There Will Be Blood ~ the truth about spiritual abuse

I began this blog-piece in response to an apologist piece on the ABC's religious news page which claimed that the scale of the Catholic Church's paedophilia scandal led to the inevitable conclusion that it was suffering from 'institutional atheism'. That churchmen 'were behaving as if God did not exist'. 

While this is clearly an insult to atheists everywhere, it's also a complete misunderstanding of the dynamics at play here. The Church is not just any organisation. Its purpose and premise demand that we look deeper and consider the Church on its own ground. We have to ask, what exactly is it at the core of the Church's evil, and in the light of the global revelations of decades of violent abuse, it can only be evil, says about that edifice?

The unspoken issue so far in the Church's response to the exposure of entrenched and systemic paedophilia, and the endless revelations of decades of physical and emotional abuse of those in its care, is the spiritual cost. The damage to souls that are the Church's ultimate pastoral responsibility. Allow me to explain.

The fundamental spiritual significance of the death and resurrection of Christ has three main elements:

 # 1. The end of the Blood Rite as the primary spiritual technology.

 # 2. The cultural shift to the Mediated Rite - the symbolic sacrifice of the Mass.

 # 3. The triumph of the human soul over the death of the body. Christ's incarnate soul becoming 'excarnate' at his death on the cross, and incarnate again before the opening of the tomb around 36 hours later (proving the immortality of the soul, and it's primacy over the body as the 'essential self' of the human experience).

It's the first of these that's spiritually significant in terms of paedophilia and the systematic abuse of the weak and victimised within the Church. 

The Blood Rite was the original form of guaranteed connection with the 'next world' and the world of the Gods. In essence it works like this. When a ritual death is enacted, when the Winter King, or the Chosen One is formally and ritually murdered the Soul leaves the body and makes its way to the next world.
Originally this meant a human sacrifice, later an animal victim.

When this ritual slaughter happens, a hole, a gateway, is opened between that world and this, and the skilled magical practitioner (a.k.a priest) can put his hand through that opening, bringing things from that world to this, or sending messages from this world to that.

This can mean bringing divine knowledge, wisdom or truth from the Gods to earth, which is the basis for all ancient religion's use of augury, reading the future from the entrails of a sacrificed animal. Or it can mean sending prayers, spells, or requests for assistance to the Gods in a way they cannot ignore. 

Either way, ripping a soul from a body is a powerful magical tool; the ultimate mechanism for powerful magic. The awful shock to the soul of a bloody and painful death to a conscious victim causes a trauma that can't be beat for ripping open a connection with the spirit world.

OK, I hear you say, that's weird, and possibly nauseating, but so what? What has it got to do with abuse in the Church? Let me explain.

The Blood Rite still works. When Christ invented the symbolic sacrifice of the Mass, and went on to sacrifice himself as a final act of atonement for the whole human race it became unnecessary to kill anything to connect with the Gods. But it didn't in any way eradicate or de-power the Blood Rite as an effective magical tool. It may be old technology, but it still works.

In the New World thousands were slaughtered in Mayan blood rituals as recently as the 15th century. In the Western Magical Tradition variations on the blood rite are still a guarantee of at least partial success (if you know what you're doing). And it still follows the principle that the more conscious the creature that you kill the more powerful and effective the spell. Human sacrifice will still be more effective than animal sacrifice as a human being is more conscious of the painful progress and ultimate end of ritual murder than an animal.*

But human sacrifice is messy, and of course illegal. And there's always the problem of what to do with the body. But there is an alternative. A way of causing a trauma to the soul that can open up that rift, that can allow the skilled and unprincipled magical practitioner to re-use the same victim again and again. And that's the ritual abuse of an innocent.

If you ritually rape a child you cause the kind of psychic and spiritual damage that can achieve the same magical effect as a ritual murder. Only, generally speaking, the life force in a child is powerful enough to keep the child alive and more or less functioning afterward. The same energy that gives children the ability to heal rapidly when injured can help the child 'recover' mentally, with memory growing a scab over the wound and burying the damage deep within. It may mean the child becomes more peculiar or eccentric. It probably means that they will become prey to depression, despair and mental illness as they grow older, if they survive that long. It certainly means that they will be only too vulnerable to the predatory behaviour of other paedophiles, rapists and opportunist bastards that our society has in abundance.

And yes, this is what's known as Black Magic.

This is what Black Magic looks like. Some magical practitioners will tell you that there's no black or white magic, it's just a spiritual technology. Which is true enough ~ for a given value of 'truth' at least: Magic doesn't kill people, people kill people. But it's this 'no good, no bad, just energy' Manichean view that gets a lot of magical neophytes/cult fodder into trouble in the first place. Spiritual subjection in a cult causes the same type of damage to the soul, if more slowly and rarely to the same extent. In a cult it's usually a parasitic rather than predatory form of spiritual abuse, based on domination and slow spiritual degradation. But the spiritual mechanics, the metaphysics, are the same.

And it's this same principle that's the spiritual elephant in the room in the abuse of children by priests. The damage they do isn't just physical and psychological, it's spiritual. Clerical child abuse is profoundly spiritually destructive. And it has never been raised in any discussion or analysis of the problem or the Church's response to it that I've come across.

Do the priests involved understand this spiritual issue? Do their bishops? Is it a conscious part of what they do to children? Is their predatory behaviour spiritually sharpened? Are they consciously performing a twisted form of sacrifice when they abuse children? These are, after all, men for whom the spiritual is their raison d'être.  Can they really do what they do in ignorance of its darker spiritual aspects? And does the Church hierarchy understand the implications? 

From my own experience I know of one case in particular that may illuminate. A child who had been a victim of the kind of 'black magic' ritual abuse I describe above spoke about it in confession. That priest took advantage of that information. Among the vile things he did was to rape the child in an empty Church while reciting the Lord's Prayer. With particularly heavy emphasis on the 'forgive us our trespasses' part. So there was at least an awareness of the risk to his own soul, if no concern for the child's soul, which was presumably already the plaything of the Devil. 

In the late 1990s the Vatican sent a Cardinal around the world to collect testimony from victims of clerical child abuse. This victim described in detail what had occurred. I find it almost impossible to believe that the spiritual implications weren't fully understood by a Prince of the Church. So the Church knows, or should know. 

Yet not a word is ever said. No compassion ever evident. No openness about what such spiritual corruption, such outright heresy has done to the Church, if not just to its victims. Only a closing of ranks around men who have perverted not just the social standing of the Church but seriously compromised its spiritual core. If the Church stands for anything it stands on the purity of its spiritual connection to the Godhead. Without it there is nothing but a shabby collection of men with a liking for power, baubles and dressing up.

And on the basis of the evidence, the endless global outpouring of cruelties, predatory abuse, and deliberate and callous brutalising of the innocent,  this monstrous spiritual cess-pit is not, cannot possibly be the workings of a compassionate loving God. 

And if not God, then whom?

'Institutional atheism' is a ludicrous conceit. 

I'm sure we can find a more precise definition. 

.o0o.

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* To intensify the shock and trauma involved the black magician Aleister Crowley recommended torturing the chosen animal to increase its fear and suffering before the final killing.

 

Cardinal Pell 3, Royal Commission 0.

 

In the last few days we've been treated to an extraordinary display of an ancient and very specific skill. There's a specific word for it, and that's casuistry. Casuistry is a form of bloody-minded reasoning and hair-splitting argument that dates back to ancient Sumeria, at least three centuries before the Code of Hammurabi, usually considered the world's first set of workable laws.

It reached the peak of its 'modern' form in the period 1550 - 1650 with the Jesuits, the Catholic organisation that used case based reasoning and a certain moral flexibility to argue any case, black or white, in support of the Catholic Church's position outside the laws of civil society. It was a triumph of rhetoric over truth, of skilful argument in a given situation over the broader truths the Church and churchmen were meant to express and embody.

The primary purpose of casuistry is to appear to answer specific questions honestly while using terms which prevent any moral responsibility, or personal immoral act from ever coming to rest in the hands of the priest under questioning. The key to this is simple. Keep all answers related to the specifics, while making it almost impossible for those specific answers to be connected to any moral compass, or higher values that should guide a 'righteous' man.

It allows a specific group of men, Catholic priests, to engage in situational ethics, a form of moral slipperiness that their supposed Christian morality should consider repugnant. While clinging to the social respectability of 'holy' men, men of righteousness and faith, these priests use rhetorical and linguistic devices to avoid being pinned down by anyone with lesser skill. That this is hypocrisy, dishonest and self-serving hypocrisy, is never firmly established at the time and place of the contest. And while priests will use canon law, the Church's private code of laws, to hide behind, they claim the props of civil law, ie: the presumption of innocence and the demand of those opposing to prove beyond doubt their charges, to place their opponents (who are 'enemies' of the Church) at a disadvantage.

Over time it became so notorious in its ability to justify mass burnings under the Inquisition, righteous slaughter in South America, and financial, moral and sexual corruption within the Church hierarchy that the term became a pejorative, a term of moral disgust at the use of intellect to avoid responsibility for any crime by any priest, in any place, at any time. And it does so today, at the public hearings of the Royal Commission into Child Abuse, in the guise of Cardinal George Pell.

Those who have followed this blog over time will know I've written about Pell's skill, hypocrisy, slipperiness and situational morality with some asperity before now. Frankly, I loathe the man. But you have to give the devil his due. As a casuist he is probably this country's finest. And the counsel questioning him today was, frankly, lousy at picking apart his obfuscations, claims of injured innocence, and personal presumption of purity of intent. She was outclassed. So much so that a woman in the public gallery was heard to say, with a tone of both grudging respect and disgust,

"He'll do well in Rome."

Just so.

At one point the Cardinal said that while he was 'guided by compassion it had to be tempered with justice'. The counsel questioning him was clearly knocked off her stride by this astounding claim, and sadly, never really regained it. Pell was calling on these two sacred principles as the pillars of his actions, his decision to fight in court the case for compensation of Mr Ellis, the victim of abuse, while feeling a brand of compassion for him that involved no effort or action on Pell's behalf. None whatsoever.

Had the QC been a little quicker on her feet she might have questioned Pell's decision to accompany self-confessed paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale to court to give him moral support when receiving his first sentence. An act of compassion (for a man so notorious he has his own WIkipedia page) tempered with a bizarre notion of justice indeed, when Pell was simultaneously doing absolutely nothing to meet the needs of that priest's victims. Whose needs and concerns he would fight to deny, diminish and repudiate as he advanced up the clerical food chain.

But, alas, she was not. And the moment was lost.

Questioning will resume tomorrow.

In a week or two Cardinal Pell will leave us far behind, and kick the dust of Australia off his sandals. He will take up his new role as guardian of the Church's notoriously corrupt finances. His skill in casuistry will serve him well. If he uncovers a scandal he'll be well equipped to justify to himself and the Vatican that such a scandal can only hurt the church, and should therefore be buried. And if it blows up in his face he'll be far too clever to be found responsible in any specific, legally binding way.

Whatever his future holds we can be sure of one thing. 

He is doing this country a great service by leaving it.

 Cardinal Pell, the Great Casuist

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Something Spiritual for Christmas?

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Or, why our Immigration Policy is
The Hand Of God Moving in Mysterious Ways.

I have a new IPad app that lets me listen to British radio stations (oh yes, the thrill of it all!) and I recently caught the tail end of a conversation with an Anglican Bishop who was bemoaning the decline in Church attendance. He made the following comment:

"The Evangelical movement has failed as a reform movement within the Church."

I was amazed he had ever thought it could be one, when, to paraphrase my youngest daughter, it could best be described as "petri-dish mysticism" [i]. So, lest I be damned at Christmas, let me explain: First, churches operate at two levels:

1.     The communal and religious: the human urge to come together and sing uplifting songs, hear the word of their God expounded, and unite in worship and that warm feeling of virtue and connectedness. Enjoying communion - being part of a spiritual community.

2.     The individual and spiritual, or mysticism: an individual and direct personal spiritual connection to God, the Godhead, the Universal Soul (or whatever term works for you).

The first is the visible part of the church: the people it includes and all the charitable, generous, open-hearted and 'inspired' works they do. Which is the part of most Christian churches that's dwindling just as fast as their congregations are aging and dying.

The second is the personal spiritual connection that's always been distrusted and tightly controlled by Christian churches. Known as mysticism, it's about personally penetrating the 'cloud of unknowing' to reach and connect with the ineffable mystery of God. And that's why the Evangelical movement in Catholic and Protestant churches is a problem: it's a hybrid form of communal mysticism. All that speaking in tongues and spiritual healing and what looks uncomfortably like mass hysteria is the spirit of Christ, or the Holy Spirit, or whatever you want to call it, reaching down and overwhelming the faithful with bliss and rapture. It's a group orgasm of the spirit.

And if you think this doesn't have anything to do with you let me remind you that our Immigration Minister, Scott Morrison is a very senior Evangelical. His faith guides him, and therefore his attitudes and actions. And this is where the 'petri-dish mysticism' comes in. There are four levels or stages of transcendent experience involved in mysticism. They are:

1.     Bliss, or rapture.

2.     Illumination - the enlightenment bit, where you get new insights and a little humility.

3.     Exstasis, the separation of the soul from the body, and:

4.     Merging with the infinite, the Universal Soul, or God.

The problem is that Evangelicals aren't reaching beyond the first level. The 12th century Christian mystic and Augustinian monk Richard of St Victor described it thus:

"In the first degree spiritual feeling sweeter than honey
enters into her soul and inebriates her with its sweetness.."

That inebriation, being spiritually drunk (on the Holy Spirit), is what Evangelical services offer. Mass drunkenness, without alcohol. A cathartic emotional release which can wash away guilt and pain and regret without the understanding, insight or reflection of personal mediation or prayer. When people break out into babbling and gibberish it isn't a sign of over stimulation, mental intoxication and emotional overload it's a sign of holiness, of purity, of God's acceptance of who you are, with all your faults. And there's the rub. If this emotional and spiritual hot-tub washes only God's chosen vessels then we are, by definition, absolutely worthy, upright and deserving, true and correct in all our opinions and beliefs.

The Catholic and other traditional churches' long-held suspicion of this 'rapturous connection' is based on a genuine spiritual concern. People who are in this state of spiritual and emotional openness are enormously suggestible. And there's plenty of charismatic individuals in any generation willing to allow themselves to be first adored, then worshipped as beyond ordinary conceptions of morality, then obeyed to the letter in any despicable act or impulse. Cult leaders from Jim Jones to Charles Manson are notable examples of rapture followed by bloodshed. And while the Church may debate the degree of demonic influence involved the results here on earth are still bloody, appalling and socially destructive. 

Defensiveness, cults and reactionary politics

And it's not just religious cults that feed on this emotional and spiritual orgasm. When historian Robert Waite described Hitler as the 'Psychopathic God' this process is exactly what he had in mind; the cynical and systematic manipulation of people's emotional states to prey on their religious needs and instincts. The cult of personality around Lenin or Mao are similar extremes, but you can see the same fervour at an Obama rally, or in the cult of personality around Ronald Reagan among the conservative 'faithful'. People in groups will quickly connect and hype each other up emotionally, but intellectual processing drops to the lowest common denominator just as quickly. There is no need, or use, or room for intellect, discernment or logic. Just the rush, and the obedience of the herd.

That rapture, for the solitary individual praying or meditating is a sign that you're becoming spiritually open and emotionally responsive. It's there to motivate you to engage in the hard work of reflecting on yourself and your place in the world. On honestly seeing yourself in a broader context, which should produce humility. 

Instead Evangelical Churches favour an anti-intellectual Biblical literalism whose status as 'the absolute truth' is directly proportional to the fevered fervour of their emotional and spiritual experience. Which is the greatest, most powerful experience of their lives.  So there are no questions which can't be answered by their 2000 year old book of fables, myths, eye-for-an-eye morality, xenophobia, selective editing and obscure metaphysics. 

The head-shaking and derision this elicits from the rest of us does not make them feel loved. It only serves to amplify their self-imposed cultish isolation. And with all cults isolation breeds defensiveness, suspicion and a pseudo-martyr complex. God knows, they know they're right (about everything no matter how ridiculously uninformed they may be). They have God's miracle of orgasmic spiritual fever to prove it. 

This is the mindset that inspires reactionary politics: suspicion of outsiders, possession of a Holy Truth that others lampoon, direct authority from God for their opinions, no matter how small, or petty or cruel, or selfish, or self-serving or .. well, you get the drift. And when they get the power to punish others for their temerity in questioning God's chosen people.. well, watch out, Buddy.

I once worked with an Evangelical Catholic and his most prominent trait was an astonishing level of spiritual arrogance. He truly believed he was 'chosen of God' if not chosen by God. He was, unsurprisingly, reactionary and conservative, and he closely identified with the authority structure of the organisation, becoming progressively more humourless and authoritarian the longer he held any organisational power over others. He went from being regarded with amused condescension, to mockery, to animus, to fear and eventually outright hatred for his punitive, bullying manner and acts of spite and petty revenge.

The 'holier than thou' reactionary politics of Evangelical Christians is consistent with history's worst religious excesses. Pogroms, massacres, jihads and crusades all stem from religious fervour and fear. Fear which morphs into hate, and hate which generates violence. 

The cumulative weight of micro-aggressions targeted at refugees and other outsiders makes our society uglier and more hateful. It isn't just the 'boat people' who suffer. We all do when they arrive here damaged and in pain, embittered by their treatment, angry and resentful. And while Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott may keep them from staying here we will all still have to live in a society with new norms of behaviour that are progressively more hate-filled, mean-spirited and extreme, less tolerant of difference and diversity, more abusive, authoritarian and violent. 

And no God worth a good goddamn could be pleased with that.

And A Merry Christmas to You All.

PS: If anyone would like to engage me upon the rest of the four levels of transcendent whotsit, mine's a very large rum.

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[i] An acerbic and insightful young lady, she once memorably described the idea that pole-dancing empowered women through physical mastery as 'petri-dish feminism'.