Miscellanea Agnostica

A high-ranking Roman Catholic exorcist claims that the Devil is alive and well in the Vatican, and that recent scandals result from it. The (UK) Times reports on this apparent revelation (WebCite cached article):

Sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are proof that that “the Devil is at work inside the Vatican”, according to the Holy See’s chief exorcist.

Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican’s chief exorcist for 25 years and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as “cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon”. …

Father Amorth, who has just published Memoirs of an Exorcist, a series of interviews with the Vatican journalist Marco Tosatti, said that the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in 1981 had been the work of the Devil, as had an incident last Christmas when a mentally disturbed woman threw herself at Pope Benedict XVI at the start of Midnight Mass, pulling him to the ground.

Not everyone is impressed, and a Catholic priest interviewed for the story denied Fr Amorth’s claim:

Father José Antonio Fortea Cucurull, a Rome-based exorcist, said that Father Amorth had “gone well beyond the evidence” in claiming that Satan had infiltrated the Vatican corridors.

“Cardinals might be better or worse, but all have upright intentions and seek the glory of God,” he said. Some Vatican officials were more pious than others, “but from there to affirm that some cardinals are members of satanic sects is an unacceptable distance.”

I’m no fan of the Roman Catholic Church, it’s true, so the allegation that the Devil is there and is to blame for its recent problems, is one I find amusing, to say the least. That said, I also happen to be no fan of people who — on the cusp of releasing a memoir, some other book, or a movie, etc. — make some kind of eye-catching, outrageous claim or other, in order to increase sales. To say that I take Fr Amorth’s claim with a grain of salt, is putting it mildly.

The Roman Catholic child-abuse scandal has reached into yet another country … the Netherlands. The NRC Handelsblad reports on the most recent expansion of what is becoming one of the worst ecclesiastical scandals in history (WebCite cached article):

Child sex abuse in Dutch Catholic Church revealed

Amid the high-profile child sexual abuse scandals in the United States and other European countries, the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands has remained unsullied. A joint investigation by NRC Handelsblad and Radio Netherlands Worldwide shows this is unjustified. …

At the boarding school in ’s-Heerenberg, 80 to 100 boys between the ages of 12 and 18 slept in four large dormitories. “Sometimes you knew for sure: there’s something going on between that boy and that priest,” said [abuse victim Janne] Geraets. It happened on a large scale. Several of the priests were involved. Some priests were more popular than others. You could tell because more boys visited them.” The priest who abused him is now 98 years old. “Everything I held sacred turned out to be a facade,” said Geraets. “It was a huge blow to my self-confidence.”

The article goes on to relate several examples of abuse by Catholic priests, as well as failures to deal with it. It concludes with denials of anything wrong by the Catholic hierarchy in the Netherlands:

In the period that Janne Geraets was abused at the Don Rua school, the current bishop of Rotterdam, Ad van Luyn, was working there as a teacher. In the 1970s, Van Luyn was provincial head of the Salesians. Since 2008 he has chaired the Netherlands’ Synod of Bishops.

Ad van Luyn declined to discuss “past issues”. Through a spokesman, he said that “matters relating to the congregation are the responsibility of the current father superior, even if they relate to previous governors”.

Father Herman Spronck, currently the most senior Salesian in the Netherlands, denies all knowledge of abuse in ’s-Heerenberg, and refers all inquiries to his predecessors. He is not opposed to an investigation and is keen to emphasise that sexual abuse goes against the vow taken by the fathers of Don Bosco. “At Don Bosco, the inviolable sanctity of youth is key to our system of education.”

Well, I guess that concludes the matter. Child abuse is against their vow so it cannot possibly have happened! Thanks for clearing that up for us, Fr Spronck.

Not only has the scandal of abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests struck Pope Benedict XVI’s native Germany, as I blogged already, the most recent revelation from Germany has come even closer to the Pope … by surfacing in a cathedral choir which had been run by the Pope’s brother. Reuters reports, via the New York Times, on this development (WebCite cached article):

Germany’s Roman Catholic Church revealed charges of priests beating and sexually abusing boys in at least three schools in Pope Benedict’s native Bavaria on Friday, one linked to a renowned choir once led by his brother.

The charges at the cathedral choir in Regensburg, the Benedictine monastery school at Ettal and a Capucian school in Burghausen came to light after abuse cases revealed at Jesuit schools around the country shocked the country last month.

Rev Georg Ratzinger, 86, who led the choir from 1964 to 1994, told Bavarian Radio he knew nothing of any abuse at the “Regensburger Domspatzen” (Regensburg Cathedral Sparrows) choir, which regularly performs on tours in Germany and abroad.

At this point the Pope’s brother is not implicated in any of the abuse. The Regensburg diocese admitted to some abuse, decades ago, which had been prosecuted:

The diocese said in a statement that one priest had abused two boys sexually in 1958 and was sentenced to two years in jail. Another clergyman served 11 months in jail in 1971 for abuse. Both men have since died.

It said three men claimed to have suffered sexual abuse as well as beatings and humiliation in the early 1960s while at boarding schools connected to the choir. The diocese was investigating these cases and more could be revealed, it said.

My point is that the scandal of long-term abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests has become so epidemic that it has veered uncomfortably close to the Pope himself.

I’ve blogged before about the Roman Catholic clerical-abuse scandals, here in the U.S. and in Ireland. It’s also happened in other countries, such as Australia and Canada. But this scandal has finally hit home for the current Pope — literally (WebCite cached article). The German magazine Der Spiegel offers an exposé in how it has been going on, for decades, in the Benedict XVI’s native Germany:

Inside Germany’s Catholic Sexual Abuse Scandal

This is what it looks like, the document of a conspiracy: 24 pages, with appendix, in Latin, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican. A “norma interna,” or confidential set of guidelines for all bishops, who were required to keep it a secret for all eternity, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

The guidelines, issued in the year of our Lord 1962, address a sensitive subject: sex in the confessional. The Vatican doesn’t put it quite that directly, preferring to use more guarded terminology to describe what happens when a priest leads a member of his flock astray before, during or after the confession — in other words, when he provokes a penitent “toward impure and obscene matters” through “words or signs or nods of the head (or) by touch.”

According to the instructions from Rome, the bishops were to deal very firmly with each individual case — so firmly, in fact, that everything would remain within the confines of the Holy Church. After all, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — formerly known as the Inquisition — has centuries of experience in conducting internal investigations. The Vatican has always filled all the positions in such investigations — prosecutors, defendants, judges — from within its own ranks, while the investigation files have been kept in the secret archives of the Roman Curia.

Because these guidelines were issued with regard to the sacrament of Confession — or Reconciliation as it’s more commonly known — the focus of this document, naturally, is on secrecy … because of the fact that everything having to do with the confessional is supposed to be kept secret. The problem with this is that the document in question has been used as a precedent for how the Roman Catholic Church handles all accusations of clerical abuse … even when it didn’t occur within the confessional or in connection with that sacrament. This is, of course, extremely convenient for the Church.

Der Spiegel’s report is a a multi-page online document which covers a lot of ground. I cannot address all of its points. I will point out only a couple:

In page 4 of the report (cached), the weakness of the Church’s own internal criminal law (not government criminal law) is mentioned:

But because the Church refuses to admit to the mere possibility of crimes within its own ranks, its criminal law is as obfuscating as incense smoke at the altar. “One can’t say that the criminal law has any practical significance,” says Klaus Lüdicke, an expert on church law in the northwestern German city of Münster. In the past, he adds, the number of cases that became known was “negligibly small.”

The Church, then, cannot philosophically accept with the possibility of crimes being committed by its priests, so it barely deals with the subject at all, and the Church’s apologists toss it away as “negligible.” How nice.

On the same page, it’s mentioned that German Catholic hierarchs dismissed abuse cases as a merely-American aberration back in 2002, but found out that this wasn’t so:

Even after the massive abuse scandal in the United States in 2002, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, the bishop of the southwestern German city of Mainz and the head of the German Catholic Church at the time, felt no particular need to take action. “We don’t have a problem of the same dimension (as in the American Church),” he told SPIEGEL in an interview at the time. In his diocese, he said, anyone who “is truly a pedophile is immediately removed from pastoral service.” These kinds of people, he said, could “not simply be transferred to a different location.”

Only a few weeks later, however, Lehmann was confronted with a new case of abuse inside his own diocese, in a parish near Darmstadt. A few months earlier, parents in a small city near Frankfurt had discovered, to their dismay, that the new director of their children’s choir, Father E., was the same man who had been forced to leave his previous parish because of questionable relationships with minors. Lehmann’s system had already shuffled the priest around several times from one location to another.

On page 6 of the report (cached), Der Spiegel mentions that help has been offered to the Church to help treat priests who may be pedophiles, but that offer wasn’t well-received:

Klaus Beier, one of Germany’s most prominent medical experts on sexuality, initiated the Dunkelfeld Prevention Project at Berlin’s Charité University Hospital to help pedophile men. Some of the men who have participated in the project are religious, and for them the path to his institute was particularly difficult. Beier has assessed a number of priests, including members of orders, sometimes in the context of trials and sometimes in response to a church’s request. …

Beier, who is convinced that priests can be helped, offered his support to the Vatican in a letter to Pope Benedict XVI in the autumn of 2008. His clinical experiences, he wrote to the Holy Father, could “be of great benefit to affected members of the clergy.”

Surprisingly enough, the Vatican responded to Beier’s letter. “On behalf of the Holy See, I wish to thank you for your concern about the welfare of children and your efforts to provide appropriate assistance to those affected,” an official with the Vatican Secretariat of State wrote. Beier’s remarks, he added, would be “carefully acknowledged and forwarded to the appropriate officials.”

Folks, this is known as the “we’ll take this under advisement” dismissal. Der Spiegel did not say that the Vatican has responded to Beier in any other way, so it’s safe to conclude that the Vatican is not going to ask him for his help.

As long as the Roman Catholic Church retains its insular and secretive treatment of these cases, things will not change, and the abuse will not stop. The truth about the Church is that it is hypocritical down to its very core … claiming to be the sole remaining arbiter of morality and ethics in the world, yet unwilling to examine the morality or ethics of its own hierarchy or clergy.

The plot thickens concerning the Idaho Baptists who were caught in Haiti trying to sneak some children out of the country (about whom I’ve blogged several times already). First, we hear (from the New York Times) that their leader, Laura Silsby, is no stranger to law enforcement, not in Idaho anyway (WebCite cached article):

The leader of the group of Americans charged on Thursday with abducting children in Haiti is an Idaho businesswoman with a complicated financial history that involves complaints from employees over unpaid wages, state liens on a company bank account and lawsuits in small claims court.

The leader, Laura Silsby, defaulted last July on the mortgage on a house in an unfinished subdivision here in Meridian, a suburb of Boise, according to the Ada County Tax Assessor’s Office. Yet in November, Ms. Silsby registered a new nonprofit, the New Life Children’s Refuge, at the address of the house, which she bought in 2008 for $358,000. …

Ms. Silsby and her business, Personal Shopper, which provides shopping services for Internet customers, have faced multiple legal claims.

According to state records and officials, Personal Shopper has been named 14 times in complaints from employees over unpaid wages. Among the reasons cited by the employees for having not been paid were “no money for payroll” and “fully investor funded and investors have been hit hard by the economy.”

Employees won nine of the cases, forcing Personal Shopper to pay nearly $31,000 in wages and $4,000 in fines. The Idaho Department of Labor initially put liens on a company bank account to get the money.

Nevertheless, despite her questionable business history, Ms Silsby has some very loyal and very religious supporters:

Clint Henry, pastor of Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, where five of the Americans charged in Haiti attend services, said Ms. Silsby had attended his church for about two years.

“You wouldn’t find any finer Christian people than these people,” Mr. Henry said in an interview earlier this week.

Uh, OK, pastor. Whatever you say.

In addition to this, it appears that Ms Silsby’s nine followers are no longer fans of hers, as the New York Times (again!) is reporting (WebCite cached article):

Divisions emerged within the group of 10 Americans jailed in Haiti on child abduction charges, with eight of them signing a note over the weekend saying that they had been misled by Laura Silsby, the leader of the group.

“Laura wants to control,” said the scribbled note handed to a producer for NBC News. “We believe lying. We’re afraid.”

The infighting came amid a shakeup in the legal representation of the Americans, who have been charged with trying to remove 33 Haitian children from the country without government permission. …

The note signed by the group, which is affiliated with a Baptist church in Twin Falls, Idaho, made clear that they were emotionally distraught and divided. “We fear for our lives here in Haiti,” said the letter, which was signed by everyone except Ms. Silsby and Charisa Coulter, Ms. Silsby’s former nanny and co-founder of the group.

“We only came as volunteers,” the note went on. “We had NOTHING to do with any documents and have been lied to.”

It’s too bad it took being jailed in Haiti before they figured out Ms Silsby is not to be trusted.

An Equality Bill currently under consideration in the UK Parliament has a well-known critic: Pope Benedict XVI. Yes, that’s right. The Pope said that equality for all, is “unjust.” The BBC reports on the Pope’s remarks (WebCite cached article):

Pope Benedict attacks government over Equality Bill

The Pope has urged Catholic bishops in England and Wales to fight the UK’s Equality Bill with “missionary zeal”.

Pope Benedict XVI said the legislation “violates natural law”. Supporters of the law see this as a wish to keep a ban on gay people in Church positions. …

He told the Catholic bishops of England and Wales gathered in Rome: “Your country is well-known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society.

“Yet, as you have rightly pointed out, the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs.

Basically the Pope is claiming that the Roman Catholic Church — and, one many assume, individual Catholics — possess a fundamental right to discriminate against gays, because their religious dogma despises them. But even worse than that, Benedict went beyond mere religious principles, in his attack on equal treatment of gays:

“In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.”

In other words, he is not merely saying that Catholic dogma condemns gays; he is saying that gays as a group fundamentally should not be allowed any equality.

I wonder what the Pope would think if I were a business owner and decided that it was against my principles — as the godless heathen agnostic that I am — to hire Catholics (or any other kind of believer). Would he consider that acceptable? Would he claim that I possessed this right to discriminate, as a “natural law”?

By the way, Benedict … have you gotten around yet to reprimanding the recently-restored Bishop Richard Williamson for having failed to obey your directive to retract his Holocaust denials? Unless you’re willing to deal with him, I’m not sure you have any credibility on the matter of morals, ethics, and “natural law.” Once you’ve taken care of the wayward members of your own flock, then we can sit down together and discuss how the UK deals with its own people. OK?

Things are looking stranger and stranger in the case of the Baptists who tried to take some children out of Haiti, about whom I’ve blogged a couple times. Not only were these not orphaned or abandoned children, it seems that, in some cases, the parents gave the children to them, in order to give them a free education. The New York Times reports on how the Baptists’ story grows increasingly disingenuous (WebCite cached article):

Guerlaine Antoine pushed aside a tub full of laundry, wiped her soapy hands on her T-shirt and rushed barefoot to bring out photos of the 8-year-old boy she entrusted to 10 American Baptists.

“Do you think I would give this child away?” she said, opening a grade school yearbook to show her son, Carl Ramirez Antoine, in cap and gown, at his kindergarten graduation. “He is my only treasure.” …

Kisnel and Florence Antoine said they sent two of their children with the Baptist missionaries because they had offered educational opportunities for the children in the Dominican Republic. Ketlaine Valmont said she had sent a son.

They showed school photos and academic awards to demonstrate that they had not selfishly sent their children away to lighten their load.

In a country where more than half of all children come from families too poor to keep them in school, the parents said that the Americans’ offer of an education seemed like a gift from heaven.

They also wanted to give opportunities for something better to their children. They said that the missionaries had promised they would be able to visit their children in the Dominican Republic, and that the children would be free to come home for visits.

At least these parents, then, were not giving up their child for adoption, just entrusting them to people who would educate them but still allow family visits. It’s clear, however, that the Baptists had planned to place these children for adoption:

The Americans said that the children had been orphaned in the earthquake, and that they had authorization from the Dominican government to bring the children into the country.

But it became clear on Tuesday that at least some of the children had not lost their parents in the earthquake.

So not only were these kids not orphaned or abandoned — and the Baptists knew this, because they had spoken with at least some of the parents — their claim of not planning to adopt them out, is also demonstrably untrue:

And while the Americans said they did not intend to offer the children for adoption, the Web site for their orphanage [WebCite cached version] makes clear that they intended to do so.

In addition to providing a swimming pool, soccer field and access to the beach for the children, the group, known as the New Life Children’s Refuge, said it also planned to “provide opportunities for adoption,” and “seaside villas for adopting parents to stay while fulfilling the requirement for 60-90 day visit.”

The reason these Haitian families were willing to trust these strangers with their children, is because a local minister vouched for them:

They trusted the Americans, they said, because they arrived with the recommendation of a Baptist minister, Philippe Murphy, who runs an orphanage in the area. A woman who answered the door at Mr. Murphy’s house said he had gone to Miami. But she also said that he did not know anything about the Americans.

It’s interesting, don’t you think, that a person as pivotal in all of this as the Rev Murphy, is somehow not to be found? Hmm.

It’s clear, at any rate, that this Baptist organization has told more than one lie to more than one person. This places them squarely among my “lying liars for Jesus” club.

It looks as though the military’s policy toward gays in its ranks … known popularly as “don’t ask, don’t tell” … will probably be changed to something less medieval (WebCite cached article). How soon is not known, as it’s only just being studied right now. But that doesn’t mean a ferocious culture war won’t be stirred up over it. The latest religious figure agitating against treating gays like equal human beings, is Jewish — Rabbi Yehuda Levin, to be exact (cached article):

Rabbi Yehuda Levin, spokesman for the Rabbinical Alliance of America issued the following statement:

“When Americans are suffering economically and millions need jobs, it’s shocking that the Administration is focused on its ultra-liberal militantly homosexualist agenda forcing the highlighting of homosexuals and homosexuality on an unwilling military. This is the equivalent of the spiritual rape of our military to satisfy the most extreme and selfish cadre of President Obama’s kooky coalition.”

I honestly don’t get how treating gays in the military as regular human beings is “spiritual rape,” but the Rabbi appears adamant about it, even if his claim is irrational and nonsensical. He goes as far as to claim that the 9/11 terror attacks, the 2004 tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the earthquake in Haiti all happened because the New York City government chose to recognize “domestic partnerships” among city employees:

“Thirteen months before 9/11, on the day New York City passed homosexual domestic partnership regulations, I joined a group of Rabbis at a City Hall prayer service, pleading with G-d not to visit disaster on the city of N.Y. We have seen the underground earthquake, tsunami, Katrina, and now Haiti. All this is in sync with a two thousand year old teaching in the Talmud that the practice of homosexuality is a spiritual cause of earthquakes. Once a disaster is unleashed, innocents are also victims just like in Chernobyl.”

Alluding to the Chernonbyl disaster was also a wonderful touch. And no, I have no idea what “underground earthquake” he’s referring to … but I’m guessing he doesn’t know, either. Levin rages on like a child throwing a tantrum:

“We plead with saner heads in Congress and the Pentagon to stop sodomization of our military and our society. Enough is enough.”

Well, Rabbi, I agree. You are right when you say, “enough is enough.” That is absolutely correct. Enough is, in fact, enough. Sanctimonious and militant religionists like you, Rabbi, have run the show for most of humanity’s c. 6,000 years of known history. And where has it brought us? To the point where childish little twits like yourself stamp and fume and scream and whine, because — God forbid! — some people you personally dislike (in this case, gays) might be treated the same as other human beings.

Again, Rabbi, I agree. You’re right. “Enough is enough.” It is long past time for you and your fellow religionists to finally grow the fuck up — for the first times in your collective little lives — and act like grown adults who are capable of actually living with other human beings — yes, even those you personally dislike. (I don’t personally like religionists such as yourself, Rabbi, but I’m not about to go around screaming for you to be given fewer rights than the rest of the country, just because I dislike your militant religionism!)

I’m also surprised that someone who’s Jewish is not, apparently, aware that it’s generally not a good idea to devalue another class of human beings, just because of who they are.

Hat tip: Religion Dispatches.

Anyone out there who was concerned that the onset of the 21st century might have had the effect of diminishing primitive barbarism in the world, you may now breathe a sigh of relief. Thanks to entrenched hyperreligious thinking, including religiously-inspired hatred of women, primitive barbarism lives on! A 16-year-old girl in Bangladesh was punished for — get this! — having been raped and impregnated. The (UK) Guardian reports on this event (WebCite cached article):

Rape victim receives 101 lashes for becoming pregnant

A 16-year-old girl who was raped in Bangladesh has been given 101 lashes for conceiving during the assault.

The girl’s father was also fined and warned the family would be branded outcasts from their village if he did not pay.

According to human rights activists, the girl, who was quickly married after the attack, was divorced weeks later after medical tests revealed she was pregnant.

The girl was raped by a 20-year-old villager in Brahmanbaria district in April last year.

Note, it’s not uncommon for rape victims, anywhere in the world, to choose not to file a report. Of course, her living as she did in a society full of delusional, hyperreligious, wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth Islamist zealots, that probably only further discouraged her. But the Guardian goes on to add:

Her rape emerged after her pregnancy test and Muslim elders in the village issued a fatwa insisting that the girl be kept in isolation until her family agreed to corporal punishment.

Now, if you’re probably wondering what kind of horrific punishment was meted out to the rapist, if the victim had been whipped for having gotten pregnant. Well, not to worry. Those Muslim elders took care of him, all right:

Her rapist was pardoned by the elders.

Yes, indeed, they bestowed the kindness and loving-mercy of Islam on that rapist. I have to hand it to the self-proclaimed “religion of peace.” Boy, you sure kept “the peace” all right. You whipped a crime victim and pardoned a criminal. Why, I can think of no better way to keep the peace, than that!

All right, enough sarcasm. Does anyone finally see how truly demented religious thinking can be, if it’s not reined in by common sense?

Hat tip: Unreasonable Faith blog.

Although Egypt is a majority-Muslim nation, it has a significant Christian minority, which has been there for about as long as there have been Christians … Christians have been in Alexandria since the middle of the 1st century CE, and many early Christian document discoveries have been made in Egypt. Arguably the dominant Christian church of Egypt, known as the Coptic Orthodox Church, has a more continuous and older pedigree than the church of Rome. Even after the Muslim conquest of Egypt which took place c. 640 CE, Christianity has maintained a presence there. Depending upon whom you ask, between 10 and 20% of Egypt is Christian.

There has, of course, been trouble between religious groups in Egypt, through its history. Christians themselves were known to have committed some violence of their own (e.g. their butchering of Hypatia of Alexandria, the destruction of the Serapeum in the same city, etc.). It’s no surprise that some of that violence crops up in Egypt now and again.

Except that … if you listen to the Egyptian government anyway … it doesn’t happen, even when it does. The New York Times reports on this strange paradox (WebCite cached article):

A few weeks ago, on the day that Coptic Christians celebrate Christmas Eve, a Muslim gunman opened fire on worshipers as they walked out of church, killing 7, wounding 10 and leading to the worst sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians in Egypt in years. In the days that followed, there were riots and clashes. Stores were wrecked. Homes were burned.

The government responded by sending in heavily armed police officers, banning the news media and insisting that the Jan. 6 attack was retaliation for a rape.

“There are initial indications connecting this incident to the consequences of accusing a young Christian man of raping a Muslim girl in one of the governorate’s villages,” the Interior Ministry said after the attack.

That’s right. This may have been religious violence, but it wasn’t religious violence. (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, knowwhatImean?) The Egyptian government has tried to cover up the real story:

The one thing the government would not do was admit the obvious: Egypt had experienced one of the most serious outbreaks of sectarian violence in years. Instead, it said talk of sectarian conflict amounted to sedition.

But the evidence, provided in newspapers, was irrefutable: 14 Muslims arrested, 28 Christians arrested, Christian shops burned, Muslim houses burned.

“We are now facing a sectarian society and street,” wrote Amr el-Shoubky, a political analyst and columnist, in an article under the headline “The New Sectarianism: The Alienation of Christians,” which appeared in the daily newspaper Al Masry al-Youm.

Despite the fact that pretty much everyone knows what really happened, the government still will not change its tune:

“The crime of Nag Hammadi is just an individual crime with no religious motives, just like the crime of raping the girl,” Ahmed Fathi Sorour, the Parliament speaker, said in Al Ahram, a state-owned newspaper.

Egypt’s society may look homogeneous on the outside, but as the Times explains, it is — in reality — anything but homogeneous:

In daily life secular divisions can be subtle. People work together, study together, but then go their separate ways. The neighborhoods are integrated, but private lives are segregated. Tension grows as young men talk about cellphone videos showing Muslim girls with Christian boys, or as Christian parents complain that their children are forced to study the Koran in public schools.

The group outside the warehouse slowly acknowledged that there was little mingling in Nag Hammadi. “We are separated,” said Essam Atef, 32, a Christian who manages the pharmaceutical business. “If there is a wedding, you offer congratulations, and if there is someone sick, you might visit, but we are both on our own here.”

All the men agreed.

What the government of Egypt is doing, then, is just what Egyptian society does, itself, which is to “keep up appearances.” Society pays lip-service to the notion that Muslims and Christians get along well, but in truth, they’re segregated. In the same way, the government tries to make it seem as though there is no sectarian or religious strife, when in fact, it is most assuredly there.