Trials of A Pope - BBC2

15th September 2010

I have just watched Mark Dowd’s “Trials of a Pope" on BBC 2.

 Interestingly I found that this documentary  by a  likeable gay liberal Catholic, bending over backwards to be fair to the Pope whilst acknowledging the force of at least some of the charges against him, left me feeling far more critical of the Papal position, indeed almost contemptuous, than would any number of documentaries by Peter Tatchell or Richard Dawkins.

 We are told, again and again that, whatever his faults and gaffes, the current Pontiff is a towering intellectual, and yet he appears to have swung the ballot of the Cardinals his way with warnings against a “Dictatorship of Relativism” – which seems to me as nice an example of an oxymoron as you are ever likely to come across. His strictures against targets as diverse as homosexuality and Islam are characterised by similarly sloppy and eccentric language.

 One truth that I have observed again and again is that more battles are probably lost by underestimating ones opponents than for any other reason. – (and in this context I think some Humanists can sometimes trivialise some aspects of Religion – and the weight and depth of its appeal). But that is nothing as far as I can see to the crass and simplistic view of secular society that now seems to dominate thinking in the Vatican. They, and this Pope in particular seem to believe that the only alternative to clinging to obtuse doctrine, enforced from the centre is some swirling “anything goes” anarchy. Dowd’s program left me with the conviction that the Vatican’s stance is dominated by a genuine almost personal terror.

 There is also the impression that the Church genuinely does love the sinner in the sense of almost needing him or her in a co-dependent way. One defender made the point that the Church does do a lot to care for AIDS sufferers in Africa, as if in some perverse way a “cure” is somehow better than prevention (which the Church hampers through its opposition to condoms). Similarly the Church seems to embrace people who are troubled by their sexuality, but to throw up its hands in horror at anyone finding sexual happiness outside of heterosexual marriage. (It is a paradox that a Saviour needs people who need saving as much as they need him or her).

 The huge advantage that we as Humanists should have is that Humanism has to be a continuous learning process, where we learn from our own mistakes as much as anything else. Purveyors of eternal objective truths simply so not have this option, except perhaps at the margin – or else they baldly refute their prior selves and hope that no-one notices. Humanists are aware of the moral complexity and ambiguities of the real world, something which the RC Church with its black and white positions cannot begin to grapple with.

 In sum, if anyone feels that we are be in any sense too dogmatic in our opposition to the Papal state visit, I think this program, more than anything that I have seen or read recently, confirms why we are right to remind the Pope of his, and his church’s moral disorder.