Catholicism in the developing world: Hardly a unifying church

Blessed are the poor. Why the Catholic church doesn't always agree

Earthly Mission: The Catholic Church and World Development. By Robert Calderisi. Yale University Press; 278 pages; £20. To be published in America in October; $35. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk



Where praying isn’t enough

Sep 7th 2013 | From the print edition

CATHOLIC-BASHING is easy sport. The church’s myriad sins, from sexual misconduct and ugly cover-ups to financial mismanagement and Vatican infighting, leave it vulnerable to attack. Its stance on contraception makes it seem at best unworldly and, at worst, callous. But such assessments, though often fair, overlook how the church has and continues to minister to the needs of people in poor countries. “Earthly Mission”, Robert Calderisi’s new book, aims to redress the balance.

Mr Calderisi brings experience of two sorts. He has worked for many years for organisations such as the World Bank and has written compellingly about why aid has failed Africa. He is also a Catholic. He is, however, clear-eyed about the church’s flaws. He decries the breathtaking insensitivity of the Vatican’s declaration in 2010 that the ordination of women would be an ecclesiastical crime as serious as the sexual abuse of children. He left the church for a decade after Pope Paul VI confirmed the ban on birth control, so distressed was he about the damage the edict would do in the developing world. He is gay and has little time for the church’s pronouncements on homosexuality.

Instead, he is interested in where the church follows the Bible’s call to love, “not in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth”. The church’s role in setting up schools and hospitals is familiar territory, as is its (mixed) political influence in Latin America. More gripping is Mr Calderisi’s examination of its actions in Rwanda and its stance on contraception. Nowhere is the Manichean struggle between the “kind-hearted clergy, religious and lay people” and the “airy theologians and mean-spirited enforcers of the Vatican” starker than when it comes to birth control. Mr Calderisi is bewildered by the Vatican’s distance from the daily realities of millions of Catholics and its indifference to the harm that its stubbornness causes. But not all are blind. Using a wooden phallus, nuns in Niger show women how to use condoms. When some protest that their husbands will object, the nuns suggest an old prostitutes’ trick: slip them on with their mouths. They speak of their love and respect for the pope but justify their teachings, saying: “This is the reality. If we don’t do this, a large number of them will die.”

Much of Mr Calderisi’s book is taken up with the church’s good works, but it is at its most powerful when he addresses its faults, especially in the Rwandan genocide. Its sins, say some church leaders, were errors of omission, not commission, but they were grievous nonetheless. “We can’t all be martyrs,” pleads one cleric. One priest who tried to save those being killed gave up when he learnt that those he had sheltered had been murdered. Throwing up his hands, he closed the doors of his church. Inside he waited, reciting his rosary, “hearing the clubs coming down on the skulls of those outside, the women screaming, the children dying in silence.”

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21584959-blessed-are-poor-why-catholic-church-doesnt-always-agree-hardly-unifying