Ah yes, another Catholic Church pedophile abuse scandal from the lecturing pro selective life crowd. Oh, but the Vatican says it’s all about smearing Pope Benedict. Perhaps they should consider that when a cardinal acts immorally reprehensible he will have to deal with the consequences. We all are judged here on earth, with the Catholic Church only too ready to judge when it suits their religious and political purposes.
A very good question coming from Jodi Jacobson, Editor, RH Reality Check: Why is a pedophilia-ridden, pedophilia-hiding, child-abusing Church allowed to write laws controlling women’s rights?
To Ms. Jacobson I’d say, see the picture with Nancy Pelosi, which provides the answer, with progressives in Congress mute when she did it.
The Catholic Church is the same institution Speaker Pelosi invited to help write health care language on abortion that launched Rep. Bart Stupak to stardom. Mr. Stupak’s insult to the nuns who stood up to Catholic bishops just another chapter in Catholic misogyny. Speaker Pelois’s actions in bringing Catholic reps into the room definitely not what the Founders had in mind when they created this great country.
It was the Catholic Church, which also threatens to deny communion to politicians who support a woman’s right to self-determination, who made quite an issue of John Kerry’s support for women’s rights during the presidential election season of 2004, though he’s hardly the only one targeted, just the most prominent. Even if it is the Democratic Party, including through the health care bill just passed (no matter how bad the bill ended up), that continues to represent a buttress for the poor and less fortunate, while honoring the human and civil rights of women and gays, something the Catholic Church does not come close to doing.
Their charitable world-wide outreach does not make up for any of these abominable moral failures and the incredible harm done through their political meddling, trumped by the revelations now hitting that when Pope Benedict was a cardinal he turned away from protecting children.
[...] It’s hard to imagine a deeper crisis for the Catholic hierarchy than this. If the church is to survive – and it will because it is the vessel of eternal truth – it will have to go through a wrenching transformation. Beginning with the resignation of this Pope and an end to priestly celibacy. – Andrew Sullivan
Why the Catholic Church still has tax exempt status is a mystery, except that no politician of either political party has the nerve to strip them of this privilege.
The latest molestation outrage (as reported by the NY Times and AP) just the latest in a corrupt patriarchy that protects its own, which likely wouldn’t happen if the good nuns were given more power, but also if women could hold the priesthood.
When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI (and seen in the picture at the top where Nancy Pelosi is kissing his ring), was brought charges by two bishops out of Wisconsin, which alleged the molestation of 200 deaf boys, Cardinal Ratzinger made sure it was kept secret, says the Times report. That he is now the Pope is a disgrace, but it does solidify the mind on the moral and ethical bankruptcy of the Catholic Church.
From the New York Times, which has seen the documents proving their report:
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.
The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.
The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.
In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal. [...]
It continues to disgust me how politicians will go to such length to raise their particular religion above all common decency, while also actually believing that their church’s input in the legislative process is the right course in a democratic republic. What’s just as bad is the people continue to put up with it. That’s really the rotten core of our politics. Too many people excuse the political parties and their leaders of anything. It’s why so many Democrats, but also Republicans, have turned “independent,” not wanting anything to do with either political party, both of which are philosophically corrupted.
Maybe it’s because I’m a meditating Episcopalian that I have such utter contempt for the Catholic Church hierarchy. Belonging to a church, however loosely, that supports female women priests (the best ones in churches I’ve enjoyed being women), having heard and met Katherine Jefferts Schori the Presiding Bishop, but also (depending on the parish) honors gay unions and also recognizing the value of gay priests, even bishops in the case of Bishop Gene Robinson.
Nothing short of Pope Benedict’s resignation will do.
TM NOTE: Reader “Jane Austen” has written a powerful diary on this subject that everyone should read.
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