German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a gathering of young members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party this weekend that the “multikulti” concept – where people of different backgrounds would live together happily – does not work in Germany.
At “the beginning of the 1960s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country,” said Ms. Merkel at the event in Potsdam, near Berlin. “We kidded ourselves a while. We said: ‘They won’t stay, [after some time] they will be gone,’ but this isn’t reality. And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side by side and to enjoy each other … has failed, utterly failed.”
The crowd gathered in Potsdam greeted the above remark, delivered from the podium with fervor by Ms. Merkel, with a standing ovation. And her comments come just days after a study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think tank (which is affiliated with the center-left Social Democratic Party) found that more than 30 percent of people believed Germany was “overrun by foreigners” who had come to Germany chiefly for its social benefits.
Even more terrifying:
The study also found that 13 percent of Germans would welcome a “Führer” – a German word for leader that is explicitly associated with Adolf Hitler – to run the country “with a firm hand.” Some 60 percent of Germans would “restrict the practice of Islam,” and 17 percent think Jews have “too much influence,” according to the study.
The French senate voted 246 to 1, with about 100 abstentions from mostly protesting left-wing parties, to ban face-covering Islamic headdress.
As an atheist with humanist pretensions, I have to describe this sort of secularism impoverished of tolerance worse than useless. It will almost certainly retard the assimilation of Muslim immigrants most of its proponents want to encourage. Muslims will recognize the arbitrariness with which they have been singled out, and respond with the same fear and distrust that they have been met with. Jihadist goons will use the law to indict the West as a whole, swaying more of their undecided kinsmen closer to their own position, or at least away from appreciating democratic ideals. This plays into their narrative.
The transcripts of two meetings between Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels and a man sexually abused by the disgraced former bishop of Bruges make for sad reading indeed. Two Flemish-language newspapers, De Standaard and Het Nieuwsblad, published the texts on Saturday after the victim provided them with his secret recordings of the sessions. My analysis of the case is here.
Apart from the exchanges they reveal, the transcripts are sobering because of the context of the meeting. It took place on April 8, at a time when the series of clerical sexual abuse revelations that began in Ireland the previous year was tearing through Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria like a tornado. Pope Benedict had issued an unprecedented apology to the Irish for the scandals only shortly before. Church leaders all over were vowing to end the Church’s culture of secrecy and put the victims’ welfare above the defence of the clergy. If there was any time to simply say, “OK, he has to go. We have to report this,” this was it.
(above) Archbishop Godfried Danneels
It’s a sad end for the career of a leading Catholic cardinal, a grandfatherly man who spent 30 years as primate of the Belgian Church and stepped down last January amid wide popular support (except from conservatives who denounced him as too liberal).
There’s also an almost comic side to this story. When Belgian police swooped down on Church offices and Danneels’s apartment in late June to seize files and computers for abuse records, they also searched two tombs of deceased archbishops in the Mechelen cathedral crypt because someone suggested the cardinal had hidden some incriminating documents down there. They found nothing but the previous primates’ remains. Little did they know a real bombshell was elsewhere, on the tape the bishop’s victim had made.
In the published transcripts of that meeting, the unnamed victim, now 42, told Danneels he could no longer keep quiet about how his uncle, Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, sexually abused him between the ages of 5 and 18. He says Vangheluwe could not remain in office and the case must be reported to the Church hierarchy, but he doesn’t know how to do this.
“What do you really want?” asks Danneels, cutting the victim off by saying he already knows the story and doesn’t need to hear it again. When the man says “I give you the responsibility, I can’t decide … you should do what you think should be done, because I don’t know how this whole system works.”
“Do you want this to be made public?” the cardinal asks. “I leave that to you,” the victim responds. Then Danneels begins his effort to convince him to keep the lid on the problem: “The bishop will step down next year, so actually it would be better for you to wait.”
“No, I can’t agree that he takes his leave in glory, I can’t do that,” the victim replies.
The transcript is too long for me to translate all of it here and the only English version I’ve seen is too rough to be recommended. In any case, the exchange only gets worse. At one point, Danneels ducks and weaves trying to fend off the victim’s pleas to inform the Church hierarchy about Vangheluwe’s misdeeds. He says he has no authority over the bishop, only the pope does. When the victim suggests Danneels arrange a meeting with the pope, the cardinal gives the flip reply: “The pope isn’t that easy to reach.” A little later, he says: “I don’t think you’d do yourself or him a favor by shouting this from the rooftops.”
At another point, Danneels suggests the victim admit his guilt and ask for forgiveness. “Who do I have to ask forgiveness from?” the surprised man asks. When the cardinal remarks that going public would put the bishop in a quandry, the victim replies: “I’ve been living my whole life in a quandry … I was brought up Catholic. I see the institution is wavering, I read the newspapers and so I think I have a duty to do this. How can I get my children to believe something that has such a background? I can’t. That’s just always shoving it onto the next generation. And everything stays the same. That’s not what the Church is for.”
When Danneels suggests the victim may be trying to blackmail the Church, the man pleads with him to take up this case, saying there has to be someone in the Church who can handle it because he cannot bring himself to expose his uncle on his own. “We were forced to get married by him, our children were baptised by him, how can I explain this to them?” he asked. “Yesterday I said to my oldest son, look, this is what happened to me. They must know what has happened.”
The exchange goes on with Danneels repeatedly arguing he has no power to do anything and that the whole story would come out if Vangheluwe were forced to resign. That’s when the victim asked: “Why do you feel so sorry for him and not for me? … You’re always trying to defend him. I thought I was going to get some support, but I have to sit here and defend myself against things I can’t do anything about.”
New Statesman columnist Carla Powell disapproves of public disapproval of the pope’s impending visit to the UK:
[O]n recent visits to London, I have been shocked by the negative criticism of the Pope and the Catholic Church. Why are so many of the capital’s liberal elite upset? Why is Pope Benedict, an 83-year-old retired university professor, causing such anxiety?
The child abuse scandals central to all this have been a stain on the Catholic Church. But it is important to remember that this is a problem the Pope has been working to resolve for at least a decade. Grave as it is, the scandal should not be allowed to obscure his core message.
Dang it, Powell is right. Because Ratzinger’s central message is one of love and compassion, we shouldn’t judge his character entirely on the worst thing he did. Just like we shouldn’t let Enron’s surviving executives’ core message of service to the public in their maintenance of the energy infrastructure be overshadowed by their financial indiscretions. Just like we shouldn’t let Nixon’s illegal, secret bombing campaigns or conspiracy to conceal burglary by his own staff overshadow his core message of preserving Constitutional checks and balances and the rule of law. Just like we shouldn’t judge Mussolini for falling in with a rough crowd–after all, he made the trains run on time!
When people do good things, or say they’re doing good things, we can’t hold them responsible for the bad things they do. Because that’s how responsibility works: rewarding people for their stated intentions regardless of the actual consequences of their actions. Even if those consequences result in the thwarting of justice for 200-plus rape victims. Because it’s central message that matters; whether or not the person reciting said message actually lives up to it is beyond the point. Pontificating about selflessness, compassion, and justice aren’t about actually making sacrifices, taking into considerations the pain of people we’ve hurt, or actually affecting justice. It’s about saying things that make us feel good about ourselves.
Contrary to common prejudices, giving lip service to principles in public while also denying our part in the most extravagant defilements of those same virtues isn’t hipocritical or or sycophantic at all; they are the qualities that make heroes. Heroes like Ratzinger, as he exists in Powell’s imagination.
The Italian magazine Panorama recently published an expose on the subculture of Roman priests who frequent gay sex clubs. The Vatican has promised to seek out and defrock any clergyman to be connected to the story.
So why, after ten years of having the conspiracy out in the open, hasn’t the Magisterium made a similar promise to seek out and expell pedophiles? The promise to expell Rome’s cruisers was made immediately upon publication of the article; but an accusation of pedophilia initiateds a process of review that can take a decade to produce a quiet, private defrocking, if one happens at all.
Why is this? Because many church administrators, up to and including the highest office, have for decades been sitting on their knowledge of their own participation in actively covering up abuses. To move against any abuser or concealer of abuse, they would be indicting themselves. The thing really paramount to them, their first and last obligation, is protecting themselves, and by extension, the image of their institution. Even the expulsion of the priests featured in the Panorama piece is framed in image-control terms. Via the above linked Newsweek article:
Cardinal Agostino Vallini, head of the Rome diocese, is in charge of purging the offending clerics, and he has called on all gay priests who cannot respect the basic tenet of celibacy to get out of the priesthood. “Priests who are living a double life have not understood what the Catholic priesthood is and should not have become priests,” he said in a statement responding to the Panorama expose. “Consistency demands that they be discovered. We do not wish them ill, but we cannot accept that because of their behavior the honor of all the other priests is dragged through the mud.” [Emphasis mine.]
Where the face is covered, ethics cannot exist. I have been pondering all this again on the occasion of “the bill to forbid covering one’s face in public,” or the anti-burqa measure recently passed by the National Assembly in France. It has been defended on grounds of human rights. France, declared its minister of justice, “does not accept attacks on human dignity. It does not tolerate the abuse of vulnerable people.” Uh-huh. I confess that I am watching the French struggle with the distinction between Islam and Islamism—I mean the French who are struggling with it at all—with a certain malicious delight. Is the distinction really so slippery? When did France become the homeland of l’Autre, naturally tolerant and welcoming to cultures unlike its own? (The philosophy of Levinas was, among other things, a prophetic castigation of France.) And the same question may be asked of other European societies whose suspicion of, or hostility to, the Muslims in their midst has a foul familiar air. Otherness is the challenge that Europe never mastered. (I apologize for the gross historical generalization, but I have been immersed in Jordi Savall’s monumental reconstruction in music of the Cathars and their destruction.) And now, to fight Islamism in France, the power of the state, the frightened state, is being used to forbid the free practice of religion. It is of course shocking to encounter a person in a burqa, as it is to encounter a person tattooed from head to toe: it is a mutilation of personhood. But by what right does the state intervene? If some Muslim women are forced into their hideous sartorial prison, the state will not relieve them, and the Muslim men who are solicitous of their humanity, of the need to dissent and to rebel—of the rupture of modernization, which can only occur within, as it did in Christianity and Judaism; and if many Muslim women cover themselves consensually, the state should leave them be. Intolerance is a poor security policy. Moreover, the face is not all it’s cracked up to be. The face may be manifest but deceptive, and no disclosure at all; or it may disclose anger and hatred and violence. A visible face may be more dangerous than an invisible one. I am thinking of nineteen faces in particular.
I don’t think anyone seriously expected the UK government to detain Ratzinger, but now rules will be altered to close the loophole that could have made it legally possible.
The Government has moved to prevent the possibility of an arrest warrant being issued against the Pope during his state visit this autumn.Sky News understands that Whitehall officials have been “seriously concerned” that campaigners would use international criminal rules to try to detain the Pontiff while he is in the UK. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC were among those campaigners reported to be looking at the options for bringing a private prosecution in relation to the Pope’s alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
Now Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has proposed changes to the rules on universal jurisdiction, a law that allows individuals to be prosecuted in the UK for serious offences such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and torture even if they were carried out abroad. The plans would mean the Director of Public Prosecutions would need to give his consent to any arrest warrant issued under universal jurisdiction. This would effectively mean taking that power out of the hands of the courts.
Ministers say the current rules are open to abuse because the evidence required to get a warrant is far below the threshold that would be needed to bring a prosecution. This has meant the rules are often used by those who wish to make a political statement or to cause embarrassment.”
