I really admire Andrew Sullivan’s energy and optimism about the possible repercussions of Catholic Church’s latest round of sex scandals — here, here, and here, for example.
But he’s wrong that anything will happen to Ratzinger or Cardinal Brady over this. Brady was cheered at mass yesterday:
The applause that rippled through Armagh’s vast St Patrick’s Cathedral as Dr Séan Brady entered this morning stated in the clearest terms exactly what his parishioners think of their cardinal.
[….]“We didn’t need to clap him,” parishioner Maura McClean said afterwards, “because I think God will applaud him”.
“But that was the reaction of the decent people of Armagh. I think he’s a true genuine person who’s done no wrong.”
[….]Marie Ryan said to condemn him for failing to alert the authorities about notorious paedophile priest Brendan Smyth 35 years ago was to judge him using today’s standards.
[….]“It was a different era back then and a lot of things happened that shouldn’t,” she said.
“But he definitely has to stay – he shouldn’t resign.”
The weirdos and oldsters who still attend mass couldn’t care less about whether or not the Catholic Church raped thousands of children. It’s as simple as that.
Eventually, these people will die off. In the short term, they will be replaced by suckers in some poorer, less literate part of the world. But, I have to think, that as education and access to information improves, the supply of suckers worldwide will start to dwindle, and the Catholic Church will eventually vanish.
Until then, though, Cardinals and Bishops will continue to aid and abet child molesters. And their parishioners will applaud them for it.
There’s probably nothing any of us can do about it.
4tehlulz
>judge him using today’s standards.
HAHA no. I think the standards of thirty-five years ago would have condemned him if he was caught.
canuckistani
I guess child molestation was A-OK 35 years ago. It was the 70’s, after all.
4tehlulz
@canuckistani: It was the “incense” they were burning during the mass. “Reefer Madness” has taught us that even slight exposure to “incense” will lead to lewd behavior.
If only they listened to Opus Dei sooner, this would never have happened.
...now I try to be amused
The Roman Catholic Church has been “vanishing” since the Reformation almost 500 years ago. Even rotten institutions have that staying power that institutions have. Think of it as the Republican Party of religion.
beltane
What disturbs me most about this is that I get the distinct feeling that Ratzinger and his loyalists really see nothing wrong with the sexual abuse of children. They go through the motions of condemning it, but it clearly does not horrify them the same way it does everyone else.
Besides, even if Ratzinger were to go (and he’s not) there is likely not a single member of the College of Cardinals who is untainted by this, and the purging of the Church carried out by Ratzinger and JPII effectively eliminated any insider opposition to the “pedophile caucus”.
I really feel for Sullivan and others who still hold out hope that the church can be reformed and renewed, but I just don’t see it happening. All human institutions eventually come to an end, and the RC Church has a longer run of it than any other, but it is now a diseased remnant of its former self.
Brandon
By “suckers in less literate parts of the world”, I am sure you mean the burgeoning Catholic/conservative intelligensia set here in the U.S. I am probably wrong in this, but my recollection is that John Roberts is a convert to catholicism. Wasn’t Bob Novak one too?
beltane
@canuckistani: That’s what gets me. They feel that outrage over child rape is some kind of absurd form of political correctness. Sick people.
MikeJ
@Brandon: Tony Blair too.
Cat Lady
The Catholic brand is toxic now, and there’s no fixing it. When I see a picture of a priest now, the first thing that flashes through my mind is molester. It’s visceral, and with each new report, the impression gets stronger. Tying in to the last post, there’s probably 27% of Catholics that will always be into the authoritarianism the Church represents, no matter what.
beltane
@Brandon: Sam Brownback falls into that category as well.
Ash Can
It’s probably a lost cause for me to even mention this, but not all Catholics think the way Maura McClean and Marie Ryan do.
beltane
@Cat Lady: 27% of the population would happily acquiesce to human sacrifice and cannibalism if the right people told them to do it. Such is the nature of our species.
Nannergrrl
But, I have to think, that as education and access to information improves, the supply of suckers worldwide will start to dwindle, and the Catholic Church will eventually vanish.
Hahahahahaha!
Oh ye of little faith.
As access to information improves it only becomes more glaringly obvious that a vast majority of human beings are generally not known for critical thought and prefer to cling to their tightly held beliefs regardless of what solid evidence contradicts them. People will ignore or outright contort themselves emotionally and irrationally in order to rationalize their positions rather than be proven mistaken.
Willful ignorance. Learn it. Embrace it. Love it.
mclaren
The good news? Surveys show that America is steadily becoming less religious. The dropoff in churchgoing and in religious belief becomes particularly steep among young people, so the trend seems to be accelerating.
Church attendance is down, people who identify themselves as members of organized religions is way down, people who profess belief in the Devil or other supernatural entities is down across the board.
geg6
Understand that many Irish will never give up the Church, no matter what those repugnant criminals do. Never.
But almost all of those people are old or simply too invested in their Catholicism to accept this. I can tell you from friends I have who are Irish or who now live in Ireland, the Church in Ireland will most likely never recover from this. Which is, on the whole IMHO, a very good thing. Over the centuries in Ireland, the Church did good things while Britain treated the Irish like animals. But overall and especially at this point in history, the value of the Church to modern Ireland is pretty much zero. It has been much, much more of a detriment to the country, socially, economically, and politically. And more and more Irish do not attend church; if they do, they pretty much ignore the teachings on things like birth control and divorce just like American Catholics. The fact that the dead enders are cheering this criminal conspirator is disheartening to a certain extent, but I have no doubt that the Church no longer holds sway over the politics and personal lives of the Irish the way it has for centuries.
beltane
@Ash Can: Most Catholics do not think the way these women do, but these other, sane Catholics are the ones who have steadily and quietly been leaving the Church in the same way that sane conservatives have left the Republican party.
kay
I thought the Boston victim’s story would have some effect, but I don’t think they mattered.
I still think about one particular six year old boy, who is now a grown man. I tear up thinking about him. How scared he was, every day, waiting for the next summons.
shortstop
Not for the first time, I note that the infallibility thing prevents a board of directors from taking you out. Well played, sir.
Of course, most of the board’s likely as bent as you are, so they wouldn’t kick your evil ass to the curb anyway.
ed
Monsters.
shortstop
No, it’s as simple as this: they cannot, under any circumstances, permit themselves to believe that this might be true, because it would shake their entire worldview to its foundations and they have no ability to refashion it based on new information.
Which isn’t any better than what you said. It may be worse.
Robin G.
“Disaffected Catholic” will become an actual denomination. And why not? Most of the ones I know no longer have faith in the bureaucracy, but still feel pulled toward the teachings and the culture. Catholicism will survive in one incarnation or another.
John PM
Two points:
1) Not to be crude, but it appears that Jesus’ saying “Let the children come unto me” has now been corrupted by the modern Catholic Church as “Let me cum onto the children.”
2) If the standards of 35 years ago were too lenient, perhaps we should use the standards of 100 years ago, when Oscas Wilde was convicted of gross indecency.
beltane
@John PM: As to point #2, there was a medieval French bishop who later became Pope who handled a child sex abuse scandal by defrocking the offending priest and burning him at the stake for heresy. It seems they took these things more seriously back in the 14th century.
jm
Only to be replaced by something similar. The emotional security to be found in submitting to an authoritarian institution will always be attractive to a sizable percentage of the population.
Here’s a little thought experiment if you don’t agree. Turn this:
into this:
The Republicans and Democrats who still defend America’s Iraq policy couldn’t care less about whether or not the that policy resulted in the deaths of thousands of children. It’s as simple as that.
(To be clear, I’m not comparing US to the Catholic Church. I’m comparing subsets of their supporters.)
DougJ
@Brandon:
Ross Douthat, Tony Blair (an honorary American in the worst possible sense), Newt Gingrich.
Kristine
@beltane:
They value living children so little, yet are virulently anti-choice and call themselves “pro-life.” Someone explain this?
I am a lapsed Catholic. I will never return. The tenets that form the basis of the faith–love, respect, charity–have been swamped by the need to control. Rigid hierarchy. The spread of fear. Old men in robes hanging on to power by their fingernails.
“Catholics Come Home.” Not in this lifetime.
J
Beltane@5
Do they fail to see anything wrong with it or is it rather that they have a perverse view of what is wrong about it? Is it (I speculate) that they are focussed less on the dreadful harm that abuse does to the victim and on the appalling violation of trust that it represents than on the crime as a ‘sin’, a lapse in the priest’s inner struggle to observe his vows or whatever, so that the victim the harm done to whom is uppermost in our minds recedes from view for them?
Brandon
Oops. I was wrong on the Roberts score. Life long Catholic he is. Clarence Thomas however is the Catholic convert on the court.
My guess is that if you are a conservative intellectual, you join the Catholic church to give yourself moral street cred. It seems only natural seeing that it is an old hierarchical institution controlled by old white men who are captive of the Republican party. It also allows them to avoid whackjobs like Dobson and the Family. Additional benefits are that mass is short (usually 1 hour), is highly scripted so once you learn the ritual, you don’t need to pay attention, requires minimal participation at best (some standing, kneeling, some amen’s and a hymn where it’s okay to mouth the words) and best yet, you don’t need to go every time. Many Catholic churches can be large and impersonal and no one really keeps track of how often you attend, maybe only a general sense that you attend often or not. Of course this last part changes if you have kids for Sunday school. But perfectly enough, many of these conservative/Catholic convert “intellectuals” are traditional DINOs (double income no kids). They oddly don’t seem to care what the bible says about procreation as it applies to themselves, only others.
MoeLarryAndJesus
They’re changing the name of the Virgin Mary to just plain old Mary because Pope Rapezinger cornered her in a Vatican loft and, uh, gave her his “blessing.”
He’s thinking of changing this title of Pope to something more fitting, like maybe Shtuppenfuhrer. Now stop crying and eat your wafers. All of you.
cintibud
I am starting to seriously check out the American Catholic Church. The deeply liberal and socially conscious Church of my youth still exists but is consistently being suppressed to the margins.
http://www.accus.us/
twiffer
Marie Ryan said to condemn him for failing to alert the authorities about notorious paedophile priest Brendan Smyth 35 years ago was to judge him using today’s standards.
wait, pedophillia was okay 35 years ago? gee, i must have missed that in history class.
DougJ
@Kristine:
I have often said that lapsed Catholicism is one of the greatest religions in the world.
SGEW
I’ve always heard that there are only two types: suffering Catholics and recovering Catholics.
You don’t “lapse”: you’re recovering.
Tom
You know, I read this site all the time. I love it. But you guys really have a seriously anti-Catholic buzz going. The pedophilia stuff is painful, evil, cruddy, reprehensible & the hierarchy has got to deal & a lot of those people have got to leave. But some of us Catholics are socialists and fellow travelers. And lets not forget the likes of Dorothy Day & the Berrigans. There’s a lot that’s good in this church.
CynDee
WARN CHILDREN. Tell them what to report, when, to whom, and how. Tell them how to get away. Start pamphlet campaigns in schools and churches. Have seminars and meeting for the purpose of warning children in classrooms and church organizations. Teach children that they own their own bodies and lives, and no one else has a right to them. Teach children that domineering behavior and intimidation is a danger signal, and that sexual abuse is a crime.
@mclaren: Hopefully these folks are gravitating to something like this: “There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.” — Dalai Lama
MBunge
“But, I have to think, that as education and access to information improves, the supply of suckers worldwide will start to dwindle, and the Catholic Church will eventually vanish.”
As others have pointed out, that’s not going to happen. But not because people are brainless sheep who aren’t as brave or clever as some of the non-religious commentators here. History shows us that human beings as a whole have a fundamental need to believe in something. That’s usually been religion, though the atheistic communism of the 20th century demonstrated that non-religious faiths can be just as evil and destructive.
Mike
Robin G.
@cintibud: Very nice. As an American Baptist, I’m always sympathetic to liberal churches within conservative denomimations (“I attend a [blank] church, but not THAT kind of [blank] church.”) They look like good folks. I hope they spread.
TooManyJens
And yet the reason the Church can’t get with the times and embrace modern views on issues like LGBT rights and birth control is supposedly that morality comes from God and is therefore unchanging. You can’t have it both ways.
SGEW
@Tom:
I think this may be because of a conglomeration (conflation?) between a) outraged reaction to the Catholic hierarchy’s corrupt handling of the scandal, b) criticism of the Catholic church as a cultural institution (esp. here in the U.S.A.), and c) some broad anti-theistic sentiments and occasional pointed rhetoric.
Hot topic.
Brandon
@cintibud:
Where have you been? Cardinal Ratzinger, the great Sith Lord himself, was responsible hunting down and murdering that church in every corner of the galaxy where he could find high contrations of vaticantwo-chlorians. I personally trained with Master Archbishop Hunthausen in a small outpost known as the Seattle dioces. He had the highest concentration of vaticatwo-chlorians in that sector. Unfortunately Sith Ratzinger overpowered him a long time ago, before the fall of the Great Empire, during the reign of Ronaldus Magnus. Perhaps you could still find some small, remote outpost such as an ice planet, where you could find one who could teach you the ways of the vaticantwo. However, I fear that that knowledge maybe lost to history through Sith Ratzingers decades of ruthless rule.
Good luck.
Crusty Dem
@SGEW:
You’re forgetting “Former Catholic”, although anti-catholic would probably work pretty well, too (at least for me, but then I have major issues with the whole “child rape” thing).
As far as the article goes, who gives a shit what the people who remain in the church think? Talk about your self-selecting groups. People who tolerate decades of the worst kind of abuse think those who didn’t stop it are totally awesome. In other news, women who stay with their battering husbands think that, deep down, they’re really sweet guys.
Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be in jail.
Hiram Taine
@MBunge:
If that were so than all population groups would have a roughly similar percentage of non-religious types.
This is not the case, some Scandinavian nations are well over 50% non-religious and they aren’t communist.
MaximusNYC
What Tom said. There’s some painting with an awfully broad brush going on here.
I know some ultra-liberal Catholics who are outraged and sickened by all of this. They pay little heed to the Pope or the bishops, and attend parishes that are on their (lefty) political and social wavelengths.
The Catholic hierarchy insists that it is the center of the Church. Many of the Catholic people disagree, and are quietly putting their grassroots view of how the Church should function into action.
The hyper-conservatism of today’s hierarchy represents a powerful reaction against Vatican II. But it’s conceivable to me that the rigidity and moral corruption of the current leadership could spark another pendulum swing, back in the opposite direction. Just as the Bush years shaped many younger Americans into liberals, the Ratzinger years may be shaping young Catholics into liberals as well.
Granted, many will likely just bail, and become Episcopalian, Wiccan, agnostic, or atheist. But I suspect there could be a serious left-wing uprising within the American Church in the coming decades.
lurkergirl
@Brandon: Catholicism appeals to two types of intellectual: rigid authoritarians who want the moral cover, and gays who are terrified to come out of the closet (hi Ross!) because it makes sexual repression seem heroic. I think there’s little argument anymore about where it really leads.
And yes, I’m a former Catholic – not lapsed, not recovering, not ever going to return. One of the first major clergy abuse scandals happened in Canada and that did it for me, along with all the hypocritical “pro-life” propaganda shoved at me in high school. It’s a rotting dinosaur of an institution and I won’t miss it when it’s gone.
Johnny's mom
Marie Ryan said to condemn him for failing to alert the authorities about notorious paedophile priest Brendan Smyth 35 years ago was to judge him using today’s standards.
They hid it. Of course they knew it was as wrong as it ever was.
Some people are using the Church as a beard, just as some are using the Republican party as a beard.
Crusty Dem
@Tom:
Yes, yes, let’s not bicker and argue over who raped children.
A family friend was raped by a priest, when the mother finally found out (years later), she went to the diocese, wrote letters, called the relevant offices, the whole bit. No response. She called the diocese and said “I’m having a press conference in 15 minutes” and hung up, the bishop himself called back immediately.
The reason so many who remain in the church don’t blame those who allowed this to happen is that they blame the victims. I’ve heard it myself, my own mother (who wasn’t very religious, was fairly liberal, and generally a justice-seeking, decent woman) would say things like “Well, everyone knew to keep their children away from Father X…”
And if you grew up in the church, it was very hard to realize exactly how unbelievably fucked up that statement was…
Anyway, I am sorry for your pain, but if pointing out the enormous flaws and errors of the church causes you discomfort, you might want to consider why that is rather than being upset over those who bring it up…
fraught
That’s what the ‘lawnless” always say about the people two or three generations up ahead, those who own the lawns and want to keep kids off of them.
Unfortunately, every generation grossly underestimates how many of it’s own will become just as proprietary of their own lawns, once they are the one’s who own them, and become just as cantankerously wild, whiteheaded and holler-y about y’all walking on them.
Hoping for the dying off of an entire generation just makes you feel better about something that seems unchangeable.
It’s just as futile as saying you’re never going to get old like that.
les
The notion that the Catholic Church is somehow ok because some of its members are anti-child abuse, or otherwise somehow liberal, is at best lame. Those “liberal” Catholics provide a large measure of financial and social support for the organization and the hierarchy, and a nice cover for the abuse. What’s especially sweet (or stupid, if you prefer) is that, given the chance, the hierarchy would bar the liberals from the sacraments for the very beliefs and behaviors that the liberals hold up as defense of the church.
qwerty42
I’m glad my parents are not alive to see this. My mom especially. Seeing the church fall into the hands of a reactionary group which holds its own members in contempt has been depressing. The only hope I see is the abolition of celibacy and the ordination of women and I do not imagine this group of misfits ever approving that. If I want the ritual, there are always the Episcopalians or the Orthodox. Or I could just sit at home on Sunday, drink coffee and read the NYT (hmmm, I seem to be doing that now …)
Crusty Dem
I can’t help but wonder how things might’ve been different if conservative cardinals hadn’t killed Pope John Paul I (allegedly).
kansi
Cyndee:
We’ve done this in our parish and school. We take the abuse of children by anyone very seriously. Sad that our gentle priest had to admit he sometimes finds it uncomfortable to wear the Roman collar in public. Many of them are good men who are shamed and stereotyped by the perversion of others.
Mark S.
@MaximusNYC:
I doubt it. The Church isn’t a democracy, and almost all of the cardinals and bishops have been appointed by John Paul and Benedict. Change is glacial in the Church.
ricky
I want to thank Rev. Bart Stupak for his courageous stance
behind the Bishop’s favorite position behind their yourful followers. It is a wide stance and firmly delivered.
This is about HCR, isn’t it? Isn’t that all the church cares about this week?
Comrade Dread
There needs to be repentance and institutional reforms that will prevent such evil from occurring again.
And by repentance, I mean a strong conviction of wrong doing, a full confession of the evils done, a determination to submit to the justice demanded by the civil authority to pay restitution to victims, or incarcerate those who perpetrated such hideous crimes.
I suppose if I were cynical, I would say that it is difficult to imagine that the image of the Catholic Church could get much worse by confessing all rather than stonewalling.
ricky
@Crusty Dem:
Is it your position that the sudden appearance of images of Christ on freshly fried tortillas is part of the cover up or merely a distraction for followers in this hemisphere?
grendelkhan
Okay, good. Nobody’s talking about them. I’m sure they’re very nice people, and I’m sure most if not all of them haven’t raped any kids. That doesn’t change the fact that the whole organization is suffused with child rapists and their defenders. From the bottom to the very top, from the clergy to the laity, it’s become very difficult to claim that the Catholic Church isn’t objectively pro-child rape. Getting one’s knickers in a twist when someone points this out is about as relevant as getting all huffy when a lifelong Republican doesn’t want to hear about torture because it might harsh his mellow.
Look, the Catholic brand is now pretty much synonymous with child rape. This is indeed profoundly tragic for people who’ve devoted their lives to it in the name of service, of charity, of humanity. But that’s the fault of the rapists and their enablers. Blaming people for trashing the Church reeks of the same mindset that blames the victims for coming forward, since nobody would have to feel bad if they didn’t.
DAmned at Random
I was raised Catholic, though I began “falling away” from religion while still pretty young – about 12-13. When the pedophile priest scandal broke, I believed it on an intellectual level- the whole forced celebacy deal is unnatural, still I can’t believe the kind priests of my childhood could have done such a thing. The Church did a great disservice to the nonoffenders, the vast majority of good people who are called to a life of service become suspect because of the coverup.
Crusty Dem
@ricky:
I was mostly joking about the conspiracy theory, though I was discussing Catholicism with an Italian friend and her response was “Of course the conservative cardinals killed him”. Even DougJ has a while to go before he reaches the level of cynicism of an Italian Catholic…
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
Fuck Brady.
A relative was asked to leave an Irish seminary back in the 1940s. The experience was very painful for him.
He ended up with a family he was proud of, and lived a noble and dignified life, but it was only the year before he died that he could talk about why he’d been asked to leave training for the priesthood. He was a good family man, but he’d have been a tremendous priest.
He was asked to leave the priesthood because he had a stutter.
A frackin’ *stutter*. Molesting little boys was A-OK, but stumbling over your t’s and d’s – nope, pack your bags, you’re outta here.
The sex scandals in the Irish church really shook his faith, and he couldn’t comprehend it.
Me, I was just furious on his behalf. It’s not like the Irish church at that stage was lacking applicants who weren’t criminals violating innocents.
A friend in Ireland was in the priesthood for 15 years, did his PhD as a priest, went to Rome, etc. Finally, just before he turned 40 two years ago, ditched the church, got engaged to a lovely woman 4 months later, and hopefully is making babies with her. Why any young priest would stick with a bunch of criminal conspirators is beyond me.
Ann
“Eventually, these people will die off. In the short term, they will be replaced by suckers in some poorer, less literate part of the world. But, I have to think, that as education and access to information improves, the supply of suckers worldwide will start to dwindle, and the Catholic Church will eventually vanish.”
Wow! I am as taken aback by this classist observation as I am by all the commenters who have agreed with it. Nothing is more loathsome than religious institutional corruption; with that I wholly agree. But to ascribe religion to poor suckers is to defy current sociological and political data. And to be comfortable with a very high degree of ‘elitist’ (though I question the term) discrimination. You guys can do better!
Mnemosyne
@MaximusNYC:
If there is a pendulum swing, I seriously doubt that we’ll see it in my lifetime (and I’m expecting to live at least another 40 years). The young priests coming out of the seminaries right now are the true believers in the infallibility of the Church (and, by extension, themselves). My aunt, who’s a two-time Bush voter, was a little shocked at how dogmatic and retrograde the new, young priest at her parish was compared to the older priests who were leaving.
I wouldn’t make any bets on the Church strengthening VII anytime soon. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being weakened even further, or even rescinded.
Windhorse
In the early Church Christians met in each others’ homes and worshiped quietly and in secret. Given the corrupting influence of any institution upon a movement, perhaps now is the time for those who are interested to return to this kind of practice.
For those who value the liturgy and the sacraments there are a number of offshoot Catholic Churches who worship in this way and many have valid sacraments and apostolic succession. These churches tend to be socially liberal and more reflective of an ethos centered around compassion rather than legalism, as do the similar Gnostic churches.
Phoebe
@Crusty Dem: Yes, exactly, exactly. I’ve heard this too. “In school everybody knew about so and so, whenever the loudspeaker would tell a kid to report to his office, we’d all yell ‘bring your kneepads!'”. Oh. Okay!
But yeah, that woman’s right: molesting kids was okay in the seventies; it was a different time. Now, with today’s morals, it doesn’t happen anymore. So problem solved!
Phoebe
And if I were a Catholic, and belonged to one of those do-gooder churches, you know, because they do good, I wouldn’t put a penny in the plate ever, because a fraction of that is going to the Vatican and HELL NO.
Rebecca
@Tom:
THANK YOU. I read this blog daily and whenever DougJ and others get their Catholic Hate on it gets me really uncomfortable. And I stopped being Catholic when I was a teenager.
I agree that the pope is a scumbag and a lot of the Bishops are too–not to mention that all the priests who child molest should die in a fire–but there are still good people doing good things in the Church. I mean, dude, are you going to spit in the face of those 59,000 nuns?
I don’t want the Catholic church to die, dammit. I just want most of the Vatican to be defrocked and replaced by priests who aren’t assholes.
Allowing nuns to be ordained would be nice too, though.
kay
“MEXICO CITY — Dominican authorities announced Friday that they arrested Jorge Torres Puello, who acted as a legal adviser for a group of American church members detained in Haiti on child abduction charges even though he himself was wanted on trafficking charges in the United States and El Salvador.
Working together with the United States Marshals Service and other United States law enforcement agencies, the Dominican authorities detained Mr. Torres Thursday night without incident in the parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant in Santo Domingo, the officials said.
In El Salvador, Mr. Torres is wanted on accusations of human trafficking and exploitation of minors for pornography and prostitution. In the United States, he faces accusations of alien smuggling in Vermont and of probation violations for fraud in Pennsylvania. He is also wanted in Canada, American officials said. ”
I wonder if expliotation of minors would stick.
Ya know, against the leaders.
Phoebe
@Rebecca:
Good luck! And keep giving them money until they do that.
Seriously, I don’t think you can amputate the bad from this institution. I think it’s set up in such a way that this stuff is inevitable.
This, from someone who teaches religion to Jesuits, is a pretty damning indicator of the chances for reform there; in a culture “that values obedience over honesty, submission over truth telling, and it is set up in such a way to assure that deviating from this value structure will lead to great personal loss”, what can you really hope for? And the pope is infallible, so according to their law, he can’t be fired, he can only resign. He can’t be fired for anything.
Me? I hope those nuns form their own religion or nonprofit or whatever. You really can do lots of good outside the Catholic Church. And you can still believe in God.
Why is it so insane and offensive for us to hope this institution dies? How bad does it have to get?
stormhit
@Rebecca:
I’m certain there are plenty of people who love this blog that feel the same way. I don’t mind any of the coverage- Sullivan is doing a great job for instance. But DougJ’s commentary on the matter tends to come off sounding not much more sophisticated than a misanthropic 15 year old who just figured out he didn’t have to follow mommy and daddy’s religion any longer.
MoeLarryAndJesus
The current Pope is a scumbag who thinks baby rape is less important than what stupid-ass hat and gown he wears on a given day. The next Pope will be exactly the same sort of scumbag – maybe worse.
Those of you who want to go on supporting this rotten criminal institution because “they’re not all bad” remind me of how Mother Teresa went to Haiti and sucked up to the Duvaliers, and how she preached to the poorest women in the world that using birth control was evil. I wonder how many instances of child rape she turned a blind eye to.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Blaming all Catholics for child-molesting priests is like blaming all taxpayers for child-molesting public schoolteachers.