Gesture of Conciliation or the Kiss of Judas?

By George Gregoriou
Religious controversy gets me nowhere. I leave it to priests and each individual to wrestle with his or her own conscience. But I cannot stay away from controversy. Pope John Paul II decided to return the bones of the two most revered saints in the Orthodox Church, ‘St. John Chrysostomos and St. Gregoriou of Nazianzus’, to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. This gesture of conciliation annoyed me. The theft was in 1204, when Constintinople was sacked by the crusaders. The crusaders were ‘sent’ by the Holy Roman Emperors (neither holy, nor Roman, nor emperors (Bryce’s words)), with the Vatican’s blessings, to ‘rescue’ the holy places from the conquering Islamic hordes. In reality, the third crusade was a front to sack and destroy Constantinople, the center of Greek Orthodoxy, to weaken it, to guarantee the preeminence of the Papacy. This ‘sacking’ was one of those events leading to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. So, why wait 800 years, and in the last days of the Pope’s papacy, to forget and forgive?

The Vatican is not known for speed. Its reaction to the rampant pedophilia among Catholic clergy was slow and hypocritical. Known pedophiles were reassigned to other parishes, to continue their sexual assaults on children. When pedophilia was public knowledge, it was declared a ‘sin’, a ‘moral failure’, to be forgiven, with cash. The layman’s response: priests are not married, can’t stop nature, sex. But, Catholic priests did marry in the old days. The problem? Children, a lot of them, with inheritance passed to them. The Vatican put a stop to it, with celibacy. Property belonged to the church. So was pedophilia.

Popes were notorious for power struggles, for venerating Virgin Mary and having illegitimate children, and procuring prostitutes for themselves and the cardinals. Bela Dona was the choice drink, poison/murder those challenging the power of the inner sanctum. Heretics were burned at stake.

The case of Galileo is well-known. His heresy? The earth is not flat. It revolves around the sun! If the earth is not the center of the universe, and the Catholic church is not the center of the earth, neither is the Pope next to Jesus Christ or St. Paul. Infallibility is its dogma. No scientific evidence could shake this conviction. Without dogma there are no money collectors, no property, no power, no empire, and no promises of salvation. Galileo was convicted and sentenced to be burn at stake.

Bertold Brecht in his play Galileo presents Galileo as a man who liked his bottle wine and goose liver. He had to decide between his wine and goose liver and his scientific principles. Being no Socrates, Galileo decided in favor of his wine and goose liver. In the play, his attendant comments: “Unfortunate are the people who will have no leader like you!” Galileo’s response: “Unfortunate are the people who need a leader like me.” It took the Vatican four centuries to appoint a committee to study Galileo’s conviction, to determine whether the Church erred. It took the committee another 15 years to reach this decision: ‘the Church did not err. Its decision was based on the evidence at the time’.

800 years to return the bones and 400 years on Galileo. Bureaucracies have a life of their own. They also provide jobs. They need lots of money to perpetuate themselves, the Catholic empire. In Gramsci’s words ‘the Pope’s heart may be with St. Paul, but he is also the head of an empire’. In matters of protecting the empire the Vatican acts quickly. I recall watching the Pope getting off the plane in Managua (Nicaragua), standing in front of a Sandinista priest/minister with his finger pointed at him, lecturing him on his ‘involvement in revolutionary struggles for the working poor’. What poor? What ‘liberation theology’? It’s a ‘no, no’. It does not put money in the Vatican’s pocket. The Pope was also quick in conspiring for Catholic Poland to break away from the former SU, Croatia from Yugoslavia, in proselytizing Orthodox Russians. Does Washington and the Vatican have a hand in Ukraine? Is the feuding in Ukraine, between Catholic (west) and Orthodox (east), and Washington’s Cold War strategy to roll back Russia’s spheres of influence related?

Does the return of the bones require reconciliation, forgetting, and forgiving? Think again. If the Vatican wants the ‘dead to bury the dead’, it has to stop what it is doing and undo what it has done. This will happen when the pigs fly or the Pope is not Catholic. Let’s get real.

It is same with our ‘friends and allies’. Our right-wing media tells us to stop criticizing Washington. Cheap shots and knee-jerk reactions to Washington do not help. I agree. But, shall we stop telling the truth? Were the junta, the partition of Cyprus, and recognition of Macedonia cheap shots? Shall we put ‘our tails between our legs’ and ‘kiss and make nice’ because Washington ‘recognized’ Greek independence day or some official gave a speech about the ‘greatness’ of ancient Greece or Alexander the Great? I will stop criticizing and ‘make nice’ when what was done is undone. But, I am not holding my breath.

George Gregoriou, Pol. Sci. Dept., Professor, Critical Theory and Geopolitics
The Wm Paterson University, Wayne, NJ 07470