In Our Time: Arianism

 Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the form of Christianity adopted by Ostrogoths in the 4th century AD, which they learned from Roman missionaries and from their own contact with the imperial court at Constantinople. This form spread to the Vandals and the Visigoths, who took it into Roman Spain and North Africa, and the Ostrogoths brought it deeper into Italy after the fall of the western Roman empire. Meanwhile, with the Roman empire in the east now firmly committed to the Nicene Creed not the Arian, the Goths and Vandals faced conflict or conversion, as Arianism moved from an orthodox view to being a heresy that would keep followers from heaven and delay the Second Coming for all.

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The Los Angeles Review of Books: French Secularism, Reinvented

 The proposed measures appear to mark a dramatic shift in the purpose of secularism. But despite the different contexts and reversed power relations, there are revealing continuities between the Third Republic’s campaign against Catholicism in the early 20th century and the current campaign against Islamist “separatism.” In fact, 19th-century secularists talked about Catholicism and Islam in such similar ways that some French Catholics even began accepting this comparison, seeing Muslims as allies against the aggressive secularism of the French state. This makes it all the more ironic that conservatives now embrace laïcité as a bludgeon against Muslims. In France, secularism has never been about removing religion entirely from the French public sphere but rather defining it, neutralizing it, and using it for the state’s own purposes.[...]

Many of the common complaints against Jesuit priests were similar to the anti-Muslim tropes of today. They were accused of being an unpatriotic “state within a state,” a communitarian, unassimilated minority; like today’s Muslims, their real loyalty was allegedly to a power outside and beyond that of the French state: their superior in Rome. As John Padberg, Geoffrey Cubitt, and other scholars have detailed, the Jesuits were long accused of being “a political corps” hiding “under the veil of a religious institute.”[...]

And yet, church attendance continued to decline. Despite a brief resurgence in religiosity after the war, some Catholics — such as the famed scholar of Islam Louis Massignon — looked to the religious practices of Muslims in French Algeria as a source of renewed spirituality for an increasingly secular France. Much of what these Catholics admired in Muslims was the all-encompassing nature of religion in their lives, which they believed promoted a deeper and more genuine spirituality. As Talal Asad has pointed out in his critiques of secularism, Catholicism and Islam are both uncomfortable with the relegation of religion to private life; both have aspired to shape society, from public space to education. Opponents of recent European headscarf and burka bans have found allies among Catholics, who argue that states overstep their rights when they seek to regulate personal expressions of faith in the public sphere.

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BBC4 In Our Time: Medieval Pilgrimage In Our Time

 Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea and experience of Christian pilgrimage in Europe from the 12th to the 15th centuries, which figured so strongly in the imagination of the age. For those able and willing to travel, there were countless destinations from Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela to the smaller local shrines associated with miracles and relics of the saints. Meanwhile, for those unable or not allowed to travel there were journeys of the mind, inspired by guidebooks that would tell the faithful how many steps they could take around their homes to replicate the walk to the main destinations in Rome and the Holy Land, passing paintings of the places on their route.

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Social Europe: Poland’s abortion protests—democratic standards at stake

 The PiS has been in power for five years now. From the outset, these have been turbulent times, marked by diverse protests—by doctors, teachers, farmers, miners and parents of disabled children. The pandemic has only aggravated the public mood, adding to the frustration of the most affected groups, such as micro- and small entrepreneurs, as well as coronavirus-deniers, a movement also germinating in Poland.

Nevertheless, it’s the ideological war which seems to have agitated the society and petrified the political polarisation. The presidential election during the summer was won by Andrzej Duda, candidate of the United Right, by the skin of his teeth. The PiS retains a majority in the Sejm, the lower chamber, thanks only to its two junior coalition partners, while the Senat was lost to the opposition after the parliamentary elections in October 2019. Local governments and cities remain independent and very often in opposition to the central government. [...]

It was in this context that over the summer the LGBT community in Poland became the target of a defamation campaign, which sadly mobilised many and mainstreamed homophobic narratives. It seems the PiS wanted to deliver a pointed response, to prove its ideological ‘purity’—and completely overdid it, putting its own government at existential risk. In so doing, it again tested the boundaries of what remains a young Polish democracy.

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TLDR News: The Vatican's Secret Deal with China - Is The Catholic Church Being Paid to Stay Quiet?

 In 2018 the Vatican and the Communist Party of China signed a deal ostensibly to try and make life easier for Chinese Catholics. Since then though it's been alleged that the Catholic Church has allowed the CCP to take over Catholocism in China for payment, a payment which has also led the Church becoming increasingly subservient to China.

Nerdwriter1: Caravaggio: Master Of Light

 

Balkan Insight: Poland Struggles to Deal With Pedophilia in Catholic Church

 Piotr M.’s case, while shocking, is sadly not unusual in Poland, where hundreds of Catholic priests have been accused of pedophilia, with over one hundred convicted so far in court, according to a map of the cases created by the victims’ rights group, Do Not Be Afraid. According to a 2019 report by the Polish Episcopal Conference, the central organ of the country’s Catholic Church, 382 complaints against priests over sexual molestation were filed with the Church between 1990 and 2018.

Artur Nowak, a lawyer who has supported victims in tens of cases, including Magda’s, told BIRN that these numbers are underestimates and there are probably thousands of cases of pedophilia among priests in Poland, many of which will likely never come to light. [...]

Artur Nowak, the lawyer, says pedophilia is such a big problem in the Polish Catholic Church because young men hardly out of adolescence are forced into a life of celibacy and given no education or support in how to deal with their evolving sexuality. [...]

When the Church pedophilia scandal broke last May, the governing Law and Justice (PiS), whose key politicians have been loudly accusing the “LGBT lobby” of posing a threat to Polish children, was faced with a tough balancing act: suddenly, facts revealed in the documentary indicated the threat was actually coming from inside the Polish Catholic Church, a PiS ally. While PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his party colleagues promised tough action against pedophiles, they were quick to stress that the phenomenon was present everywhere in society and not especially linked to the Church.

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Notes from Poland: Polish bishops call for “clinics to help LGBT people regain natural sexual orientation”

They also call for the creation of “clinics to help people who want to regain their…natural sexual orientation”. Such “conversion therapy” has been rejected by the established medical community as unethical and harmful, and has been completely or partially banned in a number of countries. [...]

The bishops admit that this idea “stands in clear contradiction to positions regarded as scientific, as well as to so-called ‘political correctness'”. [...]

The premise that non-heterosexual orientations are a mental illness has in recent decades been rejected by leading medical bodies, including the World Health Organisation in 1990. The practice of “conversion therapy” to “cure” or “correct” such orientations has also been deemed unethical and harmful. [...]

Further countries are currently considering legislation to outlaw the practice. In 2017, the Church of England declared conversion therapy to be a “discredited” and “theologically unsound” form of “abuse”, and called on the British government to ban it.

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openDemocracy: Poland is moving further towards autocracy

For many years after the collapse of communism Poland's political landscape was characterised by consensus. But consensual politics frayed in the mid-2000s and gave way to contention between two main political parties, PiS and Civic Platform. The rivalry of these two parties has fostered polarisation in Poland. Since 2015, when PiS won an outright majority in parliamentary elections and when Duda first became President, PiS has aggressively pursued its policy agenda (including troubling reforms to the judiciary, anti-abortion measures, and politically targeting LGBTQ individuals), pushing Poland's liberal democracy toward conservative autocracy. In turn, the government's actions have stoked the fires of polarisation. [...]

What about when polarisation gets ratcheted up? The PiS government has been marked by politicisation of gender equality and regression for LGBTQ Poles. Quite often, actions in these areas have been justified on political bases with few appeals to biblical canon or Catholic dogma. Nevertheless, Poland's Catholic establishment (chiefly, the Polish Episcopal Conference) and religious conservative voters endorse and take succour from PiS's reactionary measures. Resultantly, Poland is among the most polarised countries in the EU along religious and gender and sexual orientation dimensions. [...]

Events following President Duda's re-election, such as the arrest of an LGBT activist and resultant protests as well as the persistence of so-called 'LGBT free zones' in several Polish towns, have signaled the continuation of polarisation trends. As long as PiS retains its control of governing authority – which it will do at the national level for at least three more years, until the November 2023 parliamentary elections – polarisation is a useful strategy that allows the party to pursue its conservative autocratic agenda. The liberal opponents of PiS are left to pursue resistance through collective action and to build resilience in local communities.

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Notes from Poland: “No apologies, no shame”: the rise of Poland’s guerrilla LGBT activists

Various legal efforts have been made by LGBT groups to stop the vans, but have largely been unsuccessful, due to the fact that Poland’s laws against hateful and offensive speech do not cover sexual orientation or gender identity.

Although a court in Gdańsk ordered Fundacja Pro to temporarily stop using some of the slogans it claims are based on “scientific” evidence, another judge in Wrocław rejected a case against the organisation, saying that its activities are “informative”. [...]

Speaking with Notes from Poland shortly before her latest detention, Margot explained what she calls the groups’ “no apologies” approach. They have sought to “throw off the discourse of docility and shame” that she associates with the respectability politics of more moderate members of the LGBT movement. But this radicalism does not exist in a vacuum; it has “adapted to the growth of homophobia”. [...]

For some, the insult to religious feeling was a step too far; others questioned the wisdom of strategies that make LGBT people standout, preferring campaigns that present them as “normal people”. One interviewee said they should be looking for issues that they have in common with religion, such as the idea of love.

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Time: #PolishStonewall: LGBTQ Activists Are Rallying Together After Police Violence at Protests in Warsaw

 By Saturday, thousands had gathered in Warsaw to denounce Margo’s arrest and police aggression against LGBTQ people. And although Poland is experiencing a rise in new cases of COVID-19, at least 15 solidarity protests, both big and small, took place on Monday in towns and cities across the Poland, as well as in Budapest and London, New York, Paris and Berlin, with more planned.

While not all activists may agree with Margo’s methods, her prosecution and imprisonment has been widely condemned. “These radical actions are a part of history that has happened in many other countries before,” says Julia Maciocha, chairwoman at the Warsaw-based LGBTQ organization Volunteers of Equality Foundation. In a nod to the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 in New York City, several users on Twitter started posting #PolishStonewall in tweets about the weekend’s events and subsequent solidarity protests. [...]

The church in Poland also wields enormous influence over education, law and politics, and about 86% of the population identify as Roman Catholic. Marek Jedraszewski, an archbishop, warned last year that a “rainbow plague” seeks to “control” the population. Since 2019, authorities in one-third of cities across Poland have adopted resolutions declaring themselves “LGBTQ ideology free zones.” In late July, the European Union announced it would not provide funding to six Polish towns that made this declaration.[...]

What activists want now is stronger international solidarity, particularly from European governments. Remy Bonny, a Brussels-based LGBTQ rights activist and researcher who focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, says “we have seen this kind of violence in Russia and Belarus, for example, but not in an E.U. country.” The European Commission should condemn police violence in Poland in the same way it recently denounced the repression of protests in Belarus, he says. Makuchowska says she and other activists are calling on the international community to “help us to immediately release Margo.”

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99 Percent Invisible: Valley of the Fallen

Despite the atrocities he committed, Franco still has supporters in Spain. Some even see him as the emblem of a traditional Spanish Catholic life, and some actually like his fascist ideology and would like to see it make a comeback. When his body was removed, hundreds of his supporters gathered at the new cemetery to wield swastikas and Franco-era flags, and to perform the fascist salute in his honor.

But this isn’t just the story of an old mausoleum and the dictator who used to be buried there. Because the monument is also a mass grave. There are tens of thousands of other bodies still trapped in the basilica beneath where Franco used to lie. Many were victims of Franco’s security forces, murdered during the height of the civil war. For years, their families have been trying to get them out. [...]

The Americans relied on Spain as one of their European partners during the Cold War. And when they heard about Franco’s plans for the Valley of the Fallen, they started to get nervous. The monument was beginning to seem quite confrontational and divisive. The Americans hoped Franco would dial it back a bit, making it a place that memorialized not just the Catholic crusaders, but all the country’s war dead, sort of like Arlington National Cemetery.

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Dissent Magazine: The Law and Justice Party’s Moral Pseudo-Revolution

Today’s political divide between PO and PiS can be traced to the electoral collapse of the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). In 2005, having eroded their base of support through social spending cuts and corruption scandals, SLD’s electoral share in the Sejm (parliament) dropped by 30 percent. The two right-wing parties, PO and PiS, scooped up the lost votes, marking the beginning of the political duopoly in Poland that persists to this day. [...]

While the negative characteristics of the governing camp have been widely reported in the Western press, we hear less about the sins and failings of the opposition. PO’s primary weakness is its lack of a clear political identity. It is against PiS, but it is difficult to say what it is for. Even among hardline PO voters, one hears few positive statements about the party or its program. In pro-PO circles there is a culture of condescension toward the poorer part of PiS’s electorate, reminiscent of Reaganite discourse about “welfare queens”: PiS voters are supposedly bums who have babies to collect benefits, which they spend on vodka and vacations to the Baltic coast. Among the pro-PO middle class, there are some who have an inability to differentiate, as the great writer of the Polish left Stefan Żeromski once did, between snobbery and progress. [...]

PiS is vocally anti-communist. But its relationship to the communist era is more complicated than its rhetoric would suggest. As the opposition loves to point out, many members of the party’s in-crowd were once members of the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR), the communist party that governed the country for over four decades. For example, Stanisław Piotrowicz, who had been a prosecutor during martial law in the early 1980s, was recently appointed to the Constitutional Tribunal. Unlike the vulgar anti-communism of the 1990s, which blamed unemployment on “red capitalists” and argued that all Poland needed was one great purge, PiS’s critique is not directed at nefarious ex-communist personnel. Instead PiS rails against what happened after 1989. According to the party, the privatization process following the transition was distorted by secret service involvement, corruption, or just plain criminal activity. According to Jarosław Kaczynski, what occurred was not marketization but “Latinization,” which turned Poland into a Latin American oligarchy. Only PiS, he claims, can bring about justice in economic relations, an argument that appeals to a large cross-section of society repulsed by the dirty dealings of the political and business elite, including former SLD voters. [...]

In contrast, PiS’s welfare programs cannot be dismissed as trivial or symbolic. While the tendency of the liberal opposition to call PiS “socialist” sometimes outdoes the Tea Party’s abuse of that word, it cannot be denied that 500 złoty per month for each child has really helped the Polish poor. PO has learned the hard way that to stay relevant in Polish politics, one has to declare one’s commitment to this policy. The same goes for lowering the retirement age, which PO had increased when it was last in power.

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UnHerd: How the Dutch invented our world

In recent years, however, bourgeois revolution has gone out of fashion and subjected to revisionist critique wishing to consign it to the dustbin of history. Part of what underlines this dismissiveness is a rather childish unwillingness to credit capitalism, and by extension, the bourgeoisie and liberalism, with any positive contribution to human development. The assumption is that because the bourgeoisie has been reactionary for so long, therefore it has never played a historically revolutionary role; because capitalism is now senile and decadent therefore it has never been historically progressive; because liberalism is now servile therefore it has never been emancipatory. None of which is true.[...]

For the likes of Goethe it was the struggle for liberty that made the Dutch revolt a subject of fascination, and his play in turn inspired Beethoven to compose Egmont. Friedrich Schiller, in his history of the Dutch revolt, extolled the “spirit of independence” of the Dutch people in their liberation struggle against the Habsburg Empire. [...]

The revolt was about religion but it was also about money, and the right of the bourgeois to make it. As Pepijn Brandon has argued, the revolt unconsciously, yet effectively, facilitated capitalist development, with Church lands confiscated and turned into large-scale commercial exploitation, and the political influence of the nobility and Catholic clergyman diminished. On top of this, the merchant class had way more control over state power where commercial interests usurped dynastic warfare.[...]

Because of this he was a firm defender of confessional toleration, the idea that state had no business concerning itself with the private beliefs of citizens no matter how heretical, unorthodox, crazy or immoral they seemed. Unlike his English contemporary John Locke (they were born just three months apart), Spinoza made no “special exceptions” for who did not deserve tolerance: Catholics, Protestants, Jews and atheists were all to be tolerated alike.

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Al Jazeera: Polish archbishop refers child abuse negligence case to Vatican

The referral, unprecedented in the deeply religious country, will test procedures introduced by the Vatican last year to hold to account bishops accused of turning a blind eye to child sex abuse. The Vatican is now expected to assign an investigator to the case. [...]

The case came to prominence after a film by brothers Tomasz and Marek Sekielski, released on Saturday, showed how Bishop Edward Janiak, based in the city of Kalisz, failed to take action against priests who were known to have abused children. [...]

"For the last year, the Catholic Episcopate has known that there are bishops who covered up paedophilia cases, and yet none of them have been dismissed."

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Notes from Poland: Most Poles religious but few “strongly committed” to their faith, new data show

Just over 60% of Poles display “religious commitment”, according to new data released by Statistics Poland (GUS), a government agency. But just 5.5% of them are “strongly committed” to their faith, while 23% are “moderately committed” and 33% are “weakly committed”. Meanwhile, some 34% of people are “uncommitted” (meaning that they have a religion, but are not religiously active), while the remainder, 5%, are outside of any religion, reports Onet. [...]

Katarzyna Zielińska, a sociologist at the Jagiellonian University, told Notes from Poland that, although the new figures do not directly indicate any change in religiosity, the wider trend observed in recent years – shown in data from the CBOS polling institute – has shown a decline in terms of declarations of practices as well as religious belonging. [...]

The new Statistics Poland data also show significant differences between age groups, Onet notes. The 25-34 age group is the least religious – more than half of respondents in this group (51%) are either religiously uncommitted or outside of any religion, and just 17% are either strongly or moderately committed. [...]

This has been confirmed by CBOS’s data – which show that the proportion of school leavers declaring themselves believers has dropped from 81% to 63% in a decade – and also by the Pew Research Center, which has found Poland to have the biggest decline in religiosity between the oldest and youngest generations.

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UnHerd: Why arranged marriages make sense

For most of recorded history, marriage was seen as a contract, largely for the creation of children. If love — agape — developed as a result, all the better, but romance was not a reason for marriage. The Greeks and Romans essentially saw romantic love as a mental illness — “a sickness, a fever, a source of pain” in the words of historian Nigel Saul — while the medieval aristocracy thought of marriages as more like business contracts. Kings used their children as assets with which to make deals, one of the most ruthless being the 12th century Henry II, who had his heir Henry wed when he was five and his bride, daughter of the king of France, just two. [...]

Along with rules about consent and age, the Church also became increasingly strict about the marrying of relatives, which had a profound effect on wider society. Once people were forced to marry out, their loyalty to their family declined in relation to wider society and this fostered more radical ideas. Maybe Romeo wasn’t just a member of the Montague clan but an individual with his own desires? Maybe his individual happiness was more important than the extended family’s status? The effects have been long lasting, with various studies showing a link between the Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage with corruption and democracy. [...]

There are now around a quarter of a million marriages a year in Britain, just over half the rate in 1969 when the Divorce Reform Act was passed. Marriage has also become a luxury good, with the gap between professional and working classes rising just this century from 22% to almost 50%. The results are huge numbers living alone, a figure that will surpass 10 million by 2040.

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UnHerd: Sex-obsessed conservatives are wrong about families

Having little historical imagination, the moral majority movement of the Eighties fetishised this very particular notion of the family — one that only flourished within some very particular economic conditions during the post-war period. But this iteration was only a blip during the long transition from large, extended kinship groups to the ‘chosen’, ‘blended’ family that begun to emerge within the gay community at precisely same the time Jerry Falwell and Ronald Regan were insisting that nuclear was the only proper way for families to be. For these two reactionaries, the nuclear family was the all-American redoubt against the twin threats of communism and homosexuality. The family was nuclear not just in the sense of being a nucleus, but also, as the premier expression of resistance to the nuclear threat of Communism. Family, God and country became “the holy trinity of American traditionalism”. [...]

One way of telling the story of the Biblical narrative about the family is as an arc that begins with the association of family life – and particularly procreation – with patriotic duty, and then gradually subjects this position to ever increasing scepticism. For a fledgling community intent on nation building, the production of children was essential to communal survival. Thus the suspicion of all those who do not contribute to the expansion of the population – eunuchs, homosexuals, unfertile “barren” women. The problem here is not about sex, it’s about children. This is what modern sex-obsessed conservatives miss about the argument that is going on within the pages of the Bible. The charge against homosexuality is not that people shouldn’t have sex this way, the charge is a lack of patriotism. [...]

It is very peculiar how religious conservatives have sought to construct an apologia for the nuclear family from the Bible. Broadly speaking, the Old Testament is perfectly relaxed about its heroes having multiple wives — Solomon had 700 of them. In contrast, the heroes of the New Testament are mostly single men, with little interest in the domestic duties and pleasures of a settled family life. St Paul even advised that it was “good for a man not to marry” (1 Corinthians, 7). To say the least, it is very hard work indeed to try and find a secure theological model of the nuclear family within the pages of Holy Scripture. [...]

Yes, like the nuclear family, this family has also been thinned out by the community dissolving properties of contemporary capitalism. But as a model, it is far more deeply rooted in the Christian witness than the nuclear family ever has been. Which makes the church’s continued obsession with policing the biological mechanics of love-making so thoroughly depressing.

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UnHerd: Why is Sinn Féin rising?

Ever since Ireland gained independence in 1922, every Irish Government has been led by either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael (or one of its antecedents). The two parties emerged from a split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty that paved the way to independence. The side that became Fine Gael accepted the Treaty, and the side that became Fianna Fáil, led by Éamon de Valera, rejected it. The pro-Treaty side, under Michael Collins, won the subsequent civil war but Fianna Fáil soon emerged as the strongest and most popular party in the new Irish state. [...]

But as time has gone on, and the Civil War recedes ever more into the distance, the historical differences between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael seem less and less important and increasingly they are seen as two sides of the same coin. [...]

Irish politics is also unusual in that immigration has barely raised its head as an issue, despite the fact that Ireland actually has a higher proportion of non-nationals living here than almost any other EU country, including Britain. Both the media and the mainstream parties absolutely refuse to permit a debate on the matter, but most of the immigrants to date are from other EU countries and fit in well for the most part. [...]

But every scenario is bound to strengthen Sinn Féin further. A second confidence-and-supply deal makes Sinn Féin the de facto opposition party, and if there is an outright coalition between the two parties, Sinn Féin becomes the official opposition. One way or another, the party of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness will benefit and the next time an election is called it will be running far more candidates and could potentially become the biggest party in the state for the first time since independence almost a century ago. It’s also possible that, if either main parties dumps their leader after the election, they choose a successor willing to cross that line and enter a coalition government with Sinn Fein.

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BBC4 In Our Time: The Siege of Paris 1870-71

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war and the social unrest that followed, as the French capital was cut off from the rest of the country and food was scarce. When the French government surrendered Paris to the Prussians, power gravitated to the National Guard in the city and to radical socialists, and a Commune established in March 1871 with the red flag replacing the trilcoleur. The French government sent in the army and, after bloody fighting, the Communards were defeated by the end of May 1871.

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