Papalphobia
A reader sent me a link to an article about the tragic death of Jody Dobrowski who was allegedly killed because he was homosexual. In it Matthew Paris starts by making some valid points
...The newspaper commentaries would write themselves. We owe it to Jody’s memory, we would declare, to root out all prejudice against homosexuals. If that prejudice could only be exterminated, murders like this would never happen again, and Jody would not have died in vain. All stirring stuff. And true in at least one sense.
But he did die in vain and he wouldn’t have been killed by homophobia. He would have been killed by one or more psychopaths, and if they hadn’t latched on to homophobia they would have latched on to another hatred, and killed a black, or a Jew or a French tourist. Homophobia would not have been the reason; it would have been the excuse.
Every age produces its small, sick crop of brutes. Every culture reaps among its harvests the tares of human failure. Every body of human beings has its leg ulcers.
And they need excuses, these pathetic riff-raff. Every blood-lust needs to rationalise. Even the least human among us is human enough to seek reasons for our brutality. There will always be young men whose heads and lives are so comprehensively messed up that they are crazed by the urge to wound, destroy and kill. It is they — and not Jody — who are the outcasts.
and then lapses into incoherence.
Pope Benedict XVI does not tend a flock of psychopaths who need to hate and will anyway hate. His flock are normal, balanced people — more than a billion — who begin each day with no desire to wound, who do not hunger for someone to despise, but who seek from his Church guidance as to what kind of life and what manner of men to approve or disapprove.
When he teaches them to hate, there will be more haters in the world. The hatred will be new, a net increase in both haters and hated. Pope Benedict XVI therefore has the power to enlarge the circle of darkness, to widen the skirts of human misery.
He has recently pronounced that candidates for holy orders, even when celibate and resolved to remain so, should be disqualified if by inclination they are gay. By this pronouncement he does more than lay down criteria for a job: he points to millions of his fellow men, people whom there would be no other reason to shun, and calls them offensive to God.
To what kind of philosophical shambles can our Government have been reduced, when it promotes laws to criminalise me if I encourage hatred of such a Pope, yet looks away when such a Pope encourages hatred of me? For whoever killed Jody I can feel the forgiveness that comes with pity. For men like Ratzinger I can feel none.
Of course the fact is the the Holy Father has made no such pronouncement and the document much talked about is not even out (though it is reported it will be released tomorrow). Then to further say that the Pope calls those suffering with same-sex attraction "offensive to God" is to prove that you have read nothing that the then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote while head of the CDF. So it is now okay to have a hatred of the Holy Father and to have more sympathy for murderers than a man who has poured himself out in service to the Church. Just another example of Papalphobia - an irrational hatred of the Holy Father not based on anything the Holy Father has actually said but misleading and erroneously amplified press reports. Even if the document actually does bar those with homosexual inclinations from attending the seminary is the author also upset about the monarchy ban applicable only to Catholics? It is always nice to be lectured about hate by someone displaying their hate for all to se.
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My reaction to the article was the same as yours, Jeff.
It was a wonderful article until the last paragraphs when he started spouting nonsense about the Pope.
It is interesting that this article comes out now with our new Pope having been elected. It seems the writer was not aware of [url=http://www.baywindows.com/media/paper328/news/2005/04/07/News/The-Holy.Fathers.Homophobia-916335.shtml]John Paul II's stance on homosexuality[/url]. I suppose his silence concerning JPII is that JPII chose to do nothing about it, like he did for so many other pastoral issues that have caused problems in the US and Europe.
The article by Matthew Paris is vile, and I fear any good points he may have made, initially, are marred by his obvious hate for the current Pope and Catholicism in general (which is obvious from the rest of his writings). It's long been clear to me that 'The Times' has become quite hateful of our Faith and when we read Paris' latest rant in our Priory, we were tempted to write to the paper in protest at his poor reasoning and faulty journalism... Rubbish such as this is not worth the ink and paper it's printed on!
"psychopaths" "sick crop of brutes" "tares of human failure" "leg ulcers" "outcasts"
And this is the part you support!? All of this points to an intense hatred of the person, rather than the sin. Why should you be surprised when the writer then turns on someone with it?
Those people above are the ones we are most called on to help as Christians, especially the last - the "outcasts" - on which falls the whole brunt of Dobrowski's fury.
Jeff, I see this kind of bashing too often, but is anyone doing anything to correct these journalists? It's frustrating to think they get linked to blogs and corrected in the blogosphere where readership is a whole other demographic, and I don't see anyone with the ability, writing letters and correcting these people. So the bashing goes on and on, practically unchecked.
We need some kind of organized campaign, with the contact info for journalists, people to scour and submit fallacious stories, and people to write letters to the actual journalists and not just cover their stories in a blog. We need an organization that at least on a social level, is a force to be reckoned with, and which will hold the media accountable.