Explain, don't apologise

Mary Kenny
ST PAUL would have made a fine journalist: he has a brilliant style, a ringing commitment and a keen sense of invective.
He gives gays a hard time ("men ... burned in their lust, one toward another"). He deplores drunks ("be not drunk with wine ... or any form of wantonness.") He is very down on fornication, and fornicators of any kind.
He robustly exhorts the faithful, "not to keep company with . . . a fornicator, or the covetous, or an idolator, or a drunkard, or an extortioner". He has some enigmatic views on the eating of meat, on the muzzling of oxen, and on circumcision, and he sometimes sees marriage as a remedy against the dreaded fornication ("it is better to marry than to burn").
Paul was a Hellenised Jew, steeped in the patriarchy of both Greek and Hebrew cultures, and a bit of a cranky bachelor, to boot. And yet, he was a crucial figure in the spreading of the Gospel.
Some secular historians claim that without Paul, Christianity would have remained a minor Jewish sect, instead of becoming the dominant world religion, Paul was the "marketing man" who took Christianity outside of tribalism, and even (despite his patriarchal views) beyond gender, since he declared that there is neither man nor woman, Jew nor Greek, but equal persons in Jesus Christ.
Paul is sometimes characterised as a misogynist: but it is more accurate to describe him as a patriarch. He held it that women should cover their heads in church (a Semitic idea still extant), and he believed that in marriage women should be subject to their husbands.
Yet, by the light of his own times, he was enlightened in that he recognised the reciprocity entailed in marriage, and the duties of the husband to show love, care and respect. He thought a woman's body belonged to her husband: but, in a radical bid for equality, he also thought a husband's body belonged to his wife.
St Paul has now elicited the disapproval of the Irish Bishops' Commission for Justice and Peace, who recommend that the church patriarch should be censored in some passages, for fear that these convey, "an undesirably negative impression regarding women". Dr Laurence Ryan, the Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin and Dr William Walsh, the Bishop of Killaloe have called for the blue pencil of censorship to be drawn through some of Paul's texts, notably on the subjection of wives and on women covering their heads.
Certainly, Pauline texts should be explained more fully (as the bishops also recommend), and some priests fail to do this adequately when they are preaching a commentary on the Gospel of the day. The Bible has many puzzling, and of course, archaic, passages that need interpretation.
But suppressing, expunging, or prettifying the Scriptures, invites a kind of dishonesty, a denial of what has been, through the ages, Holy Writ.
I am also uneasy about the context in which the bishops have placed this critique of St Paul. There is an implication that the patriarchs of the Church in some way endorsed beating and cruelty to women. Both bishops said that on the issue of domestic violence, "the Church not been without its share of responsibility [for such violence] in the past and we acknowledge this".
Excuse me, but where, exactly, has the Church endorsed or promoted domestic violence? Which texts or Church commandments, ordained that "it is permissible for a husband to beat his wife"? To the contrary, the history of Christianity is a history of rebutting personal violence, from the early days of the Roman matrons and Christian martyrs, to the leadership of Mother Teresa and the present Pope.
Did not women, at all times over the past two millenia, flood into the Christian Church because of the emphasis on gentleness and caritas? Did not Christianity beget the notion of courtly love, and of chivalry? Did not even a Protestant historian such as W H Lecky, who deplored the Roman Church and hated "priestcraft", concede that Catholicism had developed a refined and respectful attitude towards women, had made possible a softness and a sweetness towards women that no other religion had shown?
If certain priests counselled women to accept brutal husbands, that was their individual judgement: certain other priests, in any case, did not.
In my mother's village in County Galway, the local priest connived, with my grandfather, the schoolteacher, to arrange a wife's passage to America because the husband was a wife-beater.
St Paul needs contextual interpretation, but censoring him is dangerous and dishonest. And implying that Paul or any of the Church fathers promoted personal violence is, quite frankly, an error and a lie that looks uncomfortably like an abasement before the powers and principalities that prevail in our time.
STHE ANGUISHING case of the Siamese twins, Mary and Jody, who must be separated if one of them is to live has drawn commentaries from both Catholic and Islamic theologians that it is not permissible to take one human life to save another. But a Jesuit friend of mine believes that the "double effect" principle could also be invoked: the prime goal is to save Judy's life, not directly to kill Mary, and in that sense the operation is legitimate.