I saw images of gay and lesbian couples kissing in front of the Popemobile and I couldn't help but laugh, in a congratulatory "screw you, Ratzinger" way.
I consider myself Agnostic, mainly because I honestly am uncertain as to whether some form of deity exists. I was, however, technically raised in the Catholic faith, went to both a Catholic primary and high school, and was reasonably religious until my mid-teens. I can honestly say that many people in Britain with some link to Catholicism baptise their children in that church only to get them into Catholic state schools (read: schools which comparatively get better grades than other state schools). Practically everybody in my year at school was as dirty as anywhere else, and practically nobody practices religion regularly or goes to church anymore. Any conservative or traditionalist attitudes frankly derive more from societal pressure and non-religious aspects of their upbringing.
I do think that the Catholic Church really needs to sort itself out, and the fact that such a traditionalist pope is in charge is quite frankly worrying, whether or not he gets involved with politics or not. I have many gripes with the pope, and with his Bavarian homeland (not the nicest region of Germany as far as some of its inhabitants go, and this is from personal experience
), but I'll try and stay focused. Let me just first say that there are religious members of my family who are against the current pope and what he stands for. I, along with many people I know, feel the Vatican should allow priests to marry (they did prior to around 1000AD), and to allow women to be equally ordained; the prevention of the latter is particularly pathetic, and the fact that a nun in Britain was reputably ex-communicated for suggesting that women should be allowed to be ordained proves the misogyny of the current powers-that-be.
I also think that the pope should keep his mouth shut on the way society is going, and whether or not he hates the idea of men getting it on with other men. We've been through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and other major social changes up until this day, all of which can frankly be said to have benefited humanity for good. Resistance to the progress of civilization is essentially the undoing of humanity's triumphs. I'm not trying to colour this society and day in age as the best, as there are naturally many problems, but a lot of the Church's resistance is aggravating to the problems of society, and defies reason and human intelligence. Attitudes towards sexuality and life have changed in numerous societies, and the danger of STDs is huge. One simply can't say "no, don't do anything until you're really in love", when all that is supposedly being done wrong is being in love. And when it comes to "natural" and "unnatural", if two men (or two women) are in love with each other, what's wrong with that? They are
consenting to one another, which is where the lines of "natural" and "unnatural" are drawn.
The pope's condemnation of contraception is unnerving as it could create problems. I know that in much of Latin Europe, the Church has indeed been resisted (as in my old school, pupil-wise, that is), but there are cases where this isn't the case. I have a friend who was an assistant English teacher in an Austrian school for a year (Austria being a Catholic country, btw). She was asked by a teacher to run a sex education class, a rarity. They were all around 15-16 and were sexually active, but knew little of the consequences. Contraception was harder to procure (the pill is apparently very expensive in Austria, practically free in the UK), and rarely used by these teens, and they had very little idea of any STDs outside of HIV and syphilis. My friend ended up just giving in to the bitter truths and telling them all about why they need to protect themselves, and what the other STDs were (a girl was in tears when she discovered she could end up becoming infertile if she wasn't careful enough). Now, I do think that these teenagers probably shouldn't have been having aimless, hedonistic free-for-alls, but their own society should have been informative and upfront about certain issues, regardless of what a guy in a nice stone building may say; anybody who knows
Spring Awakening (the play or musical) will know what I mean.
Now, I don't want the Catholic legion of UD (if there is one
) to think that I'm being necessarily anti-Catholic in this post, and attacking them. I have some Irish ancestry, and my family history is often interwoven with aspects of the Catholic faith; trying to deny some of it would be ignoring my own personal history and the personal identity of my ancestors. My own problem is with the pope and the direction that Christianity (Catholic or non) is going in at the moment, as it's lacking a lot of rationality to be fully relevant or fully acceptable in my books.
Anyway, congratulations again to the protesters in Barcelona. Love is by far a better (and more entertaining) weapon than violence.
