Who's the victim here?

The classic definition of chutzpah is of a defendant who murders his parents and then asks the judge to have mercy on him because he's an orphan.

We have a new contender.

According to today's Times:

ROME — The Vatican recalled its ambassador to Ireland on Monday, citing reaction to a recent Irish government report that said the Vatican had discouraged efforts by bishops to report cases of sexual abuse to the police.

If you're wondering, the report of the Irish government, over 400 pages, is very strong in its condemnation of the church's responsibility for the rape of children all around Ireland by Catholic priests.

Last week, the Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, denounced “the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day,” in a speech that represented the government’s sharpest-ever direct attack on the Roman Catholic leadership.

The prime minister told Parliament last week, “The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation.’ ” Mr. Kenny added that the Vatican had not listened “to evidence of humiliation and betrayal” with compassion, but had instead chosen “to parse and analyze it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer.” The Irish Parliament also passed a motion denouncing the Vatican’s role in “undermining child-protection frameworks.”

Any decent human being, or any organization with the slightest regard for human rights and human dignity, would be so humbled the the only possible response would be abject apology, or, in the case of the organization, to dedicate all its resources to compensate the victims and help them to heal.

Of course, the Catholic church, having no regard for human rights and human dignity, takes the opposite approach, recalling its ambassador in affront over the Taoiseach's comments, noting that, "the decision “does not exclude some degree of surprise and disappointment at certain excessive reactions.”

Yes, believe it or not, in this situation, the injured party is not the rape victims, or the government officials who stand up for them, but the criminals who were at the receiving end of "certain excessive reactions".

Chutzpah, anybody?

Nicholas Kristof gets it partly right

Nicholas Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist for the Times, deserves a lot of praise for his concentration on the oppression of women. He is perhaps best known for his writings about teenage girls held in slavery as prostitutes, and his efforts to free them by buying them from their captors.

This week's column takes another step in opposition to women's oppression, pointing out how religion across the world, in various denominations, operates to keep women down.

He writes:

Religions derive their power and popularity in part from the ethical compass they offer. So why do so many faiths help perpetuate something that most of us regard as profoundly unethical: the oppression of women?

It is not that warlords in Congo cite Scripture to justify their mass rapes (although the last warlord I met there called himself a pastor and wore a button reading “rebels for Christ”). It’s not that brides are burned in India as part of a Hindu ritual. And there’s no verse in the Koran that instructs Afghan thugs to throw acid in the faces of girls who dare to go to school.

It's good to see a mainstream news outlet publishing such a point.

So why do I say that he gets it partly right?

Simple. He treats pervasive religious sexism as somehow an aberration, a distortion of the true nature of religion. In fact, as Kristof's own words demonstrate, sex oppression is at the very core of the largest religions in the world. Sexual oppression isn't the entirety of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, but it is a fundamental part of all three:

The New Testament quotes St. Paul (I Timothy 2) as saying that women “must be silent.” Deuteronomy declares that if a woman does not bleed on her wedding night, “the men of her town shall stone her to death.” An Orthodox Jewish prayer thanks God, “who hast not made me a woman.” The Koran stipulates that a woman shall inherit less than a man, and that a woman’s testimony counts for half a man’s.

He is right that there appears to be an opportunity for some religions to abandon their sexist natures, but it is no help to pretend that those who oppress women in the name of religion are not doing so in line with the central principles of those very religions.