Headlines. Reactions to headlines. The agony of outrage crosses the internet like a tsunami just as it does most days. Destructive, unreasonable, stories leaving truth behind or spattering it with mud until almost unrecognisable.
What is it today? It's the Pope, Francis. What's he been saying this time? Is he picking on people like me again? Well read the headlines. If you're enthusiastic then read the articles too. Today the headlines all agree, "Pope says that people who choose to have pets rather than children are selfish." I'm paraphrasing of course but I'm freewriting rather than checking my phone and offering three sample headlines from three different newspapers in three different countries. You can check for yourself if you want to read the headlines.
Naturally people are annoyed. What a crappy thing for the Pope to say. They're on the attack. "What about social care?" they ask, though Francis often promotes that. "What about poor people who can't afford to look after children?" though he's often addressed poverty too. "How can he say that in the riches of the Vatican?" which are a lot less than people believe though still very far from material simplicity. "How can a celibate priest say such things about the choice to have children?" which is a question that can often be asked, perhaps with abundant justification. There are tweets and posts and comments that say horribly mean things too. I saw it suggested that Francis just wants to have lots more children born so that priests can abuse them. Outrage soon turns to lashing out in sour anger.
Most people, including Catholics, would agree the abuse in churches is utterly evil and more so that the response to abuse by the church and church leaders has also very often been utterly evil. We'd say, rightly, that any attempt to protect the reputation of the church organisation, or a priest or the seal of confession over and above the lives and wellbeing of abused children is completely indefensible. Of course we would because most of us are far from being monsters.
This is not going to be a defence of the Pope or of the office of the Papacy. It's not a defence of the Catholic Church, of religion, of abuse, or of anything else. The Pope says lots of things with which I disagree. The Church teaches lots of things I disagree with too. We don't see eye to eye on the existence of that one creator God.
I used to regularly spend time in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament held aloft in a monstrance and publicly displayed in what Catholicism called "Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament." I believed Jesus was before me sacramentally under the appearance of that wafer and I worshiped him with all of my heart. Now I confess to finding the entire Catholic (and Orthodox) belief in transubstantiation to be nonsense. While I can't prove absolutely that a wafer isn't body - and in Catholic teaching the blood too - of Jesus even though it looks and tastes and can be chemically analysed to be a wafer I don't think I have the burden of proof or evidence here. I'm not making the extraordinary claim when I say that I believe a wafer, while it may symbolically mean more to a believer, is still a wafer. Nevertheless the church has taught more than symbolism for 1900 years and I understand the emotional and mental appeal of the belief.
No, I'm not a defender of the faith and I stand far from Rome dogmatically and morally as well on lots of issues. How can I not when I'm a transgender lesbian? The Catechism of the Catholic Church still calls homosexuality intrinsically disordered and same sex relationships gravely disordered and Francis himself has said and written on several occasions that the very existence of transgender people goes against both God and nature so it's really possible at all. How could I possibly want to defend that? I ask the question as one who for so long rejected myself and others and did defend things like that.
Yet today I find myself on the defensive in some way for Pope Francis. And I'm on the attack against media sources and the consequent outrage that I suspect is often the deliberate intent of such articles. When we are constantly outraged against little things we are distracted from bigger things. In the UK we were outraged over a party in Downing Street that shouldn't have happened. No, it shouldn't. Absolutely it was wrong and not only it should be condemned but the subsequent lies and attempts at justification by the government. But in the noise made about a party they were pushing through two laws restricting our freedoms and human rights in ways far more dangerous, wide ranging, and long-term than a very condemnable party.
I read some of the articles last night. I wanted to know what Francis had said and on the face of it what the articles include was utterly outrageous. Selfish to not have children? Those without children are less human? Outrageous. It's easy to see why anyone would be annoyed. There's a lot to be annoyed about.
I wondered about it though and asked a question that most readers will not have asked: "Did Pope Francis say it?"
I've seen before that there are occasions when a Pope's words are misreported or taken out of context or twisted into an entirely different intent. I remember an occasion where a sentence spoken by Pope Benedict XVI was quoted in full. Almost. The sentence as reported in the media was disgusting. An absolutely horrible thing for anyone to say and therefore Benedict must be as bad as a devil. I'll happily condemn some things Benedict said. There are things that make me physically shudder. On that occasion though one word was left out of the quotation and that word was "Not." What he'd said was the absolute opposite to that which ended up appearing in media worldwide to widespread moral outrage.
None of the articles I read last night included a link to the full talk Francis gave but they did say it was during a General Audience, something which for many years has included the Pope giving a catechesis to the church on a particular subject, often in a long series on particular aspects of the church's faith and life. I used to own, in print, the catechesis of Pope John Paul II on the creed, something that took him quite a few years to cover.
I was curious. What would I find if I read the talk? It turned out to be the sixth in a series about Joseph, the adoptive father of Jesus or so the story says. From other reading this week I happen to be able to put adoption into a better contemporary to Jesus cultural context than I could a week ago. The most important child in that time, at least in the situations and cultures in which the gospels were written, was the one adopted into the family. That's a topic for another occasion but it's something that's lost in many sermons.
What did I find? Simply that the claim of global newspapers was, to a large extent, false.
Francis did not call people who have pets instead of children "selfish" or "less human." That's a lie and a lie doesn't become true no matter how easy people find it to believe.
The word "selfishness" does appear in the English translation of the talk, and I wonder further about the intent, vocabulary and nuances in the original language. However the word does not appear alongside people who prefer to own a cat than have a human child or alongside people who do not have the physical means, mental resources or desire to raise a child.
He does also speak of a loss of humanity when we, primarily speaking societally and to Catholics, are not open to life or to children. Take from that what you will and condemn if you wish but the way his words and ideas have been misquoted and twisted can only either be deliberate dishonesty or gross stupidity or the ignorance that comes when a modern myth is repeated as literal truth.
Unfortunately people do not tend to question reports which which they want to agree. That's true for almost everyone. Some of the outraged and some of those who seemingly are just glad of the opportunity to insult the church are the same people who often speak out and tell us to distrust media reports, to check sources, and to be very wise to journalistic and editorial biases.
It is wise to do all that too, at least to the extent our intelligence, time, resources and energy allow. Often there are fact checking sites that do the work for us and reference everything well. Last night I shared a video responding to an interview on Joe Rogan's show with the scientist most often quoted by Covid anti-vaxxers. Every single point he made was thoroughly debunked if necessary and the facts given instead. Every fact and rebuttal was thoroughly backed up with the best of sources and scientific papers and the whole thing had been produced with the input, advice and checking of other scientists. I didn't have to do any work. People far more knowledgeable than me had done it all. I only had to watch a video.
Most of us are far more inclined to challenge the things that disagree with our own thoughts, beliefs, likes and motives than those that broadly agree with us. That goes for the biggest conspiracy theory and the smallest misquotation. It goes for the most rational among us. It goes for me too and I've been known to post things I agree with without checking, things that have turned out to be false. When we are emotionally attached it's harder too. For all of us. A Covid anti-vaxxer will probably not watch the video and dispassionately consider all the sources. A religious fundamentalist will find it hard to explore any other possibility. And we all have weak points where our own biases and prejudices will, most times, drown out even the most well backed up alternative view.
Another important thing to note is the intended audience. These catecheses are spoken primarily to Catholics, members of a church with a particular teaching or set of teachings about parenthood, family, the openness to life, self-offering and so on. You may not agree with the teachings and probably don't know many of them. Even committed Catholics often don't agree with all the teachings. I don't agree either - about LGBT acceptance, abortion, contraception, and lots of other Catholic teachings even without looking at theological views. That's okay though. I'm not a Catholic and there's no reason for me to agree.
Simply, the Pope wasn't really talking to the world except perhaps in a secondary manner. He spoke to a people within a particular tradition that raises up the particular calling to marriage for most people who are not called to a full time religious life. Even teachings about these things are subject to change. Priestly celibacy, for example, is a discipline not a dogma. It won't necessarily remain part of the vows most ordained catholic priests make. Francis' words and pastoral advice are to them primarily. Not to someone such as me.
There are things I disagree with and things I'd unequivocally like to see change and I'm well aware of ways in which both church members and its leaders have often fallen far short of the ideals called for in the teaching and times in which the organisation has metaphorically pushed for Hell rather than Heaven. They've turned from teachings the rest of us may find peculiar (ignoring for just this moment the more anti-human doctrinal and moral teachings though we could all discuss them) into practices that cannot be seen as anything but evil.
However that does not, in itself, annihilate the intent and audience of papal catechesis. This is no more addressed to everyone regardless of creed, religion or personal philosophies and choices than were Francis previous teachings about Joseph or the months he spent before that looking at the biblical letter to the church in Galatia.
We can see of course that in some (or many) respects Francis and catholic teaching is out of step with our post-modern society and the freedoms we'd all like to be able to take for granted. We can see from his words that he seems bemused and even confused by it. He seems to be stumbling and finding it hard to see that other ways than his may be just as valid. Even ways that may lead to the demographic winter he, along with some secular sociologists, talks about.
I'm going to close by noting that it's not only media sources and non-catholics who misreport and misrepresent words and situations, sometimes completely deliberately and with arrogance. Catholics can do it too. Even Catholic priests.
When I was an ardent Catholic and entrenched in traditionalism while being very suspicious of modernist tendencies in the church I followed a traditional priest online. I liked what he wrote at the time though I now realise his views would lead to a church even more stuck in the past and increasingly irrelevant than it is, a church where perfection in ceremonies became more longed for than perfection in love.
I started to become disillusioned by such ways and by his ways in particular as a result of something in one of his blog posts. A quotation and a claim that a particular person said it. I can't remember who of course or what the quotation was. It's been more than ten years and I couldn't reliably quote the conversation I had this morning. I remember though that it seemed to me highly unlikely that this person ever said those words. So I checked. Very thoroughly. They hadn't said anything remotely similar. The priest had got something wrong. He wouldn't like that!
So I queried the quotation with the priest expecting a response along the lines of "Hey, thanks for telling me. I'll get that changed because I like truth and don't want to spread falsehoods and slander."
That didn't happen.
His response was that he agreed with the quotation so it didn't matter that it had never been said and it didn't matter that the person it was attributed to hadn't said it. The priest agreed with the words and that was all that mattered to him. I was shocked and began to see on that day that the priest couldn't be a hero of faith because he was happy to knowingly lie to promote his religious ideals.
I was amused, much later. I'd set up a blog when we lived in Wales. My first ever blog. Don't go hunting, it's no longer there. I have posted on it. Not once. My mum did once though, completely accidentally when staying with us. She wrote a very nice post with excellent photos about a family walk on Bangor Mountain.
Later, when starting a second blog that fared only marginally better than the first, I spotted that that priest had taken time to seek out my blog and that he'd placed a comment on my mum's accidently post.
"You are a very rude person."
If anyone ever chanced upon and read the blog and comment they'll have been very confused!
2588 words. I'm pretty sure free-written morning pages aren't meant to be 2500 words long.
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