I’m starting to believe that the Papacy is actually being run by Richard Dawkins. No other explanation for the succession of public relations disasters surrounding the current Catholic leadership seems to make sense.
I’ve been scouring Google for previous Popes with a worse idea of public relations than Pope Benedict XVI. I was very disappointed to find that the stories I had never looked up for fear that they were false were indeed so; unfortunately, neither a horse, nor a pregnant woman, has (probably) ever been Pope, although it serves me right for getting my historical information from Blackadder. It’s also probably not true that the Pope had to expose his balls to Cardinals; and not once was the expression “Testiculos habet et bene pendentes” (“He has testicles, and they hang well”) uttered. I feel like a kid who’s just been told Santa’s not real.
It appears that, historically, in order to become Pope, you had to be about the most corrupt person they could find. This is unsurprising, given the amount of grisly stuff the job often involved. Sergius III is a particular favourite. His corrupt actions include: having two of his papal predecessors strangled to death, and knocking up a prominent noblewoman with the future Pope John XI.
‘Historically, in order to become Pope, you had to be about the most corrupt person they could find’
However, in a time when TV subscriptions weren’t high, he could perhaps get away with a bit more than he would now. Pope Benedict, however, doesn’t seem to understand that the media, and ideas about responsibility of authority have changed. While he is nowhere near as bad as most historical Popes, he appears to be out of touch with the expectations of religious leaders in the modern world.
There is a hitherto unwritten list of things not to be accused of when leader in any capacity of anything ever. It reads like this: Things Not To Be Accused Of, And To Take Really Bloody Seriously If You Are (in reverse order): Paedophilia, Nazi Paedophilia, and Unrepentant Nazi Paedophilia.
While I don’t for a second believe the Pope is a paedophile or a Nazi, his belittling of accusations of paedophilia as ‘petty gossip’, and his preacher’s comparison of anger at the Catholic Church with anti-Semitism, play into the hands of those who wish to see the news in black and white.
The accusations of the Pope’s own inaction over the abuse of several deaf children by Rev. Lawrence Murphy in America are damaging, and need to be dealt with in some way. That way is not to blame the press, who have finally exposed the abuses that for so long went unpunished. It is certainly also not to dismiss such accusations as unimportant. Doing so has merely further highlighted something they wanted to quickly move on from.
The anti-Semitism comparison was not itself anti-Semitic, although it was tactless. The problem is that it brings to public attention a string of PR disasters that could very easily be perceived as being so. The push to beatify Pope Pius XII, accused of indirect complicity by not speaking out against the Nazis as Pope during the Second World War, and the decision to lift the ex-communication of holocaust-denier Richard Williamson were politically unwise, and morally dubious, moves.
‘A Nazi Pope is just a James Bond villain/Dan Brown book waiting to happen’
In addition to this, Pope Benedict appointed as Bishop of Linz, in Austria, a man who claimed that Hurricane Katrina was punishment from God for tolerance of homosexuality, and famously made enemies within the Islamic faith by publicly quoting a Byzantine emperor, accusing Islam of being “evil and inhuman”.
All of this will be worsened in the eyes of the public by the Pope’s obligatory membership of Hitler Youth as a German child during World War Two. While all evidence shows that he didn’t particularly enjoy the ‘Hitler Youth’ experience, a Nazi Pope is just a James Bond villain/Dan Brown book waiting to happen, and the public always prefers a good story to reality.
All of this together suggests to me that there must be some underhanded play going on. You would think the leaders of the Catholic Church would be a smart bunch; they wouldn’t needlessly insult other religions, then bring these insults back into focus when dealing with other problems; they would want to minimise any risk of accusations of papal anti-Semitism given Benedict’s Hitler Youth past; they would never belittle accusations of paedophilia, and in apology would be humble and clear in their condemnation of paedophilia and those who cover for it.
Yet none of these obvious actions has been taken. Rather, they have gone out of their way to insult other religions, and to ostentatiously defend their own to the point of dismissing accusations of sexual abuse as gossip.
Only one man so boldly described religion as what the Catholic Church appears to be advertising itself as. Only one man painted religion so crudely and unilaterally as abusive, tribal groups fighting it out between each other, protecting their own and abusing others unrepentantly: a man who has disappeared from public view recently, and who has been oddly quiet about the whole debacle; a man who, I wager, has never been seen in the same room as the Pope.
So watch out for Dawkins’ new bestseller All Religious Leaders Are Unrepentant Nazi Paedophiles. You heard it here first.
