How the Pope made me an Agnostic

For those of us paying attention, Pope Benedict XVI, or as they’d call him at my high school, le pape Benoît XVI, is visiting the United States.

I’ve seen very little of this in the American media — you think they’d be apeshit over it — nor have I heard much from the Canadian newswires (though to be fair I haven’t been paying much attention.) A quick read through the top Popely headlines in a French newspaper has things pretty much summed up though.

I’ve often said I enjoy reading about American news in French newspapers and Canadian news in American newspapers and all sorts of combinations of the above. International bias is a beautiful thing sometimes, and in this case, it jumps out all over the page.

Les francophones autour de moi won’t need a translation but I’ll summarize one or two articles for the rest of you.

In Washington Thursday, the Pope expressed his ‘profound shame’ regarding the pedophiliac-priest scandal that has rocked the entire Catholic church. That same Thursday, he met with a small group of people who were sexually assaulted by clergy members. The majority of meetings and speeches he’s given, however, have been varied as to the content: to the American people, he states that clergy-related rapes should be viewed “in the bigger context of sexual morals” of the American people, as if these rapes are somehow the fault of a lack of morality on the part of the general American population. His speeches to the Bishops, however, contain a totally different tone: “Your efforts to care for and protect are bearing their fruits; not only as part of your pastoral responsibility; but for all of society as well.” Having these facts all on the same page makes it quite clear that Benedict believes the problem of rapist clergy is in fact the result of American sexual immorality, specifically pornography, and goes so far as to tell the Bishops that they are doing a good job in handling the scandal.

Let’s digress for a moment, to see how the glossing over of this important issue is a very deliberate political move on the part of a politically conservative figurehead who is empowered by the people of the Catholic church to be an idol on par with God. Let’s not forget the commandment that stated one shall not have idols before God — however and unfortunately, many Catholics (and Christians) take the word of the pope as the word of God directly, without considering personal agendas.

The official priestly pedophile scandal did not erupt in a major and public way until 2002, when a Boston-area bishop admitted to having kept silent about sexual abuses committed by clergy members. It was the pope at that time, John Paul II, who entrusted Benedict with handling it. He wasn’t Benedict at this time, of course — he was a simple cardinal, Josef Ratzinger, responsible for the all-powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. In total, more than 10,000 children were sexually abused since 1950 by more than 4,000 priests. After a long period of abject denial, the American church was finally forced to take responsibility: 700 priests had their priesthood revoked, and 2.3 billion Euros (3.65 billion Canadian dollars) was dispersed by the church to buy clemency from the families, avoiding several embarsassing lawsuits, and finally, an official zero-tolerance policy for pedophilia within the clergy was instituted. (This is, of course, over and above the actual law within the actual criminal code that forbids sexual contact with minors when in a position of authority.)

Many victims are dissatisfied with this result, saying that it is one thing for the pope to express shame, but that he has revealed no mechanisms by way this tragedy can be avoided in the future. Elsewhere, the pope gives the impression that he’d rather gloss over the issue of sexual abuse by clergy members, stating that every sector of society is touched by sexual abuse, and that this should be considered alongside the abovementioned sexual immorality that he says pervades the United States. He never gives specifics for how the issue will be handled, nevermind having been personally at the helm for the last six years. He simply uses it as a springboard to slam his favourite scapegoats: mainstream media, pornography, and general moral bankruptcy:

(translated from French quotes): “What significance is there in talking about protecting our children from abuse when pornography and violence can be seen in so many living rooms, across the many media outlets easily accessible today?” He stated that reaffirming the ‘fundamental values of society, in order to give young people and adults a solid moral foundation’ was something he hoped for.

Within what was supposed to be a intervention about rapist pedophiliac clergymen, the pope managed to broaden his scope to include “the media and the industry of entertainment,” and the danger of secularization in a country with 65 million Catholics — the third highest concentration in the world, after Brazil and Mexico.

It’s a devious jump, the jump from rapist pedophiles to pornography to mainstream media to secularization. It’s interesting to note that when Benedict mentions pedophilia, a rapist clergyman, sexual assaults, or his shame, the next subject out of his mouth is about America’s moral decay. As if America’s moral decay suddenly makes a man who attended seminary school and took a vow of celibacy unable to prevent himself from sexually assaulting a small child.

It’s important to pay attention to his word associations, as they’re tricks pulled by religious pundits quite frequently in print media. The reason he always mentions these subjects side by side is to cause people to think that there must be a correlation between the two (or three, or four) — and that correlation perhaps equals causation. Nothing could be further from the truth, but it is how major political and religious leaders use the media to manipulate our opinions.

During his stern talk to the 400-some bishops, the pope highlighted some points to take note of. He preached that by moralizing the United States, by banning pornography and violence in the media, he hopes that ‘the children’ will therefore avoid degrading situations and vulgar manipulations of sexuality, which, according to him, are omnipresent in the present day.

I personally fail to see how less violence on TV makes fewer priests rape children, but I do see how controlling our media by calling for the desexualization and desensationalization of the same would make the Catholic church a more powerful political identity. He also preached against secularization, and against the once-a-week Catholics, stating that it is unacceptable to attend Sunday mass and then spend the rest of the week promoting practices that are against the doctrine of your faith, which, as far as catholicism goes, means no sex except for procreation and under no circumstances may you use birth control.

I find it personally quite interesting that the pope wants to control the sex lives and the media consumption of 65 million target Americans, but will pay out somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.5 billion dollars American to prevent rape victims from filing lawsuits and will secretly relocate them to make pressing charges extremely difficult.

God loves you. Jesus will forgive you. But the Catholic church as a political construct will stop at nothing to gain total control over what information goes into your head (as little as possible and as dogmatic as possible) and over how you live your life and affect those around you, and they want you to live your life with only the tiny slivers of information they’ve given to you. Dogmatically they go so far as to pressure that they should reserve their skepticism for science, not faith — that instead of having faith in science, and the thousands of years of experimentation and eureka!s that went into it, we should devalue it at every opportunity.

Don’t buy the smokescreen about pornography — pornography is not making priests rape little boys. Pornography is a word that Benedict uses to distract the easily-distracted from the topic at hand — that their young sons are being sexually assaulted by men in a position of authority, ordained by the one of the oldest Christian traditions in existence, by men who’ve taken a vow of celibacy, by men who you trust to confess your darkest secrets to so that your sins may be forgiven.

This is a church that will remove a priest from the priesthood entirely, shaming him for a lifetime, for having consensual sex with a woman once — but will relocate a priest to a new parish for having raped perhaps dozens of young children.

I thought hard about it. I really did. And there are some parts of the Catholic church that I will keep with me for the rest of my life — but I cannot, in good conscience, associate myself with an institution that would protect rapists from legal recourse and silence victims with injections of cash, all the while trying to control my access to legal and consensual sexual activity, stating that it’s what contributes to the moral decay of society.

I call bullshit, Benedict. No man who protects rapists from the full punishment they’re entitled to will be looked upon kindly by God, and I refuse to accept such a man as my religious leader.

Consider me excommunicated.

a coming-out, of sorts

Perhaps I should explain.

I am a slut.

I’ve always been this way — since I could remember. I don’t know how child’s play devolved into playing ‘doctor’. I don’t know how the neighbor girl and I ended up playing with each other with our clothes off. I don’t know why my friends at the time were interested in roleplaying a married couples’ struggles with sexual desire. I don’t know where I got the idea to see and touch other peoples’ nakedness.

I do distinctly remember the first time I found pornography.

I was mesmerized. Fascinated by all this new content, pretty ladies in pretty clothes, their nethers being photographed in extreme close-up. I remember my favourite section being the letters section, where I would read story after story of some fabulous sexual tryst. I locked myself in the bathroom, delicately pulling the magazines out from their hiding place, turning the pages slowly, carefully, drinking in every detail. I felt feelings in places I’d never felt feelings before — tightenings in my sides and tinglings down under. I knew I enjoyed all of this talk and the sight of all of these naked ladies, but I was terrified of what it all meant.

All of my first sexual experiences had been with women. Women, and their nakedness, their warmth, their curves and softness. Pictures of these women aroused me. I had never had a boyfriend. My train of thought, as a young woman just beginning teenagehood, was one of constant anxiety — the petrifying circular fear that I was a lesbian, a pervert, abnormal, different, set apart in some way.

I was precocious. In a house where my mother talked openly about how little girls who wore makeup looked like whores. (I wanted to wear makeup.) They talked about homosexuality as if it were sick. When my mother found out my father had pornographic magazines in the house, it was a Big Freaking Deal.

I grew up with a twisted sense of what sexuality was, or what sexual identity was. This was further exacerbated by the fact that I was lucky to go to a school that discussed puberty as a topic — let alone sex.

I believed when growing up that since I’d had sexual contact with a woman, that made me a lesbian. It was like a disease that I had caught, that I couldn’t get rid of. I tried to rationalize it — maybe as I got older and more womanly I could “shed” it like a skin, love boys, get married, have an easy life and that would be it.

Eventually I started reading about what being homosexual actually meant. I felt relieved to be attracted to men, to not be this big “L” word, to not have to tell my family I was going to cut my hair like k.d. lang and the whole works. But to be attracted to women at the same time was strange. I ignored it, wholly, though I maintained sexual relationships with women. The tension was huge and I had crushes and loves. I said to myself I was just ‘curious’ but it wasn’t curiosity that caused my head to lean a little closer to hers, to make my heart stall a beat at the thought of kissing her.

I dated men. I grew up. I met bisexuals, who told me it was okay to be the way I was — how unfortunate that this message came at the same time as a large number of other ones. The signal-to-noise ratio was not a good one. I was coming out of a long-term relationship with a man I’d thought (naively) I was going to marry. My mother called me a slut for having sex with him, at the tender age of 16. I was crushed. She grilled me as to why I would do such a horrible thing to her. I was encouraged to ask the man to apologize to her. I didn’t understand then, what I understand now. I didn’t understand the old-school idea of my virginity as the property of my parents. I just knew that while it was he who’d pushed me to have sex with him, it was me who was being called the slut.

That stuck with me, that word. My one [real] male sexual partner had made me into a slut — whereas the four or five girls I’d had relationships with before didn’t. True, my mother didn’t know about the four or five girls — or not that she let on, anyway.

Thinking back, perhaps I was a bit sluttish. I say [real] because I’d had sexual contact with men before — wondering what all this fuss was about, about this singular act. More learning when I discovered that what I’d thought was a singular act — sex — was actually a series of acts, acts which a woman was expected to be proficient in, without ever having practiced.

The inequality did not strike me at the time; at the time what I was most struck by was how little I’d been told. Even though I’d been exposed to such topics as oral sex and multiple partners, I’d never thought about the implications of such things. Suddenly things that weren’t sex were sex and things that were sex weren’t sex and it all depended on who you spoke to. Some girls weren’t sluts because all they did was suck cock — the ‘technical virgins’ that are commonplace in today’s media, which, as usual, is about a decade behind the times.

I resolved to raise my children differently with regards to sex, and walked into my relationship with my now-Master feeling very much like damaged goods. I’d lost my (value) virginity to someone else, I’d fooled around much since then, what was to make my sexual relationship with my sweetheart anything more meaningful than a pair of drunken tourists fucking in a hotel room?

My society taught me not to expect sex better than the sex joked about on TV. My society taught me that to want more or to expect more or to, Lord forbid, demand more, was anathema. I would take the cock I got, and damn it all, I was going to like it whether I liked it or not.

I’d like to lodge a complaint.