Theology: Catholics Ban Surfing!

Should Catholic schoolboys be fed to sharks? A theological conundrum!

Don’t it feel good to have a provocative religion-based headline. I remember when it was the thing of anyone who regarded themselves as “edgy” to stick the boot into the Catholic Church. It peaked, I think, when an artist, Andrew Serranos, submerged a crucifix in a beaker of his post-modernist pee-pee and called it Piss Christ.  He even talked his way into a five-gee grant from a US-taxyapyer funded agency.

Good times.

Of course, with the arrival of the whole Islam thing, when even as people are beheaded in the streets and machine-gunned in their offices, the rest of us tie ourselves into knots to exhibit our tolerance, it has shut the door on taunting religions. Sometimes they bite back, literally, and often via various legal avenues.

Anyway, it was revealed by the Northern Star newspaper, recently, that “surfing will be banned at all Catholic schools on the North Coast for the foreseeable future.

THE Catholic Diocese of Lismore, which controls all Catholic schools from Port Macquarie to the Queensland border, has issued a ban on all open ocean surfing and surf lifesaving in response to the threat of “shark encounters”.

A memo announcing the ban was sent to principals by Director of Catholic Schools David Condon on February

1.It stated that the Catholic Schools Office had recently sought an independent risk assessment of parish schools conducting surfing and surf lifesaving in open waters, “specifically in relation to potential shark interactions”.

“After consultation with the Catholic Schools Council, it has been determined that all Diocesan surfing, and Diocesan surf lifesaving in open waters conducted under the auspices of the Catholic Schools Office, will cease in 2018,” the memo said.

At this stage it is unknown who conducted the independent risk assessment, nor what criteria were used.

The door was left open however for schools to conduct their own “independent assessments” of the risk.

The memo listed three recommendations if schools opted to continue with ocean activities:

1. Events to be held at beaches protected with either nets or smart drumlines

2. Drones to be used at events

3. If no nets or smart drum lines are present, then the event should not proceed.

The memo emerges at the same time a new CSIRO report using world first genetic analysis estimated there were almost 5500 white sharks living off Australia’s East Coast.

The estimate came with a huge margin for error, with the real number considered in the report as being anywhere from 2900 sharks to 12,800 sharks.

(The latter number if you’re lazy at maths like BeachGrit)

Do you like irony being spooned to you like this?

That a religion built around the concept of a heaven and the notion that the hand of God is in every creature, that to die, i.e. go to heaven after being eaten by God’s creature, could somehow be a bad thing?

Wouldn’t a little Catholic boy tossed into the mouth of a Great White be the completion of some sort of divine circle of life?