediate delegation to the suffragan bishop of Edmonton). The priest says mass in persona episcopi who is himself in persona Christi.

The deaconate was not originally a liturgical role at all. I suspect that the deacon's role in the high mass evolved just to give them something to do. (Incidentally this is sometimes used as an argument against women deacons, because although there were women deacons in the NT, they didn't do what deacons do now.)

Just to address some specific points made above (although I realise that Alex will know this), any Christian can baptise people, and deacons frequently do. Deacons can also marry people. Priests (and bishops) can say mass, give absolution and administer extreme unction (commonly but inaccurately referred to as the last rites). Bishops retain to themselves the power to confirm and ordain.