bill maher’s apology was better than the pope’s apology

Subtle. Brilliant. Manipulative. Not Bill Maher. The Pope.

Pope Benedict XVI has come to America and apologized for the sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests. He may have apologized for the truly heinous sin of the bishops’ coverup, too, but I’m not really sure. In fact, I’m not exactly sure what he said, because his logic makes me feel like I’m crazy. Nevertheless, don’t let his humble, mild-mannered appearance fool you. He’s a wiley man, and he managed to apologize for the Church by blaming us.

Here’s what I mean, a few quotes from the Washington Post via Get Religion:

• the abuse of minors…had to be eradicated in a broader attack on the degradation of modern-day sexuality
• to address the sin of abuse within the wider context of sexual mores
• What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes

Why should the sex abuse scandal be addressed in the “broader attack on the degradation of modern-day sexuality”? The sex abuse scandal has little to do with sex and everything to do with power and lies. And is he suggesting we’re hypocrites to go on and on about protecting children from priests because “pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes”?

His assumptions are outrageous. His implications are just plain wrong.

Torturing Reason

First, the Pope’s framing of the issue implies that sexual abuse by priests is a modern thing, a result of the decay of morals in the modern world. All we can say for sure is the revelation of it is modern. Do any of us really believe pedophiles, molesters, and rapists entered the Church only in the 20th century? Anecdotes have reached us throughout history of such things, but we weren’t ready to believe the children in those Golden Days the Pope harkens back to. Clearly, it didn’t take modernity to create abusers and a cabal of men to hide it. It did take modernity to speak truth to power.

Secondly, the framing implies the abuse and cover ups were the result of sexual desire. But sex between authority and its subject doesn’t exist by mutual consent and is therefore more appropriately examined as a power relation. Like rape is about violence, not sex, these priestly transgressions are about eroticized inequality, whether the victims were children or teenagers. Dominance, not relationship, is the turn-on.

Pope Benedict XVI is a brilliant thinker, so this framing is deliberate, and therefore, shameful. He means to imply abusive priests arise from a culture with a liberal sexuality, so he’s using the scandal to further his agenda against our “moral relativism.” This, of course, doesn’t begin to explain the coverup, and you’ll notice he wants to make this a conversation entirely about sex to avoid the real discussion about his bishops.

The more his notion of “moral relativism” is spoken of in the press, and the more it’s linked to sex and abuse, the less culpable the Church will appear. Already, one commenter on another blog took up the Pope’s message, blaming our liberal culture for priest/boys “sex parties” she had heard about. Who really believes such liaisons have only occurred in our modern “liberal” culture? And what about the bishops who said they never happened?

Better than Barack

I’m not sure the Pope is as charming as Senator Obama, but he’s certainly better at torturing logic in his speeches. The Pope’s preferred method of argument is an indirect maneuvering, a perversion of the Socratic method that gently pushes you toward a conclusion that makes no sense until he’s linked tenuous premises and broad generalizations together.

His book Jesus of Nazareth was so brimming over with this style of arguing that I could barely finish it. I’ll save that analysis for another post, as there’s lots to say about his idea of freedom and obedience, but one example I’ll share is his analysis of the Beatitudes.

For 29 pages the Pope examines Jesus’s message to the people; you know, the meek shall inherit the earth, etc. Jesus was talking to the people, addressing individual suffering, but by the end of his analysis, the Pope has made Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount about the Church:  

The people who are persecuted for righteousness’s sake are those who live by God’s righteousness–by faith. Because man constantly strives for emancipation from God’s will in order to follow himself alone, faith will always appear as a contradiction to the “world”–to the ruling powers at any given time. For this reason, there will be persecution for the sake of righteousness in every period of history. This word of comfort is addressed to the persecuted Church of all times. In her powerlessness and in her sufferings, she knows that she stands in the place where God’s Kingdom is coming. (p89)

Emphasis is mine. 

The Pope is writing on the persecution of people and their powerlessness in the world as described by Jesus, but then he suddenly transposes “people” with “Church” (and, yes, that is his capitalization). The Pope calls the Church “powerless” and “set apart” from the world. Are you kidding me? And who’s persecuting whom?

The Heart of the Maher

Bill Maher is just damn funny. And he hates religion. I don’t blame him for that. His criticisms are well-founded. In his sarcastic style he compared the Pope to the leaders of the FLDS and neither fared well. Outcry over his comments forced him to apologize. I like his nonapology much better than the Pope’s.

For now, I’ll leave you with Bill Maher, who doesn’t mind being direct. (YouTube video is defunct. Here’s the text.)

Last week I got into some trouble with the Catholic League…not the first time. The Catholic League not my…how many Catholic League members…not my biggest fans.

Because I said in our little essay ending the show, I said the Pope – and I looked at it again…I looked at the words carefully – “used to be a Nazi.”

OK, now first of all, it was a joke, during a comedic context… I said he used to be a Nazi, he wears funny hats, and ladies, he’s single. So, right away we’re in the context of a joke, OK and “used to”…

But now, you know what. You got me OK, the Pope was not a Nazi. When he was a teenager he was in the Hitler Youth, which meant that he said the oath directly to Hitler and not to the Nazis, which is sort of worse.

OK, but, but wait a second. The thing that argues for their side of this is that he was coerced into it. He was a teenager, I wouldn’t blame him, he was a 14-year old kid in Nazi Germany, of course he’s going to do what they tell him to do.

So on that score, you know what, my Catholic friends, I will never make ‘The Pope is a Nazi’ joke again. Because you’re technically right, okay, and also because it distracts from the main point.

And the main point I was making was that if the Pope, instead of a religious figure, was the CEO of a chain of nationwide day care centers who had thousands of employees who had been caught molesting children and then covering it up, he would have been in jail. So…and I noticed they didn’t say a word about that.