A Rant. About the Pope. Not, like I said, like I've ever been *pro* Pope.

[psocoptera]

So the Pope says gay marriage is part of an "ideology of evil". I'm having a hard time, in this particular moment, understanding how my Catholic friends can still be in communion with this man. I feel hurt and confused and baffled, by the Pope, and I don't even know why: it's not like I ever *did* have any respect for him, or look to him as any sort of spiritual leader, or agree with him and his beliefs and his church on anything whatsoever. But "evil"? Evil? I mean, I think it is possible for a person of good will and good character to come to the conclusion that gay marriage is undesirable and tragically misguided. I think that would be a *wrong* conclusion, but I can see how someone could have a set of plausible beliefs about gender and society that would lead them there - mistaken beliefs, misplaced priorities, but, you know, earnest attempts to figure things out properly. I have no idea how someone could reach the conclusion that gay marriage was *evil* in any sort of decency or honesty about the world around them. I mean, it's not like we're so short on examples of real, genuine evil that you could just forget what it looks like and think it's a sort of loving partnership. Either the Pope is totally divorced from reality (which, again, I've always believed, given the whole thinks-he-talks-to-god thing, so I don't know why I'm so appalled), or from morality. Or, heck, both. Gah.

(More on people of good character coming to profoundly flawed moral judgments: the O'ists, especially the more hardcore/"devout" O'ists, have an unpleasant tendency to refer to people and things as "evil". This really doesn't help the thing where everyone else thinks they're raving wackos. And it's just sort of ugly and base, which is ironic for people so concerned with a virtue ethic. But it doesn't infuriate me so much, which is ironic as you'd think I'd have *higher* standards for my, er, fellow non-travellers, but, well, they're wackos. Er. I guess I feel you don't have to be quite as careful with your denouncing if you're some fringe group as opposed to the spiritual leader of millions. I suppose also I do believe people who want to marry their partners to be entirely innocent and undeserving of denunciation while, while I think the O'ists go craaazy overboard in calling things evil, I do think a number of the things they target are at least deserving of some criticism. I mean, I call Jeremy Rifkin evil and he has not actually blown up a bus or anything. Maybe I should try harder to stick to calling him and his ilk "poisonous" and "toxic" and things. Hrmm.)

Comments

[carnap.livejournal.com]

It makes more sense to me; the Pope says that the "new ideology of evil . . . attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man", which I read as saying something like "these people are trying to expand individual rights in a way which will destroy society". Why anyone would believe that gay marriage is going to destroy "the family" or society is beyond me, but I'm not sure I can say that it's any more unreasonable than all the other wacky stuff Catholics believe anyway.

[carnap.livejournal.com]

Just to clarify: my point is that think destroying society gets to count as objectively evil, so once you wrap your mind around that idea that gay marriage will destroy society the Pope's position seems perfectly reasonable. And, as I said, I'm not convinced that "gay marriage will destroy society" is any more unreasonable than the rest of Catholic dogma.

[kelilah.livejournal.com]

I understand the hurt and bafflement, and hey, not Catholic here either.

But...hm. It seems to me that the Pope is not in the best health, either physically or mentally. I mean, he thinks there was a conspiracy to kill him, and he compares abortion to the Holocaust. And again, like your feelings about people who dislike gay marriage, I'm fine with people who think abortion is wrong and bad; I'm not going "yippy skippy" about it myself. But while it is *legal*, I wouldn't call it an extermination, because, what, it's not like abortions are imposed by one person/government/whatever, and it's not methodical, like "all black/Jewish/gypsy/gay/whatever fetusus will be aborted."

I think my point is that the Pope is probably going a bit senile and paranoid, and people who listened to him will still listen to him, and people who didn't still won't. But yeah, evil. Overused word.

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

The pope has an unhealthy attachment to Aristotelian concepts of natural law, as filtered through that rat bastard, St. Paul.

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

I like Fred's response :)

Though I actually have some sympathy for Paul.

People have written entire books on the topic of "Why I am a Catholic," and I could write about it for a long longer than I have at the present moment, but one quick point -- I don't see any reason why us social-radical Catholics should abandon the territory to reactionary sex freaks.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Yeah, no, sure. It was just one of those ranty moments. Yay non-freaky Catholics. Er, that sounded wrong, but, uh, yes. ::grin::

[eastgategirl.livejournal.com]

I'm not a Catholic either, and I think that many of the Pope's positions are incomprehensible at best and frequently reprehensible, but at the same time, we've got, to use that old phrase, to give the Devil his due and not forget that the Pope has been an outspoken critic of both the war in Iraq and capital punishment.

[carnap.livejournal.com]

You forgot 'the capitalist system'. psocoptera won't consider that a plus, but the Pope doesn't deserve his reputation as a conservative at all.

[saxifrage.livejournal.com]

I agree with what Kelilah said--the pope is seriously old and seriously senile. Probably you should be mad at the pope's stupid advisors rather than the pope himself--perhaps we should all feel sorry for the pope, since the church is giving him a very long and excruciating death.