Popes and An Unflattering History
A Commentary by Warren J. Blumenfeld
During his end-of-the-year Vatican address, Pope Benedict XVI implied that homosexuality is as great a threat to humankind as climate change. He argued that saving humanity from homosexual behavior is as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. Humanity, he asserted, needs to listen to the language of creation to realize the intended roles of man and woman. He warned of the blurring of the natural distinctions between males and females, and called for humanity to protect itself from self-destruction. The Pope compared behavior beyond traditional heterosexual relations as a destruction of Gods work.
The Popes warning comes only two years after another of his controversial Christmastime addresses in which he quoted a 14th century Christian emperor who asserted that the Islamic Prophet Muhammad imposed on the world only evil and inhuman conditions.
Pope Benedict XVI, by invoking his interpretation of Christian scripture, follows a long history of Popes who, throughout the ages, have employed these texts to justify and rationalize the marginalization, harassment, denial of rights, persecution, and oppression of entire groups of people based on their social identities. At various historical moments, Popes have applied these texts, sometimes taken in tandem, and at other times used selectively, to establish and maintain hierarchical positions of power, domination, and privilege over individuals and groups targeted by these texts.
On Slavery: Quoting a number of Biblical passages, Pope Nicholas V, in 1452, composed his Dum Diversas, which granted to the kings of Spain and Portugal the right to reduce any Saracens [Muslims] and pagans and any other unbelievers to perpetual slavery. Then in 1548, Pope Paul III, reasserted that any free person may buy, sell, and own slaves, and that runaway slaves were to be returned to their owners for punishment. Pope Gregory I in 595 sent a priest to Britain to purchase Pagan boys to work as slaves on church estates. Around the year 600, Pope Gregory I wrote, in Pastoral Rule: Slaves should be told...not [to] despise their masters and recognize that they are only slaves. And between 1629-1661, Popes Urban VII, Innocent X, and Alexander VII, purchased Muslim slaves.
On the Jews: In 1239, using Biblical passages as his rationale, Pope Gregory IX ordered all copies of the Jewish holy book, the Talmud, confiscated, and in 1322, Pope John XXII ordered all copies of the Talmud burned on the eve of the Jewish Passover. Pope Paul IV, in his Papal bull Cum nimis absurdum, segregated Jews within a walled ghetto with locked gates at night to keep them separated from the Christian majority, and to emphasize their inferior legal and social status. Pope Pius IX, in 1858, kidnapped a young boy, Edgardo Mortara, from his Jewish parents in Bologna, Italy, and raised him in Rome as a Catholic against his parents wishes on the justification that a Catholic maidservant had secretly baptized the boy earlier when he was gravely ill. Pope Pius IX also referred to the Jews of Rome as dogs.
The Church has since admitted regret for many of the actions and words of former Popes. The Rev. Angelo Roncalli, who later became Pope John XXIII, was honored by Jewish leaders around the world for his work in saving large numbers of Jews during the German Holocaust. As Pope, he convened the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which authorized the declaration Nostra Aetate and approved in 1965 under Pope Paul VI. An article in the document, while certainly not going far enough, stated: True, authorities of the Jews and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today. Moreover, the Church deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source.
Coming back to the Churchs positions on same-sex identities and lives, I wonder how long it will take the Church to apologize for its long-standing marginalization and persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Time will only tell.
Warren J. Blumenfeld is co-editor of Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States, Sense Publishers, 2009.