THE “DYSFUNCTION, disconnection and elitism” which Enda Kenny said
“dominates the culture of the Vatican to this day” did not start with
the investigation into clerical sex abuse in the Cloyne diocese.
It
has been the defining characteristic of the Catholic Church throughout
history and abuses of an even greater scale than clerical child sex
abuse have been a feature of that history throughout most of its
existence.
The Catholic Church has been an advocate for slavery,
for the subjugation of people in Africa, North and South America and
Asia, for acts bordering on genocide and for the most appalling
cruelties.
Its supreme achievement is that this record is almost
obliterated from public memory and the organisation is regarded as the
repository of truth and morality by hundreds of millions of its
adherents.
Let me explain.
A papal bull,
Dum Diversas , issued on June 18th, 1452, by Pope Nicholas V,
declared: “We grant you (kings of Spain and Portugal) by these present
documents, with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to
invade, search out, capture and subjugate the Saracens [Muslims] and
pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may
be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, countries, principalities and
other property . . . And to reduce their persons into perpetual
slavery.”
This was no aberration.
Three years later the same pope issued another papal bull,
Romanus Pontifex, confirming the conquest of lands and peoples
by the king of Portugal and asserted the sole right of this King Alfonso
to the territories captured by him.
In doing so, the pope specifically
invoked the claim that popes derive their authority from Jesus.
It
said: “Since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among
other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso – to
invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans
whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the
kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all
movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to
reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to . . . convert [these
properties] to himself and his successors [and these possessions] do of
right belong and pertain to the said King Alfonso and his successors”.
These were followed by further papal bulls along similar lines by his successors.
Thereby
popes gave divine sanction to the brutal colonisation of large tracts
of the world, through murder, pillage and terror.
Yes, the means of
colonisation were not spelt out and specifically sanctioned, but wasn’t
it obvious what the means would be? These very papal bulls were invoked
by an authority of a different kind in a different era and with
significant consequence.
That other authority was the supreme court of America in a 1823 case known as Johnson v McIntosh.
In
that case, the court ruled that the lands “discovered” by Europeans
were owned by the colonisers, not by Native Americans, and that the
authority for that law with the Law of Nations, the basis for which were
the papal bulls.
This remains the law of the United States.
Native Americans have requested the Vatican in the last few years to
reverse these papal bulls, to no effect.
There are numerous instances of special depravity in the history of this institution.
One
of these was the slaughter of hundreds of Inca warriors under the guise
of their failing to convert to Christianity on being challenged to do
so by a priest wearing clerical garb, with which the Incas would hardly
have been familiar.
Others would have been the atrocities of the
Inquisition, crusades instigated and sponsored by the church,
specifically authorised by another papal bull, and massacred Muslims, in
one instance hundreds of defenceless men, women and children in the
mosque at Jerusalem.
Yes, there have been “acts of contrition” by
the Vatican for some of these atrocities but these have been couched in
the most tentative of terms and then the golden alibi: the Catholic
Church was founded by Jesus Christ and, being the impersonation of Jesus
Christ, it is immune from institutional defect.
No acknowledgment that its foundation document, the Bible, is suffused by incitements to genocide, intolerance.
It
has also been one of the primary cultural instruments of the
subjugation of women. The very claim that the exclusion of women from
the priesthood is ordained by the divine, in the person of Jesus, gives
added venom to that injustice.
Catholicism is a fundamentalist
religion, believing unswervingly in its own divine origin and, as a
consequence, its essential holiness.
Injustice, slavery and atrocity are
viewed within “the bigger picture” and, as such, diminished in the
shadow of it being the vehicle of humankind’s “salvation”.
What
significance in that context has the wholesale clerical rape of
thousands of children and the institutional cover-up of that wholesale
rape, the massacre of a few thousand innocents, the enslavement of
entire peoples?
And anyway look at the good the Catholic Church has done.
It will all be okay in the next world.