richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 313
attitude to children is particularly revealing of the religious mind,
and the evils that arise specifically because it is religious. First is the
remarkable perception by the religious mind that a sprinkle of
water and a brief verbal incantation can totally change a child's life,
taking precedence over parental consent, the child's own consent,
the child's own happiness and psychological well-being . . . over
everything that ordinary common sense and human feeling would
see as important. Cardinal Antonelli spelled it out at the time in a
letter to Lionel Rothschild, Britain's first Jewish Member of
Parliament, who had written to protest about Edgardo's abduction.
The cardinal replied that he was powerless to intervene, and added,
'Here it may be opportune to observe that, if the voice of nature is
powerful, even more powerful are the sacred duties of religion.'
Yes, well, that just about says it all, doesn't it?
Second is the extraordinary fact that the priests, cardinals and
Pope seem genuinely not to have understood what a terrible thing
they were doing to poor Edgardo Mortara. It passes all sensible
understanding, but they sincerely believed they were doing him a
good turn by taking him away from his parents and giving him a
Christian upbringing. They felt a duty of protection! A Catholic
newspaper in the United States defended the Pope's stance on the
Mortara case, arguing that it was unthinkable that a Christian
government 'could leave a Christian child to be brought up by a
Jew' and invoking the principle of religious liberty, 'the liberty of a
child to be a Christian and not forced compulsorily to be a Jew . . .
The Holy Father's protection of the child, in the face of all the
ferocious fanaticism of infidelity and bigotry, is the grandest moral
spectacle which the world has seen for ages.' Has there ever been a
more flagrant misdirection of words like 'forced', 'compulsorily',
'ferocious', 'fanaticism' and 'bigotry'? Yet all the indications are
that Catholic apologists, from the Pope down, sincerely believed
that what they were doing was right: absolutely right morally, and
right for the welfare of the child. Such is the power of (mainstream,
'moderate') religion to warp judgement and pervert ordinary
human decency. The newspaper Il Cattolico was frankly bewildered
at the widespread failure to see what a magnanimous favour the
Church had done Edgardo Mortara when it rescued him from his
Jewish family: