Peter Hitchens Defends Church and Pope

While the elder brother offers frenzy and rage (Leading atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens seek Pope's arrest), the younger, wiser brother offers facts and logic.

"Nothing – especially facts and logic – seems to be able to stop the ill-informed frenzy of rage against the Roman Catholic Church (to which I don’t belong)," he begins — Facts and Logic. "The anti-Pope campaigners must work out what they really care about," Mr. Hitchens concludes. "Are they, as they claim, trying to help the children? Or is this all just a pretext to attack one of the last remaining strongholds of Christianity?"

Assuming the latter, Mr. Hichens is, in a second piece, "struck... by [the] open desire to see [the Roman Catholic Church] vanish," asking, "Do they really want it gone, including all its many charitable activities, its educational institutions, its provision of help and comfort at the end of life, its uncompromising stand on many moral issues (whoops, perhaps that's what they don't like)" — Philip Pullman takes the cat out of the bag, plus thoughts on the Pope. "And what of its artistic, musical and architectural heritage?" he asks. "How will that survive if the church that nurtured and sustained them is gone?"

"But there's another point here," he continues:

Let's go through the case as it stands in general.

Did Roman Catholic priests engage in abuse of children? Yes.

Were these crimes sometimes covered up? Yes.

Does the Church admit this? Yes.

Does anything in Roman Catholic theology or belief mandate or excuse such behaviour? No.

Is the RC Church the only institution in which such abuse has taken place? No.

Have the transgressors been punished and have steps been taken to prevent them having renewed opportunities to transgress? Yes, though not as swiftly as it should have been, some are now beyond the reach of the law, or dead.

Has the Church admitted that it was at fault? Yes, unequivocally and repeatedly.

Have steps been taken to prevent a repetition? Yes.

Has the current Pope in any way condoned the crimes? No.

Has he repeatedly and explicitly condemned them and those who failed to act against them? Yes.

So what I want to know, in detail, is what those who now call for the prosecution of the Pope specifically allege against him?

Then we can debate the strength of these charges.

After noting that "there appears to be no 'universal' instinctively-discoverable code of sexual ethics (independent of Christianity) which mandates that paedophilia is wrong," Mr. Hitchens asks "what precisely is the moral basis on which the atheist critics of the church found their ferocious disapproval of this activity, while they take a pretty much Kinseyist anything-goes attitude to almost all other sorts of sex?"

"I'm not a Roman Catholic and have no dog in this fight, except a desire for the truth," Mr. Hitchens reminds us in a third piece — My wonderful logic. "Are the critics attacking the RC church because of what it does? Or because it is the RC church?"

Also worthy of note are his answers to those who ask "why I don't become a Roman Catholic." He writes, "Because I'm English and view it as a foreign church. Because I hesitate over many of its doctrines and don't find its forms of worship, ancient or modern, specially edifying. Because I prefer the Church of England (the actual one, not the simpering bureaucracy which now usurps the title), its Bible and Prayer Book."

[links via David Lindsay]