Easter, Passover, Catholics, Protestants: What Are Friends For?

Citing "an Irish friend," the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom we might call the Anglican Pope, slagged off the Catholic Church for its handling of pedophile-priest scandals. But before we'd figured out what His Grace was saying, exactly, along comes Father Raniero Cantalamessa, pastor to Auld Red Socks himself in Rome, and he cites "a Jewish friend" to invoke antisemitism as a sort of allegory to the growing rage against the Catholic Church.

I will cite my imaginary Zoroastrian friend in order to assert my claim that both these geezers should just administer the sacraments, visit the sick, bury the dead, and shut their big yappers. If they and all the rest of that class that wears its collars backwards had been attending solely to those minor obligations of their trade all these years, we all would have had a great deal less misery.

Archbishop Rowan Williams appears to have only now discovered that the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has a slight difficulty in the reputation department, "suddenly becoming, suddenly losing all credibility - that's not just a problem for the Church, it is a problem for everybody in Ireland." He might have had a point there somewhere except that the Catholic Church has been squandering its credibility among the Catholic Irish for some generations now, and this is hardly a "problem" for Ireland. It's been positively liberating.

Father Cantalamessa's astonishing discovery is that sometimes Passover and Easter fall during the same week. This gives him the notion that his Easter homily might allow a disingenuous comparison between antisemitism as collective punishment (for what crime he does specify) and the transfer of personal responsibility for child-molesting to the pope and the church itself. Or something. Cantalamessa is a smart guy. If you die and and go to heaven and years later your widow and the guy she ended up marrying eventually show up, Cantalamessa can explain who's legitimately married to whom.

Anyway, say that in the spirit of the Easter-Passover thing Cantalamessa had wanted to make the point that Rome's indifference and complicity in the abuse of countless Catholic victims by predatory priests owes its origins to the same institutional pathology at work in Rome's historical indifference and complicity in the sufferings of the Jews. He might have had an arguable if unnecessary indictment to propose. But that would have invited the unpleasant inference that his bishops were like Nazis or something. Which would have been embarrassing.

But nevermind. My imaginary Zoroastrian friend just interrupted me to say we're all getting it completely wrong. To assert his claim, he cites his "former Living Marxism correspondent friend" Brendan O'Neill, who says Catholic-bashing is the thing to keep your eye on and illiberalism, scaremongering and elitism are behind it. I think this means that Brendan would want to have Father Cantalamessa's cake and eat it at Archbishop Williams' table.

I miss Noreen. She can properly interrogate touchy ecumenical subjects. True, she flirts with a view of certain Old Testament events that might be considered slightly schismatic, but still.