Foot and mouth disease

I've been on the point of writing something about the whole paedophile scandal for a couple of weeks now, but really, why bother? The Vatican is doing such a good job of shooting itself in the foot - yes, that's right, the one it's managed to jam into its own mouth - that additional comment from me seems superfluous. Let them get on with it, say I. Ratzinger and his gang of frocked deniers have managed to anger just about everyone and mollify no one so far, something I'd never have dreamed of achieving with my own humble sniping from my own very small rooftop 100 miles away from Ground Control by the Tiber.

So I'm not even going to comment on the latest nonsense from a certain Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (seen here with friends), who claims that a clear link has been found between paedophilia and homosexuality but not between paedophilia and celibacy (except perhaps to point out that if you're celibate, darling, you're not having sex with anyone). In fact, the only clear link I can find in this whole sad business is the one between a bunch of frightened old men whose authority is being challenged and the spouting of malicious bullshit.

And that's not a comment. That's science.

Democracy at work

Children and religion. Following on from the post below, it seems that not only the Dalai Lama doesn't get it. A scientific high school in Cesena, in Emilia Romagna, has suspended one of its maths teachers for two months without pay. Why? Because he distributed a questionnaire to 70 of his students asking them which they'd prefer to study: catholicism, the history of religions, or human rights. Most of the kids chose human rights (65%), followed by history of religions (24%). That left a mere 11% into catholicism. This didn't go down at all well with the local scholastic authorities, who demanded a six-month suspension of the offending teacher, Alberto Marani, a period that was subsequently reduced to two. The full story, for Italian readers, can be found here. Among the readers' comments is one from an ex-student who claims that the school is effectively run by Opus Dei, which makes Marani's act not just culturally relevant but also a gesture of reckless, exemplary folly. All power to him.

Seventeen years

Earlier this year I wrote a brief post about a man called Giuliano Ferrara. Ferrara really isn't that interesting, except as an over-exposed example of chronic brown-nosing that would take some beating even in Italy, and I wouldn't bring him up again if I didn't have good reason, believe me. But I mentioned the grotesque buffoon at the time because of his typically vulgar reaction to a court decision to allow Beppino Englaro to finally cease the forced nutrition and hydration of his daughter, Eluana, after seventeen years in a state of vegetative coma. That was 15 July.

Five months later, Eluana Englaro continues to have food and water pumped into her, against the wishes of her family and against the expressed wishes of Eluana herself, when she was in a position to express wishes. During these five months, Beppino Englaro has been forced to negotiate an obstacle course of such deliberate, appalling cruelty, masterminded by the Vatican and with the all-too-willing connivance of its representatives in the Italian government, on both sides of the political divide, if such a distinction makes sense any longer in a country in which the most basic democratic rules are flouted daily. A campaign designed to prolong the agony of a man whose only interest is his daughter, supported by some of the worst Italy and the catholic church has to offer, from Ratzinger to Binetti to Ferrara and their merry gang of fundamentalist hypocrites. The final straw came yesterday, after the Supreme Court had, once again, given the go-ahead for treatment to be stopped. Minister of Welfare, Maurizio Sacconi*, ex-socialist and with the moral apparatus of a sea-urchin, announced that government funding would be withdrawn from any clinic that dared put the court ruling into practice. This was greeted by some cardinal whose name I can't be bothered to look for as "a reasonable and sensible decision", immediately making him a candidate for slow rotting in his own hell. 

The latest news is that, after having sought legal advice, a clinic in Udine is prepared to, finally, satisfy the wishes of Eluana and her father, with a team of anonymous volunteers taking medical responsibility. 

*Sacconi's wife, in the meantime, is president of Farmindustria, the association that protects the interest of the pharmaceutical industry.

Speechless

(Thanks to Towleroad for this.)

A froggie would a sacking go

The curator of the exhibition in Bolzano that included this admittedly rather unlovely artwork, by Martin Kippenberger, has just had her contract withdrawn. Corinne Diserens, appointed director of the new Museion to give it a touch of international class and responsible for the presence of the crucified amphibian, has already been excommunicated by the local archbishop, as well as being on the receiving end of protests, hunger strikes, complaints to the authorities and a letter from 'Eggs' Benedict himself. Given that the exhibition, entitled Peripheral Vision and Collective Body (it sounds better in Italian, just) ended in September, Diserens, currently gathering material in China for her next show at the Museion, must have been surprised to be told yesterday that her services are no longer needed. There's surely no connection between her summary dismissal and the fact that the Volkspartei, which had an absolute majority in the province until last week, did rather badly in the local elections. Maybe they should ask for the crucifix back and see if they can attach a scapegoat to it.

Croatia. The Mediterranean as it once was?

Thinking of going to Croatia on holiday? Read this piece by Diamond Walid and see if you fit into the rather narrow range of sexual and racial acceptability demanded by Croatian youths on the lookout for victims (you know, the kind that 'ask for it'). If you do, think about whether you want to have a holiday in a place where the range matters.  If you don't, think twice.

Croatia is 90% catholic. Nice one, Ratzy.

Thin end of wedge

According to 73 year-old Fr. Jeremy Davies, a priest, qualified physician and official exorcist in Westminster, it wasn't that naughty old scout master at all, but the devil himself, that turned you gay. He says: "Among the causes of homosexuality is a contagious demonic factor."

You can find out more here. He's particularly good on the relative dangers of thin and thick ends of wedges. But he would be, wouldn't he?

Ave Hitler

Now that the catholic church has got a government prepared to present its belly to the clerical boot without any questions being asked, this photograph is a useful reminder of another epoch in which the interests of church and state also appeared to coincide.

(I wouldn't have felt the need to post this rather snippy comment if I hadn't just heard Minister for Equal Opportunities Mara Carfagna (see topless photo here) explain why Rome, as the heart of Christianity, isn't an appropriate venue for Gay Pride. Maybe someone should tell her that it was also home to Julius Caesar, Petronius, Hadrian, etc. But why bother? Why tell the monkey what the organ grinder already knows?)

Thanks to Marisacat for the photo.

Hell

I don't know if Colchester is a typically or untypically ungodly example of modern urban Britain, but of the three churches open last Friday one had been converted into a museum, one into a shop and the third, although still functioning, had the air of a place little visited and less loved. Although it's clearly being used by someone. I took this photograph at the bottom of the stairs leading up to a sort of dusty gallery, used, like this vestibule, for storage.

Note the writing to the right of the door.

Smalltown baroque

This wonderfully bold decoration comes from the Mission San Xavier del Bac, just outside Tucson, rising from a patch of desert as though it had once expected a community to form around it, as I imagine it did, although what kind of community it might have wanted is hard to envisage with charity. The interior is probably typical of churches of this type, relying heavily on paint and plaster and memories of the old world to make up for the lack of more precious materials and models closer to hand. It reminds me very much of the chunky flamboyant provincial baroque of a couple of churches I saw some years ago in the small Sardinian town of Tempio Pausania, which also sticks in my memory for having as one of its local delicacies the nearest thing I've ever seen outside Britain to a Melton Mowbray pork pie.

The world the missionaries found here doesn't get much of a look in, which isn't surprising. Tyla pointed out the sad juxtaposition in the right transept (see below) of an admonishing saint, maybe Xavier himself, and the devout, rather cowed figure of a native American, hands clasped before him in a posture that might be called the missionaried position. The sculpted and painted column that separates them has more life than either figure and I can't help wondering whether local help might not have been called in to do some of the purely decorative stuff. I'd like to think so.

And talking of cultural contamination, what about this curious little artefact, spotted in a gift store in the historic section of Tucson, squeezed in between feathered headdresses, tomahawks and gilded shells for holy water. It combines the Renaissance trope of the winged head of a putto with some distinctly native American features. As if that weren't enough, it also manages to look remarkably like John Travolta in Hairspray, another challenging example of aesthetic syncretism (or maybe not).

Red bull? Papal bull? Plain bull...

Thanks to the efforts of one humourless Sicilian priest (Father Marco Damanti, if you care), who's played the blasphemy card and scared Red Bull into compliance, you'll no longer be able to see this harmless advertisement on Italian television.

Never mind, you can see it here.

Ciao Darwin, Addio Alberto

Just when you thought the catholic church and I had agreed,amicably, to differ and go our separate ways, news arrives of a local priest, Don Paolino (Little Paul), who has expelled one of his choristers from the choir and excluded him from all further church business. What grievous sin can Alberto Ruggin, the fresh-faced young man in the photograph, have committed?

He came out during a TV game show called Ciao Darwin, in which two groups compete to see which is better adapted for survival. In the past we've seen men up against women, so to speak, priests versus atheists, nurses versus doctors, fatties versus skinnies. As you can, it's not exactly the Brains Trust, but it does have its moments. Last week saw a team of heterosexuals compete against a team of gays, including Alberto Ruggin. I didn't see the programme myself, so I can't imagine what was involved, but Don Paolino, no doubt attracted by the prospect of seeing so many perverts in one place, didn't miss a minute. And there was his choir-boy and Sunday school teacher, all six sinful feet of him, parading his shame. The only word for it, as far as Don Paolino's concerned, was 'disgusting'. Followed by Fuori! Surprising? Not really. As my father used to say, What can you expect from a pig but a grunt?

Ruggin, in the meantime, seems to have devoted the last few years of his life to the parish and Berlusconi's Forza Italia, a party not renowned for its gay-friendliness. He could spend a few moments of his newly acquired free time to ask himself whether his energies might not be more profitably channelled into organisations that don't regard him as a social pariah and sexual deviant.

Good riddance to...

...Don Oreste Benzi, the smarmy sanctimonious little twat priest who took it upon himself to conduct funeral services for foetuses, said that scantily-dressed women had only themselves to blame if they were raped, pestered sex workers with his medieval twaddle about redemption (his greatest publicity stunt was to get JP2 to kiss a Nigerian prostitute with AIDS) and had this to say about homosexuality:

«Le relazioni omosessuali sono contro natura e sono nocive al Bene della società… L'omosessualità è una deviazione. Se uno non lo cura è un vizio... (translation: Homosexual relationships are against nature and damage society. Homosexuality is a deviation. If it isn't treated it becomes a vice).

If you speak Italian, you might find this interview instructive.

Pontifical knickers twisted

Editorialist for La Repubblica and one of Italy's sharpest journalists, Curzio Maltese, has been looking at the way Italian taxpayers contribute, largely without their direct consent, to the Vatican's bulging coffers. The money collected by the catholic church each year through the legalised scam known as otto per mille* amounts to an extraordinary €80 billion. Of this, just over a third comes from taxpayers who specifically choose to direct part of their money to the Vatican; the rest of it - €524,565,000,000 in 2004 - is skimmed off the taxes of those who express no preference.

It would be nice to think that all this free money is spent on good works. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case. The 2005 campaign (created by Saatchi and Saatchi, friends to the wise and good) showed images of the tsunami and its devastating effects. The price of the campaign? Nine million euros. The amount of aid provided by the Vatican to tsunami victims? Three million euros. In percentage terms, the Union of Jewish Communities gave twenty terms as much, despite the fact that there are no Jewish communities in the areas affected. The amount of otto per mille money actually spent on charitable works by the catholic church amounts to no more than 20% of the total. The rest of it goes on, well, other things. I'll leave you to decide what these might be, but they certainly aren't priests' wages: these have halved since 1999; the amount of tax money the church has received in these years has quintupled.

Livia Turco, ex-minister for solidarity, once suggested that the otto per mille money assigned by taxpayers to the state (around 8% of the total) be used directly to combat infant poverty, imagining the Holy See would be only to keen to back her. She couldn't have been more wrong. The Vatican peevishly accused the state of 'unfair competition' and the idea was dropped. Infant poverty is clearly Vatican business. Under Berlusconi, the state's portion was used to finance the war in Iraq and, get this, the restoration of churches. Catholic churches, naturally.

The response to Maltese's articles was immediate. Vatican house organ Avvenire called them 'one of the most colossal operations of disinformation of recent times' - unlike, presumably, the Vatican's tsunami campaign - and, for good measure, 'indecent': a common ploy when anyone dares to criticise the church, as though decency were a spiritual rather than social value. Unlike his papal predecessors, who let their underlings do the dirty work, Eggs Benedict threw one of his usual hissy fits, insisting that the catholic church doesn't ask for or expect financial favours. I'm sorry? Say that again? Even the EU begs to differ.

*Otto per mille. Italian tax payers can devolve 0.8% of the tax they pay to a religious body of their choice, or to the state. Most of the people who bother (40.86% of taxpayers) devolve it to the Vatican. The percentage of tax that isn’t assigned to anyone is divided up in the same proportions as that which is, although some churches - such as the Waldensians - refuse it. The Vatican, in other words, gets a substantial slice of revenue from people who don’t want to give it to the catholic church.

Going, going, gone....

Encouraging news today, as Eggs Benedict goes all Latin. No, we're not talking Ricky Martin (Calm down, Eggs!), but the opportunity given the faithful to return to the Latin mass, thrown out at the modernising Second Vatican Council. Now Eggs claims that the old rite was never abrogated, and he's the pope so he ought to know. So if you've been excommunicated for rambling on in a dead language now's your chance to squeeze back in and do it with papal approval.

The encouraging news is that while 97% of Italy's population is baptised, 86% declares itself catholic and 57% practising, only 21.4% is actually prepared to shift its arse from couch to pew on a regular basis. And the arses that so inadequately line the peninsula's places of worship tend to be old, poor and southern. Not at all the human resources that old Prada-wearing Eggs is after.

The reasons 'practising' catholics give for not actually practising include boredom (33.7%), banal sermons (7.8%) and a lack of spirituality (11%). I'm sure a little Latin, Gregorian chants and the priest's back turned to the congregation will push up viewing figures no end.

Yo! Benedict!

The Vatican hierarchy is notorious for being morally supine in the face of wealth and power. It buried Pinochet with honours and encouraged the Albanian pain fetishist, Mother Teresa, in her quest for photo opportunities with the likes of tin-pot dictator Marcos and the adulterous Princess Diana. So Tony Blair probably won’t have that much difficulty in persuading Eggs Benedict to fast-track him in. But wouldn’t it be nice if he found the holy door barred to him as a warmonger, abortionist and proponent of gay adoption? Wouldn’t it be nice to see the hurt on his duplicitous little face as he spreads his blood-stained hands and wonders, once again, what Jesus would have done?

Blood and sperm

An exhibition in the once-red city of Bologna has been closed after complaints of abominable blasphemy from the catholic church. The offending collective was named La Madonna Piange Sperma (The Madonna Weeps Sperm). This would be unremarkable if the reference were to Mrs Ritchie née Ciccone, who has surely done this and everything else that can conceivably be done with sperm, bar produce it herself. But, rather naughtily, it isn't. As the original Madonna's representatives on earth, the local Bishop and various other ecclesiastical (and not) bigwigs have huffed and puffed and the show has duly been taken down. The organizers have managed to defend the right of art to say whatever it pleases while rubbing their foreheads on the ground in abject apology. The church has staged an expiatory mass, the high camp solution to gross offence. And so everybody's happy.

Oddly enough, when a garden statue of the Madonna wept blood some years ago in Civitavecchia, blood that was subsequently analysed as male, the church was more circumspect. I quote from a site called Visions of Jesus Christ:

The city's bishop, Monsignor Girolamo Grillo, said the statue cried in his hands.

"We have not proclaimed that the tear-shedding of the Madonna was miraculous," Grillo told the ANSA news agency Sunday. "But the facts speak for themselves." Corriere quoted the Rev. Stefano De Fiores, a Madonna scholar and professor at the Vatican's Gregorian University, as concluding: "There's the hand of God here."

Your bodies, their bigotry

Amnesty International's recent advocacy of abortion in the case of rape, incest or risk to the woman's health has inevitably got up some clerical noses. One of the largest belongs to cardinal Martino, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, who is quoted as follows:

"The inevitable consequence of this decision, according to the cardinal, will be the suspension of any financing to Amnesty on the part of Catholic organisations and also individual Catholics,"

Well, he can say all he likes about what the hierarchy is supposed to do with its fabulous, unaccounted for, wealth, but individual catholics may continue to feel that the work done by AI continues to deserve their support. Let's hope so. It's certainly persuaded me to join up, for the first time in years.

In the meantime, Eggs Benedict has returned to the dangers represented by television and the Internet. Right, like BBC documentaries, Eggs? Readily available on Google? Or maybe it isn't that personal.

If he's so against the commercialisation of human dignity why is he doing everything in his (considerable) power to ensure that Berlusconi takes over the reins of the Italian government again?

Suffer the little children...

A parish priest in Pescara, Don Lino Cisotto, has refused first communion to a nine-year-old autistic child on the grounds that he's incapable of understanding the full significance of the Eucharist.

I would have taken this as a sign of mental health.

Blair leapfrogs new boss

Alexander Chancellor, in today’s Guardian tells an amusing tale about Tony Blair being reprimanded by Cardinal Hume for taking part in mass at his wife’s church. Hume pointed out that Blair, as an Anglican, had no right to his sanctimonious nibble of the Lord’s transubstantiated body. Blair apparently reacted thus: ‘I wonder what Jesus would have said.’

Of course, he didn’t wonder at all. He knew. But Chancellor continues by remarking that Blair, assuming he soon becomes a catholic as predicted, will have to accept that the direct line with the Saviour he’s enjoyed up to now will have to be mediated by his new main man, Eggs Benedict.

If only this were true. The fact is that the catholic church is tough with the weak, but historically supine with the strong. Mother Teresa, the poison dwarf of Calcutta, may have disapproved of analgesics for the poveri cristi in her detention centres care centres, but she made an exception for Diana Spencer, Pinochet, etc. Why on earth should Ratzinger adopt a different policy in his dealings with Blair?