A more godless Pontiff or a more guilty one?

Thumbs up for Atheism????

In March of this year, Pope Francis looked at a bunch of apostate media hacks and said he would bless them even though “many of you do not belong to the Catholic Church, and others are not believers".

Later that week, while delivering a homily, the former Jesuit, Pope Francis said:

“The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone!  'Father, the atheists?'  Even the atheists.  Everyone! ... We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all … We need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. 'But I don't believe, Father, I am an atheist!' But do good: We will meet one another there.”

After that surprising olive branch, the Vatican officials ran around retracting it but the tolerance cat was out of the bag.  Atheists can be redeemed.  Not that many of us care. 

This approach seems to be informed by the concept of “the Anonymous Christian” promoted by another Jesuit, Karl Rahner.  This notion is that people who have never heard of the Christian Gospels might be saved if "in [their] basic orientation and fundamental decision," Rahner wrote, "accepted the grace of God, through Christ, although [they] may never have heard of the Christian revelation." Now we atheists actually have heard of, and maybe even read, the Gospels but have failed to be persuaded. So the atheistic olive branch offered by Pope Francis is a dramatic escalation of the Anonymous  Christian doctrine. 

The Rahner doctrine and the Francis overture taken together are extraordinary.  They are examples of the Jesuits in the Catholic Church dealing with the plausibility problems of faith in a modern world.  The Jesuits were supposed to be the hard line soldiers of Christ and look at them now! The plausibility crisis has been present in an increasing for centuries with the boom in science post The Enlightenment but now seems to be cutting a swathe in the European faith communities.  What do the churches’ leaderships do in Europe when the flocks have lost their creeds?  One could become more truculent and fundamentalist.  Or one could become more inclusive and modern.  Pope Francis seems to have embraced the latter.  

This is a marvellous development.  There is no knocking tolerance.  Since March, however, such overtures seem to have evaporated but the record cannot be denied.

Two issues therefore are opened by this event: why did he do this? And will he do it for other appalling beliefs of Catholicism?  Next time, I look at Pope Francis and the gay and lesbian issue but I want to spend some words speculating on why Francis may be concerned with redemption and therefore reach out to those(like atheists and gays) whom other Popes thought were beyond redemption.

Pope Francis, with his emphasis on redemption of even apostates, is a person who reminds me of John Newton.  “John who?”, I hear you cry.  John Newton was a slave trader who was redeemed by faith and became a leader of the anti Slavery movement.  He celebrated the role of redemption in his life by penning the most popular hymn of all time on the subject – Amazing Grace.  Francis too embraces redemption and, like Newton, needs to redeem himself.

Francis, as the Cardinal Jorge Borgoglio, was in Argentina during the so called “Dirty War” where up to 30,000 dissidents were killed and/or tortured.  It is difficult in these scary situations to emerge both with clean hands and alive.  Cardinal Borgoglio was the subject of allegations as leader of the Jesuits.  There were clearly disagreements within the Jesuit community about how to deal with this brutal regime.  At the end of it all, Borgoglio was accused of collaboration and even betrayal but the betrayal allegations appear to be without substance.  However, I ask myself that in the aftermath, whether Borgoglio felt some remorse for his lack of opposition.  He was supine – not a rogue but also not a hero.  Thus, repentance would, I imagine, like John Newton, figure in his internal narrative about his behavior in the Dirty War and his faith.

I speculate that this insight into his own fragility and humanity must inform this Papacy.  Thus redemption of atheists is comprehensible to him.  John Newton was an unbeliever who was redeemed.  Francis has never lost his belief in God but he may have in the post Dirty War time lost some belief in himself.  Hence he embraces ostentatious modesty.  Thus he can deal with atheists and contemplate that we could be bound for glory. 

This is all, of course, speculative.  But the perestroika displayed by Francis is extraordinary.  We must now observe the Papacy of Francis through this lens.  He is open in ways that no Pope has been open since John XXIII.  Paul V, JP II and Benedict XVI were reactionary duds and the Church has plummeted in Europe and elsewhere as a result. Francis may not be such a dud. 

What is your view?

Is the overture from Francis to the world of unbelief an unprecedented opportunity to converse with the godless or a momentary slip?

Is the emphasis on redemption guided by the Dirty War guilt or just another Catholic with redemption as a principal marketing tool?  It is pretty good that a few Hail Mary’s can get you out of trouble.  Just ask the priestly paedophiles.

Is a more rational Catholicism bad for atheism as we have lost our favourite whipping boy or is it good for those of us who want to work with reasonable people of faith?

Over to you….

Commemorating the Death of a Woman

In the gloaming of a perishing evening, candles added a flickering luminescence trying to defy the descending darkness.  An idiosyncratic community had gathered in St Kilda to commemorate the unspeakably violent end of street sex worker, Tracy Connelly from stab wounds to the face and chest.  Hundreds of us from the neighbourhood, the sex work industry, the welfare industry, the Parliament, the council and the media made for a motley but united crew.  Well not entirely united for I stood there in the twilight seething with anger at the hypocrisy and cant of our Parliamentary and Mayoral speakers.  More of that later.

The candle lit vigil for murdered street sex worker Tracy Connelly (Photo Fairfax Media. Wayne Taylor)

The ceremony was very Post Modern Australia, a pastiche of secular and sacred, the non verbal and the verbose.  The power of ceremony and ritual fascinates me.  At the heart of great ceremony is the use of non verbal community symbols.  Whilst verbosity is a turn off, symbols will overpower words when a group of people gathers to share feelings.  For Tracy’s ceremony the non verbal included a sea of candles, a choir with a Christian repertoire, a minute of silence holding the candles aloft, contemporary secular singers and finally a plaintive rendition of Amazing Grace with its plea for the power of redemption.  But the most powerful symbol was the night itself.  Night is evocative. The danger of the dark and the inhospitable cold of midwinter were potent icons of the perils of street sex work. Modern Australians seldom gather together at night in the frigidity of winter.  Just standing there together was instructive and moving.  We held our candles aloft in unity. The wind held off and the flames struggled on against the night.  When a brother’s tears and palpable love for his dead sister stirred the crowd, the rite of commemoration was potent. It transfixed us.  We were shamed for the societal negligence that bought about Tracy’s murder.  We were left in no doubt that we could not dismiss this as the killing of the unwanted and unloved. This part of the ceremony, for those like me interested in ritual, was stunning.

But then the speeches started. My blood boiled in anger. You may recall from the last blog how a decade ago the Victorian Parliament failed to (partially) decriminalise street sex work so that the prostitutes would not regard the police as the enemy and the police could focus on protecting prostitutes not controlling them.  The Parliament, both sides of the fence included, in the face of community reluctance and the moralistic legacy of our religious past, failed to embrace law reform when it was offered.  Parliament has blood on its metaphorical hands.  So too do the reform critics including Leslie Cannold, a Senate Candidate for the Wikileaks Party in Victoria. 

Tracy with long term partner Tony Melissovas

Violence against women is most stark in two situations – when marriages breakdown and against sex workers.  60 Australian women were murdered last year.  The street sex worker component can be diminished if the prohibition is modified as it is for brothels. Prohibition in social acts from alcohol to abortion fails.  Indeed prohibition exacerbates the harms.

Tracy was murdered in her home which she used to take clients. Because she was homeless, her panel van was her home.  This is a story of poverty as much as anything.  She wouldn’t have been murdered if she operated from a lawful safe house. She wouldn’t have been murdered if her vocation was not illegal and the police could make her work place safe.  This was an avoidable killing. 

And so the piety of the politicians who opined on the scourge of the violence against women and said they would do anything to stop it, were dishonest hypocrites.  They claimed they would do anything but no one who spoke mentioned the simple law reform of partial decriminalisation.  It was disgusting.

Sex is often confronting. Paid sex is very confronting and morally ambiguous. Religions stuff up sex and their legacy in the secular world is to add a layer of moralistic inhibition that prevents good policy.  Tracy’s death was avoidable.  Unfortunately good policy is avoidable when cowardice grips our politicians.  Their blather diminished a beautiful ceremony.

What is your view?

How do we craft good ceremony?

How do we get parliamentarians with the spine to oppose stupid prohibitions?

Do the opponents of reform have blood on their hands, capitulating to noisy opponents or are they merely reflecting the community?

Over to you

Death of a woman

Greeve St is a pick up zone in St Kilda and the site of the murder.

Tracy Connelly is dead.  She was murdered at her work place last week. Few are surprised for her work place is frightening and dangerous.  No, Tracy did not fight in Afghanistan or walk a tight rope traversing the Grand Canyon.  She was a street sex worker in St Kilda.  And so another avoidable murder of a street sex worker occurred to apparent public indifference.  Her relatives will mourn the bubbly character taken too soon.  The rest of us, however, will shrug our collective shoulders, and many will think but not say out loud, “well what can one expect” and move on. 

Ms Connelly was murdered in a street across the road from mine.  It is a street where violence is not unknown and I am aware of several murders in the past decade.  These were not the quick clinical killings by bullet or lethal injection.  These were the slow, agonizing, awful murders by bashing or knife. 

It is a pick up zone for the street sex workers. Street sex work is illegal and this sets up these often vulnerable women for violence and sexual assault.  The police cannot easily protect a group in an illegal vocation.  I am sure that the police will vigorously pursue this murder investigation but there are ways bloodshed could be minimised. 

In 2002, I served on the Port Phillip Council and we finished a law reform process with the State government via the Attorney Generals’ Street Prostitution Advisory Group (AGSPAG) which included police, residents and one worker.  That law reform process was motivated ostensibly by activists in the community sick of the detritus of sex litter, the constant leering of the men and the public sex.  But there was another less publicised reason. In 2000 there were a string of unspeakable assaults, rapes and the occasional murder.  The situation was out of control and no council could abide such ferocity without trying to do something.  Remember that street sex workers are really vulnerable.  Street sex workers are often (but not always) drug dependent and that dependency is frequently seeded by sexual assault as kids.  So I sat on AGSPAG cognisant of both the concerns of the residents and the terror of the women.

People outside Melbourne might have heard of the rape and murder of Jill Meagher.  That murder has now exposed what was happening.  Her murderer was the main culprit.  In 2002, Adrian Bayley was prosecuted regarding 16 counts of rape committed between September 2000 and March 2001. He pleaded guilty to the charges, all of which were committed against prostitutes working in St Kilda.  Bayley had driven his victims to a lane behind a group of shops in Elwood, before parking against a fence so they could not open the passenger door.  http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/bayleys-life-of-brutal-crime-20130611-2o1c1.html#ixzz2ZwpzTi3w

This information closed the circle for me. It was a partial explanation why there was such violence at the time of the AGSPAG process. Even though the Bayleys of the world may come and go, there is still an endemic culture of violence that rules street sex work. It needs to be addressed. And moreover, Bayley showed that those who assault prostitutes easily alter their MO to visit violence upon the wider community.  Women at large are not safe if they rely on the “Ripper Rationale” – murderers of sex workers are gentle with and respectful of the rest of the gender.  

This man has terrorised women in St Kilda and across Melbourne.

 The AGSPAG group chose the concept of “tolerance zones”.  (Remember in NSW, street sex work is lawful as long as it is not near or within view of a dwelling, school, church or hospital) Many other reforms were implemented but AGSPAG is known for the one infamous idea that failed to get up.  The rationale for these zones, places where street prostitution would be tolerated, was to limit the areas of prostitution, increase the monitoring and safety of the women and lessen the impact of the litter, public servicing and perceived intimidation from pimps.  There was a sense of unanimity when AGSPAG reported. http://www.popcenter.org/problems/street_prostitution/PDFs/Victoria_prostitution_2002.pdf

That unanimity dissolved in an instant when the community was consulted.  We made errors in the process but it was clearly controversial. If the bipartisan support at the State had stayed intact, the proposal might have been modified to an acceptable extent.  That did not occur. The Liberal Opposition went opportunistically ballistic and the Labor Government went weak at the knees. Moralistic hypocrisy prevailed and the flawed prohibition model is still with us today with all of its cruelty and inefficacy. The one chance we had to have a fundamental rethink of the safety both of the community and the sex workers has probably been lost for decades.  And so more lives will be lost and many women will be bashed and/or raped because sex workers apparently don’t matter.

It will not surprise you, but I blame the Abrahamic religions of the Judaeo Christian tradition.  These are faiths which are punitive.  They set up moralistic schemes where the evil are punished in some afterlife.  Sin is dealt with by prohibition not sophisticated harm minimisation techniques needed in a modern time where the prohibition exacerbates harm.  Drugs, prostitution and some socially stigmatised practices like abortion have their harms increased by legal prohibition.  These are biblical in their nature.  They are wrong.  I know that Mary Magdalene was perhaps a sex worker and that in St Kilda, churches do wonderful things for street sex workers.  But the ideology of the creeds still inform those who cannot cope with law reform.

The time has come to revisit this issue.  I know that the world will not mourn Tracy Connelly like we mourned Jill Meagher but they are both blameless women victims of appalling violence.  The Jill Meagher case, though not involving a sex worker, reminds us of the need to organise our community in such a way as to make it safer for sex workers.  Bayley has shown, those who assault sex workers can cross over and assault (and murder) the general public.  Thus this is an issue for both a vulnerable sub group and the whole female population.

 Tolerance zones are probably out of the question. At the last Council election, the notion of the zones was used as means criticising candidates.  The incumbents at State and local levels will not go near the idea.  A review is needed. The current prohibition model fails our most vulnerable and indeed the female gender.   

Did Peter Jensen Save the Global Anglican Communion???

A benign picture of a recently departed but scary prelate.

11 days ago, after a tumultuous term for a dozen years, the most Reverend Archbishop Peter Jensen retired as the leader of the Sydney Anglicans.  I hate many of his views but he may have saved the Anglican denomination from tearing itself to bits.

The Anglican Communion matters.  At 80 to 85 million adherents, it is the third biggest Christian denomination after Catholicism and Orthodoxy. 

Anglicanism matters also because it represents the tensions all the big denominations of faith face – diversity and disagreement.  How they manage this critical to the future of the denomination concerned.  It is also a pointer to all global organisations, secular and sacred, on the question of managing change when we have divergent global views. As change hits different countries in different ways and at different speeds, global churches (and other global institutions) have a real problem keeping it all together.

In the homeland of England, the C of E is sclerotic.  Click on this PowerPoint discussion by Prof Linda Woodhead.  http://www.churchofengland.org/about-us/facts-stats/research-statistics/faith-in-research-2013.aspx

This survey of English belief discloses a Church sliding into irrelevance. Even 33% of Anglicans are “doubters”.  Only 6% of the community turns to God for moral guidance.  68% (including “don’t knows”) of the community don’t really think about the established Church at all and of the rest, only 18% see it as positive.  Last year at the November Synod, the idea of women bishops was rejected to massive public derision.  They had another go last week at the Synod in the beautiful northern city of York where the Synod agreed to a new glacial process to decide on this unexceptional idea.  Instead of derision, this development elicited a yawn.  In its home of Great Britain, Anglicanism appears to be a train wreck.

Anglicanism very roughly follows the boundaries of the British Empire with adherents in the UK, Africa, here and increasingly Asia. Anglicanism and indeed Christianity in general are having a growth spurt in the developing world at the expense of Islam. There is a claim by a Muslim scholar that 6 million Muslims are lost each year to Christianity particularly in Africa. http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles6/AlJazeerahAfrica.php

 One of the beneficiaries of this trend is African Anglicanism.  There are more Nigerian Anglicans than in the home of this denomination, England.  Thus the Africans are claiming to have more power in both Catholicism and Anglicanism.  Catholic and Anglican Africans can mount a claim for more power in their respective churches.  They are growing.  They are waging the often bloody war with Islam.  They have the numbers.  They ought to have the power.  And these congregations are often hopelessly conservative on the two topics that that churches traditionally do poorly – sex and gender.

Anglicanism is being stalked by the prospect of Schism because its conservative wing cannot deal with pretty unremarkable ideas such as ordination of gays and women.  The conservatives can be found in every part of the Anglican world but the Africans are big on these topics and the Nigerians in particular make no bones about it.  They will not tolerate ordination of gays and women.

The Dioceses in the West naturally find these ideas not too confronting.  The northern Americans embrace gay and women leadership.

To the outside world, there is a temptation to see the divide over doctrine as a racial divide.  That is not the case.  But it does have a superficial look of the black versus white wings of the church.  The reality is that the American diocese is bitterly divided with the conservatives gravitating towards two movements – the Continuing Anglican movement which is outside the main denomination and the Anglo Catholics who were poached by Pope Benedict in 2007.  The can keep their Anglican liturgy and their married priests but are hybrid Roman / English Catholics. 

Peter Jensen allied himself to a similar conservative grouping called GAFCON – the Global Anglican Future Conference.  This mob includes the Africans and other conservatives.  I think that it may have saved Anglicanism from schism.  For it spoke to the African conservatives and gave them an outlet for their grievances.  Archbishop Jensen was an important leader of this gang. It also made obvious that this is a doctrinal fight not black versus white divide. 

In 2008, GAFCON met in Jerusalem prior to the Lambeth Conference which is the meeting of worldwide Anglicanism.  The Conference is so named for it takes place a Lambeth Palace which is the headquarters of the boss of Anglicanism, the Archbishop of Canterbury. 

The GAFCON views are loathsome to me and I imagine most of the godless. But I suspect that it saved Anglicanism for the time being.  Within that faith there are intractable disagreements.  These disagreements must have an outlet or the discontented will walk. If organisations do not provide the disgruntled with outlets for their rage, then schism beckons.  

I sense that GAFCON kept the conservatives in the Anglican community. I sense too that it showed that the clash of ideology is not a sectarian and racial one but doctrinal debate. That is a wonderful thing for the last thing the world needs is another fight between races.  Indeed that is probably the best thing about the Commonwealth Games and Anglicanism – differing races, ethnicities and groups can share communion brought about by the dying embers of the global anachronism that was the Empire.

So I sense that Archbishop Jensen, though championing views that are utterly repugnant to me, and in the long term, not viable for any modern organisation, did squirt some glue into the fraying Anglican Communion.  I will pine for him for he is such an easy target for us atheists to aim at.  However, we cannot deny his role globally.  And locally, whilst I despise their liturgy, there is no doubt that Jensen’s Evangelical foot soldiers slugged it out better than most for planting new Christian bums on seats.  Oh yes, Jensen was belligerent, intelligent and annoying.  But he was the sort I love to hate and I think I may miss him.

Am I mad?  Should I be dancing a gig at the prospect of his departure?

Would you miss Archbishop Jensen more that Cardinal Pell or do you hope that someone stuffs Cardinal Pell and mounts him permanently on a plinth?

How do global organisations deal with the fractious few who stand in the way of progress?

When should schism triumph over compromise and moderation?

Over to you guys.