Vatican still thinking in Manichean terms - Updated August 2005

Introduction

Pope Benedict on a visit to his native Germany in August 2005 condemns the Nazis and reassures the (European) Jews. But he will not censure the Israelis, an East European minority who has taken over Arab territory with western backing and who have unleashed massive terror and humiliation on the natives in their own land. (Other European interlopers have done this before - in the Americas, South Africa and Australia.)
 
The Pope decides to lecture the German Muslims on the evils on terrorism but does not castigate Europe for its Islamophobia and racism. The Vicar of Christ fails to trace the roots of Muslim behaviour - as a reaction to the western military presence and intervention in the Middle East for some 100 years, re-arrangement of borders, planting of dictators and arming them, siphoning of the oil wealth of the region, launching illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with over 100,000 killed, engaging in torture and degradation of the natives and their scriptures. 
But the Pope just cannot see evil within the West, only outside it.
 
All Popes have acted European first, then religious leader. All their encyclicals have a Eurocentric context and never taken account of Asian and African realities. In fact, the Church was actively involved with colonialism right through, starting with the 16th century in S America. [For a lucid account, see Michael Prior's 'The Bible & Colonialism' (1999)]
 
The current pope is an intellectual in the European tradition. He is the one who got the Sri Lankan theologian Tissa Balasurya excommunicated because he couldn't stomach an Asian interpretation. In Sept 2000, he produced a turgid document called  Dominus Jesus: The Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ & the Church". It is meant to be an arid, academic re-affirmation of Roman Catholicism as the true faith. Can even the title be translated into any Asian or African language? Would Christ understand the title?

The Euro-American model of Christianity (with its distortion by Greek philosophy and Roman legal idiom) is a spent force. We need a new model that speaks from the lived experience of the world's people, not just the Europeans. Given Ratzinger's background, he cannot possibly provide such a model.

 In the 09 July 2005 issue of the National Catholic Reporter, Rome correspondent, John Allen, reported that:
"An early draft of Pope Benedict XVI's telegram of condolence for the London bombings referred to the terrorist strikes as 'anti-Christian'. That draft was prepared by the Secretary of State, Italian Cardinal Angelo Sodano, and
not by the pope. In the telegram as it was released by the Vatican Press Office mid-afternoon July 7, after the pope had reviewed it, Benedict instead defined the bombings as "barbaric acts against humanity."

The Vatican seems prompt when it comes to condemning terror acts of disgruntled groups but less enthusiastic when it deals with state terror. There are important issues involved here:

- does the Vatican recognise such thing as 'state terrorism', most of it emanating from powerful western states?
- does the Vatican acknowledge the far graver 'barbaric acts' (mass deaths and destruction) inflicted by military interventions or covert action, compared with those of groups mostly reacting to imperial violence?
- how even handed is the Vatican in condemning atrocities arising from state action?

Sodano's instinctive  reaction was to characterise the London bombings as 'anti-Christian', suggesting that the Vatican still thinks in Manichean categories - 'us' (Christians, civilised) and 'them' (non-Christians, barbarians).
Let us recall that popes from Alexander VI (1493) to as recently as Pius X (1912) had no qualms referring to non-Europeans as 'barbarians' in their writings. Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) wrote explicitly that Europe belongs to the “civilised nations” (never mind the barbarities of the colonizers) and he declares himself to be “indeed the Vicar of Christ”. He was full of praise for Christopher Columbus for opening the New World to Europeans and was in total support for celebrating the 400th anniversary of his arrival in the Americas in 1892. He wrote:
"The whole world is eager to celebrate the memory of the event and glorify its author. Columbus is ours …(He had to) bear the sufferings (from) the adverse opinions of the learned, fights with savages, criminal conspiracies…".

In contrast to the pope's blatantly Eurocentric insensitivity, the US Council of Churches on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' trip (1992) condemned the "discovery" as
"an invasion and colonization with legalized occupation, genocide, economic exploitation, institutional racism and moral decadence." It called for "a year of repentance and reflection rather than celebration."

For centuries, western states have intervened in the territory of non-western states with horrific results. How many popes have condemned these interventions? Was there a single encyclical written specifically on the evils of colonialism? Sadly, spreading the collaboration of the churches was an integral part of the colonial project.

The US-UK-led Iraq invasion has caused over 100,000 deaths (many of them civilians, women and children). All conceivable weapons have been used - including depleted uranium, cluster bombs and more recently a version of
napalm. Shocking atrocities and forms of torture have been committed by the occupying Christian troops on the Muslim natives of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Consider this small extract from the US weekly CounterPunch:
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"On May 20 The New York Times published details about vicious torture and eventual murder of helpless captives. While the Taliban persecuted people out of religious frenzy, US soldiers torture people for fun.
"Their helpless captives died lingering deaths, suffering hellishly for days from soldiers' fists and feet and dogs before merciful release. The documents given to the Times include one terrifying quote 'Everyone heard him cry out and thought it was funny.'
"Tim Golden's opening sentence in the Times sums it up: 'Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him'.
"Military spokesmen maintained that both men died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides".
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How has the Vatican reacted to these horrors? Has the Vatican labelled them anti-Christian and 'crimes against humanity'? Have they issued repeated and proportionately severe condemnations? I suspect that the Vatican is still staffed by people with the Eurocentric mindset of Sodano and they may well continue to think that the occupiers are after all one of 'us' and these barbarities are just hazards of bringing freedom and democracy to 'them', the benighted Muslim peoples.