VATICAN TRIES TO REWRITE STORY OF GAY CARDINAL BY MOVING GRAVE
Robert Verkaik, Independent, UK - The Catholic Church is under growing pressure to abandon the "homophobic" exhumation and reburial of the body of one its most famous cardinals, in defiance of his wish to lie for eternity next to the man he loved.
Gay rights campaigners have accused the Vatican - which has ordered the disinterment in the first step towards beatification - of attempting to cover up the sexuality of Cardinal John Henry Newman, who died in 1890.
Opposition to the reburial among some British Roman Catholics has been bolstered by a new poll organized by The Church Times which shows that a majority of Anglicans are now against the separation of Cardinal Newman, a former Anglican clergyman, and Father Ambrose St John who lived together as "husband and wife" for most of their late adult lives.
Yesterday, the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell told The Independent: "The Vatican's decision to move Cardinal Newman's body from its resting place is an act of grave robbery and religious desecration. It violates Newman's repeated wish to be buried for eternity with his life-long partner Ambrose St John.
"They have been together for more than 100 years and the Vatican wants to disturb that peace to cover up the fact that Cardinal Newman loved a man. It's shameful, dishonorable betrayal of Newman by the gay-hating Catholic Church."
The Church Times' poll found that 80 per cent of responders were opposed to the Vatican's decision to move Newman's body.
But Austen Ivereigh, former advisor to Cardinal Cormac-Murphy O'Connor, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, told BBC Radio 4's Sunday program that Mr Tatchell's criticism was a nonsense. Mr Ivereigh said the reburial was "part of the process to the journey towards canonization" so his remains can be taken to a suitable city to allow pilgrims "to venerate the saint to be". He added: "I don't think anyone disputes that Cardinal Newman deeply loved Ambrose St John. He did say after St John died that the grief is comparable to a husband losing a wife or wife losing a husband, but he did not mean that the relationship with Ambrose St John was a marriage like a gay relationship. It is simply wrong to read back from today's categories into the Victorian periods when these very intense, passionate, but totally celibate relationships in Oxford and among the Anglocatholic community were very common."
Cardinal Newman and Ambrose St John share a memorial stone and are buried side by side in the same grave in Rednal, Worcestershire. Cardinal Newman wrote shortly before his death: "I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Father Ambrose St John's grave - and I give this as my last, my imperative will."
On their gravestone is a Latin inscription, "there from the shadow and images into the truth", which many people believe is a posthumous coming out.
16 Comments:
No one really seems to understand the Victorian era. It's not like they didn't have sex during that entire period, or that it only happened between heterosexuals who were married to each other. What characterized that era was total public denial that any other kind of sex existed while everyone went about doing as they wished behind closed doors as long as they didn't get caught.
To translate this for Americans, it's like all the Southern Baptists who preach against smoking, drinking, gambling, and dancing and raise a scandal anytime someone gets caught at it, but still, everyone knows that behind closed doors, when other Baptists aren't around, anything goes.
Is there anything more backwards than religious dogma?
Believing that capitalism (whether regulated or not) is good for anyone other than the already rich?
religious amgod
"Is there anything more backwards than religious dogma?"
Possibly the secular humanist inclination to foist their own disbelief onto others?
What's the difference?
Faith, or non-faith, is a personal decision and I'll not condemn anyone for their beliefs so long as they keep it to themselves, or at least present themselves as willing to acknowledge that absolute truth is unavailable to any of us on this Earthly plane and that nobody really knows what is and what is not.
"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive anything more destructive to morality than this?"
---Thomas Paine The Age of Reason Part I
"Faith, or non-faith, is a personal decision and I'll not condemn anyone for their beliefs so long as they keep it to themselves, or at least present themselves as willing to acknowledge that absolute truth is unavailable to any of us on this Earthly plane and that nobody really knows what is and what is not."
Apart from the Unitarians and the Neo-Pagans, there are no religions that make that acknowledgement so I guess you are condemning just about everyone for their faith or non-faith.
Oops. Insert "and the agnositcs after "Neo-Pagans".
Do not confuse individuals with institutions.
And, quite to the contrary, within many of the great religions exist factions that proclaim exactly such a level of tolerance and acceptance. It is certainly true of many Buddhists, Hindi, and Taoists. And, believe it or not, many Christian sects. Shall we add Deists to the list as well? I offer Thomas Paine's concluding words from The Age of Reason:
"I trouble not myself about the manner of future existence. I content myself with believing, even to positive conviction, that the Power that gave me existence is able to continue it, in any form and manner it pleases, either with or without this body; and it appears more probable to me that I shall continue to exist hereafter than that I should have had existence, as I now have, before that existence began.
It is certain that in one point all nations on earth and all religions agree---all believe in God; the things in which they disagree are the redundancies annexed to that belief; and, therefore, if ever a universal religion should prevail, it will not be by believing anything new, but in getting rid of redundancies and believing as man believed at first. Adam, if ever there were such a man, was created a Deist; but in the meantime, let every man follow, as he has a right to do, the religion and worship he prefers."
---Thomas Paine
I believe all the Deists have been dead for a couple of hundred years, but it's nice to see I'm not the only one who here who understands what they were.
'"Is there anything more backwards than religious dogma?"
Possibly the secular humanist inclination to foist their own disbelief onto others?
What's the difference?'
The difference is that it's not possible to prove a negative, but it is possible to prove a positive. Therefore, the burden of proof lies with those claim there is a god. Hiding behind the word "faith" is the tool of those who want to control the thoughts of others for purely personal reasons.
The life force exists.
Stand before a mirror and the proof will be before your own eyes.
Proof of what? That I exist? I already know that without a mirror.
The only thing that resembles "god" in this universe is the answer to this zen koan:
Who is the master who makes the grass green?
(Warning: if you answer that incorrectly with the word "god" the zen master will beat you silly with a stick.)
"It lies in the nature of Grand Virtue
To follow the Tao and the Tao alone.
Now what is the Tao?
It is something elusive and evasive.
Evasive and elusive!
And yet It contains within Itself a Form.
Elusive and evasive!
And yet It contains within Itself a Substance.
Shadowy and dim!
And yet It contains within Itself a Core of Vitality.
The Core of Vitality is very real,
It contains within Itself unfailing Sincerity.
Throughout the ages Its Name has been preserved
In order to recall the Beginning of all things.
How do I know the ways of all things at the Beginning?
By what is within me."
Lao Tzu Tao Teh Ching #21
"If a man holds himself dear, let him guard himself well.
Of the three watches of his time, let him at watch over one.
Let him find first what is right and then he can teach it to others, avoiding thus useless pain.
If he makes himself as good as he tells others to be, then he in truth can teach others. Difficult indeed is self-control.
Only a man himself can be master of himself: who else from outside can be his master? When the Master and the servant are one, then there is true help and self-possession.
Any wrong or evil a man does, is born in himself and is caused by himself; and this crushes the foolish man as a hard stone grinds the weaker stone.
And the evil that grows in a man is like the malava creeper which entangles the sala tree; and the man is brought down to that condition in which his own enemy would wish him to be.
It is easy to do what is wrong, to do what is bad for oneself; but very difficult to do what is right, to do what is good for oneself.
The fool who because of his views scorns the teachings of the holy, those whose soul is great and righteous, gathers fruits for his destruction, like the kashta reed whose fruit mean its death.
By oneself the evil is done, and it is oneself who suffers: by oneself the evil is not done, and by one's Self one becomes pure. The pure and the impure come from oneself: no man can purify another.
Let no man endanger his duty, the good of his soul, for the good of another, however great. When he has seen the good of his soul, let him follow it with earnestness."
---The Dhammapada #12 Self-Possession
"This Self is the honey of all beings, and all beings are the honey of this Self."
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 1.3.28
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