Wednesday 1 December 2010

Religion? Shit it.

Forgive me quoting a sweary Stephen Fry as a title, but I saw something on the Beeb last night that made me incandescent with rage at the cruelty of religious dogma. A programme called 'Limbo Babies' related the experiences of a group of Catholic women in Northern Ireland the mid/late 20th century who'd given birth to dead babies. Traumatic, straight away. Worsened, considerably, by the fact that those babies were taken from their mothers literally immediately and buried in a swamp in unconsecrated ground next to their church graveyard. The reason? Unbaptised. Therefore not allowed in a Catholic graveyard.

The suffering of these poor women of losing a child, something unimaginably horrible and traumatic to anybody but those who've experienced it, was made much worse by this insult to their children's memories. The Catholic faith carries with it the concept of Original Sin. We're born with this, and only baptism can eradicate it. If you're not baptised, you can't get into Heaven, and that's it. If you die unbaptised and you've led the life of a saint, or too brief a life to have committed sin in the first place, you go to a place called Limbo. Forever.

Though the Church's position has supposedly softened on this since these outrages, of which more in a moment, at the time this was an absolute position. One woman, clearly still desperately upset about the loss of her child 50 years on, related how, on asking the priest why she couldn't have her baby buried alongside her grandparents, said, "I spoke to the priest, and he said, 'You couldn't have had that anyway, because the baby wasn't baptized. And she'll be in Limbo now, until the end of time.' " A priest, a man supposed to bring the comfort and love of the Church to people, said that to a woman who had, just days before, lost her child.

I don't suppose it helps of course that the Catholic clergy is entirely populated by men, so there's not a single member of it, from the Pope himself to the newest inductee, who could possibly even begin to relate to the suffering of a mother who's lost her child. But this cruelty, this twisting of a knife into a mother's already suffering heart, beggars belief.

Despite their Church telling them otherwise, some of the women displayed a much more thorough understanding of what a faith should, I think, if you're to have one, be all about. A woman, frail and elderly now but still crying for her child of almost 70 years ago, said, "He shouldn't be in that ground. What did the wee baby do? Nothing. Nothing. They're all innocent, and not only mine, like. All of them that was buried there." She clearly understands the reality of sin far better than her Church.

It made me glad, once again, of my atheism. Somehow, despite its supposed role in life, the Church had found a way to make atheism look like the more comforting belief. These women suffered so profoundly already. Losing a child and then wracked by guilt, they genuinely believed that their children were in Limbo. Had they been atheists, at least they'd have been spared that further agony.

I mentioned earlier that the Catholic Church had softened its position somewhat in what should be more enlightened times now. This, for example, from the International Theological Commission in 2007: "We may hope for the salvation of the children who have died without baptism. The reasons for that hope are very great indeed." While better than the absolutist brutalism that the mums were faced with during their youth, this is basically a fudge. They can't back too far away from the basic concept of Original Sin completely because it's too far entrenched in the Catholic belief system, as this very modern quote from a Catholic priest on the same programme demonstrates: "Baptism was necessary because humanity had fallen away from God. There was the fall, we often speak about Original Sin. And everybody was born with Original Sin, baptism corrects that, and baptism then becomes the gateway to everlasting life, and the vision of God."

So all they can basically do is 'hope' that, in the face of that all too human dogma, some leeway is allowed by the man upstairs. I only hope that these poor women eventually find comfort. After a long campaign by some of the mothers, and siblings who never got to meet their brothers or sisters, the ground in which their children were dumped, (literally unceremoniously, having been denied even the sacrament) has been re-consecrated so they can draw some succour from that. But unless the Church changes its position on one of the most fundamental tenets of Catholicism, they'll go to their own graves believing their children are in Limbo.

Like I said. Religion? Shit it.

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