Shared a meal with, among others, a priest. He was (I think) recently ordained, had joined a parish where he had moderate duties, while he was pursuing further studies. I am an atheist, ex-catholic, and was among catholics. I mostly listened, so expect a dump of catholic zeitgeist. A shame I didn't make an effort to be more outspoken as I represented a wholly different viewpoint. I got interrupted and non-sequitured a few times while we were still on neutral topics, got the cheap satisfaction of putting the priest in the assholeish column and, because I care more knowing I'm right than having it acknowledged, left it at that. No, that attitude won't get me far.
A major theme was the feeling of being threatened. Abortion, Edvige, politics in general, were all seen in that light.
His studies involve canon law (now a mere historical curiosity, I should hope), as well as parts of regular law the church interacts with. I learned about chaplains in prisons; he isn't one, but the legal/administrative angle is interesting anyway. Remember we have a strict separation of church and state, and prisons are the state's responsibility. The state gets bishops to vouch for chaplains, with a similar hierarchy operating for the protestant, the orthodox, the jewish, etc. (Also it gives them paperwork. Heh.) The point of it is that chaplains should be providing moral support, not proselytizing. The recently created (2003 or so) muslim council has appointing imam chaplains as part of its mandate. There are very few of them. Priest then took the opportunity to point out that muslims were well represented within prison population; accurate but rather dickish, one should further point out that they lack political representation and opportunities, so the blame doesn't stop at them. He then pointed out that islam was, unlike catholicism, more high-maintainance, with food preparation and fixed-hour prayers in the right direction with the right clothes (I doubt that last one, I don't think too many religions would make prayer conditional on dress code (oh wait, they aren't rational. Still, only literalists take the book of Leviticus seriously)). Ranting about islam being too special snowflake earned him another asshole point. His general point that freedom of religion is hard in a place where freedom is limited is valid. However, this particular religion is prominent enough that it should be accommodated. When someone hinted that justice could be about not just punishment but also rehabilitation (and religion could be helpful in the latter), he failed to take the hint and said prisons were overcrowded anyway. So apparently he doesn't have that particular vocation. There's a line somewhere in new testament about what one does to prisoners and the humblest being done to Jesus; oh well.
On edvige, a recent decree that tries to get blanket permission for the secret service to keep files on people connected to people the government is afraid of, we could see eye to eye. This is one of those government power grabs in the name of terrorism, and it tried to bypass legislation altogether. The broad definition of potentially dangerous people is enough that they and their relatives total millions, which means a very big file indeed. It blows some post-holocaust safeguards we have, allows keeping files on minors, etc. He maybe wasn't aware of the millions of people part, but took offense at the fact that priests were part of the potentially threatening category (activists, politicians, criminals… are also there).
The abortion comment was that he thought catholics were being marginalised from gynecology, because they are trained to perform abortions. I know doctors can bow out of performing abortions. He was trying to say there was some sort of initiation ritual of a student having to perform a live abortion, which I find very doubtful. But arguing by squick is an effective tactic (I was squicked). He followed up with chemists being forced to stock Ru486, which the church dislikes even more than other contraceptives (presumably because preventing nidation the day after fits their definition of abortion).
We touched the other classics very quickly: euthanasia was somehow mentioned, as were gender roles.
On faith, he said he was told by a priest, when doing catechism, that he shouldn't tell the kids that the wafer was literally the body of christ. He was shocked, as were the other catholics at the table, since this is a basic part of church doctrine (also, gross abuse of the world literally that certainly helped me shed my faith). He sees woolly belief as an heritage of the 1968 near-revolution counter-culture (trying to find USian analogues), and thinks it will not hold; the general lack of catholic practice (4% of the French go to a catholic service monthly), not to mention the lack of priest vocations, to him means that only people professing “purer” faith will stick around, so if he is right it will give more representation to hard-liners. He in fact wasn't positive about the John-Paul II generation; I wonder if this was a sneaky way to state a preference for Benedict XVI over John-Paul II; Benedict XVI seems more of a hard-liner, if having presided over the renamed Inquisition is any indication.
There was some quick talk re other religions having facets of the truths planted there by the holy spirit (basically, whenever a religion agrees with catholicism, it's telling the truth). So islam is right about there being only one god, and so on. Pointless in my opinion, but it's nice to see the plurality of religions is at least acknowledged.
He talked a bit about the priests of his parish not being afraid of “telling it like it is”, not telling what they would be telling sadly. He thinks the church should get involved in politics again. This is a big no-no (enforced by the bishops) since the separation of church and state in 1905 (which he bemoans, and blames on a trend starting 300 years ago (doesn't he mean 220, with the French revolution? Unless this was about Voltaire and the Enlightenment?)). There is a recently-created political party for this, whose chief platform is “social doctrine of the church”. Whatever that means. So far their platform has actually been abortion. But maybe this will be a proxy for the politically-minded clergy to state whatever their political views are as being truly the “social doctrine of the church”. There is also a particularly outspoken catholic who was elected as a deputy, Christine Boutin, and has been part of a recent government. He highlighted she was great for the legitimacy of catholics in politics.
He was aware of the latest pedophilia scandal (he might have called it “recent trouble”), and noted that more people were getting their baptism certificate revoked as a consequence of it (as an aside, he notes baptism can't be undone, the church merely acknowledges the demand and gives some hoops to jump if you try to join again). Now that I think of it, this was very relevant to his study of canon law. The problem was that, as Ratzinger, pope Benedict XVI or someone acting in his name has shuffled around a known pedophile instead of bringing him to justice. It means he substituted church administration (which has its priorities very wrong) for penal justice. So I'd be curious of knowing where this priest thinks canon law stands, if he thinks it was invoked, if he thinks it was applied correctly, and if he can explain why the church didn't bring the affair to the attention of actual justice.
So this priest's preoccupations were mostly with being threatened in his role (edvige, chaplain regulations), in his values (abortion), in his faith (too many muslims! they believe blindly like I do but in the wrong faith which I don't!). His solution is greater insistence on blind obedience to the one true faith (I'm reaching, but he's not the “find your own path” type, as the catechism incident shows), and more political involvement (I dislike it, especially as he has a great influence on his parishioners, but politics is still the right arena for this). I wish ill to his political positions (abortion and gender anyway); introducing a party doesn't change the balance, except if people can link the faith with the politics, which is an interesting debate. I don't think the faith (new testament, not old testament) preaches anything besides compassion (helping the disenfranchised, etc), but obviously many people see differently; we didn't talk at all about social problems like poverty (not that I'm actually helpful there besides paying taxes). I've checked out of this when I let go of faith, but I can still be annoyed at their priorities.
