Excommunicating Greg – Who’s weirder, Muslims or Christians?

One of my favourite books while studying English literature at Auckland University was 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’, a quirky work of fiction by 18^th century writer Lawrence Sterne. Generally regarded as a novel for want of a more appropriate category, the book doesn't have much of a plot. We learn the circumstances surrounding young Tristram's conception and the inauspicious christening where he was misnamed. Apart from that we learn more about the idiosyncrasies of the baby's father Walter and Uncle Toby than those of Tristram himself.

An episode that stuck in my mind was where the doctor attending Tristram’s birth suffers a small accident and begins to curse the servant whose negligence led to his discomfort. Walter Shandy offers to assist him by supplying Dr Slop with what he claims is the most comprehensive and effective curse of all time, provided the doctor will read the entire text - which he agrees to do. It turns out that the document he is obliged to read is the text of a Roman Catholic service of excommunication attributed to a certain 9^th century Bishop Enulphus. Sterne prints the document in full in the original Latin version with accompanying English translation, which together take up all 14 pages of Chapter 11, Volume 3. Check it out online – you may find a use for it yourself one day.

Greg Reynolds
with his document of excommunication

Well, Lawrence Sterne, back there around 1760, was ever so politely poking fun at the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church for its archaic, anachronistic practices. 250 years on it seems little has changed. Last month news media informed the world that a 60 year-old Australian priest had received a New Year present from Pope Francis and his Doctrinal Congregation in the form of a lengthy document, written in Latin, informing him that he had been excommunicated.

Pope Francis
looking distinctly unimpressed

Maybe it’s something a new Pope has to do early in his term of office, to stamp his authority on the world of Roman Catholicism. This was Pope Francis’s first such act, and it was done, apparently, because the gentleman concerned, Greg Reynolds, an ordained priest, had been publicly advocating the ordination of women to the priesthood, and celebrating the sacrament of Holy Communion without proper authority. According to an official RC source, Reynolds had resigned his position as parish priest and had his priestly faculties removed, but continued to celebrate the Eucharist and expound his unorthodox views, leaving the Holy Father with no alternative but the ultimate sanction – excommunication.

You can see his point. Rules are rules, and if you want to be a member of my club you have to toe the line. When William Webb Ellis, in the Year of Our Lord 1823, grasped a football in his arms and ran with it, he is said to have initiated the game of rugby football. Whatever game he was actually playing at the time (and there seems to be some uncertainty about this), that specific action was evidently frowned upon. The implication, at least in rugby circles, is that, if you want to be a man, run with the ball in hand, jump on opponents and be jumped on, you’d better join a rugby club and leave soccer to the girls.

So with Mr Reynolds. He may be perfectly justified in his belief that gay couples should be entitled to get married, and that women have as much right as men to serve as priests – but RC doctrine decrees otherwise. Pope Francis would probably have left Reynolds alone if he had been an ordinary parishioner keeping his unorthodox views to himself or sharing them with close friends in a Fitzroy pub. It’s a bit unreasonable on his part, it seems to me, to expect church authorities to tolerate his preaching those views from the pulpit.

Still, the whole business aroused my interest, and I did a little reading round the subject. It seems Aussie Greg has joined a rather elite band of 105 souls excommunicated by the Catholic Church[1] during its two thousand year history. Admittedly twenty-six of those have been added to the list in the last 114 years, so some might argue that its value has been somewhat eroded over time. On the other hand, church authorities don’t have the same powers of persuasion they once enjoyed, foot-roasting and burning-at-the-stake having become less acceptable in recent years.

Even so, I can’t help feeling, were I in Greg Reynold’s shoes, rather than being miffed at my fate, I would feel a certain pride in having been elevated to such august company, since it implies that the Pope and his inner circle are taking my views seriously and even feeling threatened by them. I won’t try your patience by itemizing the entire list of 105, but let’s just take a random sample. Father Greg Reynolds, a humble (ex-) parish priest from Melbourne, Australia, can now claim comradeship with two kings of France and one king of Scotland (Robert the Bruce). Several monarchs of England made the cut, including, as we know, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The list also includes five Holy Roman Emperors (one of whom apparently made it twice), one Byzantine Emperor and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in 1054 CE. Demonstrating the Church’s even-handedness with respect to women, French heroine Joan of Arc was excommunicated and burnt in 1431 – though later forgiven and even canonized. In 1577 an entire monastery of Carmelite nuns suffered the punishment, although it was revoked the following year – suggesting that even celibate Holy Fathers have a soft spot for the ladies. According to Wikipedia, Fidel Castro himself was excommunicated in 1962 – but even the US government didn’t manage to have him burnt.

One thing that struck me, as I perused the list, was that there seems to have been a diminishing of social status among recipients of the honour since the glorious days of the Middle Ages, when most seem to have been kings and emperors, or at least bishops and other members of the European aristocracy. Not to detract from Greg’s achievement, but it doesn’t really bear comparison with William I of Sicily who, in the 12^th century, attracted the ire of Pope Adrian IV by waging war against the papal states and raiding pilgrims on their way to the tombs of the apostles.

I can’t help feeling there seems to be a tendency these days for Papal authorities in the Vatican to direct their awful power on more humble adherents to the faith, at the risk of demeaning their own majesty and credibility. It may be true that God in Heaven is convinced that abortion, family planning, gay relationships and women priests are abominations – but how can you really know? At the very least, you might think that a more enlightened approach by the Pope and his Holy Cardinals to such matters would endear them to the world community of Roman Catholics, and lure some of those lapsed bums back to the seats of parish churches and monumental urban cathedrals.

In 2009, Margaret McBride, administrator at St Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Centre in Phoenix, Arizona, authorised an abortion for a 27-year-old woman pregnant with her fifth child and suffering from pulmonary hypertension. Her doctors believed that her chances of dying if the pregnancy continued were close to 100%. McBride was excommunicated – though subsequently reinstated after a public outcry.

A group of Canadian Catholics calling themselves the Community of the Lady of All Nations was excommunicated en masse in 2007. Apparently they believe that their founder, 92-year-old Marie Paule Griguere is the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary. The Church begged to differ on the grounds that: A, reincarnation does not exist, and B, ‘Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven by God, and therefore Mary’s soul is not separate from her body, so that if she were to appear, it would have to be as herself, not a reincarnation.’

Well, what can you say to that? Medieval Christian scholars are said to have debated how many angels could dance, or at least sit, on the head  (or point) of a pin (or needle). That may or may not be true, but it is certainly true that arguments over the physical, spiritual and or metaphysical nature of Jesus Christ, as well as the question of whether the bread and wine in the sacrament of Communion actually became His flesh and blood, led to excommunications, major divisions in the Church, horrific violence against individuals, and even catastrophic wars.

If you are of the Roman Catholic persuasion, you may like to consider that any of the following can get you automatically excommunicated[2]:

• Procuring of abortion
• Apostasy: The total rejection of the Christian faith.
• Heresy: The obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth, which must be believed with divine and Catholic faith – such as rejection of contraception, gay marriage and the ordination of women as priests.
• Schism: The rejection of the authority and jurisdiction of the pope as head of the Church.
• Desecration of sacred species (Holy Communion).
• Physical attack on the pope.
• Sacramental absolution of an accomplice in sin against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments - against murder and bearing false witness, which you might think leaves Tony Blah's local confessor in a difficult position.
• Unauthorized episcopal (bishop) consecration.
• Direct violation of confessional seal by confessor.

The following offenses warrant excommunication as a result of a judgment from a church authority:

• Pretended celebration of the Holy Eucharist (Mass) or conferral of sacramental absolution by one not a priest.
• Violation of confessional seal by interpreter and others.

Well, you may think you’re on safe ground with most of those, and anyway, what the Holy Father doesn’t find out won’t worry him unduly. On the other hand, you might want to drop Greg Reynolds down there in Melbourne a note offering a little encouragement and support.

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[1] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_excommunicated_by_the_Roman_Catholic_Church

[2] http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/catholicism-excommunication-and-other-penalties.html

Santa Claus, Mevlana Rumi and the Spirit of Christmas

Of the numerous debates ongoing in Turkey these days, one of the less headline-grabbing, but nonetheless significant, is on the question of whether citizens should (or should not) celebrate New Year.

For me personally, it’s not a big deal. I have lived in the country long enough to give up missing the festive brouhaha of Yuletide. For the majority Muslim population, life goes on as normal without holidays and the associated partying. In addition, I have the antipodean’s difficulty of coming to terms with a mid-winter Christmas/New Year halfway through the academic year for schools and universities. It’s just not right!

Of course it’s that Christmas business that’s causing the debate in Turkey. They don’t celebrate it. Muslims may recognize Jesus as a major prophet, but not of sufficient importance to justify closing the country down. That’s a Christian thing. On the other hand, after the Republic came into being in 1923, one of the early modernizing reforms was switching from the Islamic lunar calendar to the Gregorian solar one. As a result, midnight, Tuesday 31 December will see 2013 CE click over to 2014, as it will for most of the global community.

I suspect, however, that’s not the big issue for Turks objecting to New Year celebrations. After all, pretty much the whole world (including a few avowedly Islamic states) explodes fireworks and indulges in extravagant private and public spending sprees at this time. More to the point is that, in Turkey, Father Christmas (Noel Baba in local parlance) seems to have become established as a popular icon, along with the decorative paraphernalia and retail sector feeding-frenzy associated with Christmas in historically Christian countries.

Norse god Odin
painted by Georg von Rosen

Ironically, displays of pyrotechnics and white-bearded old guys dressed in red and white have very little to do with the Christian celebration of Christmas either, which, as you may recall, is somehow related to the birthdate of that religion’s eponymous founder. There are even, and, in fact, there have long been, Christians of a more purist bent, who object to the extravagant feasting, drinking and commercial exploitation of a day supposedly devoted to the instigator of a religion dedicated to the pursuit of a more spiritual agenda.

Despite discussions about the origins of Santa Claus in northern Europe, and links to an earlier Christian worthy, St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra (now Demre in modern Turkey), it seems that we owe most of our contemporary Christmas iconography to the United States of America, God bless them. Much of it originated with a 19^th century academic by the name of Clement Clarke Moore, who penned (anonymously at the time) a poem entitled ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ (more likely known to you as ‘The Night Before Christmas’) in which he laid out the key principles of a merry old guy dressed in fur dismounting from a sleigh pulled by reindeer, coming down chimneys and filling children’s stockings with presents. The story was taken up and further embellished in 1902 by Lyman Frank Baum, creator of ‘The Wizard of Oz’, with the final touches being added by added by the Coca Cola Company via an advertising campaign in the 1930s.

So there we have it. Not much connection to a poor Jewish woman giving birth to her first child amongst the animals in a stable two thousand years ago, so laying the foundation of a belief system that would eventually encompass one third of the world’s population. Then there’s the problem of the date, even with pretty much universal use of the solar calendar. For a start, the actual date of Jesus’s birthday is unknown. 6 January was initially preferred by the Eastern Orthodox Church, who later decided to go along with 25 December, the date selected by Roman Catholics in the 4^th century. The breakaway Armenians, however, preferred to stick with 6 January. The matter was further complicated when Pope Gregory XIII decreed a revision of the calendar in 1582 resulting in a loss of ten days. However, Christians in a number of counties, Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Serbia, the Republic of Macedonia, and the Republic of Moldova, while embracing 25 December, steadfastly refuse to accept the disappearance of those ten days, and continue to use the older Julian calendar, celebrating Christmas on what, in the Gregorian system, is January 7.

Confused? Well don’t think those are the only problems. According to Wikipedia, ‘Yule, or Yuletide, is a religious festival observed by the historical Germanic peoples, later being absorbed into and equated with the Christian festival of Christmas.’ This pagan mid-winter event apparently went on for twelve days with much feasting, drinking and sacrifice, and was associated with a rather fascinating supernatural phenomenon known as the Wild Hunt, and with the god Odin, or Woden, after whom Wednesday was named (coincidentally Christmas day this year, so you may want to mention him in your prayers).

So what’s it really all about? Probably you’d have to say, people generally (with the possible exception of those religious puritans) like to find reasons for partying, and Christmas/New Year provides an excellent pretext. Mainstream churches may lament declining congregations making it increasingly difficult to fund the kind of monumental buildings and associated large staff numbers they once took for granted – but if we are honest we will admit that institutionalised Christianity really only latched on to a much older event that was already being celebrated. People were getting together with family and friends, feasting and giving gifts to brighten the depths of winter and look forward with optimism to the beginning of a new year long before bishops, Popes and Holy Roman emperors decreed religious uniformity.

Of course, it is impossible.  "There’s nowt so queer as folk" goes the old saying (from before ‘queer’ took on its current meaning). You can scare people into superficial conformity with threats of torture and incineration, or social ostracism, but as soon as you release the pressure they will begin to reassert their individuality. The internal inconsistencies and hypocrisy of organized state religion are evident from the beginning, as shown by constant splintering and breakaway sects. So, on close inspection, the wailing and hand-wringing over Christmas losing its true meaning sound a little hollow.

Sad to say, if you google ‘Why I hate Christmas’ you will come up with approximately 372 million results – twenty-five percent more than the entire population of the United States! Time constraints at this busy time of the year prevented me from visiting all of them, but one site in particular, Eight Reasons I Hate Christmas, made some points that appealed to me:

• All the extra waste it produces. All that gift-wrapping ending up at landfills.
• The awful music – What do you feel like doing when you hear another saccharin rendition of  ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’?
• Frenzied shopping and burgeoning consumer debt.
• Negative psychological effects, including increased suicide rate.
• Tacky Christmas decorations made by desperately poor people in Asian sweatshops. 

Scarier to me, however, than the gross commercial exploitation is the evidence I see that state-sponsored, institutionalized religion is fighting back. And it’s not just the Muslims. I began this post with the observation that some authority figures in Turkey are arguing against the celebration of New Year – we assume for religious reasons. But what are we to make of Time Magazine’s choosing the Roman Catholic Pope as its Person of the Year? Whatever the personal qualities of Jorge Mario Bergoglio (aka Pope Francis I), the fact remains that he is head of a monolithic, multi-zillion dollar institution with a one-and-a-half millennia history of religious intolerance, promoting violence at local and international levels, sponsoring schools and orphanages sanctioning abuse of vulnerable boys and girls, and expounding a doctrine that supports a hierarchical wealth-based status quo condemning millions to lives of poverty and misery. Am I exaggerating? It seems to me that, even if we ignore its past sins, any church accepting New Left plutocrat Tony Blah into its community of faith without administering a hefty dose of penance raises serious doubts about its spiritual credibility.

So party on, dude, at Christmas time, say I! And if you are truly looking for spiritual succour in a world drowning beneath a flood of materialism, you may want to look in less-frequented corners. Fortunately, there are sources to be found. One week before (the Gregorian) Christmas Day, Tuesday 17 December marked the ‘Wedding Night’ of Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, better known in the Western world simply as Rumi, the 13^th century Sufi mystic. Şeb-i Arus (Persian for ‘Wedding Night’) is celebrated throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey. His tomb, in the modern Turkish city of Konya, is a place of pilgrimage for people of diverse cultures and religious backgrounds who appreciate his non-denominational message of universal love.

Tomb of Mevlana Rumi, Konya, Turkey

Those who do make the trip to Konya will find queues of respectful visitors waiting to enter a green-tiled mausoleum bearing the inscription, ‘When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men.’ Interestingly, the revered founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is reported to have said something similar: ‘To see me does not necessarily mean to see my face. To understand my thoughts is to have seen me.’ In spite of this, it is difficult to go anywhere in Turkey without seeing images of that gentleman’s face. As human beings we are constantly subjected to the tension between the transformative power of ideas and the siren allure of material wealth. Atatürk himself, sometimes accused of being an enemy of religion, made it clear that what he was opposed to was the perversion of religion by seekers of temporal power. 
According to Atatürk, Mevlana was 'a mighty reformer, who had adapted Islam to the Turkish soul.'

17 December is actually the date of Mevlana Rumi’s death – well, truth to tell it is the nearest Gregorian equivalent given that he died within the borders of the Muslim Seljuk Empire. For Rumi, his death was not an occasion of sadness since it brought about his union with God (hence ‘Wedding’). As a result, there was no need for reincarnation or resurrection. The physical body was the cage that trapped humanity in the world of material unhappiness. To die was to escape to a better, if incomprehensible, other.

At the same time, the Sufi path is not a rejection of physical realities. ‘[Rumi’s] poetry and doctrine advocate unlimited tolerance, positive reasoning, goodness and charity, and awareness through love’ as the means to achieve personal fulfilment and build a better world on earth. He summarised his practical philosophy of life in seven pieces of advice, the last line of which is an oft-quoted admonishment against hypocrisy:

Cömertlik ve yardım etmede akarsu gibi ol.

Şefkat ve merhamette güneş gibi ol.

Başkalarının kusurunu örtmede gece gibi ol.

Hiddet ve asabiyette ölü gibi ol.

Tevazu ve alçak gönüllülükte toprak gibi ol.

Hoşgörülükte deniz gibi ol.

Ya olduğun gibi görün, ya göründüğün gibi ol.

In generosity and helping others be like a river.

In compassion and grace be like the sun.

In concealing other’s faults be like the night.

In anger and irritability be like death.

In modesty and humility be like the earth

In tolerance be like the sea.

Either show yourself as you are, or be as you seem.

Who’s Funding the Islamic Revolution? Will the real Muslims please stand up (Part II)

‘Ekmek var mı?’ It’s the title of the first unit in my old Turkish language course book, ‘Teach Yourself Turkish’. ‘Have you got any bread?’ It’s a useful structure to learn when you’re living in, or even just on holiday in a non-English-speaking country. ‘Have you got bottled water? Camera batteries? Have you got any of those little masculine or feminine essentials I am desperately in need of?’ 

As usual at this time of year, we are in Bodrum for our summer vacation. Bodrum is a popular getaway spot, not only for urban Turks, but also for foreigners, particularly English, who in recent years, attracted by the climate and tempting property prices, have purchased holiday houses in the area. My morning exercise is a cycle ride to the local village to buy simits for breakfast and a newspaper. The other day I was in the bakery and the baker was patiently trying to serve the gentleman in front of me who clearly knew not a word of Turkish. ‘Have you got bread?’ He was asking, in his distinctive north country accent, and the transaction continued with sign language and the baker’s limited stock of English.

My next stop was the hardware store down the road. As I was leaving, another customer entered, and I caught the beginnings of the conversation. ‘I need a pump.’ ‘Ok, but today is Sunday.’ ‘Yes, but I’m flying home tomorrow.’ The last I heard was the hardware guy getting on the telephone to a plumber trying to organise something for this foreigner who was totally dependent on his goodwill and knowledge of English.

‘So what?’ you’re saying. ‘You want to sell your product, you do what you gotta do. The customer is always right.’ But let’s just reverse the situation. A guy from Turkey goes into a shop in England, the USA or New Zealand. He can’t speak a word of English (not a single word, not even please or thank you!) but he’s got a problem, or he wants to buy a few things. How much sympathy or assistance would he get? Maybe I’m wrong, but I think, not much.

Now I don’t know much about those guys, the baker and the hardware store guy – but I suspect they are good Muslims, because in Turkey people of that class usually are. They go to the mosque to pray at least every Friday, and probably more often. They very likely fast during the month of Ramadan. They take seriously the Prophet’s requirement to show hospitality to strangers, and feel uncomfortable if they can’t give a positive response to the question, ‘What have you done for God today?’ People like this make up a large proportion of Turkey’s population, and when they cast their vote in elections, they naturally want it going to someone they feel is sympathetic to their particular world-view.

Not everyone in Turkey feels that way, however. The fear of Islamic fundamentalism and extremism is almost as strong among secular middle class Turks as it is in the United States – and perhaps with more reason, considering the nearer proximity of scary neigbours given to stoning adulterers, denying a drivers’ license to women, and publicly whipping citizens for drinking a beer or other alcoholic beverage.

I have been hearing, since first coming to this country, that some of these neighbours, resentful of Turkey’s secular democracy, channel a portion of their petro-dollar wealth into undermining that hated system by, for example, paying Turkish women to wear head-scarves and even to cover themselves from head to toe in that particularly unattractive black garment that Turks call çarşaf or sheet. It may indeed be so. Despite the fact that their ruling classes love to holiday in the liberal atmosphere of Turkey’s classy urban streets and beach resorts, those Arab elites do not show much sympathy for the aspirations of their own people to greater social freedom.

Nevertheless, they are Muslims, when all’s said and done, and we might expect them to show more tangible support for Islamic brothers and sisters in other neighbouring states when the opportunity arose. The media in Western nations was greatly excited when the so-called Arab Spring that blossomed in 2011 seemed about to bring secular populist governments to power in the benighted lands of Islamic oppression. The excitement turned to dismay, however, as grass roots movements seemed in danger of installing Muslim Brotherhoods in place of previous dictatorships, particularly in Egypt, one of the larger, more powerful countries in the region.

Well, you can understand that. Western Christendom has had a fear of, and antipathy towards Islam since conquering Muslim armies spread through North Africa and into Spain from the 8^th and 9^th centuries. When Muslim Turkish tribes entered the region at the beginning of the 2^nd millennium CE and began pushing back the boundaries of the eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire, the Pope in Rome felt obliged to unleash legions of crusading knights to combat them. As the Ottoman Empire grew in the Eastern Mediterranean and assumed leadership of the Islamic world, it required a determined union of previously quarrelling Christian kings and princes to turn them back from further encroachment. More recently, there’s been the business with al Qaeda and New York’s World Trade Centre, so it’s not surprising that the Muslim religion and its followers tend to get a bad press in the West.

However, I confess to some confusion when I read in my newspaper yesterday that the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait were providing a $12 billion aid package to the newly installed regime in Egypt – the one taking over after the Egyptian military overthrew the supposedly Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohammed Morsi. According to an Associated Press correspondent reported on Yahoo News, ‘The Saudi king praised the military's move, and Anwar Gargash, the UAE's minister of state for foreign affairs, wrote in a commentary posted on Foreign Policy's website that "the rejection by Egyptians of their Islamist government marks a turning point — not only for that country, but for the entire Middle East." ‘

So now I’m totally confused. The West supports democracy in the Middle East region (and everywhere else, of course) as long as it doesn’t throw up elected governments sympathetic to the aims and aspirations of the predominantly Muslim populations. In that case, they prefer to support military dictatorships – which have a tendency to get out of control and start oppressing their people and attracting unwelcome attention from Western civil rights organisations, which then pressure their own governments to intervene.

Arab states with autocratic governments oppress their people with draconian shariah laws involving public floggings, executions and amputation of body parts, but are on the whole supported by Western states whose economies depend on their oil and natural gas, and their readiness to purchase military hardware.

Arab states with autocratic governments rule their people by means of hard-line Islamic clerics and shariah law, and are accused of funding groups aiming to undermine the secular integrity of democratic neighbours (especially Turkey). On the other hand, when a military dictatorship with close ties to the United States and Israel is overthrown by a popular uprising, and the people show a willingness to elect a government with Muslim sympathies, they give no support. On the contrary, they provide financial aid to ensure the success of a regime imposed by another military coup.

Make what you will of that! And when you’ve finished, answer the following questions:

Who loves who?

Who hates what?

Who are the real Muslims?