Pell and Hickey: cult leaders without a cult

National Day of Secularism

May the 26th

What does the Catholic Church in Australia have against secularism, liberal democracy and the Enlightenment? Quite a lot, it seems, because in the last 24 hours no less than two high-ranking clergy have warned Australian Catholic politicians that if they vote in favour of expanded stem-cell research, they risk being kicked out of Benedict's gang. By now you would have heard about Sydney Archbishop Cardinal George Pell's heavying of Catholic parliamentarians in NSW who are considering voting in support of a therapeutic cloning bill currently being debated in the Lower House:

Cardinal George Pell has warned Catholic politicians they face "consequences" in the life of the church should they vote for an "immoral" bill before the NSW Parliament to expand stem cell research.

[. . .]

"These possibilities are quite grotesque and I'd be very surprised if they had approval throughout the population," he said.

"To create a human embryo for the express purpose of using it and destroying, that's the way we treat lab rats. It's totally inappropriate for human beings. It's a perverse new direction in human experimentation.

"I don't think Catholic politicians, Christian politicians or pro-life politicians who has properly informed their conscience should vote for these changes."

"Cloning is not quite the same as abortion and the legislation for such a thing as cloning is different from actually performing cloning," Dr Pell told reporters.

"But it is a serious moral matter and Catholic politicians who vote for this legislation must realise that their voting has consequences for their place in the life of the church."

As Bruce points out, Pell seems to be taking his Escriva-esque contribution to political science, what he calls "normative democracy"--"simply a case of “norms” (coincidentally parallel to church doctrine) that the state was not allowed to breach (in other words if the Church dictates against it Australia doesn’t get a say)"--to a new level. But one wonders whether Pell's acting entirely off his own bat, or in response to a memo from head office, given that this morning Perth Archbishop Barry Hickey issued his own fatwa against stemcell research. Hickey has form, of course: early last month, in response to a similar call from Pope Benedict, he declared that any doctor performing an abortion would be excluded from communion and would potentially face excommunication. Declaring that Catholics who vote for therapeutic cloning are acting against the Church's teaching, Hickey said:

"I had to speak about conscience and I would call on Catholic politicians to examine their conscience before taking communion if they supported stemcell research."

I don't want politicians Catholic or otherwise to "examine their conscience" on this issue (or any other) if it means that they stay up nights worrying about whether their sky-daddy will cast them into a lake of unquenchable fire for eternity if they disobey the orders of the Archbishop. Because, let's face it, that's insane. I want them to use one of the few opportunities they get in party political life to actually use their brains--and in the process, to tell the likes of Pell and Hickey to go fuck themselves. Fortunately, that's what they seem to be doing.

Courtesy of SMH. And too bloody right!

Let us hope, then, that Catholic school principals show as much backbone. As Mikey blogged a few days ago, earlier in the week Pell proclaimed that school principals in his archdiocese would have to take an "oath of fidelity" regarding Church teaching on homosexuality, birth control, and the ordination of women:

In a first for the Australian church, the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, is set to extend the oath of fidelity and profession of faith, a requirement of church law for bishops, priests and heads of seminaries, to all senior educational leaders.
The oath demands "religious submission of intellect and will" on questions of faith and morals - even if these are inferred but not defined by the pope and his bishops - and an acceptance that everything solemnly taught by church tradition is divinely inspired.
It suggests they would be bound not only to impart these teachings but to live by them. [Emphasis added]

Religious submission of intellect and will? Can I just suggest, to any principal who is seriously considering "submitting his or her intellect and will" to the sky-daddy's representatives on Earth, that you don't deserve to be at the helm of an educational institution in the 21st century? Perhaps management training at McDonalds is more your speed, because schools (real schools, that is) are supposed to develop in students the ability to think and to reason for themselves, not to transform them into mindless religious automatons.

Indeed, Pell seems to be taking cue from Jerry Falwell. Just look at what he has in store for those poor students whose parents are fool enough to believe that five to twelve in the Catholic education system will magically transform their little darlings into model citizens:

Among its other new measures are marriage preparation classes for senior secondary school students, twice-yearly reviews of its educational bodies, and forums so Catholic politicians can be updated on church teachings.
There will also be renewed efforts to teach youth about "sexuality and life issues" through formal courses and seminars, and measures to bring in to the fold young people inspired by next year's World Youth Day.
Cardinal Pell has taken an intense interest in Catholic education, ordering the rewriting of the religious education curriculum, and aiming to turn around Catholic thinking that faith is caught, not taught.

Sorry: that's not a school, it's a madrassa. All this talk about getting values back into the classroom . . . when did education stop being a value?

In the end, though, you have to laugh at these gentlemen who have been so cloistered from reality that they appear to think this is the eleventh century, there's still a Great Chain of Being and the secular powers still defer to religious authority unquestioningly. Unfortunately for them, most Australians, and indeed many Catholics, have voted with their feet on abortion, birth control, women's rights, gay rights and stem cell research. Pell and Hickey and cult leaders without a cult.

See also Ninglun's post
Read more!

Red-letter day for women's reproductive rights in Australia?

National Day of Secularism

May the 26th

Anti-abortionist Rosanna Capolingua has been appointed president of the national Australian Medical Association.

(Just sayin'.) Read more!

The Myth of church-state separation in Australia

National Day of Secularism
May the 26th

“The Myth of church-state separation.” Google that phrase, and you invariably come up with historical revisionist articles claiming that America’s Founding Fathers were strict Biblical literalists who intended the US to be a Christian Nation ™. That’s because, however devoutly the American Christian Taliban wish it to be otherwise, the First Amendment has repeatedly been interpreted to have established a “wall of separation” between church and state. Probably the most significant legal ruling to be based on such an interpretation was Kitzmiller v. Dover.

In Australia, many of us take it for granted that a similar wall of separation exists in our democracy. Well, perhaps we shouldn’t.

In a 2005 issue of Australian Humanist, Max Wallace points out that there are only two places in the Australian Constitution in which religion is mentioned—in the Preamble and in section 116:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

As Wallace’s article demonstrates, High Court judges and constitutional law experts alike have been unanimous in insisting that a notion of church-state separation cannot be inferred from the wording of section 116, much less from anywhere else in the Constitution. This interpretation was crucial in the 1981 Defence of Government Schools case, in which the Federal Government’s funding of church schools was challenged.

Justice Sir Ninian Stephen said s.116:

... cannot readily be viewed as a repository of some broad statement of principle concerning the separation of church and state, from which may be distilled the detailed consequences of such separation.

That is pretty unequivocal. The day after the case, none of the newspapers reporting the case published what the judges had said. Also, in many histories of Australia, these words, and the subject of church and state, do not appear. Textbooks on politics in Australia do not discuss it. We have an Australian Republican Movement that is arguing for a republic with no mention of church and state on their website. This is despite the fact that separation of church and state is the foundation stone of two of the leading republics in the world: the American and the French.

It is, in other words, the elephant in the room of Australian democracy. It places us, Wallace suggests,

somewhere between democracy and theocracy. I suggest that is an unacceptable state of affairs for a modern liberal democracy. We can hardly criticise regimes that refuse the distinction when we have not formalised it ourselves.

Indeed. On this National Day of Secularism, it is truly sobering to consider that the separation of church and state in Australia is even more tenuous than it is in the maniacally-religious US. You can just imagine what might transpire if the Religious Right (whether it’s the Opus Dei Liberals or the Pentecostal megachurch Liberals leading the parade) ever attains the same level of influence here that it has attained over there.

Other resources on this topic:
"Separation of church and state?" (Michael Hogan, University of Sydney)
"Church and state in Australia" (also by Max Wallace)
"Church and state" (Anglican bishop Tom Frame, who has also written a book on the subject)

UPDATE: May 26th also marks the tenth annual National Sorry Day, and it has been remiss of us not to have mentioned it earlier.

So the Australian Prayer Network just happened to select this date for their National Day of Thanksgiving? How interesting. I wonder who they think the members of the Stolen Generations should be thanking. See Simmo's post. Read more!