Atheist Age

Godzone Australian Idol

When we last left Mary MacKillop, an Irish family felt their sons improved health was due to her intercession.  We still wish David Keohanes family all the best in their private endeavour. Check out the post for some background information into the woman set to become the first Aussie Saint sometime [perhaps April] in 2010, and crucial documents updated by John Paul II.

The Vatican have now announced formal recognition of Mackillops “second miracle” in curing a womans cancer. Note that Saints aren’t so much “made” as recognised by The Pope, under Vatican law. I realise this is a stretch given Pope John Paul II’s almost febrile Saint Factory approach. He beatified 1300 and canonised 500 whilst less than 100 canonisations covered the previous century.

Last time, we looked into the history of Sainthood and the fact that The Holy See only engaged with the practice in 993 and took full control over beatification and canonisation in 1153.

This may seem like pure opportunism on the Vatican’s part but it’s more likely that the genuine aim was to ensure canonisation of known rogues, sinners and 12th century versions of Tiger Woods might be curtailed – and thus controlled. The integrity of this control was very much a function of individual Popes and history reveals morality to be more than ambiguous in perhaps the worlds most revered religious office. Pope John XXIII who died in 1963 was the last to use full papal rights and ceremony, expunging historically suspect saints, including St. Christopher, from the canon of saints.

Today, it is rather sad that a tough Aussie woman skilled in manipulating the misogynistic and overarching control arising from Rome, reversing her excommunication within a year, is kept tightly wrapped in her Habit – frozen in youthful time much like a New Idea photoshopped model. The other simply unacceptable trick John Paul II pulled was to remove advocatus diaboli from the process of recognising Sainthood.

Whilst the hoax perpetrated by Teresa at the Vaticans urging is now well known, abolishing Devils Advocate – the very input of which ensures Saintly integrity – also blocked what would have defined Teresa for ever – trolleys of documents proving her theft and embezzlement. Teresa’s 30 years of confessed atheism, carefully outlined in her own letters to the Vatican, only reinforces the selective corruption of the canonisation process.

Thus all in all, this recognition of an Aussie heroine is great for believers, great for business. But quite ridiculous and demeaning for Secular Australia in an age of reason, humanity and an absence of magic – miraculous or not.

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Even in most secular conditions people will seek out the presence of the infinite, writes Guy Rundle author of Godzone.

© Fairfax:

WHEN Mary MacKillop was born in the dusty streets of Newtown, Melbourne – before it became Fitzroy – Brunswick Street was lined with villas, now long vanished. Grand buildings, they were set back from the road to guard against the miasma – the mysterious substance believed to be the cause of disease and borne in the dust. Scientists investigating the nature of light posited an invisible substance known as the ”aether” through which it moved (how else could a wave move?) and devised experiments to measure it.

Humans and animals were seen as separate orders. It was a world of mysterious forces, slowly emerging into the atomised, analytical word of modern science. Matthew Arnold was yet to hear ”the long withdrawing roar” of the tide – and his faith – on Dover Beach, its sad scrape echoing all the way into the neo-atheist movement of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins today.

Over the decades in which MacKillop received her call from God and built the Order of St Joseph, the idea of that someone might be not merely a good and selfless person, but what one might call ”a piece of God”, a manifestation of His presence, changed utterly. It went from being part of the general furniture to being a quite distinct and separate idea; belief in it, and in the possibility of miracles, a test of faith against a materialist and increasingly godless world.

One response – John XXIII’s modernisation through Vatican II – was seen by many conservatives as dissolving the church altogether. So John Paul II tried something else – a reconstruction of the church as a genuinely global entity, with a broader idea of acceptable rituals, ceaseless personal touring, and the manufacture of new saints on an industrial scale. Where John XXIII had ruthlessly cast from the canon dozens of saints whose historical existence could not be proved – sparing not even St Christopher – John Paul II turned Rome into a just-in-time saints roll-out warehouse, canonising 500, beatifying 1300 (the pre-sainthood stage), compared to fewer than a 100 canonisations for the entire 20th century.

With his rockstar-like tours, his meetings with the likes of Bono and his supercharged saints, JP2.0 was challenging the secular cult of celebrity on its own turf. Since celebrity culture with its sense of auratic specialness is really a borrowing from saintliness, one could see it as taking back something they already owned.

Crucial to this process was ”reforming” (i.e. nobbling) the office of advocatus diaboli, the devil’s advocate, whose job hitherto was to disprove the would-be saint’s credentials – to find bad conduct in a life held to be stainless, to explain the two miracles attributed to her or him in material terms, and so on. But in removing any genuinely adversarial power by advocatus diaboli, the reverse of John Paul’s idea has occurred – saints have become part of the celebrity cult, not vice versa.

That strategy has brought dividends, but any attempt to use the profane methods of everyday life to reinvigorate the sacred is fraught with risk, chief among them that every smooth operator comes along to grab a piece. Mary MacKillop is no exception, now being enrolled into the new ”progressive patriotism” as a truly Australian saint, often by people like Jesuit priest Peter Norden who ought to know better. For if the idea of a saint has any real meaning, it has to be someone who, while working in the world, is separate to it, and free of any particular loyalties, even to the Church Militant on earth – not a bit of spiritual branding.

Even the Order of St Joseph seems to be in on the act, quietly retiring photos of Mary as an old woman and replacing them with a line drawing of one damn sexy young nun, with the full lips of an Angelina Jolie and the promising smile of Kendra from MTV’s Girls of the Playboy Mansion. You have to be very pure of heart to believe that this process cannot be ultimately self-defeating.

Indeed, much of the agenda set by John Paul II, the manic saint-making and ”got the T-shirt” tours, is an enormous wager – a huge bet that the hypermodern world we inhabit, in which every aspect of our lives is interpenetrated by science, will prove not the death of revealed religion, but its rebirth. As the world becomes more empty, devoid of mystery, depth and texture, and as Marxism, the one humanist movement to promise a transcendence of such, fades into historical memory, people are turning back towards religious ways of thinking, often fusing them with patriotism, in their search for a ground for life’s meaning.

Thus the church is no longer shy about the required miracles, knowing that a world with ”psychics” hanging out their shingle in every shopping centre, and The Secret topping the best-seller lists, supernatural explanations are more popular than ever before. As the world disappears down the Twitterfeed, and in the swirling particles of the Large Hadron Collider, people reach for anything that will put it, and themselves, back together.

Those who believe that such religions are ultimately a regression, and a refusal to stare the joys and terrors of human freedom square in the face, need to better understand the reason why such a bizarre process as canonisation can re-enter the world as a rational activity, and the degree to which the self-defeating neo-atheist movement of people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins – the most shatteringly empty creed to come along for many a year – has been of God’s party without knowing it.

Even among the bars and cafes of Brunswick Street, people will still seek out the presence of the infinite, something that takes us beyond our given conditions, and a fallen world. If their belief in miracles offends you, better to show them a better world on earth than to deny that one is even possible.

• Source: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/australian-idol-20091219-l6ke.html

Tags: Christianity, Faith Healing, MacKillop, Miracle, Morality, Myth, Sainthood