So we had this feminist group Femen invading the Cathedral in Stockholm and staging a semi-nude protest just before Mass. Evidently, these women have just about enough brains to strip topless and show off their mammaries, although not always enough to spell out their protest properly. At least they managed to spell properly this time.
The slogan "Catholic Church out of my body" - I am at a loss to know what that means. Has the Catholic Church ever been inside a woman's body? I'm just curious.
We had a similar protest in Russia a while back and while a lot of people - including our mainly thoughtless celebrities - were making all sorts of stunts urging for the release of the protesters on that occasion, I was very keen to stress that violation of sacred space is one of the most egregious crimes we can have against a population. The Russian protesters received only about 2 years for their crime, and I argued it should have been much more because a hard precedent needs to be set. For the religious person, violation of sacred space is a more vicious crime than breaking and entering into one's own home, and unless a government wants to send the message that it's a free-for-all on attacking each other's religious sites, tough punishments have to follow, and short of destroying a place of worship there can be no hardly be a greater violation than a protest of the kind that those women staged.
In fact, protests inside churches seem to be the fashion nowadays as similar sacrilege has been observed in Spain and France over recent years, and the authorities seem intent on encouraging it, or at the very least maintaining an undignified silence over it.
With that in mind, I was intrigued to see that the comment on the Metro piece was "Metro har sökt Katolska Kyrkan i Stockholm för en kommentar", which translates roughly to "Metro has sought the Catholic Church in Stockholm for comments". I was struck that it was not something on the lines of "Metro has sought the police department for comments" because I would have thought that this at the very least qualifies as an act of public disturbace - in which case the police should be sought out to find out what they are going to do about the crime - but the comment is quite telling because the media has come to accept the Catholic Church as fair game and its followers as people who more or less can never be seen as victims.
Another text worthy of comment is "Efter ett tag tvingades kvinnorna ut ur kyrkan av personal och åskådare" which translates roughly to "After a while the women were forced out of the church by personnel and spectators/onlookers". I do wonder whether the standards of journalism have sunk so low that we cannot even expect a journalist for a major outlet to know that when believers congregate, they do it to worship and not merely to spectate over an event, and that the proper term for Christians gathered in worship is worshipper, congregant, believer or something of the like; words which do not lack Swedish equivalents.
In fairness, with the banalisation of Christian worship over the last 60 or so years - although it has to be admitted that the Catholic liturgy in Sweden is generally of a high calibre -, it is not that surprising that somebody not raised a Christian (which I presume he wasn't) would equate Christian worship with just any old secular event. Nonetheless, I would still expect someone with any decent amout of professional integrity to make the proper distinction between a mere spectator event and a Catholic Mass, or at the very least be curious about why people were gathered in the first place - a 5-minute Internet search would certainly be enough to form that impression and having formed that impression, the congregants would surely not be labeled mere spectators.
The proper response to this kind of incident, would of course, have been to detain these women until the police came to take them away. Alas, this does not appear to have happened and they were simply escorted outside, no doubt so they can prepare for more rebel-rousing desecration, seeing as it is a consequence-free act. In any case, given the queerness of the Swedish legal system, detaining them would probably have seen the Catholic church hit with an abduction charge, so maybe the congregants were right to take the 'safe' option.
Obviously this was nothing other than a publicity stunt - the Catholic Church is quite small in Sweden, and its leadership not particularly vocal against anti-life and anti-family measures, and the text was even in English to ensure maximum exposure (pun intended) - and for that reason, it almost pains me to afford it any attention, but with thoughtless feminism on the march we can expect more and more of this kind of non-sense, and the sort of righteous outrage I have over this kind of of demonic demonstration implores me to at the very least catalogue it whenever it happens.
