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Anticlerics: Men who police the clergy

Anticlerics: Men who police the clergy

Ashok Mahajan
The Weekend Observer
January 8, 2000

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.
 



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