BETTING ON THE NEW POPE :

A necessary HISTORICAL background

Susantha GOONATILAKE

With well over 90 per cent of the Sri Lankan population non-Catholic, the election of a new Pope now underway should not be of much concern to us. But past Popes, especially those of the 15th and 16th centuries had pushed ideologically for the devastation under the Portuguese of almost all our centres of learning in the 16th and early 17th centuries. The new Pope is being elected when increasingly Western countries from which Catholicism was transmitted elsewhere, are losing members. It is in the former colonised world where conversion was mostly under the sword and coercion that the future of Catholicism now lives.

The mass sacking of almost all our temples was not random, barbarous acts, but were powers explicitly given by Pope Nicholas V’s Bull Dum Diversas in 1452 (a Bull was a formal proclamation by the Pope). Nicholas gave King Alfonso of Portugal: “general and indefinite powers to search out and conquer all pagans… …to invade and conquer their kingdoms… to reduce to slavery their inhabitants”.Nicholas meant us. Similar papal Bulls were given by equally barbarous Popes, including by the notorious Pope Alexander VI, who was a model for the ruthless Prince of Machiavelli. In fact, the original “Machiavelli”, the name given today to a totally brutal ruler was a Pope. Many of those papal Bulls still stand.

Recognizing the decline of white supremacy in the world, with the end of the colonial period, the Second Vatican Council(1962 -1965)attempted to bring some reform and allowed some local characteristics in Catholic practices.

Catholic Church

Later, realizing the march of science as well as of the power of non-European nations, the former Pope John Paul II (1978 - 2005) apologized on more than 100 occasions for the crimes committed around the world by the Catholic Church. He thus apologised for Spanish crimes done in the name of the Church in the conquest of Central America; for persecuting Galileo, a devout Catholic, for his scientific findings that went against Church falsehoods (October 31, 1992), for the involvement of the Catholic Church in the African slave trade (9 August 1993), for burning dissenters at the stake (May 1995), for denigration of women (July 10, 1995), for complicity in the Jewish Holocaust (March 16, 1998), for the general admission of sins against other cultures and religions (March 12, 2000) and for the Crusader attacks on Constantinople and for the attacks on the Orthodox Church (May 4, 2001).

These were crimes similar to the ones that the Church committed in Sri Lanka as recorded by Portuguese Catholic priests themselves. Unfortunately, such apologies have not been forthcoming for Sri Lanka. Even in Lisbon from which these original atrocities emerged, there is a museum on Church atrocities which depict Catholic priests torturing victims reminiscent of Portuguese massacres in Sri Lanka.

Although Buddhists and others can read whatever they will, the Catholic Church had a list of banned books that Catholics were forbidden to read. It was the original “thought police”, pilloried by George Orwell in his novel 1984. This banning was through the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,CDF. The CDF still reserves the right to ban books it deems threatening. In recent years, the CDF has condemned our late Father Tissa Balasuriya’s book Mary and Human Liberation”. Balasuriya had said the obvious that in the modern age, one cannot believe in virgin births (Virgin Mary) just as one cannot believe that the sun went around the earth. For challenging the latter the Church would earlier burn people alive at the stake. Our Father Balasuriya was no Galileo, he had to go on bended knee and eat his own words as he apologized to the church. His conscience perhaps now rests in peace.

Benedict, the Pope who has now retired tried to undo some of these post colonial reforms and packed his “cabinet” of cardinals with conservatives who wanted to turn the clock back. He is leaving after a huge backlash in Western countries as public opinion rose against the Church for a variety of ill deeds, including massive sexual abuse of little children and financial fraud. The Pope remained mostly silent.

Last month, Britain’s highest-ranking Catholic leader Cardinal Keith O’Brianwho in public was virulently anti-gay, the official position of the Church, resigned as certain priests accused him of homosexual abuse. The Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony had covered up other priests as they raped and molested children. Many other cardinals, American newspapers reported, who are electing the new Pope have been accused of sexual abuse and some have admitted to failing to protect innocents from rape by priests under them. The online database on sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests BishopAccountability.org, urged others to come forward on information about other Cardinals who had compromised.

Network of sex and corruption

In 2012, embarrassing secret documents of the Vatican were leaked by the Pope’s very butler and the resulting book became a bestseller in Italy.

The butler said that his motive was only to expose “evil and corruption” in the Vatican. An example of the latter was the news in 2010 that Italian authorities had seized millions of dollars which the Vatican had tried to smuggle out of Italy in a money-laundering criminal exercise. The Italian magazine Panorama and daily La Repubblica reported that the Pope had actually decided to resign when he saw a secret dossier on these leaked documents. This document spoke of a network of sex as well as corruption in the Vatican. Italian newspapers wrote of key Vatican priests involved with male prostitutes and caught on film and subject to blackmail. Some of these had been already revealed in the Italian bestseller Sex and the Vatican. The news elsewhere in the West was also not good.

The Canadian government recently apologised and asked for forgiveness for over 150,000 aboriginal children forced into church schools and abused physically and sexually, a practice that continued up to the 1990s. The present Irish Prime Minister apologized for around 30,000 women and girls who experienced slave like conditions while incarcerated in self-styled “Magdalene laundries” run by the Catholic Church. Australia apologized for a similar policy two years ago on its “Stolen Generations“of aborigines forced into church schools.

Portugal and Spain had with falling church attendance swung away dramatically from the church. When the retiring Pope visited them as a “cornerstones in his strategy for “re-Christianising’ Europe”, there were protests that he was trying to boost fallen church attendance. In Spain, he was met by protests and marches about among others, the “scandalous” expenditure spent on his visit as Spain confronted an economic crisis with youth unemployment running at 45 per cent. Only some 70 per cent of Spaniards are even nominally Catholics.

This week, the BBC showed empty churches in France with African priests preaching to only elderly whites. Younger France was becoming secular. Similarly, a nationwide survey by YouGov poll found that more than half of Britons think Christianity is likely to have disappeared from Britain within a century. The Catholic future was in the less scientifically literate developing world.

Among the leading names for the future Pope mentioned in the Western press are Timothy Dolan, Sean O’Malley, Angelo Scola, Odilo Scherer. Our own cardinal Malcolm Ranjith has also been mentioned as having an outside chance. Would the appointment of Malcolm Ranjith give the Papal apology earlier given over 100 times? How does he compare with recent popes?

The second Vatican Council brought local practices to Sri Lanka. But in one of the first acts of Malcolm Ranjith on being appointed archbishop of Colombo in 2009, he “banned lay preachers and banished cultural practices borrowed from other religions from Sri Lanka’s Roman Catholic Church” - a retrograde step from Vatican Council aspirations. And instead of acknowledging the major destruction of Buddhist sites by Vatican-inspired Portuguese acts which required centuries later to bring our higher ordination from Siam and Myanmar, Ranjith wanted to remove teaching of that destruction from Sri Lankan school texts. The Portuguese priests who documented that destruction would have been amused. This was like the charge against some European clergy that they were denying the Jewish holocaust.

Western press

And what would be Malcolm’s stand be against the massive exposure in the Western press of molesting priests. We have Malcolm’s own words as published by the Vatican website on Asia asianews.it. Malcolm expressed “solidarity and support” for the retiring Pope over the paedophilia scandal and to express “communion with the Pope and the Church”. Malcolm called for “Sri Lanka Catholics to pray for Benedict XVI and his intentions” and he slammed the messenger of bad news, saying it was “an organised and malicious attack by international media”.

Incidentally, the Vatican website asianews.it has under it the banner “Asia our common task for the third millennium by John Paul 11”. This repeated John Paul 11’s message to convert Asia to Catholicism. Almost all of Asia was once influenced by Buddhism. And what did this late John Paul 11 think of Buddhism. In his important book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope singled out Buddhism for a major attack because it did not believe in a creator pointing out also that in the West Buddhism was gaining ground.

The Vatican correspondent for Il Messaggero, a leading Italian paper said “We need a new era in the Church”. Malcolm Ranjith, may be our man but, as the Western press labeled him, he was of the unreformed,very old guard. Il Messaggero had several different preferences, most notably Boston Archbishop Cardinal Sean O’Malley. Put your bets.