"If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.” - St. John 15:18
How many times have we read or heard that verse, and thought about how Christ was hated during His lifetime? He was hated so much that those who were driven by it insisted on His crucifixion. But when it comes to that hatred, I tend to think in the past tense. I allow myself to forget that there are still those who loathe Him with an intensity that defies imagination, and their revulsion extends to His Church and to the Pope, who is the earthly head of the Church.
We’re inclined to underestimate the power of hatred, because we’ve sanitized it through an over-use of the word. Children “hate” school and they “hate” broccoli. A lot of people “hate” getting up on Monday mornings. I “hate” polyester vestments and bad music. Now, I suppose we could take the path of some Scripture scholars and say that “hate” really means “to love less,” and that’s how they interpret the words of Jesus when he tells us, “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26). And I’m sure that softer interpretation is correct. It’s how we tend to use the word now. When the child claims to hate school, what he really means is that he’d prefer to stay home and watch cartoons, or play with his friends. When a person says he hates to get up in the morning, he’s really saying that he’d like another hour in bed.
But there is such a thing as a vicious and deep hatred for something or someone – a hatred which is primal and demonic. That’s the kind of hatred which nailed Christ to the cross. It’s a hatred which is traced back to Lucifer himself when he asserted “Non serviam,” and who then went on to plant the same attitude in our first parents, Adam and Eve. And it’s the kind of hatred which we’re seeing in some of the present attacks on the Holy Father.
It’s one thing to call for truthfulness and integrity when it comes to the treatment of victims of abuse, and to demand restitution from the abusers. Indeed, it’s right to call for an assignment of responsibility if someone in authority has purposely evaded his duty, leading to the injury of an innocent victim. This is nothing less than a Catholic understanding of justice.
But it’s quite another thing to allow a blind rage to take over. This is what we see in the following article out of Australia, appearing on the site of ABC, which is the national public broadcasting company. It’s called A Tale of Two Battles, and the author, Bob Ellis, links Pope Benedict XVI with Osama bin Laden. Be warned: his final sentence is a question. “Why not bomb the Vatican, and riddle the Pope with bullets as he staggers out of the flames?” It’s not a rhetorical question for him. He sees no reason why that shouldn’t happen.
A TALE OF TWO BATTLES
by Bob Ellis
No-one has yet suggested bombing the Vatican and pursuing the Pope through the sewers of Europe till he is caught and riddled with bullets in order to stop priests buggering choirboys in Boston, Chicago, Dublin and Sydney. But a precise mirror image of this is how we behaved in Afghanistan.
If we bomb it flat, we were told, and pursue Bin Laden through the caves of Tora Bora and the mud huts of Waziristan until he is caught and riddled with bullets, al-Qaeda won't hijack planes and blow up trains any more. And the world will live at peace.
We were told this eight years ago. And we believed it.
It's a curious premise to base a war on, really. Yet no curiouser I suppose than saying Saddam has nuclear weapons and he won't use them if 32 nations invade his country, he will bury them in the sand. But there you go.
It's the sort of thing that lately, since we have stopped thinking connectedly, we have been persuaded to believe. Like, if we shoot a pregnant woman, a policeman, a lawyer and a girl who is engaged, shoot them dead in a single town in broad daylight and cover it up and say we never did it, that town will soon forgive us and join us in a war against its neighbours.
We did this last month in Afghanistan and we still think the war there is going well.
We are doing really dumb things lately and imagining we'll win 'hearts and minds' by killing people for things they haven't done and declaring we 'acted appropriately, within the guidelines'.
Let's consider for a while the comparable crimes, or iniquities, or sins, or misdeeds, or culpable errors of Osama bin Laden and the Pope. Osama's followers killed 3,000 people in New York and around 700 more by terrorist acts in London, Bali, Madrid and Mumbai in the past eight years and desolated maybe 20,000 lives of the relatives of the dead.
The Pope's followers desolated, perhaps, 100,000 lives (or this is my guess) by sexual depravity in the past 80 years and killed, perhaps, (this too is my guess, I ask for yours) no more than 5,000 smashed and embittered Catholic boys and girls they drove to suicide or drunken oblivion and early death in those years.
The crimes are comparable pretty much and well-attested and well known from enquiries here and in Germany, the US and Ireland. Why then do we not bomb the Vatican and obliterate Italy for harbouring this criminal mastermind, this known protector of evil predators? Why do we not pursue him through the sewers of Europe and riddle his corpse with bullets?
Can it be, perhaps, because we think Italians and Germans are in some way superior to Afghans or Saudis or Palestinians? Can it be because we believe Catholic priests have a right to hurt little boys and Taliban mullahs and chieftains no right to hurt little girls and young women?
Why do we do this? Why are we not bombing the Vatican?
Is there a racial component in our inconsistency? Do we think we should bomb brown people but should not bomb white people? Is that it?
One wonders now what should be done with buggering priests and those that hide them from our detection. Clearly bombing Italy and Ireland is an insufficient solution, to judge by what little effect our bombing and rocketing and random arrest and rendition to houses of torture have had on the Taliban thus far and their hold on the minds of their people.
One wonders what we should do.
Under our terrorist laws, if you fail to report an imminent act of terror (and if raping repeatedly a deaf and speechless little boy is not an act of terror it's hard to say what is) you go to jail, and for 48 hours or 50 days, depending on the country, you can be 'questioned' without a lawyer.
Under these existing laws 100,000 Australians could be locked up for concealing vital information, and perhaps they should be. Certainly this would be better than bombing all of Sydney, where the crimes took place. But it feels a little harsh somehow, to me at any rate; especially since a lot of the covering-up was done by the parents of the children victimised, and other adjacent pupils and priests and nuns, not guilty themselves of any abuse but not wishing to make waves.
They are not exactly innocent, but they are not entirely criminals either.
What should be done?
Well, there are precedents. I remember Scientology being outlawed in Victoria 40 years ago for a lesser abuse of vulnerable minds and souls. I remember Holocaust Denial being made an imprisonable crime a decade ago and David Irving being put in jail for it in Austria.
I remember office harassment being made a sackable offence around the same time. I remember a female parliamentarian losing her career for speaking sternly to a waiter only a year ago. And I saw this week on The 7.30 Report a suggestion that schoolyard bullying (which also causes suicides) be made a notifiable crime with at least theoretical periods in jail or a padded cell for offenders.
What we should do, perhaps, before we do anything, is make a pertinent comparison.
If an Australia-wide child care corporation had been shown to have covered up 1000 cases of child rape by its teachers it would have been wound up, its assets seized and sold, its CEO arraigned for criminal neglect, its employees held for questioning, the offending perverts jailed or put in madhouses, its name eternally stained.
Yet precisely this kind of crime has occurred in another institution responsible for the care and shaping of children, the Catholic Church.
Should it be outlawed?
Or is it, simply, too big to fail?
Just asking.
It is worthwhile, I think, to make these connections, of how forgivingly we treat the First World rich and the contrasting way we treat the Third World poor. How we treat the crimes of Christians and of heathens in very different ways. It shows how crazy we have lately come to be, and how justly we are despised by the Islamic world, and the Communist world, and many of our former colonies.
If we do this violence to the Taliban for the way they treat their women and children, why not the Catholics too?
Why not bomb the Vatican, and riddle the Pope with bullets as he staggers out of the flames?
This is a glimpse into the raw face of evil. But as horrifying as it is, actually I think we can take some encouragement from it all. It’s proof to me that the Catholic Church is what she claims to be: the Body of Christ. The Catholic Church warrants the attention of Satan because he hates Christ; to hate Christ is to hate the Catholic Church; and to hate the Catholic Church is to hate the Pope, who is the head of the Church on earth. Let’s face it: it was a triumph for the devil when he was able to lure certain members of the Catholic clergy into a demonic web of sin, so that their actions were able to pave the way for this frontal assault on the Church. And the devil has found plenty of dupes to help him in this sulphuric attack. He thinks he’s winning. But then, he thought he was winning a couple of thousand years ago on a hill outside Jerusalem.
Related posts:
Unbelievable!
Just using this guy's line of thinking: isn't Mr. Ellis's article comparable to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf? Threatening violence, eh? So let's wrong a wrong with another wrong with a few more wrongs and hopefully everything will go so wrong that it will be 1969 and we'll all be at Woodstock again.
Brilliant article, Father, I think you should read some of the works of Nicholas Berdyaev, very much of the Dostoevsky school. I would recommend all Berdyaev's books, but especially "Freedom and the Spirit" and "Spirit and Reality" with some extremely profound chapters on the problem of evil.
In 1945, Europe said "Never again!". May we never again have to see our world go back into darkness as Europe did in the 1930's!
"Now, under the attacks of the world, which speak to us of our sins, we see that to be able to do penance is a grace – and we see how necessary it is to do penance, that is, to recognize what is wrong in our lives: to recognize one’s sin, to open oneself to forgiveness, to prepare for pardon, to allow oneself to be transformed.
The pain of penance, the pain of purification and transformation – this pain is grace, because it is renewal – it is the work of the Divine Mercy."
Pope Benedict XVI to the Pontifical Biblical Commission, April 15th 2010.
I have just lodged a formal complaint about Ellis' article with the ABC, and would urge others to do likewise.
Dear Father,
Absolutely spot on! We have all become too blase about the workings of the evil one. We have been in spiritual warfare from day one and we continue to be so. Love versus hate.
The difficult part is recognizing the evil one's line of attack. Very seldom does he use tactics as blatant as those that you alert us to in the op-ed piece above. As the prince of lies, Satan's favorite trick is to turn the truth just a bit off-center. Not a huge lie – that's too obvious. But just turn the truth a bit. "Did God say you would die if you eat of the fruit of this tree? You will not die." And, of course Adam and Eve didn't die – at least not right there and then. But through that act of disobedience death entered the world. It was a subtle bit of persuasion that tempted our first parents. It is the subtleties and wiles of the old tempter that still trip us up.
So, yes Father, we need to open our eyes to the subtle, and not so subtle, messages we receive from the world around us. If the evil one is against us, we are doing something right. And most especially we need to pray for those in the media and in the culture who unwittingly fall prey to the lies that the Ancient Foe spins and thus become his unknowing servants.
I'm glad this article was written. At some point the journalists attacking the Pope and the Church are going to have to admit they're not really motivated by a concern for the victims of sexual abuse. It's pure vitriol designed to turn the populace against Catholics… and even though some have been criticized for comparing it to the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime, I think it's becoming clearer and clearer that that's exactly what it is like.
Bob Ellis is a well-known political pundit of the left here in Australia. He's an old-hand ALP (Australian Labor Party) hack who rarely writes anything of value. For those who want to know what sort of a man Ellis really is, visit this link:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/a_bit_of_ellis_in_the_salad/
I was thinking, if people think that link is not appropriate, please remove it. I just find the likes of Ellis sometimes make me ashamed to see some of the anti-Catholic stuff that comes out of my country. Sorry world.
As unsavoury as it is, it does give a very good idea of the depraved pit from which this wickedness comes.
## The Ellis article may go a bit far, but instead of – or, rather than – deploring its spirit and violence, why not ask why hatred that violent is expressed in the first place ?
What has happened in the Church is indescribable – to look for words for it is therefore a waste of time. The Church becomes the Kingdom of Satan by allowing such things – and that is hateful. Hatred of evil is entirely appropriate – and evil is evil, even when tolerated by the CC; so no matter how impure & unrighteous the motives of those who hate what has happened, there is at least some element in their anger and hatred that so far as it goes is surely right.
Was Isaiah wrong to say what he did in Isaiah 1.10-17 ? Was Ezekiel wrong to condemn the horrible idolatry and apostasy of the Jerusalem of his time ? Was Jeremiah a traitor for saying that JHWH was with Nebuchadnezzar against His own city ? Has God ceased to be a God of Righteousness, & become a God Who suppports the mighty against the downtrodden and victimised ?
If the answer to any of these questions is "No", how is it even remotely tolerable for a supposedly Christian body to act as the CC has, & still does ?
BTW – I'm not anti-Catholic, but an RC.
dead dog, the Church did not do this; certain individuals within the Church did these things. The Church did not become the Kingdom of Satan; those who did these things allowed themselves to enter into communion with the Kingdom of Satan. And the question of why this violent hatred is expressed has the obvious answer, stated in the post: it's demonic.
Well, it's quite simple. This hatred is expressed because so many of these people are hypocrites and fools. You see, they're not really against sexual perversion at all, and the actions of a really small minority of clerical miscreants provides merely the occasion for them to vent their spleen at the one institution left standing in the way of their criminality.
AS for the church "still doing it", that's hardly fair. The church's act has been cleaned up – those of the school teachers, fathers/step-fathers/live-in boyfriends, judges, lawyers, doctors, journalists and other categories from which perverts (including genuine paedophiles) are drawn have yet to be. The catholic church is now one of the safest places for children.
Furthermore, just because some priests and bishops have perpetrated evil, that doesn't justify others perpetrating evil themselves – albeit a different one, calumniating the pope.
Not making excuses for what has happened in the Catholic Church, but Catholics and protestants, also the secular world, should be looking around them, as this happens in every organization and many homes on a greater scale than what has happened in the Church.
Statistics show it is more common in protestant denominations, but since they don't keep records and also their ministers are free to move around it is more difficult to build a case against them. Some of the statistics come from insurance companies who insure different churches, so I would assume their statistics are correct.
Evil is such a great part of the world today. Ellis is a vile man and has his own agenda, as do the media.
I would hope that people are not so ignorant that they are unable to see through these people and understand what and why they are going after only the Catholic Church.
I know more Catholic priests that are holy than from the church I came from. Sorry to offend anyone, but as I said evil comes into any place there are children and vulnerable people.
Bob Ellis, condemned to death at the Cambridge Trials of 2016, made his melodramatic appearance at 2.12 am. A number of Professor Dawkins’ ‘New Nazi World Order’ officers were executed by hanging the same day. Dawkins himself had committed suicide in the London Bunker by swallowing a hand grenade.
While his manacles were being removed and his bare hands bound, this ugly, dwarfish little man, wearing a threadbare suit and a well-worn bluish shirt buttoned to the neck but without a tie (he was notorious during his days of power for his flashy dress), glanced at the three wooden scaffolds rising menacingly in front of him. Then he glanced around the room, his eyes resting momentarily upon the small group of witnesses. By this time, his hands were tied securely behind his back. Two guards, one on each arm, directed him to Number One gallows on the left of the entrance. He walked steadily the six feet to the first wooden step but his face was twitching.
As the guards stopped him at the bottom of the steps for identification formality he uttered his piercing scream: 'Heil Dawkins!'
The shriek sent a shiver down my back.
As its echo died away a German colonel standing by the steps said sharply, 'Ask the man his name.' In response to the interpreter's query Ellis shouted, 'You know my name well.'
The interpreter repeated his request and the condemned man yelled, 'Bob Ellis.'
As he reached the platform, Ellis cried out, 'I wanted to destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust.' He was pushed the last two steps to the mortal spot beneath the hangman's rope. The rope was being held back against a wooden rail by the hangman.
Ellis was swung suddenly to face the witnesses and glared at them. Suddenly he screamed, 'Kill the Pope!'
The German officer standing at the scaffold said, 'Ask the man if he has any last words.'
When the interpreter had translated, Ellis shouted, 'The Politically Correct people will hang you one day.'
When the black hood was raised over his head, Ellis's muffled voice could be heard to say, 'Please, I don’t want to die.'
At that instant the trap opened with a loud bang. He went down kicking. When the rope snapped taut with the body swinging wildly, groans could be heard from within the concealed interior of the scaffold. Finally, the hangman, who had descended from the gallows platform, lifted the black canvas curtain and went inside. Something happened that put a stop to the groans and brought the rope to a standstill. After it was over I was not in the mood to ask what he did, but I assume that he grabbed the swinging body and pulled down on it. We were all of the opinion that Ellis had strangled.
Actually, Fr A, you might not be far wrong.
Bishop Fellay's rosary crusade for the consecration of Russia resulted in over 12 million rosaries being said. The last two rosary crusades resulted in Summorum Pontificum and the rescission of the excommunications of the SSPX bishops.
With the consecration of Russia, social change must come, probably NOT the kind Ellis and Co. hope for …
Another candidate for Sergeant Woods' best-quality hemp would be Hans Küng, who is making another sick grab for power:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0416/1224268443283.html?via=rel
http://wdtprs.com/blog/2010/04/kung-claws-his-way-back-into-the-news/
Perhaps the only reason why Küng would not want to be Pope is that he would no longer be infallible!
Bob Ellis is known in Australia for his weird sense of humour and his love for making controversial statements, so I am not completely certain that he was completely serious in this article. However, even if it was a joke, it was certainly in extremely poor taste.
Isn't he also an alcoholic? (Or am I thinking of someone else?)
No, it's Christopher Hitchens who is the alcoholic thug.