Pope Francis has encouraged Europeans to welcome refugees, calling authentic hospitality “our greatest security against hateful acts of terrorism.”
Francis Saturday spoke to alumni of Jesuit schools in Europe who were in Rome for a conference on refugees.
There’s a lot I could say about this, but I won’t.
Just ask yourself what it says about the judgment, and, perhaps, more than just the judgment, of the man who is now Pope.
Count me skeptical about former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, but I had to warm, so to speak, to this comment (via Politico):
Sarkozy, who hopes to secure the center-right Les Républicains party’s presidential nomination, told business leaders earlier this week that “climate has been changing for four billion years” and “you need to be as arrogant as men are to believe we changed the climate.”
Sarkozy is nothing if not an opportunist, so it’s interesting to read that he sees the opportunity in a spot of blasphemy.
Cue: outrage.
Cue: Brendan O’Neill, with some commonsense:
The swiftness and ugliness of the response to Sarkozy’s comments confirm that questioning climate change is to the 21st century what querying the divinity of Christ was to the 14th.
There are decent arguments to be made to support the claim that man is changing the climate, but those arguments have been replaced by appeals to faith.
O’Neill:
In the speech [Sarkozy] said, ‘People [talk] a lot about climate change… but the climate has been changing for the past 4.5 billion years. Man is not the sole cause of this change.’ He then said something that struck me as reasonable but which is apparently mental and unutterable: ‘Sahara has become a desert — [that] isn’t because of industry.’
…The most revealing comment came from Valerie Masson-Delmotte, who is on the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, a kind of eco-version of the Holy See, only less open to criticism and debate. She said our ‘developed societies’ have been ‘built on a pact between scientists and politicians’ and Sarkozy risks breaking this pact. In short, politicians must now heed, and certainly not openly knock, the claims of climatologists. These people have a cavalier disregard not only for freedom of speech, but also for democracy. A politician’s responsibility is to push his ideas, and try to win public support for them, not to read obediently from turgid scientific documents and instruct the throng on how to think about the climate and improve their eco-behaviour.
The fury over Sarkozy’s sensible comments — even if you think, as I do, that mankind has had some impact on the climate, you surely recognise that climate has always been changing? — shows how intolerant the eco-outlook has become. Whether they’re branding people ‘deniers’ or suggesting climate-change denial should be made into a crime, greens have a strange and terrifying urge to silence dissent; to circumscribe debate; to elevate The Science (they always use the definite article before the word science, speaking to their transformation of it into religion) above public debate.
Why so touchy? If they’re so sure they possess the truth, why do they seek to crush anyone who questions them? Because behind all the scientific posturing, what we have here is a deeply ideological outlook, one which views mankind as destructive, progress as a stain on the planet, and putting the brakes on industry as the only solution to pollution. And this ideology cannot be undermined. Sarkozy’s crime was to suggest that mankind isn’t the destroyer of worlds. The misanthropes will not stand for it.
“Why so touchy?”
That is the question that counts…
Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph reports:
Plastic crockery and cutlery is to be banned in France unless it is made from biologically sourced materials. The law comes into force in 2020. It is part of a French environmental initiative called the Energy Transition for Green Growth, part of a package aimed at tackling climate change.
Ah yes, few religions are complete without a list of what is forbidden….
Once upon a time it was alien abductions, and not so long before that, the Satanic panic of the 1980s, a wave of hysteria that spilled over into some of the child abuse prosecutions of that era with sometimes appalling consequences.
Now there is this.
The Independent reports:
Sightings of creepy clowns trying to lure children away are spreading across the US, with no-one sure whether the whole thing is a hoax or a terrifying new trend in abductions.
Four states have now reported the sinister sightings.
They began in South Carolina, before spreading to North Carolina and have since surfaced in Georgia and Alabama….
In Georgia, police said they had received numerous reports of clowns trying to talk to children as well as a threat by someone promising to dress up and kidnap school pupils….
Officers finally solved part of the mystery on Thursday, saying they had charged two people with making false police reports after they say the pair called 911 to report that people dressed as clowns were trying to lure children into a white van.
Police who responded to the calls found found two people in a white van who had run out of gas, and found no clown masks or costumes, and the 911 callers admitted the whole thing was a hoax.
The reports are not entirely new, however.
Bakersfield was among the towns in California that was gripped in2014 by dozens of reports of clown sightings including some saying they were armed.
Just as the level of trust in the West’s governing institutions is at or near all-time lows, the Daily Telegraph reports that British officials in the vicinity of Birmingham are considering allowing female officers of the Islamic persuasion to don…burkas:
A police force could become the first in the country to allow officers to wear the full-face veil after it launched a recruitment drive to increase diversity. West Midlands Police said it has “no barriers” relating to the burka as they announced that they would discuss allowing the traditional Islamic dress to become part of a policewoman’s uniform.
Chief Constable David Thompson said he would look into employing officers who wear the burka if the issue arose, as the force tries to increase the percentage of black and minority ethnic (BME) officers in the region to 30 per cent.
But this mindless attempt to signal anti-racism (note the now automatic conflation of religion and race) even to the point of completely jettisoning common sense was rejected by none other than the Muslim Association of Britain (the UK’s CAIR). The MAB believes the move would prove too unwieldy.
“We appreciate that West Midlands Police are trying to open up and recruit more ethnic minority backgrounds,” said the MBA’s Omer Elhamdoon. “But we feel wearing the burka would restrict duties, so the role might just be confined to being based in an office.”
Mr Davies, a Conservative MP, added: “It’s hard to believe that anybody with a strong religious view about how they react to men is going to be able to suddenly jump on a man and handcuff them, or rip off their shirt and offer them resuscitation. [Furthermore] The burka is a symbol of oppression for women and not something that a modern police force should be supporting.”
Note that it takes a conservative to point this out in the post-nothing, upside down-everything West.
We’ll have to see what emerges from the eventual prosecution, but this story (reported in the Daily Telegraph, with my emphasis added) from Argentina may be interesting for the light it casts on the Christian fascination with suffering (discussed here the other day) and also by the claim that the church should be above the law, a claim that also runs through the arguments sometimes made for the absolutist version of ‘religious liberty’ now being peddled in the US.
A Carmelite mother superior in Argentina faces prosecution for alleged torture after one of her former charges told a TV show that she had gone through “hell” before managing to escape from a convent. The 34-year-old nun, whose face was blacked out during the interview on the channel El Trece, claimed she had endured “physical and psychological” torture during her 10-year period of reclusion in the convent, including enforced self-flagellation, the wearing of a wire garter, being gagged for up to a week and locked up in isolation. “With Mother Superior Isabel I was subjected to the gag. Then there was a whip called discipline which was dipped in molten wax to make it harsher. We performed self-flagellation, beating ourselves on the buttocks, every week as a rule,” the former nun from the Barefoot (or Discalced) Carmelite convent in Nogoyá, northern Argentina said.
The woman, who said she had entered the order at the age of 18, also said they were forced to wear a cilice, a “crown of wires strapped around the leg that draws blood”, three times a week during Lent. But she said the worst torture she endured was psychological, being locked up alone in a cell and hearing voices telling her that others nuns’ illnesses, such as one sister’s tumour, were curses wrought upon the monastery due to her sinful nature.
Two nuns have reported the mother superior, identified by the authorities only as María Isabel, claiming she kept them against their will in the gated convent grounds. In late August police raided the convent, forcing the door open after the mother superior allegedly refused to allow them to enter.
The officers seized instruments of the alleged torture, including whips, cilices and gags. Prosecutors have recommended charges with a penalty of 15 years in prison for the mother superior, who was to face an investigating judge on Wednesday. Church leaders have justified the use of such instruments as penitential aids. “It’s not punishment, but rather discipline,” said Ignacio Patat, spokesman for the Archbishopric of Paraná, which oversees the convent.
“Let’s not forget that monasteries have different rules. This is the law of Saint Teresa, shall we say the old way of life that the Carmelite sisters follow”, Mr Patat told a radio station.
The austere order of the Barefoot Carmelites was founded in 1593 following the teachings of two Spanish saints, Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. Mortification and penance are considered useful as aids to deep prayer.
“The Church has the right to rule itself,” read a statement by Argentina’s Society of Canon Law. “The state should enforce respect for religious freedom and not compromise it because some things seem incomprehensible.”
Crux magazine appears to disapprove of the raid, taking time to defend the use of the cilice:
Although the practice to use the cilice is not as widespread as it once was, some of history’s greatest saints wore them, either in the most common modern form of a spiked chain which irritates the skin or as an undergarment made of hair as it was customary in the past. For instance, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Therese of Lisieux are known to have used them, as well as soon to be declared saint Mother Teresa, St. Padre Pio, and Pope Paul VI….
The sisters have remained silent, yet the local Catholic hierarchy has expressed its concern over the way the situation was handled. Archbishop Juan Alberto Piuggari of Entre Rios, the diocese where the convent is located, said the papal representative in the country and the bishops conference considered the raid to be disproportionate…Piuggari also denied that the Mother Superior had refused to let them in: “She told them to give her a minute to call the bishop and they broke down the door. Is that refusing [to let them in]?”
The prelate also said that the procedure should have been “different,” and that Archbishop Emil Paul Tscherrig, the papal representative in the country, should have been informed beforehand since the monastery reports directly to the Vatican.
Hmmm
Madness, too much time in the desert or just the right hallucinogenic concoction all seem to be reasonably reliable routes to mysticism. Ayahuasca is (the New Yorker reports) “an intensely hallucinogenic potion made from boiling woody Banisteriopsis caapi vines with the glossy leaves of the chacruna bush” an—bonus—it comes with added ‘indigenous’ chic.
The story begins with some Americans wandering through the Amazon (of course it does) in the early 1970s (of course it did).
[T]he travellers found themselves in a psychedelic paradise. There were cattle pastures dotted with Psilocybe cubensis—magic mushrooms—sprouting on dung piles; there were hammocks to lounge in while you tripped; there were Banisteriopsis caapi vines growing in the jungle. Taken together, the drugs produced hallucinations that the brothers called “vegetable television.” When they watched it, they felt they were receiving important information directly from the plants of the Amazon.
The McKennas were sure they were on to something revelatory, something that would change the course of human history. “I and my companions have been selected to understand and trigger the gestalt wave of understanding that will be the hyperspacial zeitgeist,” Dennis wrote in his journal. Their work was not always easy. During one session, the brothers experienced a flash of mutual telepathy, but then Dennis hurled his glasses and all his clothes into the jungle and, for several days, lost touch with “consensus reality.” It was a small price to pay. The “plant teachers” seemed to have given them “access to a vast database,” Dennis wrote, “the mystical library of all human and cosmic knowledge.”
Hyperspatial zeitgeist. Consensus reality. Plant teachers. The mystical library of all human and cosmic knowledge.
The New Yorker:
Most people who take ayahuasca in the United States do so in small “ceremonies,” led by an individual who may call himself a shaman, an ayahuasquero, a curandero, a vegetalista, or just a healer. This person may have come from generations of Shipibo or Quechua shamans in Peru, or he may just be someone with access to ayahuasca.
Naturally, wicked Western materialism takes a knock:
Ifcocaine expressed and amplified the speedy, greedy ethos of the nineteen-eighties, ayahuasca reflects our present moment—what we might call the Age of Kale. It is a time characterized by wellness cravings, when many Americans are eager for things like mindfulness, detoxification, and organic produce, and we are willing to suffer for our soulfulness.
We are?
Well, you will:
The majority of users vomit—or, as they prefer to say, “purge.”
The New Yorker:
The process of making ayahuasca is beyond artisanal: it is nearly Druidical. “We pick the chacruna leaf at sunrise in this very specific way: you say a prayer and just pick the lower ones from each tree,” a lithe ayahuasquera in her early forties—British accent, long blond hair, a background in Reiki…She and her boyfriend serve the ayahuasca—“divine consciousness in liquid form”
A background in Reiki.
The New Yorker:
When a person drinks ayahuasca, a plant-messenger molecule targets the neurons that mediate consciousness, facilitating what devotees describe as a kind of interspecies communication.
If the plant really is talking to the person, many people hear the same thing: we are all one. Some believe that the plants delivering this message are serving their own interests, because if humans think we are one with everything we might be less prone to trash the natural world. In this interpretation, B. caapi and chacruna are the spokesplants for the entire vegetable kingdom.
Ecologically aware too. Is there anything that ayahuasca is not?
In any event, if you are interested in this sort of thing (I am) it’s well worth reading as a fascinating, accidentally revealing look at the appeal of ritual, superstition and the cult of the pre-modern.
Mother Teresa has been canonized today.
The new saint’s record is more complicated than either her critics or her fans like to acknowledge, but this balanced piece by Mari Marcel Thekaekara in the Guardian is worth a look.
Towards the end, Thekaekara, a formerly fierce critic of Mother Teresa, concedes this – and understandably so:
I cannot in conscience criticise a woman who picked people off filthy pavements to allow them to die in dignity.
But it does appear that Mother Teresa was one of those Christians who subscribe to the morbid idea that suffering is some sort of blessing (I’ve posted about this phenomenon here, here, here and here).
Thekaekara:
Mother Teresa didn’t deserve Christopher Hitchen’s unadulterated, poisonous vitriol. But her vintage, “There’s something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion,” left me fuming too. How dare she trivialise poverty? But she could. She did. And the world lapped it up. She once comforted a sufferer, with the line: “You are suffering, that means Jesus is kissing you.” The infuriated man screamed, “Then tell your Jesus to stop kissing me.”
“Well I say God is the ultimate. You know you look at this?” Trump said, motioning toward an oceanfront golf course that bears his name. “Here we are on the Pacific Ocean. How did I ever own this? I bought it 15 years ago. I made one of the great deals they say ever. I have no more mortgage on it as I will certify and represent to you. And I was able to buy this and make a great deal. That’s what I want to do for the country. Make great deals. We have to, we have to bring it back, but God is the ultimate. I mean God created this, and here’s the Pacific Ocean right behind us. So nobody, no thing, no there’s nothing like God.”
God is, as always, in the eye of the beholder.
Say what you want to say about Donald J Trump, but even if he doesn’t win the election in November, there is no doubt in my mind that he has helped transform the Republican Party, and by extension, the conservative movement.
And, no, I am not talking here about immigration, trade and foreign policies. In fact, I have a feeling that notwithstanding his bombastic election campaign rhetoric about building walls, imposing huge tariffs on Chinese imports, deporting illegals and ending NATO, the Republican presidential nominee isn’t as “nativist,” “protectionist” and “isolationist,” as he is portrayed to be.
My guess is that a President Trump would prove to be a policy clone of President Richard Nixon when it comes to these issues, less of a libertarian on trade and immigration and less of a neocon on foreign policy than most members of the current GOP establishment. And from an historical perspective, that’s not really a Big Deal: More a return to normalcy than a transformative Republican president.
But there is one thing I am quite sure about: If elected or not elected, the Donald would probably be recalled as the one of the most libertine presidential nominees ever. And that includes Warren Harding and Bill Clinton.
Let’s face it. Trump was elected the presidential nominee by a political party that is allegedly being controlled by the Christian Right and accused by liberal critics of being intolerant, anti-women, and anti-gay, you know, the caricature of the American Taliban that would outlaw abortion, revoke the right of same-sex marriages, and basically return the country to the pre-Enlightenment era.
A lot of cognitive dissonance to get around here, if you consider that the Donald is a thrice married man, with his latest wife being a former fashion model who had appeared on nude photos, who has spent his entire personal and professional life in the most liberal American city when it comes to social-cultural issues, with only San Francisco being even more secular and sinful. Recall those “New York Values?” Trump probably respects them more than he does some of the Ten Commandments.
Trump had probably spent more time partying in Studio 54 than attending services at the Marble Collegiate Church (Trump was never an “active member,” according to a church statement). And the business types and entertainers from Manhattan, Hollywood and Las Vegas, that are on his list of friends, include a larger number of non-believers and immoral characters, like the late Roy Cohn, that would probably end up in Hell than many the of the true believers that are supposed to be part of the GOP electoral base who would be heading to Heaven.
Just compare Trump to the last Republican president and those who were running for the party’s presidential nomination, or for that matter to the current Democratic presidential nominee, a devout Methodist, and Trump who has been backed by gay Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel and the trans woman celebrity Caitlyn Jenner, clearly stands out as an irreligionist public figure, even more than President Barack Obama (who probably is a closet atheist).
And while other daughters of famous politicians, Carolyn Kennedy and Chelsea Clinton who had married Jewish men but refused to convert to Judaism (Kennedy’s kids are being raised as Catholics), Trump has welcomed the conversion of his daughter Ivanka to Judaism before she married a modern orthodox Jewish man. So at least we have one Trump who is practicing a religion (even if perhaps it’s not the right religion).
So from the perspective of those who regarded the GOP as the political party that embodies traditional Christian values as opposed to the liberal secular Democrats, Trump running as the Republican presidential nominee could prove to be transformative. It not only opens the party’s doors to the likes of Thiel and Jenner but could also create the conditions for its social-cultural evolution from a pseudo-theocratic political movement to an openly secular one in which membership requirements doesn’t include adherence to religious dogmas. Or at least that’s what I hope: From my laptop to God!
Cross-posted on the Corner.
Cross-posted on the Corner. 
CNN (from last year):