Title: Anticlerics:
Men who police the clergy
Author: Ashok Mahajan
Publication: The Weekend
Observer
Date: January 8, 2000
The name 'Antichrist'
(the chief enemy of Christ) figures in Christian eschatological literature
'in the letters of St John (1 John 2:18). Western theologists dealing
with apocalypses saw Antichrist in the form of the emperor Nero at one
time and Frederick II, at another. Preachers spread warnings of the
coming of Antichrist in order to call the people to repentance throughout
the 14th and 15th centuries.
But during the Reformation,
the apellation assumed a pluralistic form when Martin Luther labelled not
the Popes, but the Papacy itself as Antichrist. The idea that evil
was embodied in the head of the Church, with the clergy as 'the body of
Antichrist' became the most powerful weapon to discredit and denigrate
the Papacy.
'Anticlerics' is a term
used for those personages who were forthright and courageous in exposing
the corruption of the clergy down the ages. Historically, they can
be traced since the time of the Cathari sect in Europe in the 12th and
13th centuries. Later they came to be associated with the French
Revolution when anticlericalism became a political movement seeking to
subordinate the church to the state.
It was seen that the
clergy was also in league with feudalism and oligarchy, ready to exploit
the poor and the unlettered for its own dominance and expansionism.
It always proved to be servile to the monarch and the military dictator,
and displayed total lack of spunk in facing a tyrant. For instance,
Stalin was publicly invoked as 'Our Father' by a metropolitan of the Greek
Orthodox Church. In Africa, Latin America and East Asia, the padre was
a ruthless evangelist who broke all rules of Christ to convert the natives
to Christianity. History has recorded that the Spanish friars in
Mexico and Peru baptized the native Indian infants and immediately thereafter
dashed their brains out. They told the onlookers that through this
act they secured the place of these infants in Heaven.
The most recent manifestation
of anti-clericalism was the dissent expressed by a body of German and Danish
theologists over the ostentatious function held at St Peter's Basilica,
Rome, on December 25, 1999. It has been conjecturred that Vatican's
Jubilee 2000 ceremony cost the Holy See close to $ 500 million - a sum
that could have been better used for humanitarian causes, such as assuaging
the sufferings of quake-hit victims of Turkey or the flood-ravaged Catholics
of Venezuela.
One of the celebrated
anticlerics John Lea, in his magnum opus 'History of the Inquisition' in
the Middle Ages, graphically describes the ecclesiastical degeneration.
According to him, bishops lived in open sin with their own daughters, and
archbishops promoted their male favourites to neighbouring sees (of Lea
vol 1, p.g 14).
Pope Gregory VII made
immense exertions to cause priests to put away their concubines, but not
even towards the end of the 13th century that the celibacy of the clergy
could be enforced. In fact, the Pontiff during his time permitted
Abelard to marry Heloise - a scandal that has been immortalised in French
Literature and flourishes in more than a dozen versions the world over.
And here is WEH Lecky
providing more lurid details on the same theme: "it was not surprising
that, having once broken their vows, the clergy should soon have sunk far
below the laity.
We may not lay much stress
on such isolated instances of depravity as that of Pope John XXIII, who
was condemned for incest, among many other crimes, and for adultery; or
the abbot, elect of St Augustine, at Canterbury, who in 1171 was found,
on investigation, to have seventeen illegitimate children in a single village;
or an abbot of St Pelayo, in Spain, who in 1130 was proved to have kept
no less than seventy concubines; or Henry ill, Bishop of Liege, who was
deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illicit progeny."
Lecky contends that it
is 'impossible to resist the evidence of other councils and ecclesiastical
writers, who combine in depicting far greater evils than simple concubinage.
(History of European Morals, vol ii, pp. 350-351). The chroniclers
of the Middle Ages are full of accounts of nunneries that were like brothels
and of the vast multitude of infanticides within their walls.
Unatural love is more
than once spoken of as lingering in the monasteries. Shortly before
the Reformation, complaints were so loud and frequent that it became expedient
to requisition exclusive services of the Confessional, specifically for
the purposes of debauchery.
The anticlerics may,
at times, seem harsh on orthodox religion. But many of their cases
are skillfully argued and cogently stated. Religion is primarily
a social phenomenon. Churches may owe their origin to teachers with
strong individual convictions, but these teachers have seldom had much
influence upon the communities in which they flourished.
To take the case that
is of most interest to members of Western civilization - the teaching of
Christ, as it appears in the Gospels, has had little to do with the ethics
of Christians.
The most important thing
about Christianity, from a social and historical point of view, is not
Christ but the Church, and if we are to judge of Christianity as a social
force, we must not go to the Gospels for our material.
Christ said that we should
give our goods to the poor and that we should not fight, nor skill.
Neither Catholics nor protestants have shown any strong desire to follow
these precepts.
Some of the Franciscans,
it is true, attempted to teach the doctrine of apostolic poverty, but the
Pope condemned them and declared them heretical.
The sartorial extravagance
of the Holy Father and his train itself is a blot on the austere figure
of Christ. Worse, both the inquisition and the Ku-Klux-Klan, no less
terrifying or tyrannical than the Gestapo or the KGB, were movements also
born out of the grotesque minds of the mandarins of the Church.