Clare’s blog, aka rantspace

Barack Obama, as a left-of-centre president, was always going to get panned by the Vatican, but it’s happened in a far more laughable way than I could have imagined possible!  AAP reports that Obama has been criticised by the Vatican for overturning a ban on state funding for overseas abortion clinics (see here).  But it was the form of the criticism that had me astounded – though I should be used to the breathtaking superciliousness of the church by now.  The Vatican official ascribed to Obama “the arrogance of someone who believes they are right”, and further added that “What is important is to know how to listen… without locking oneself into ideological visions”.

If there’s one group of people who are arrogant enough to believe they’re right (and threaten those who think differently with eternal damnation!), and who are locked into an ideological vision to the extent of being unable to listen, it’s the conservative church!

Having grown up in a Christian family (one side of it, anyway) and having developed as a child a fondness for some series of books that have a quite strong Christian basis (in both the series I’m thinking of, the characters’ faith is a significant part of their lives, though in a mostly very practical way), when I re-read any of the books as an adult, I find myself approaching the depiction of the characters’ faith in a quite different way.

For instance, I no longer accept the argument from one character to another that the outcome of questioning the existence or the goodness of God is too awful to contemplate.  In one book, a character says “Don’t even begin to think that [ie. that God doesn't exist], because if it were true it would make everything we do worthless and the world pointless.”  My perspective now is that such reasoning is badly awry.  If God doesn’t exist, it may indeed make some things that we do worthless (though not all), and it may make the world pointless (but I don’t believe it must), but surely it would be better to believe the truth than to bolster ourselves into some artificial sense of purpose by holding to a false belief?

But back to my point: the book I was reading today had a character explaining to another that it’s unreasonable to question God, and say he’s cruel, when something bad happens unexpectedly.  And she gave the analogy that when a child doesn’t understand something its parent does, it doesn’t immediately turn round and say its parent is cruel – rather it remembers all the good times and trusts its parent, and says “I’ll wait, and one day I’ll understand.”  And it occurred to me that such an attitude is one of the most dangerous ways to approach our “why” questions.  Dangerous because it encourages an avoidance of the hard questions, and a consequent vulnerability to evil.

How?  Because evil first has to be recognised as evil.  Then it has to be fought.  And if our response to bad or frightening events is to ascribe them unquestioningly to a good God, with some good (though not understood) purpose, then we risk failing to discern between bad things caused by (or not prevented by) God, and evil happenings which should be fought with all our ability and strength.

Take, for instance, child sexual abuse – particularly by some intimate or trusted figure.  It is all too easy for Christians to say (as many do after the event is known) that God must have allowed it for a purpose.  But such an attitude comes perilously close to accepting evil without question, and encourages a response of inactivity, albeit under the guise of “allowing God to deal with it”.  This, in turn, makes allowing God to deal with it simply a cop-out so that we don’t have to.  Those same people who say that would be quite likely to say – in other, less confronting circumstances – a) we are God’s instruments, b) God helps those who help themselves, or c) we are on this earth to fight against evil.

So it seems to me, the biggest question is not “why did X happen?”, but rather “what are we going to do about it?”  Because it is our response to bad happenings that will determine whether we protect ourselves (and others, such as children) in future, by not just accepting what comes as inevitable (“sent by God”), or whether we allow bad people who do bad things to get away with it.

One of the longterm results of sexual abuse is the ever-present possibility of “triggers” (circumstances, events, objects, words, songs, etc. which serve as unbidden reminders of the abuse and triggers of abuse-related emotions, body memories or post-traumatic reactions).  And when the abuse is church-related – and particularly if the victim was devout and actively involved in a religion and its practices – the circumstances around the abuse frequently encompassed the majority of the victim’s time, social circle, faith, beliefs and activities.  This all-pervadingness presents a special kind of dilemma, where the victim – in standing up against the wrongness of their abuse - loses nearly every aspect of their life, and the potential triggers are correspondingly all pervading.  Phrases that people use that happen to be in hymns, symbols that may have been part of the victim’s religious life, events that may somehow be linked with events during the abuse – all (along with many other things) can serve as painful and difficult reminders.

Christmas and Easter are typical examples which are almost impossible to avoid (Christmas is worse, because more people celebrate the religious meaning of Christmas than Easter), so this time of year is a difficult one for clergy abuse victims.  For many victims who have taken action against their perpetrator, these “festivals” are made even more painful by the thoughtlessness (or deliberate intent) of the church.  For example, this year, a few weeks before Christmas, the Catholic Church announced a review of their “Towards Healing” abuse complaint process, and asked for victims’ comments on their experiences.  There was, of course, a deadline.  So if any victims wanted to be involved in the review process by offering comments, they had to revisit their complaint process, analyse and document the toughest parts of it and how the church made it more painful, and do it all within a few weeks, at a time of year which is already extraordinarily difficult for them.

Other victims tell of frequent examples where they have been required to document something, decide something, or deal with something to do with their complaint immediately before Christmas or Easter.  It is such a frequent occurrence, it makes it hard to believe it’s all purely accidental.  One could try to dismiss it as the church wanting to deal with business before the holiday, but given how busy a time of year it is for them, it seems unlikely that they would suddenly place a priority on dealing with abuse complaints rather than church activities, given the long waits for action that victims suffer at other times of year.

By sheer weight of the frequency with which this kind of thing happens, victims are forced to the conclusion that churches do it on purpose – force them into making decisions at a time when they are least fit to do so, thereby giving the advantage in the complaint process to the church, for whom it is purely a business arrangement.