Papal propaganda
by Richard Moore
A better variety of tolerance -¦ copes with differences without antipathy or contempt. -” Bishop Anthony Fisher, coordinator of World Youth Day, Friday 13 June 2008.
Without antipathy or contempt? In the two decades before he became pope Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), successor to the Roman Inquisition. In that time he issued a stream of anti-gay statements, silenced and expelled supportive theologians, priests and nuns and banned ministries to gay people.
Ratzinger’s seminal 1986 letter On the Pastoral Care of the Homosexual Person warned of deceitful propaganda from pro-gay groups. He blamed gay people striving for legal equality for anti-gay violence: When civil legislation is introduced to protect behaviour to which no one can have any conceivable right, neither the church nor society at large should be surprised when -¦ irrational and violent reactions increase. Ratzinger labelled a homosexual orientation an intrinsic moral evil and said that homosexual acts can under no circumstances be approved.
Father Charles Curran was condemned in 1987 for, among other things, calling for a new moral understanding and acceptance of homosexuality and gay relationships. His sacking as a Catholic moral theologian was to serve as a severe warning to others. When Curran challenged Ratzinger as to why he was sacked and like-minded German theologians were not, Ratzinger responded that if Curran gave him their names they would be investigated too.
In 1992, in a letter to the US bishops, Ratzinger attempted to block proposed anti-discrimination legislation. In the same year, he published the Catechism of the Catholic Church repeating the claim that a homosexual orientation was intrinsically disordered.
In 1999, after a 15-year CDF investigation, Sister Jeannine Gramick and Father Robert Nugent were accused of being ambiguous about church teaching on homosexuality, and of causing grave harm to the people of God. Both were permanently banned from their 20-year ministry to gay people and from any leadership position in their religious orders.
In 2003, Ratzinger attacked gay and lesbian people struggling to have their relationships and families recognised. He condemned same-sex unions as evil, denounced gay relationships as depraved, and directed all people, especially Catholic politicians, to work actively not only to oppose any new laws but also to repeal all existing ones.
In 2005, Cardinal Alfonso Lopes Trujillo, on behalf of Ratzinger, condemned the Spanish government for proposing new laws permitting same-sex marriage and alleged that adoption of children by same-sex couples was moral violence against children.
Bertrand Russell once asked, Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
It is ironic that Ratzinger used the phrase deceitful propaganda in his 1986 assault on pro-gay groups. It is from the name of Pope Gregory XV’s Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagating the Faith), established in 1622, that the word propaganda entered the language.
info: Richard Moore is an active member of a theologically progressive Uniting Church congregation in Melbourne.
