The PC prejudice

How does the Grauniad's Giles Fraser top his 'evangelicals are Nazis' piece? Easy - this time it's 'evangelicals are child-abusers'.

The evidence is of the standard we've come to expect. A couple have set themselves up as a 'ministry' advocating corporal punishment, and there has been one case of a mother using their views to rationalize her sadism. Obviously a fully representative sample of 30 million American conservative evangelicals. You can just imagine our Seumas commissioning a piece like this on Muslims, can't you?

Once again, I hold no brief for the happy clappies, being more of a bells and smells man myself. I do, however, have some knowledge gleaned from close quarters of the loving concern which evangelical parents can lavish on their children. So when it comes to newspapers tickling their readers' pet prejudices, I really can't see much to choose between the Grauniad and the Daily Mail.

Nazis, happy clappies and the chaplain to the Grauniad

If you had the job of picking a tame vicar for the Grauniad, you really couldn't improve on Giles Fraser. And here he is excelling by his own high standards...

'Over the past few months there has been growing evidence of a developing alliance between the British National party and fundamentalist evangelicals.'

Well, I don't think much of conservative evangelicals' theology, and I quite understand that Dr Fraser is aggrieved by their attitude to his sexuality. But if he's going to go around effectively calling people Nazis, he really ought to have a bit of evidence.

And what, in fact, is the story here? Apparently as follows. BNP sets up 'Christian' front organization. Grand total of persons in dog collars signing up: one. Collapse of BNP stunt. Good news for everyone who agrees that the BNP stinks.

So what is ostensibly a story about other people's bigotry turns out to be a revelation of Dr Fraser's own bigotry. He can produce no evidence of any Christian organization, evangelical or otherwise, or even any significant number of individual Christians, responding to BNP overtures. But he evidently dislikes evangelicals so much that he is happy to smear them with a crude exercise in guilt-by-association.

And what is one of the unappealing characteristics that the Nazis and the happy clappies have in common? Love of publicity, says the retiring Dr Fraser. To resort to an already overused phrase, you couldn't make it up. Any more than you could his magnificently patronizing tone here:-

Rarely have I been as proud of churchgoers as I was of those wonderful old dears who would shuffle along to mass, clutching their Bibles, in open defiance of the skinheads.

But that's enough, or I might start getting personal.

The Pope and gay priests

What's come over the Grauniad? You'd expect the Vatican document to be a red rag to a bull, producing a reaction like this. This is also predictable stuff. But then there's this. Praise the Lord!

How simple does it have to be made? The Roman Catholic Church has a celibate priesthood. If you don't like it, find yourself another job or another church. There has been a problem with men entering the priesthood believing celibate is just for straights. There has been an extremely expensive and damaging problem with some of these men believing it doesn't apply to them even if they fancy one of the altar boys. That's why there's a document. No hidden agendas. Just the need for the Church to restore a basic level of credibility.

This is the Word of the errh...

Changing the subject completely, Mr Grumpy read one of the lessons in church on Sunday. This is a verse from it:-

'As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day.' (Ezekiel 34:12)

But not quite, because we have long since ditched the sublime King James Version. Here's what we got in the New Reviled Standard Version:-

'As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.'

Leaving aside the literary merits of the changes, why has the shepherd gone forth and multiplied? You're there before me, but just in case you need a hint, here's an extract from the preface to the New Despised Standard Version, by Bruce M. Metzger on behalf of the Committee of translators:-

'The mandates from the Division [of Education and Ministry of the National Council of Churches of Christ] specified that, in references to men and women, masculine-oriented language should be eliminated as far as this can be done without altering passages that reflect the historical situation of ancient patriarchal culture. As can be appreciated, the Committee found that the several mandates stood in tension and even in conflict.'

Which is being interpreted, we wanted to translate accurately but we were told we had to be PC.

The high point of this idiocy is reached in the story of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, where the quote from Psalm 118 with which the crowds hail Jesus is no longer 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord' (as it still is in the liturgy - how much longer?) but 'Blessed is the one...' (see Matthew 21:9 and Mark 11:9). In Luke's version (ch. 19:38) we still have 'Blessed is the king who comes..'. Doubtless we must await the next revision to see this corrected to 'monarch'.

By the way, Grumpy re-singularized the shepherd, and hasn't had any complaints so far.

Habemus Papam

A word about the new Pope. Mr Grumpy is not a Roman Catholic, let alone a cardinal, and if he was a cardinal it is distinctly unlikely that he would have cast his vote for Joseph Ratzinger. But does he really deserve the blanket hostility he got from British press over the weekend of his inauguration? A trawl of the “serious” papers produced the following.

One paper is portraying him as trying to encourage a schism in the Anglican Communion – on the basis of no evidence whatsoever apart from the claim by a leader of a breakaway group of traditionalist Anglicans that he has talked to the then Cardinal Ratzinger.

A second paper is accusing him of trying to cover up a child sex scandal. Now of course such matters should be taken very seriously. But there appears not to be the slightest evidence that he condones priests abusing children. The issue seems at most to be whether he showed bad judgment in attempting to retain the Church’s jurisdiction over a particular case. It’s interesting to note, incidentally, how many liberal journalists simultaneously believe (a) if a woman chooses to have an abortion it’s nobody’s business but her own, and (b) if a priest touches up a choirboy it’s their business and everybody else’s.

Meanwhile a third paper is splitting hairs over the exact date in 1945 on which the Pope deserted from the Wehrmacht. For heaven’s sake, he had just turned eighteen, and had lived under the Nazi terror since he was six.

Mr G would now like to reveal exclusively that the Pope’s favourite hobby is clubbing baby seals (sorry, bad taste, but really...)