Scandal-Ridden Church Attacks Atheism as the Ultimate Evil

A new Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, was installed in London today, making him the spiritual leader of the 4.2 million Catholics of England and Wales.  In the wake of the dreadful decades-long child abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic church of neighboring Ireland this week, what do you think his first order of business was?

That’s right, attack atheism:

At the installation of the Most Rev Vincent Nichols at Westminster Cathedral, his predecessor, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, described a lack of faith as “the greatest of evils” and blamed atheism for war and destruction, implying that it was a greater evil even than sin itself.
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In his homily at the service, Archbishop Nichols did not refer to child abuse, but pledged himself to a battle against the advancing tide of secularisation and a defence of faith.

Well, I have news for Archbishop Nichols.  In a country where fewer than 10% of the population attend any kind of religious service on a regular basis, the “advancing tide of secularisation” has pretty much finished the job of sweeping away the religious tradition that has terrorized generations of children all around the world. There is certainly has little interest in bolstering the influence of an autocratic heirarchy that condemns millions of people to an agonizing death from AIDS by warning them that using condom during sex to protect themselves from the HIV virus is a sin.

Citing St Paul, he said that faith was not only compatible with the mind’s capacity for reasoned thought but complemented it.
 
“Some today propose that faith and reason are crudely opposed, with the fervour of faith replacing good reason. This reduction of both faith and reason inhibits not only our search for truth but also the possibility of real dialogue,” he added.

Yes, faith can be compatible with reason, but only if faith continues to adjust to the realities that reason, through the scientific process, discovers.  The Catholic church has been on the losing side of the war against reason since the day it was founded.  It may, of course, win the odd Pyrrhic victory (e.g. Galileo) but in the long run it will always have to reverse its stance on the issues or risk becoming irrelevant.

The Catholic church eventually had to bow to the inevitable and embrace Galileo’s discoveries and, more recently, they accepted that the evidence for evolution, a purely secular concept in opposition to everything the Church had taught about the beginnings of life of Earth, could not be denied.

But where the Catholic hierarchy holds out against reason—e.g. condom use, IVF, embyronic stem cells, and abortion—they have been all but ignored, even by many in their own flock, as reason trumps their irrational faith-based stances on the issues.

Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor went farther. Referring to the battles that will be won and lost in the effort to sustain the Christian presence in secular society, he said: “What is most crucial is the prayer that we express every day in the Our Father, when we say ‘deliver us from evil’. The evil we ask to be delivered from is not essentially the evil of sin, though that is clear, but in the mind of Jesus it is more importantly a loss of faith. For Jesus, the inability to believe in God and to live by faith is the greatest of evils.
 
“You see the things that result from this are an affront to human dignity, destruction of trust between peoples, the rule of egoism and the loss of peace. One can never have true justice, true peace, if God becomes meaningless to people.”

In a week where one of the greatest evils possible—the systematic abuse of defenseless children who were given up into the care of those who were entrusted to keep them safe—was revealed to have been perpetrated by his own colleagues in the Catholic church, this statement could hardly be more ill-timed and ironic.

British society has been getting along fine without the major influence of religious institutions for the past quarter century now, and they don’t need lectures from pompous autocrats in silly hats to tell them what’s just and meaningful in their lives.  I would wager that far from stemming the tide of secularism in the UK, Archbishop Nichols’ first homily in his new post will result in the net loss of congregants for the Catholic Church, which is as it should be.