Official Vatican letter pushing priests to not report child abuse

The Guardian reports that there is now evidence that the Vatican took affirmative steps to conceal child abuse and prevent police involvement…

A letter to Ireland’s Roman Catholic bishops has been revealed by the broadcaster RTE that contradicts the Vatican’s frequent claim it has never instructed clergy to withhold evidence or suspicion of child abuse from police.

The letter was signed by Luciano Storero, an archbishop and the Pope’s intermediary to Ireland. The article goes on to say:

Storero wrote that canon law, whereby allegations and punishments are handled within the church, “must be meticulously followed”; any bishop who tried to go outside canon law would face the “highly embarrassing” position of being overturned on appeal in Rome.

From The Guardian

Pope John Paul to be beatified

The Vatican is set to beatify the former pope John Paul this Spring. For those who do not know what it is to beatify someone, dictionary.com defines it as:

Roman Catholic Church. to declare (a deceased person) to be among the blessed and thus entitled to specific religious honor.

What are the grounds for honoring the former Pope? The claim is that Pope John Paul performed a miracle by healing a nun who was praying to him and subsequently was cured of Parkinson’s disease. The procedure typically requires a 5 year waiting period but the current Pope waived that delay. One more miracle to go and John Paul is going to be canonized and become a saint.

Further Reading:

NY Times

Sam Harris appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Last night, Sam Harris made an appearance on The Daily Show. He was mainly there to pitch his new book The Moral Landscape. Harris describes his new book as a way for science to look at moral questions, ultimately asserting that it is a myth that science and morality are distinct, separate, and incapable of unification. Harris is well known for his other works, perhaps most famously, Letter to a Christian Nation.

It is good to see more atheists on his show because Jon Stewart has been notoriously over sympathetic to religious claims in the past. One example of this is when Marilynne Robinson appeared on his show and he made the statement: “I’ve always been fascinated that the more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith.”

The scientific community typically refutes the idea that morality comes from science. This is especially because religious people often (especially Creationists) say that morality does come from science, and that it is evil. The claim is that, for example, Darwinism leads to social Darwinism, which leads to eugenics, which leads to an elite mutant class that eats Christians. Instead, Harris takes the view that science should stop claiming that we do not or cannot receive morals from science, but rather that science can provide a more objective standard for morality. Harris, in his interview, and certainly in his book, elaborates further on some of the ways science could go about determining a common morality. You can watch the entire interview here.

Catholic Church’s stance on birth control mostly ignored

90% of American women have used some sort of birth control method, and under 5% of Catholics use birth control methods accepted by the Church. The Church supports such methods as the ‘rhythm method,’ in which the couple estimates the fertile period of the woman’s cycle and abstains from sex during this time period. Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, says that “Priests don’t even preach against [methods of birth control] any more.” It seems that many people recognize the fallibility of the Church and, to some extent, use their own discretion with some decisions. But if the Church is not divine authority, what is the point of it? It is a relief that people ignore the rules of the Church in instances like these, but this issue reminds me of Dennett’s concept of ‘belief in belief.’ At the very least, people mostly view religious dogma as malleable and dynamic; we thankfully do not kill people for not listening to priests, adultery, homosexuality, or a myriad of other reasons described in the Bible.

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