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Pope Francis’ Old Breeding Policy Fails Kids, Women & Gay Folks
By Jerry Slevin
Christian Catholicism
October 22, 2014
http://christiancatholicism.com/pope-francis-old-breeding-policy-fails-kids-women-gay-folks/
WARNING — Eternal damnation awaits those who pursue sexual intimacy without pregnancy prospects, except maybe for clerics. This is the “wonderful warning” that recently Pope Francis and his Synod of Bishops, in effect, confirmed again — both for “opposite sex couples” and for “same sex couples”. This also confirmed the clear Vatican strategic link between the contraception and homosexuality issues. As the prominent Catholic observer, Peter Steinfels, noted a decade ago: “Homosexuality becomes the obvious battleground for addressing questions about nonprocreative heterosexuality.”
Papal power, of course, is derived from (1) claims that the pope is the only infallible transmitter of Jesus’ hopeful “message of love”, and (2) continued belief in these claims by over a billion docile Catholics who contribute and vote. Unending scandals of priests’ child abuse and bishops’ financial corruption, as well as chaotic clerical confrontations over “doctrines” and “turf”, like those at the recent Synod, are sending a very “unloving and fallible” message to a billion plus Catholics.
See, in the picture and report here, as a likely indication of related political and financial considerations, Pope Francis’ welcoming at the end of the Synod, Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, hardly the most “prophetic” supporter of Pope Francis’ breeding strategy:
http://en.starafrica.com/news/zimbabwean-leader-among-faithful-marking-pope-paul-v1s-beatification.html
As usual, the voices of women, as Francis’ “Adam’s Rib”, were barely heard at the Synod, as strongly noted in “‘Baad” News Around the World” here:
http://ncronline.org/blogs/just-catholic/baad-news-around-world
The man-made “Rabbit Rule” (Breed & Breed More!) of Popes Pius XI (1930) and Paul VI (1968) appears still to be the cornerstone of the Vatican’s key moral “doctrine of procreative sex, ONLY”. Corollaries of this Rule include:
1. Catholic “opposite sex couples” must “shoot” for pregnancy in each intimate encounter; and
2. Catholic “same sex couples”, who cannot “shoot” for pregnancy, cannot be intimate ever; otherwise heterosexual couples will also demand “unfruitful non-procreative sex”.
These continuing Vatican scandal setbacks make it strategically paramount for the Vatican to generate more Catholic babies, at least to replace millions of younger, and even older, Catholics, who increasingly find the Vatican’s Church to be neither loving nor infallible. Meanwhile, the Vatican’s main worldwide religious competitor, Muslims, keep producing more babies, at a higher rate than Catholics now do, putting more pressure on the Vatican’s escalating “Baby Crusade”.
Pregnant Catholics are always a “win-win” situation for the Catholic hierarchy. If the baby survives and thrives, the “new Catholic” can be expected, after the customary indoctrination that begins at First Confession no later than 7 years old, to donate meekly and often to bishops, and even often to follow obediently Vatican “political instructions”, a key source of the Vatican’s power and wealth, as the Mugabe welcome mentioned above suggests.
If any “Catholic baby” does not survive or thrive, it is not the hierarchy’s problem in the final analysis. It is the child’s problem, and sometimes the parents’ as well, but ultimately never the hierarchy’s problem. Indeed, we read too often of stories of Catholic priests, protected by their bishops, who sexually prey with impunity on vulnerable children in dismal and “overpopulated” family situations, as with Archbishop Wesolowski and Fr. Gil in the Dominican Republic. See:
http://www.dominicantoday.com/dr/local/2014/10/15/53030/Dominican-Republic-can-extradite-former-Vatican-envoy-Think-tank AND
http://www.dominicantoday.com/dr/local/2014/10/22/53094/Poland-indicts-priest-linked-to-abuse-of-boys-in-Dominican-town
Francis, then, is only pursuing the Vatican’s centuries’ old population policy — more Catholic babies are good for the Vatican’s purse and power. Logical, yes; but magical and unChristlike nonsense nonetheless!
Pope Francis at the Synod appears to have given his best “Good Cop/Bad Cop” performance to date. Pope Francis promoted, evidently, the “Be Nice To Gay Sinners” ephemeral farce, while the Bad Cops, including Cardinals Burke, Pell, Mueller and Dolan, took care of real business, especially before the crucial US Senate elections on November 4. While the world focused for a few days on the Pope’s “gay sinners’ public relations charade”, the Pope doubled down on the 1968 anti-contraception encyclical, Humanae Vitae, and its unChristlike papal author, Paul VI. Pope Francis wrapped them quietly in a new “saintly halo”.
Indeed, at a post-Synod round table in Rome, the President of a Pontifical Institute on Marriage and Family, Monsignor Melina, argued that the open approaches proposed during the Synod were simply “ways to attract people. It is like introducing end of season sales, Church style”. It may be more than an end of season sale. If Francis doesn’t “get real” at the October 2015 Final Synod, he may be having an “Out of Business” sale!
Melina seemed to express the Vatican’s overall approach to the 99.9% of the world’s Catholics, the so-called People of God, who were not represented at the Synod –= treat them as “captive dumb customers”. Moreover, some of the many sincere and well behaved Catholic lay reformers, who met outside the Synod to express their independent views as members of the People of God in St. Peter’s public square, were reportedly harassed and nearly arrested by the Vatican’s heavy handed security forces.
What are the real options for the voiceless Catholic 99.9%? It is quite clear from the Synod’s process that the coercive and top-down hierarchy, despite Pope Francis’ disingenuous rhetoric and diversionary gestures, have no intent to return to the consensual and bottom up Church structure that Jesus’ disciples, including some women, left behind for 300 years, until the powerful Roman Emperor Constantine and his successors commandeered the Vatican as an absolute monarchy for over a millennium and a half, up until the present.
Options For the Catholic 99.9%:
The Catholic 99.9+% have mainly the following options:
1.Continuing to complain endlessly and “to wishful think” that Pope Francis, an almost 78 year old “son of the Church”, picked by ruthless, culpable and frightened Cardinals, will miraculously reform the Vatican. This is comforting and easy, but ultimately likely to be illusory, if not delusionary.
2. Leave the Church — many millions already have. Many more millions likely will, especially given the seeming hopelessness indicated by the recent Synod farce, unless the October 2015 Final Synod has real, diverse and independent participation by representatives of the Catholic 99.9%, the true People of God.
3. Stop donating and/or supporting government Church subsides, as in Germany.
— Again, many millions of Catholics now no longer donate or support the subsidies.
— I am convinced, solely with respect to the potential impacts on donations, that the Vatican would collect more in smaller donations from millions of returning and retained Catholics, than it would lose, if it told its 0.01% billionaire donors to take a hike on politically driven issues like contraception, same sex marriage and divorced Catholics’ being welcomed at the Communion Rail.
— So it appears that the Vatican and its bishops would even succeed better at the bank by complying with Jesus’ message. The bishops appear to be failures as bankers, almost as much as they are failures as pastors.
4. Rely on priest sex abuse survivors’ lawyers to “bankrupt the Church” leading thereby to positive and democratic changes in the Church’s hierarchical structure. This option will not after three decades likely succeed very far, at least any time soon. The Catholic hierarchy worldwide is too wealthy and too much is now going to non-productive legal fees.
— Moreover, the priest abuse survivors’ lawyers apparently also sometimes have a inherent conflict. These contingent fee lawyers may at times be willing to settle too eagerly with the wealthy Catholic Church hierarchy and even to agree to keep too many potentially incriminating details secret at times. See, for example, the excellent and revealing recent article by hard hitting, but fair, Minneapolis reporter, Madeleine Baran, entitled, “Lawyer’s deal with archdiocese arouses skepticism” at:
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/10/20/anderson-archdiocese-deal
5. Relying on local state prosecutors. This has been mainly unsuccessful so far, given Catholic bishops’ and their opportunist allies’ considerable political clout, for example in Boston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Now in Minneapolis, the wheels of criminal justice, which turn slowly there, seem to be turning a bit with the prospect of criminal prosecutions of a few priests, including one priest case that reportedly may involve Archbishop Nienstedt in some capacity. See:
http://www.startribune.com/local/east/279581672.html
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/10/17/clergy-abuse-cases
6. Relying on national investigations and prosecutions. As the Australian Royal Commission is demonstrating, this is the only way to get the Vatican to pay real attention to reforms. Hopefully, after the November 4 Congressional elections, President Obama will set up a similar presidential investigation commission. In my opinion, nothing else would be more of an impetus to get the Vatican to truly reform.
Concerning the Interrelationship of the Vatican’s Approaches to Contraception and Homosexuality:
The evident interrelationship between the Vatican’s “anti-gay relationships” and “anti-contraception” policies is very important.
The Vatican’s “theology” here seems more like an application of the old international political realism’s “population policy” strategy — the more Catholics born. the better it is for the hierarchy’s power and purse.
That some babies are born to couples that cannot afford to raise them, like millions of kids in the Philippines, is not the Vatican’s problem. Those that survive will be more than enough to support bishops financially and to influence politicians, who are seeking Vatican election support, to follow Vatican directives and to subsidize Vatican coffers.
So any recognition of a “loving adult human relationship” that doesn’t generate the maximum number of “Catholic babies” is “sinful”, whether that is due to heterosexual couples “planning” through artificial contraception to responsibly limit the number of their children or is due to same sex couples’ inability biologically to generate children.
From the perspective of Vatican “breeders” and “population planners”, the more important goal here is to have heterosexual couples generate, at any costs to the couples, more Catholic babies. But intimate gay relationships must, in these self-interested breeders’ view, be suppressed, since their approval by the Vatican would threaten the link that the Vatican breeders press for — namely, of “marriage” and the “openness to life”. As mentioned above, it appears the Vatican is concerned about keeping up with the high birth rates of its religious competitors, especially Muslims. It is a “procreation crusade”!
In effect, the Vatican is just extending Pope Pius XI’s original 1930 ban on birth control, which apparently was aimed at pumping up a depleted post-World War I European male population, in the face of Pius XI’s well documented obsession with the expansion of the atheistic Soviet empire.
Pope Francis is just following Paul VI’s mistaken and disastrous path. Paul VI, by foolishly trying to preserve “papal infallibility” in 1968 with his failed encyclical, Humanae Vitae, permanently and seriously damaged papal credibility. Francis is making matters worse. Please see my:
http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/new-birth-control-commission-papers-reveal-vaticans-hand
Paul VI’s ruthless disregard for his own birth control commission’s pro-contraception advice has been documented fully in Robert Blair Kaiser’s classic “The Politics of Sex and Religion”, which he generously has made available as a free e-book here:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/151118
The above Synod analysis is reinforced, in my view, by paragraph 57 of the recent Synod’s Final Report, which was approved by 169 in favor, and only 5 opposed, nearly unanimous.
Paragraph 57 (based on Google Translate) states, in pertinent part, as follows:
__________________________________________
Heading: “The transmission of life and the challenge of falling birth rates
“57. It ‘s not hard to see the spread of a mentality that reduces the generation of life to a variable of individual or couple planning. Economic factors exert a burden, sometimes decisive, contributing to the sharp decline in the birth rate, which weakens the social fabric, compromises the relationship between the generations and makes the future appear more uncertain. OPENESS TO LIFE {my emphasis added} is an intrinsic requirement of conjugal love ….”
__________________________________________
So there you have it. The Vatican through the Synod is saying, in effect:
1. More Catholic babies are needed to offset the “sharp decline {?} in the birth rate, which weakens the social fabric …”. Of course, more Catholic babies also appear potentially to enhance the Catholic hierarchy’s wealth and power indefinitely;
2. Heterosexual couples must always “shoot” for a pregnancy during intimacy, unless they are among the 2% who can abide by “natural family planning” which condones the periodic “shooting of blanks”; and
3. Same sex couples cannot be intimate because they cannot “procreate naturally”, since that might then tempt heterosexual couples to have sex without the possibility of pregnancy.
Amazing, but seemingly a true analysis.
Is Pope Francis serious?
It is becoming clearer, to me at least, that the Synod’s “one step forward, two steps backwards” ploy about welcoming gay relationships was mainly to distract from the doubling down on the Vatican’s anti-contraception policy, no?
The following remarks at the Synod by Nigerian Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama, as reported by the National Catholic Reporter (NCR), as follows, are enlightening in this regard:
“We should be allowed to think for ourselves… We are wooed by economic things,” said Kaigama, who heads Nigeria’s Jos archdiocese. “We are told if you limit your population, we’re going to give you so much. And we tell them, ‘Who tells you that our population is overgrown?’ “
Kaigama, one of 36 African prelates attending the Synod as the heads of the continent’s bishops’ conferences, spoke on Wednesday (10/8) at a Vatican briefing.
Following are the archbishop’s pertinent remarks about contraception, as reported by NCR:
” … We get international organizations, countries, and groups which like to entice us to deviate from our cultural practices, traditions, and even our religious beliefs. And this is because of their belief that their views should be our views. Their opinions and their concept of life should be ours… “
“… We are wooed by economic things. We are told, “If you limit your population, we’re going to give you so much.” And we tell them, “Who tells you that our population is overgrown?” In the first place, children die — infant mortality — we die in inter-tribal wars, and diseases of all kinds. And yet, you come with money to say, “Decrease your population; we will give you economic help… “
“Now you come to tell us about reproductive rights, and you give us condoms and artificial contraceptives. Those are not the things we want. We want food, we want education, we want good roads, regular light, and so on. Good health care.”
“We have been offered the wrong things, and we are expected to accept simply because they think we are poor. And we are saying poverty is not about money. One can be poor in spirituality, poor in ideas, poor in education, and in many other ways.”
“So we are not poor in that sense. We may be poor materially but we are not poor in every sense. So we say no to what we think is wrong. And time has gone when we would just follow without question. Now, we question. We evaluate. We decide. We ask questions. This is what we do in Africa now.”
So the celibate African Archbishop appears to be claiming that poor Nigerian couples should not have affordable access and free choice as to contraception because tribal wars and disease are already ‘thinning the population”.
Was he really serious? The Archbishop may not want artificial contraception, he cannot get pregnant! How about “his flock”? Might unwanted and unaffordable children be a factor that contributes to disease and tribal wars?
Similarly, at the Synod on Thursday (10/9), Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois of Paris, one of three synod presidents appointed by the pope, said Catholic couples “often do not believe that the use of contraceptive methods is a sin … {and} it is necessary … to thwart the contraceptive mentality that in some countries has led to a strong demographic drop whose social and human consequences are not sufficiently considered today …”. Really, the Pill has caused an “under population crisis”? Where, Cardinal? Are you serious. Cardinal?
A designated “pro-natural family planning” married couple from Brazil then followed the Cardinal and told Pope Francis and the Synod of Bishops that the Church should stop giving “contradictory advice” on birth control and help Catholics obey church teaching against contraception — how, by continuing to Ban the Pill?
Of course, with Francis having already pre-planned to serve up Paul VI for “sainthood” as the “dessert” for the Synod Bishops, the Ban of the Pill is here to stay, it appears.
And, as indicated, the Vatican’s ban on same sex relationships may also be here to stay, unless Pope Francis finds some elusive prudence and judgment and intestinal fortitude by October of 2015.
For related information, please see my remarks, “Pope Francis, Let’s Not Neglect Children at the Next Synod “, at:
http://christiancatholicism.com/pope-francis-lets-not-neglect-children-at-the-next-synod/
Please see also the fine analysis by Catholic theologian, Bill Lindsey, of the complex interrelationship of the papal contraception and homosexual strategies, at:
http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2014/10/another-post-synod-meme-among-some.html
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