Garth George: Specious rejection of moral truth deserves only disdain

COMMENT

You have to admire Cardinal Thomas Williams for sticking his neck out about as far as it could go, but you have to wonder about his timing.

For the ranking priest of the Catholic Church in New Zealand to release his homily on the moral state of the nation on the same day one of his former brethren was sentenced to seven years' jail on 21 charges of sexual abuse of children under his care was a serious lapse of concentration to say the least.

Predictably, in the howls of outrage and anger against Cardinal Williams' perfectly reasonable and accurate summation of the country's moral condition, the loudest and most frequent came from those who tried to discredit him and his words on the grounds of the behaviour of one Alan Woodcock.

It is an argument that is as fatuous as it is specious. There are scores of thousands of Catholic priests ministering throughout the world and of them only a few hundred have been revealed as sexual perverts.

Most of the rest toil day in and day out for the good of humanity, bringing comfort, solace, healing, spiritual wisdom and material help to the faithful - and to anyone else who seeks it. They do more for the benefit of mankind in a week than most people would do in a lifetime.

And, in any case, to write off the Catholic Church on the basis of the sins of a handful of its functionaries makes about as much sense as writing off the judiciary because a judge or two ends up on the wrong side of the law. Or writing off the education system because one or two school teachers are detected having improper relations with students.

The second most common attempt to discredit the cardinal and his church - every bit as fatuous and specious - is the raking up of its long-ago history, some of which is admittedly pretty gruesome.

These same people, who are only too ready to trumpet what they see as the giant strides made by humanity through liberal secular humanism, neglect to acknowledge that the Catholic Church, too, has made giant strides since those days.

It is, of course, a simple fact of life that those who holler the loudest are those who have been stung the most painfully, and the intensity of their protests tells us more about them than it does about the subject under discussion.

If I have any reservation about Cardinal Williams' essay, it is that he has not given any credit whatsoever to the spirit of liberalism which has permeated society for hundreds of years. It has not, as this newspaper said in an editorial yesterday, been all bad.

In one specific case, the emancipation of women - probably on balance the most important of all - liberalism has undone an injustice which, in fact, was perpetrated on mankind by the churches themselves.

Note that I said by the churches; I didn't say by Christianity. Because the way the churches insisted on dominating, suppressing and holding back women over the centuries, from which the secular world took its cue, is not centred in Christianity as it was taught by its Founder.

Jesus loved women. He had them around him all the time from the beginning of his ministry, looking after his needs. He let the adulterous woman off with a warning; he gave a much-married Samaritan woman a life-changing experience; he healed a haemorrhaging woman who touched his cloak; and he was stopped in his tracks by another Samaritan woman whom he had brushed off who told him that even dogs were entitled to scraps from the master's table.

His closest women friends were there when he was crucified, and two women were the first to find the tomb empty after he rose from the dead.

I suspect he would have loved to have married and settled down to raise a family. But that wasn't part of his brief.

He would have had no truck with a male-dominated religion, but that's what began to grow up pretty much as soon as the apostles were cold in their graves.

And a number of churches, not the least the Catholic Church, still have a wee way to go in modifying their attitudes to women.

One thing in Cardinal Williams' essay that really took my fancy was his comment that "conscience votes" in Parliament had become meaningless.

They probably always have been but never more so than in New Zealand today where in our Parliament there are only a handful of consciences active.

The conscience, you see, is an element of the spiritual nature of man and since most of our politicians would argue heatedly that they do not have a spiritual dimension - that man is a two-dimensional creature made up purely of mind and body - they must by nature be bereft of conscience.

"Conscience vote" has always, in the context of worldly politics, been a silly term, anyway, and it's long past time it was dropped in favour of, for example, "free vote". Because that's all it is - a vote ostensibly free of the constraints of party discipline.

Meanwhile, congratulations to Cardinal Williams for having the courage to speak out so plainly and concisely. When his church and others get their own houses in good moral order, perhaps more people will take notice.

* Email Garth George