Father Joe

 

McCarrick. 

I once lived with a Catholic priest, who took his title “father” seriously. He considered himself equivalent to the father in a family. And he once wrote a piece for publication arguing that being a father was a kind of martyrdom, that a father dies every day for his children. His editor tried to convince him not to make this claim; it sounded bizarre. And I agreed with the editor.

Now that I have had a good deal of experience as a father, it seems yet more bizarre. It is the opposite of the truth. We parents live through the eyes of our children. They give us a second, perhaps a third, perhaps a fourth, life. Perhaps more: the chain of descent is a primitive form of immortality.

But Father Joe was adamant. He even mocked his editor for not agreeing. He saw it as an obvious insight. He was a martyr for his congregation, and felt good about himself for it. Accordingly, each parent was also a martyr, being killed by their own children.

I realize now that Father Joe was a narcissist. Many members of the clergy are: it is a role that proclaims “I am better than others.” The Bible calls them Pharisees. 

This would explain the supposed tragedy of parenthood. A narcissist would indeed consider the existence of the child (or parishioner) an affront to themselves, in that it requires them to consider the interests of someone other than themselves, and sometimes deny their own desires for another. Indeed, to demand this is, in the mind of the narcissist, an assault, even murder. Consider the “transsexuals” insisting that if you do not use their chosen pronouns, or let them use their preferred washrooms, you are guilty of genocide. This is the way the narcissist sees the world. This makes them dangerous and capable of violence.

This can then justify the narcissist in any kind of abuse of their children. Or, among clergy, any kind of abuse of young parishioners. They had better be useful to the narcissist in some important way, to justify their existence. 

There is a trope in Greek myth of a parent consulting an oracle on the birth of a child; and being told the child will grow up to replace them. As a result, they persecute and try to kill the child.

Of course, this is always simply true. In the normal course of nature, the child will outlive the parent. So what is the point of this oracle?

I think this is a literary convention to make objective the inner thoughts of the narcissistic parent: children are evil. They require attention, and they are likely to survive him or her. This is an affront to the narcissistic ego. 

Freud’s imaginary Oedipus complex probably springs from the same roots. There is much child hatred in the real world. Look at the numbers for abortion, for pedophilia, and for child sex mutilation.

Social Science Professions

Don't buy it.

I remember reading somewhere the calculation that, up until about 1924, physicians did more harm than good. They killed George Washington by letting blood. President McKinley died not from being shot, but from the surgeons expanding the wound and fishing for the bullet with dirty fingers. Patent medicines relied heavily on things like cocaine and heroin.

Even today, estimates are that only 27% of what physicians do is justified by any science. The rest is mostly tricks of the trade to reassure the rubes—er, “placebo effect.”

On this slim foundation rests all the immense prestige now enjoyed by the medical profession; and extended, on their example, to so many other professions that claim to be “scientific.”

Most of the rest probably still do more harm than good. I submit that most of them—those based on “social science”—always will. Psychology and psychiatry, modern education, human resources, sociology, social work, modern journalism.

First, scientific methods do not work on human subjects, who are too unpredictable and too conscious of being studied. Studying people as objects is nonsensical, as well as intrinsically dehumanizing.

Second, any profession exists on the basis of a claim of special knowledge not available to the general public. It is therefore essential for such professions to gin up some body of knowledge that would come as a surprise to the uninitiated.

This means that they must from the start reject all conventional knowledge and common sense about their subject—all that we legitimately do know about it.

This makes them systematically harmful. We would be vastly better off if they were prohibited by law. They are actively doing harm, and demanding huge sums of money to do so.

We are seeing proof of this all the time, if we care to look. The Internet is daily demonstrating that the mainstream media, the professional journalists, are less accurate and less reliable than the amateurs, the "citizen journalists." All the studies show that homeschooled children do better than those professionally educated.

My hope for mankind is that these social science professions will soon become casualties of the Internet.

The Coventry Welcome

St. Michael's (Anglican) Cathedral, Coventry.

On the doors of England’s Coventry Cathedral, I am told, there is a sign or poster that reads:

“We extend a special welcome to those who are single, married, divorced, widowed, straight, gay, confused, well-heeled, or down at heel. We especially welcome wailing babies and excited toddlers.

“We welcome you whether you can sing like Pavarotti or just growl quietly to yourself. You’re welcome here if you’re ‘just browsing,’ just woken up, or just got out of prison. We don’t care if you’re more Christian than the Archbishop of Canterbury, or haven’t been to church since Christmas ten years ago.

“We extend a special welcome to those who are over 60 but not grown up yet, and to teenagers who are growing up too fast. We welcome keep-fit mums, football dads, starving artists, tree-huggers, latte-sippers, vegetarians, and junk-food eaters. We welcome those who are in recovery or still addicted. We welcome you if you’re having problems, are down in the dumps, or don’t like ‘organized religion.’

“We offer a welcome to those who think the earth is flat, work too hard, don’t work, can’t spell, or are here because granny is visiting and wanted to come to the Cathedral.

“We welcome those who are inked, pierced, both, or neither. We offer a special welcome to those who could use a prayer right now, had religion shoved down their throat as kids, or got lost on the ring road and wound up here by mistake. We welcome pilgrims, tourists, seekers, doubters -- and you!”

This represents the common modern sentiment: that the Church is for everyone.

Yet this is actually not the Gospel message. It is not what Jesus said. He divided mankind into sheep and goats, or wheat and chaff, and welcomed only the sheep. The rest, he said, quite literally, could go to Hell. He defined his flock in the Beatitudes, as “the little people,” the burdened, the suffering, and followed this up with an equally clear definition of those he did not want: the scribes and Pharisees. When some of them came to see John baptize, arguably the first Christian service, John basically told them to get lost: “You bunch of snakes! Who warned you to run from the coming judgment?”

Who were the scribes and Pharisees? Most literally, the intelligentsia, the educated professional class: the lawyers, journalists, accountants, teachers, professors, ministers.

It is perhaps worth noting here that, contrary to Marxist theory, this professional class, this clerisy, has always been the ruling class.

And the priests? That’s not clear. Properly, the priests of that day were the Sadducees. While Jesus’s relations with them were also difficult, he did not single them out in the same way. The phrase was “Pharisees,” or “scribes and Pharisees.” He might have added Sadducees, and generally did not. Whether or not the Sadducees of Judea can be equated with the Christian priesthood, they were not so condemned.

Instead, it was the professional “clerisy.”

I think we can also assume Jesus’s condemnation did not apply to an entire class as class; that would be arbitrary. There are some good Pharisees in the Bible. Some think St. Paul was a Pharisee in this sense. What Jesus was condemning seems rather to have been the pervasive attitude among such ruling groups that they are better than the “little people,” the laity, the Trump voters and the rednecks, the ordinary folks, and had the moral authority to tell them what to do: the self-righteous. “Pharisee” means literally “set apart, separated.” More or less, “elite.” This attitude no doubt is concentrated in the professional classes, but narcissism of a similar sort can of course appear elsewhere.

My portside buddy Xerxes proposes his own list of undesirables who should not be allowed in the cathedral--not, at least, without changing their views: “racists, misogynists, white supremacists, anti-gays, anti-Muslims, anti-immigrants.”

All of these things are indeed no doubt sinful, gravely sinful if indulged in with full understanding, since they violate human equality, and so the Golden Rule. But they are not the sins Jesus considered deal-breakers. Sin per se is after all no reason to bar anyone from the church. As Jesus said, he came for sinners, not the righteous.

And from either a Christian or human rights perspective, Xerxes’s list is incomplete. It condemns misogynists, but not misandrists; white supremacists, but not black supremacists, brown supremacists, Amerindian supremacists, or Asian supremacists. Anti-gays, but not anti-heterosexuals. Anti-Muslims, but not Muslims who might be anti-Christian, anti-Hindu, or antisemitic. Anti-immigrants, but not “anti-natives” who condemn or scorn their host culture.

Instead of opposing discrimination, this list, and any similar list, is discriminating.

And looks very much like the sort of list the Pharisees might impose on the great unwashed. Hypocritically; or as we more commonly call it nowadays, as “virtue signaling.”

Pope Francis on Hypocrisy

If it has been accurately reported--a big "if"--Pope Francis has said in a recent homily that it would be better to be openly atheist than one who attends mass daily, yet does not demonstrate love for your fellow man.

There is logic to the claim. At least the atheist does not cause scandal and bring the religion into disrepute. Jesus himself railed against religious hypocrisy in the New Testament.

Still, in pastoral terms, supposedly Francis’s talent and chief concern, this seems the wrong message. True enough, scribes and Pharisees would prominently attend synagogues purely for the sake of social status. They were not sincere about their faith. The same might be true of a Catholic who attends mass regularly.

The problem is, in these times, few are likely to attend mass daily or even weekly for the sake of higher social status. Society as a whole is at present far from impressed by such things. Throughout the developed world, attending a Catholic mass risks social stigma, rather than prestige. It is counter-cultural behaviour.

Granted, within their own mind or within a small group, they might be acting hypocritically. Still, this seems a secondary worry, and all but counterbalanced already by the moral courage required, and the value of the moral example.

Instead, given the present social and intellectual climate of hostility to Catholicism and religion, it seems to amount to publicly undermining the faithful. The implicit message—surely at least the message the world will take from it—is that sincere faith and being observant is less than worthless. Best to avoid it altogether; you are only risking hypocrisy. All that matters is doing good.

In practice it seems an argument against religion and in favour of secularism, or perhaps, to use Francis’s own quoted term, atheism. And it must plague the conscience of the scrupulous, who will always fall short of moral perfection, moral perfection not being available to us mortals. So, since they are not morally perfect, and are painfully aware of this, must they avoid the mass and the sacraments, for fear of being worse than an atheist?

Pope Francis may only be being misquoted--as so often in the past. Still, he bears some blame that he seems to so often leave mistaken impressions. That is hardly pastorally sound. If he is unreliable on the theology, and unreliable on pastoral matters, where are we?

Ph.D.s and Atheism

An acquaintance with a Ph.D. argues that the fact that few Ph.D.s seem to be believers is strong evidence that there is no God. That is, if the brightest among us do not think there is a God, that means there isn’t.

The first thing to say about this is that it can be no surprise to Christianity that most Ph.D.’s tend not to genuinely believe. The New Testament itself points it out. Those people who hold Ph.D.’s these days are the direct successors of the scribes and Pharisees of the Gospels. They did not believe in God either.

They were then, and they are now, the most learned members of society. But are they the smartest? That’s not clear. Besides Jesus himself, William James Sidus, with the highest IQ ever formally recorded, had no tolerance for the academic lifestyle. Almost no great philosophers or artists have been academics. Many if not most great scientists, too, have not held Ph.D.s. Ph.D.s may indicate no more than upper mid-range on the real intelligence scale.

That said, if you look not at Ph.D.s but at the acknowledged greatest minds of human history—the Einsteins, Newtons, Shakespeares, Descartes, Platos, Aristotles, Socrates’s-- most have in fact been believing theists. Even when that was not the social norm in their time and place.

A little learning is a dangerous thing; in the broader sweep of things, Ph.D.s in general may be the higher sophomores who think they know it all. The village atheists who have read a book or two, and think it explains the world. More characterised by intellectual pride than by intellect.

The academy seems to run on an idolatry of the human intellect. In that the existence of God puts stern limits on the power and majesty of human reason and human knowledge, acknowledging the existence and sovereignty of God can be particularly painful for intellectuals. Just as admitting that the spiritual world is vastly more important than the material world is particularly painful for the wealthy.