A talk given at the House of Lords, London, on 5 June 2014 as part of a seminar on ‘Oppression, Repression and Resistance – Renouncing the Fundamentalist Yoke’, organised by WWAFE (Women Worldwide Advancing Freedom & Equality (Pt II).

Cont. (Continued from Pt 1)

Another thing that has not changed is the kind of response you will get if you challenge Catholicism. Now as then, if you take issue or even ask awkward questions (such as, did Jesus know he was God and had divine powers? If not, he can’t have been God because God knows everything. If he did know, his so-called humanity was bogus, since humans in general do not have those powers) you get told one of the following.

1. It’s a mystery, and you have to have faith.
2. It’s in the bible, so it must be true. (the fundamentalist approach.)
3. Or, even if it isn’t in the Bible, it is part of Catholic tradition so it must be true. This is also fundamentalist, but in a different sense. Catholic tradition is created by popes, cardinals and priests. All of whom are men. It’s true because men say it is.

If we look at the justification offered for the all-male priesthood, we find an example of this circular reasoning. The Catholic Faith Handbook for Youth, which, published in 2007, has the Church’s imprimatur, i.e. official declaration that the document is ‘free from moral or doctrinal error, says this:

The Catholic church ordains only baptised men because Jesus chose men, not women, to be his Apostles…for this reason the church is bound by Jesus’s choice to ordain only men. [3]

By this analogy it might be argued that since Jesus only chose Jews to be his apostles, only Jews can be Catholic priests. But Catholics don’t exclude non-Jews from their priesthood, so why should they exclude non-men? Here’s the answer.

The Magisterium of the church has consistently upheld that this practice is part of the Tradition that has been revealed by God and cannot be changed by human beings.[4]

Or, to put it another way, It’s true because we say it is. And who are ‘we’? Celibate men.

I’m not knocking celibacy. Lots of people are celibate, either through choice or force of circumstances. But to make it part of a job specification, as the Catholic church does for its priests, does suggest the kind of fundamentalism under which individuals who are not women, and who have chosen to forego sexual contact with women or indeed anyone, nevertheless seek to control some of the most intimate areas of women’s lives.

*

Some Jesuit monk is supposed to have said, ‘Give me a child before he is seven and he will be mine for life.’

I wonder sometimes if the Sisters of Mercy who taught me were working on the same principle. Did it work? Am I ‘theirs for life’?

In one sense, yes. My brain is full of Catholic clutter. I can effortlessly recite prayers, Biblical quotations, questions and answers from the Catechism, the words of hymns in English and in Latin. While I was preparing this talk, I came upon an online Catholic general knowledge quiz, and had a go. I ticked the boxes, and checked my score.

I got 87%. I am, apparently, a Catholic Genius. I was invited to CLICK HERE to become a missionary.

I’d be a funny kind of missionary, believing as I do that God the Father, as envisaged by Catholic tradition is a bully, a tyrant, a sexist and a sadist, fully worthy of our fear and contempt, but not our love or admiration.

Eternal damnation is a frightening idea, which is why the threat of it is such an effective way of controlling some religious devotees. If Hell turns out to exist after all, that will be bad news – but not only for nonbelievers.

It will be bad news too for believers, because they may have to go to heaven – a heaven devised by someone whose idea of justice is to torture people with fire for using a condom. A person whose idea of good governance to have their own son crucified in order to teach everyone else a lesson.. How sure can we be that this individual’s idea of eternal bliss would be as blissful as it sounds? In the words of the Irish-American lapsed-catholic writer Mary McCarthy, author of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, ‘I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.’

I’ve heard that, since the revelations about sex abuse in the Catholic church, Catholic priests get spat at in the street. I don’t imagine that Pope Francis’s recent comments on the subject have helped. “A priest who has sex with a child betrays God,” [5] he told journalists recently. Betrays God? No, Francis, sexual abuse is an offence against the human victim, not God. God is all-powerful, according to you, and so cannot be abused. A child can.

At the same press conference, Francis also said “I compare it (i.e. child abuse) to a satanic mass.” What is the point of this simile? Is he really saying that the evil and cruelty of child abuse can only be expressed by comparing it with what a recent correspondent to the Guardian identified as “a harmless ritual that is neither illegal nor immoral”?

I would not defend anyone spitting at Catholic priests or anyone else. But you can see where that sort of anger and disgust comes from.

Sheila Jeffreys in Man’s Dominion calls on feminists to reconsider the idea that other people’s religions should be treated with ‘respect’.

Disrespect is crucial. Disrespect for the cultures, values and institutions of male domination is the very foundation of feminism. Since religion is crucial to the construction of cultural norms of every culture, disrespect for it should be the natural amniotic fluid of feminist thought and activism. [6]

I wouldn’t go that far. Christianity and other religions have bequeathed some good values to humanity, as well as fine literature, art, architecture and philanthropy. There are plenty of religious feminists and multiculturalists out there whom I don’t disrespect, and don’t want to.

So what has been the outcome of my non-Catholic Catholic education? Am I ‘theirs for life’? Here is my answer. I am a feminist, secular, and a humanist. I am a woman who has lived with a man for 40 years without marriage. I have chosen not to have children, and have used contraception to achieve this. I support lesbian and gay rights, and abortion rights. I do not believe that the existence of God can be either proved or disproved, any more than the existence of Father Christmas and the tooth fairy can; but I do not believe in any version of God that has been constructed by men to promote patriarchal power, and I do not know of any others. And I have the same respect for all religions, including fundamentalist ones, as they have for me.

 Zoe Fairbairns (c) June 2014

Zoe Fairbairns studied at theUniversity of St. Andrews, Scotland, and College of William and Mary, USA. Former poetry editor of Spare Rib,she is a freelance journalist and creative writing tutor, holding appointments as Writer in Residence at Bromley Schools (1981-3 and 1985-9), Deakin University, Geelong, Australia (1983), Sunderland Polytechnic (1983-5) and Surrey County Council (1989). A widely acclaimed novelist and nonfiction writer, her first novel, Live as Family, written at seventeen, was published in 1968, followed in 1969 by Down: An Explanation, whilst still at university. Benefits (1979) was followed by five further novels: Stand we at Last (1983), spanning 120 years, three continents and five generations of women living through Victorian repression, prostitution, the suffragette movement, war and the women’s movement; Here Today(1984), awarded the 1985 Fawcett Society Book Prize; Closing (1987), depicting working women caught between feminism and Thatcherism; and Daddy’s Girls (1992), three sisters enmeshed in a family’s secrets. Zoe Fairbairns’ most recent novel, Other Names, was published in 1998.

A talk given at the House of Lords, London, on 5 June 2014 as part of a seminar on ‘Oppression, Repression and Resistance – Renouncing the Fundamentalist Yoke’, organised by WWAFE (Women Worldwide Advancing Freedom & Equality (Pt II).