A Cardinal Sin

Last Thursday Pope Francis I, the most recent man to don the Fisherman’s Ring, washed the feet of young offenders at Casal del Marmo, an institution on the outskirts of Rome far from the grandeur of the Apostolic Palace. Three days later, while giving his sermon on Easter Sunday he spoke out against greed and issued a call for world peace. Prior to the Easter weekend he was already being hailed as a humble reformer, a man who unlike any other modern Pope will be able to connect the hierarchy of the Catholic Church to the poor and needy, the very people the Church should arguably be most concerned with.

Not all change… (Source: tomsviewpoint.blogspot)

For many of the billion souls the Catholic Church claims to own such a humble, quite literally Franciscan leader must be a welcome change. The high pomp of the Vatican, something any visitor to St Peter’s Basilica can attest too, makes the Catholic Church arguably the most disconnected of all religions from the reality of the world. While Francis I is by any standards a privileged figure his apparent natural humility and quiet, grandparent like concern about the way his church is perceived and the way it acts are, on the surface, a great encouragement to the faithful.

Yet Francis’s galvanisation of the church is, so far, very much superficial. While the Pontiff’s words may have been heard all over the globe his actions so far have been limited in impact to the world’s smallest sovereign nation. Going ad lib and walking around the streets of the Vatican or refusing to send an aid to pay his hotel bill may provide the media with scraps to digest but the only public act of an international nature Francis has conducted is to phone a newsagent in Buenos Aeries and cancel his newspaper subscription.  At a time when the Church is accused of both covering up the abuse of vulnerable people in its care and financial crimes concerning the running of the Vatican Bank (not exactly a stranger to criminality since the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and the murder of Roberto Calvi) one might expect a new, humble reformer to want to tackle the internal issues that are rumoured to have encouraged his predecessor’s extraordinary resignation. Furthermore after Joseph Ratzinger’s failure to apologise for the Church’s past crimes it is not unreasonable to expect Francis I to have spoken in this regard as well. While insistence that the Church apologises for acts such as the Crusades is absurd, sins such as the support of fascism or forced conversion, as well as historic cases of child abuse and attempts to smother the truth in this regard, are yet to be fully addressed by the Church in the public sphere.

A few days after white smoke rose from the Cysteine Chapel the BBC declared that the ‘eyes of the world’ were turned to a genteel, refined corner of southern England as Justin Welby was enthroned as the new leader of the Church of England. While the BBC may have exaggerated global interest in the Anglican Church somewhat it is true that, like his Catholic cousin, the Archbishop of Canterbury is also seen as a more suitable candidate for the times his Church finds itself in. Welby has, so far, performed well (no pun intended). He may not be burdened with the same kind of problems as the new Pope yet he has managed to make sense on the nature of austerity and called for a measure of levelheadedness on both the ordination of women as bishops and the CoE’s current issue of the hour, the marriage of people who happen to be gay. Yet at the same time his predecessor but one, surely one of the greatest wastes of space ever to sit in the House of Lords, has attacked the current government for ‘aggressive secularism’. Loth as I am to counter any broadside aimed in David Cameron’s direction to make such a claim the ex-Archbishop must surely have missed the Church of England being the only church given specific legal protection from being ‘forced’ to conduct a marriage between gay couples. In truth Cameron has not been secular enough but the fact that a figure in the church hierarchy can, along with many of his former flock, mistake the religious favouritism of the government (and British law as a whole) for secularism shows how out of touch the Church is.

What the cases of both newly appointed shepherds suggests is that both the Catholic and Anglican Churches are guilty of a sin, hubris, older than Christianity itself. As in a Greek tragedy they have enjoyed success from unlikely beginnings, a rise to great power, a period of renown and now, through the most towering of pride, are facing a fall. The hubris of believing they have a monopoly on good, the hubris of assuming right without question and the hubris of stating relevance in modern life while strictly adhering to the teachings of ancient texts are hallmarks of almost all major religions. This is not to say that all the followers or ministers of a faith can be covered in the same blanket but rather that the hierarchy and therefore the policy of most religions are infected by pride. How else it is possible for Lord Carey to ignore the decreasing percentage of British people who believe in his particular god (or any god at all for that matter)? How else can the Catholic Church praise the humility of its new leader while still endorsing the idea that Mother Teresa, a woman who did more to keep people in poverty than help the poor of Calcutta as her legend suggests, should soon become a saint? In a world where the location and circumstance of one’s birth is still the most likely contributing factor to one’s religion the claim of any Church that it, and only it, speaks the truth of god is the kind of egotism that any other organisation would be ridiculed for.

It may be that Francis I’s decision to wear plain shoes not handmade loafers and live and eat with priests of a more ordinary level does bring about change. If so it will be a long process, and one left incomplete while such private humbleness is not coupled with a public willingness to truly admit, or ever discuss, the wrongs of the past and present. Until then, the replacement of a quiet, red shoed conservative German with a quiet, less grandiose, conservative Argentinian will have little impact on the Catholic Church. It, like the Anglican Church, will remain a theme park under new management but where all the rides remain the same. One day the staff will come to work and wonder ‘Where did everyone go?’ but by then it will be too late.

After Chavez

If you want a succinct summary as to why Hugo Chavez matters, even after his death earlier this week then look no further than the words of Channel 4’s iconic newsman Jon Snow,

When I started working in South America the US was still killing leaders it didn’t like. Chavez is part of the order that put an end to that.

As the nearest thing current British journalism has to an Edward Murrow figure one can hardly go wrong in trusting Snow’s hundred and forty character wisdom. Chavez was a leader who brought stability and development to his country over a fourteen year rule that, while by no means perfect, was very much revolutionary.

When Chavez was elected in 1998 one would have been forgiven for thinking that history was about to repeat itself. The bloody days of the 1970s and 80s when the CIA was South America’s devil, toppling socialist governments in Nicaragua and Chile and siding with the likes of Somoza and Pinochet cannot have been far from the minds of many commentators. The US had, on the back of the millions pumped into counter-revolutionary movements by the Regan White House, won in South America. Very few could have predicted that Chavez’s victory would, in the worlds of Gregory Wilpert, lead to ‘a wave of successes for left-leaning presidential candidates in Latin America’.

Chavez’s funeral (image taken from The Guardian)

Venezuela under Chavez was able to stand up to America largely because of a change in the political landscape. The Cold War had been over for nearly a decade, the CIA was no longer a cloaked figure waiting to strike against leftist movements and American foreign policy now looked, in general, to the Balkans and the Middle-East. Chavez had the time and space to act without an American funded Contra movement breathing down his government’s collective necks. There was also a legitimacy in the eyes of the West to the Chavez government, which had won over 50% of the vote in elections that were almost certainly balanced against a socialist candidate. There had been no violent coup or long Sandinista struggle but an ‘orderly transition of power’.

Of course, as the case of Francois Hollande in France has shown, it takes more than the election of a single socialist leader to change the political landscape of a continent. It was what Chavez did to Venezuela during his rule that allowed for the ‘wave of successes’ for the left. Between 1999 and 2009 unemployment fell from 14.5% to 7.6%. From ’99 to 2011 GDP per capita rose from $4,105 to $10,810, infant mortality fell from 20 per 1,000 live births to 13, the proportion of the population in extreme poverty decreased from 23.4% to 8.5% and oil exports increased by over 200%. All of this was done by a government that was staunchly opposed to the intervention of foreign powers, be they governmental or corporate, in the affairs of Venezuela (and indeed South America as a whole). Most famously Chavez effectively nationalised the oil industry and ensured that the majority of the profits made from hydrocarbon exploration in Venezuela stayed in Venezuela.

The changes brought above over the last fourteen years aren’t just measured in percentages. The continued and increased funding of the El Sistema  program which aims to bring music to the most impoverished young Venezuelans is just one cultural program that must also be considered as part of Chavez’s legacy. Critics may scoff at the idea of youth orchestras being as important as the increasing of GDP or reduction of inflation but anyone privileged enough to have watched the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, Venezuela and perhaps the world’s best ensemble of young musicians, can pour scorn on such a suggestion. El Sistema is as ambitious a cultural program as the attempts by the FSLN to spread poetry in 1980s Nicaragua and as tool to create both great art and help young people avoid crime puts many British projects of similar goals to shame.

But what now for Venezuela? Already some commentators suggest the crows may be gathering, with talk of US oil companies interested in forcing their way into the Venezuelan market and the view that without the gargantuan personality of Chavez at its head Venezuela might crumble. There is also the prospect of change for the better. One cannot ignore Chavez’s failures, he often acted more like a dictator than an elected President and there is no denying that for all the progress Venezuela made with his hands clenched firmly upon the Presidency the country is no socialist nirvana. A new leader with a new approach may, despite the uncertain circumstances, be the catalyst for more positive social change.

However one thing the Chavez should have taught us is that to try and predict what will happen next in South American politics is a risky game at the best of times. To forecast what Venezuela will look like in a year or even six months from now is next to impossible. What is certain however is that the country will never again be the same as in late 1998 when Venezuelans went to the polls to elected Hugo Chavez as their president.