In other news, Francisco Franco and the Catholic Church, echoing the Argentine dirty war, stole babies from ‘undesirable’ families and sold them to families that kept up better on their church donations and Party dues. Apparently collaborating doctors helped arrange the theft and then told a lot of parents that their kids had died.
After Franco the Church kept selling babies for money through the 1980’s and maybe through the mid-90’s.
Another great PR moment for Vatican City…
MariedeGournay
/barf
fasteddie9318
It was already Butthurt Day today between the liberal purity brigade and the Obots, now we can accommodate the Catholic dead-enders. I’m going to be on popcorn all day at this point.
r€nato
If you can’t find work and lack a conscience, you can always get a freelance gig as a fulltime apologist and attack dog for the Catholic Church. Bill Donohue can’t possibly keep up with his current workload.
Emma
I wish, how I wish, dear God, that I could say I’m surprised.
El Cruzado
Technically it should be “Tenemos UN problema”
Grammar Nazism is the only cool Nazism in my book.
r€nato
in other news… hoocoodanode that the GOP’s efforts to reach out to Latino voters would stuff its foot in its mouth and then shoot the foot for good measure:
Lori
Terrible.
Also, small correction: ‘un’ problema (one of those exceptions that is masculine but ends with ‘a’)
Judas Escargot
There isn’t a single Teaching that can’t be turned into a good Business Model, once the right people are in charge…
Catsy
Your first link is broken.
slag
@fasteddie9318:
Oy. Too many empty carbs for me. How do you avoid getting that bloated, unsatisfied feeling afterward?
dmsilev
In other other news, someone stole Obama’s teleprompter:
Oh no, now how will he be able to communicate? Hand signals? Interpretative dance?
r€nato
@dmsilev: George Soros already bought him a new one.
fasteddie9318
@slag: You don’t. The unsatisfied regretful feeling afterward is just punishment.
piratedan
@r€nato: well over at the GOS, someone is positing that Jan Brewer is the perfect candidate for a VP slot on the Republican ticket. The hypothesis is that since Cactus Barbie is drawing big bucks (i.e. six figures) to speak at TP hosted events, that she would be bring good balance to the ticket because of her ‘tough on immigration” stand. I’m sure that will resonate well with latino voters as well.
Yevgraf
Clearly, the problem is that there is too much negative reporting on the Vatican by the secular liberal modernist press.
Further purging of liberals and the installation of more conservatives in the bishoprics, orders and parishes will do much to erase these crimes and stains of Vatican II.
Nathaniel
Just what would it take for some people to leave the Church?
Would the Pope have to eat a live baby on TV? Or would that still not be enough?
rikryah
evil evil mofos
Ogami Itto
@Nathaniel: It depends on whether or not the baby had it coming.
kindness
Wait a minute….Who here knows for sure the Vatican didn’t keep a few of the little boys for themselves? South Park says they did & they are more honest than Politico, the WaPo & the WSJ combined.
Paul in KY
@El Cruzado: Shouldn’t that be: ‘Grammar Nazism is the only cool Nazism, in my book.’?
David Koch
Invisible hand, bitches!
Paul in KY
@piratedan: She would probably be an upgrade from The Grifter from Wasilla.
Yevgraf
@Nathaniel:
Nope, because the live baby wouldn’t be a fetus.
Because everybody knows, only by really hammering home the dogma of the Cult of the Forever Fetus can one find true salvation, because that doesn’t require any truly heavy lifting. Mincing closet cases can yammer on about the evils of those little sluts, the two minute hates directed at abortionists and those sluts can consume energy, and favored parishioners with the right legal and social skills can make big coin by working with the “nonprofit” baby sales lots, er, adoption centers.
The best part is that with so much effort spent in propelling the trajectory of the Cult of the Fetus, you never really have the resources, inclination or need to talk to anybody about how they treat real living people – the K of C types get to be prominent, moral and upstanding businessmen without having to make tough personal choices, as they’ve managed to put the monkey on the backs of evil little sluts.
Rick Taylor
Good for him.
Martin
@Nathaniel:
I think that’s called a ‘test of faith’. IOW, you’re supposed to double-down at that moment and eat your own baby.
I’m going to have to go with advanced civilization alien spacecraft touching down on that one. Of course, it’s a catch-22. Why would they want to come here
what with the Pope eating live babies on TV and all that?
Chris
Old if ugly news. I had never heard of it happening in Spain, but similar things happened all over Nazi occupied Europe. Usually involved churches agreeing to hide Undesirable babies, raising them Catholic, and then refusing to return them to their heathen families after the war.
Warren Terra
Anyone who’s read any Spanish history (the inquisition, the century before the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Civil War itself, the Franco dictatorship) can tell you that the Catholic Church’s history in Spain is a pretty damn good argument for its abolition. Yes, horrible atrocities were committed against Catholic clergy in the Spanish Civil War – but you can totally see why those people hated the Church.
r€nato
@Rick Taylor: I guess, but for several years he refused to acknowledge there were nativist elements in the GOP which the party and its politicians pander to; I believe he blamed wacko population-control extreme environmentalists for that sort of rhetoric.
Baby steps…
Warren Terra
Oh, and the current Pope (Ratzi-The-Rhyming-Slang) is continuing his predecessor’s campaign to canonize the thoroughly execrable Pope Pius IX, who was perfectly happy to engage in a little baby-stealing himself – personally, in fact.
r€nato
@Warren Terra: American pundits who wring their hands about how terrible it is that Europeans have largely abandoned religious faith and respect for religious authority, usually forget to consider the context. Europeans actually know what it’s like to live in a country where religious authority is intimately intertwined with state authority.
Funny how teabaggers loathe government authority while simultaneously demanding that religion get more involved in government. Contempt for the former inevitably rubs off on the latter.
geg6
@Yevgraf:
The saddest thing of all, for me anyway, is that my late dad was very active in our K of C, which actually did do a lot of good works, along the lines of Habitat for Humanity, when I was a kid and teenager. When I left the church and came out as an atheist, he was the only one of my parents who supported and sympathized with me and my myriad of reasons. He also told me many times, on the down low, that he supported a woman’s right to choose. I’m glad he’s not around to see what a criminal organization his adopted church (he was a convert) has been revealed to be.
Dougerhead
Amazing that they kept doing it even after Franco. Crazy!
Ninos robados would be a good name for a band, though.
r€nato
@geg6:
it’s always been a crime family. It’s just that in today’s world, its corruption and hypocrisy can be investigated, revealed and talked about openly.
Amir Khalid
@Warren Terra:
Maybe they shoulda stayed Muslim (he said tactfully).
fasteddie9318
After Franco? What are you sa–OMG GENERALISSIMO FRANCISCO FRANCO IS DEAD??
handy
@fasteddie9318:
Still dead.
Cheap Jim
@El Cruzado:
This is Spanish, so shouldn’t it be “grammar Falangism”?
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Between this and what the Raped Child Corporation did to British/Irish kids from “undesirable” families in the 40s & 50s, nuking the whole fucking mess from orbit may be our only option.
Egypt Steve
@fasteddie9318: Still.
fasteddie9318
You guys, it is totally unfair to smear the entire Church because of the actions of a few, wayward elements across North America, South America, um, much of Europe, parts of ah, Africa, Asia, and er, Australia, and pretty much all of the folks at Global HQ in the Vatican. These are just isolated cases that happen to span the globe. Nothing indicative of a broad systemic corruption, no way.
Egypt Steve
@Cheap Jim: falangismo? Maybe, “falangismo grammatical”??
Culture of Truth
Yevgraf
@r€nato:
My favorite part is all the whimpering about how modernity has uncovered so many of the skeletons, and how the decline in respect has sprung from that.
Fuck them. They had their chance in becoming a decent institution with JP I, and deliberately chose a retrograde, dogmatic asshole as his successor, doubling down that nasty fucking choice by selecting Ratfucker.
I’m seething over the recollection of the combination of American, Vatican and Moslem pressure to stifle efforts to limit population growth in the developing world in the 80s, and how much of a part of that was Vatican inspired.
Ash Can
I’m not holding my breath for a reaction from the Vatican that’s either sincere or responsible (if it even reacts at all).
Roger Moore
Apologia from Chunky Bobo about how this proves the need for more adoptable children in 3, 2, 1…
Dr. Squid
@piratedan: So a Democrat actually thinks we need a veep loosely modeled on Bill The Cat?
Villago Delenda Est
@Cheap Jim:
Where do you want your internets delivered?
Ash Can
@Culture of Truth:
And I’m sure he appreciates the living hell out of it.
Culture of Truth
Wait til we find out the Church was selling tranches of collateralized child obligations
Bubblegum Tate
Even though I am deeply cynical about religion, I really do try to equate “Catholic” with those good, sincere folks in the laity who mostly roll their eyes at the latest bullshit coming from the Vatican and who really do care about doing good works in their community. But when each new revelation about the Church seems to set a new record for depravity, it’s hard not to equate “Catholic” with “The organization that has rendered the Mafia only the second most successful crime syndicate to come out of Italy.”
Villago Delenda Est
@fasteddie9318:
It’s like 90% of the barrel is bad apples, but the barrel still is not spoiled.
Librarian
In other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still critically dead.
scav
If God had wanted those women and families to raise the children, he wouldn’t have given those other families all that money and connections. The ways of the Lord (Free Market and apparently RC as well) are indeed mysterious.
Gotta admit though, this seeming obsession of the RC hierarchy with repeatedly taking it out of the most vulnerable as though they were playthings has gone well beyond creepy.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Dear Lord baby Jesus, lyin’ there in your ghost manger, just lookin’ at your Baby Einstein developmental videos, learnin’ ’bout shapes and colors. I would like to thank you for bringin’ me and my mama together, and also that my kids no longer sound like retarded gang-bangers.
Jay C
I especially loved this bit (from the source BBC article by Katya Adler from the link):
(Dr. Vela is a Spanish doctor accused of being at the center of a huge, long-term baby-stealing operation)
Yep: always “in the name of God“, always “for their own good“, and always pointedly “within the law“.
If he hadn’t thrown Ms. Adler out, how long before we’d have heard “I was just following orders“… ?
scav
I think @Culture of Truth: deserves some of the Internets associated with this thread.
Nathaniel
Where are all the usual defenders? Cmon, I wanna hear how this proves nothing, how there are good people still in the church, how this is just another example of good old American anti-Catholic bigotry.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
Or maybe that the barrel itself (i.e. the Church hierarchy) is rotten, but the apples inside it (i.e. the laity) are mostly OK.
Jay C
@Jay C:
ADD: #54, the blockquote should have extended to “Dr. Vela insists…”
FYWP – sorry
gnomedad
We bought pagan babies in grammar school all the time.
Brachiator
I think you meant anticipating the Argentine dirty war, since the Franco regime came first.
And here, the common practice of authoritarian regimes comes into play. For example, the old East Germany.
And “you know who” was also big into this.
And clearly in Spain, secular and civil institutions were as complicit as the Catholic Church.
Culture of Truth
I’m going to hell for this, but it makes you wonder exactly how Jesus miraculously came to live with Mary & Joseph. His name is Spanish, after all…
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
OK, that analogy works better.
The hierarchy itself seems to be hopelessly corrupt. It’s like that episode of South Park where one priest denounces all the pederasty going on, and he’s shouted down by the assembled clerics for interfering with their perks.
daveNYC
I’m impressed at the restraint of the victims. If this had happened to me, there’d be a fucking trail of bodies.
Just what the fuck is wrong with the Catholic Church? Where do they find these people who manage to combine stupid and evil in such an efficient package, and then why do they promote them into management positions?
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Seriously, if priests are buggering altar boys and nuns are helping fascists steal babies in Spain and nuns are helping slaughter people in Rwanda, why would anyone believe them about the heaven and hell? If the employees aren’t afraid of an eternity in hell why should the customers be?
Could you imagine what would happen to an international childcare corporation if they were discovered to employee people who not only abused the children, but sometimes claimed they were dead so they could sell them to rich people?
And what type of person buys a child?
I understand why there is “organized religion” – it’s because the default setting on humans is “shitty person” and most people have to be scared into being decent every weekend.
jayjaybear
@Yevgraf: I was born in 1971, so I was completely immersed, as only a child can be, in the party line as a parochial school student in a devoutly Catholic family in the late 70s/early 80s. I fell for the utter blizzard of PR on Mr. Wojtyla completely and totally, and honestly believed the bullshit about how he was a new, youthful face of the Church and would usher in a glorious new era of Catholic harmony and amity. It took me until I was 16 or 17 before the scales fell and I realized that ol’ Karol did his best to bury the JPI era as quickly as possible. The John XXIII/Paul VI/JPI era was like the doors of an impossibly stuffy, closed-in, claustrophobic church slooooooowly opening to let in air and light. The election of Karol Wojtyla to the See of Peter was a giant hand slamming those doors shut while the other giant hand plastered propaganda posters over them.
Brachiator
Was moderated, let’s try again
I think you meant anticipating the Argentine dirty war, since the Franco regime came first.
And here, the common practice of authoritarian regimes comes into play. For example, the old East Germany.
You don’t need a Church to do this kind of thing. And “you know who” was also big into this.
And clearly in Spain, secular and civil institutions were as complicit (whether because of intimidation or to curry favor) as the Catholic Church.
piratedan
@Dr. Squid: not exactly, they were just hypothesizing that the current GOP will most likely settle on Mittens. Ergo, who do you pair him up with to give him Tea Party street cred? Hence, Our Little Jannie, who is apparently still a Tea Party favorite because of the grift she’s acquiring while speaking at TP functions nationally. After all, “we done did it (SB1070)” is a beacon of accomplishment in Teabagger land and as such, her pairing with Mittens would likely make him a bit more palatable to TP orthodoxy. Granted I believe that she’s as ready for the big stage as Snowflake Snooki was, but not as overtly greedy.
Rick Taylor
@r€nato:
Yeah I know. But I said something snarky about him in another thread, and felt I should say something supportive seeing as he did at least leave the party. Besides, I think people who come to their senses, how ever belatedly, should be encouraged and supported.
Breezeblock
And I just visited the Vatican a few weeks ago.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Breezeblock:
Finished your post.
elmo
My Mom was a devout Catholic when she was young – even considered entering a convent. She was the next-to-youngest of eleven children, and they lived in a house that was actually owned by the Church. Rented it from the diocese.
When my Mom was fourteen, her father died, leaving his wife a widow still taking care of five children. The following month, the diocese evicted them from the house. The Monsignior found it unseemly for a single mother to be living on Church property.
The Other Chuck
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
Before I became a genuine atheist in the sense that I now equate the notion of God and angels and whatnot with unicorns and dragons and ghosts, it was the threat of hell that really drove me away from the church and eventually religion.
God makes us. God gives us free will. God has our choices result in an eternity of unimaginable suffering. Wrapping your head around infinite suffering is hard enough, but then compounding that with an infinite time? This makes all the famines, floods, and earthquakes look like pampering. That sort of thing is evil in its most raw distilled form. And this from a “loving” God?
I understand our brains are kind of wired for, if not religion itself, a sort of propensity to it. But for such a hateful death cult to hold sway over humanity seems like something anyone with the slightest love for humanity should be working to stamp out.
Martin
@daveNYC:
Hmm. Let’s see. An organization that, by definition, proclaims to know better than you do… Indeed, what could go wrong?
Exurban Mom
The sex scandals sent me away from the church, never to return. I am so appalled and dismayed at the lack of accountability. Those poor mothers and fathers whose babies were taken without their knowledge.
Loneoak
I’m surprised no one has pointed out the connection between policies like this and the anti-abortion stance of the Vatican. If you don’t have ‘unwanted’ babies, or ‘undeserving’ parents, then you can’t sell babies in Spain, or run them through adoption mills in the US.
Rick Taylor
@65 Brachiator
This is true, but given the church’s penchant for claiming the moral high ground and uses that to push for policies it favors, I think it’s fair enough to point out when they gain power, overall they’re not necessarily more moral than any other group.
FormerSwingVoter
Somehow, this bothers me more than the child molestations and ensuing cover-ups. I’m not sure why. Maybe part of me wants to think that the priests involved with child-diddling were in a minority, whereas this sounds really widespread. Maybe its because the thought of being told that your child is dead really really frightens me on some sort of primal level. Maybe on some level I’m not counting the affects of being under a dictatorship enough. I don’t know.
But somehow, this strikes me as one of the purest manifestations of evil I’ve even ever heard of, let alone heard of church involvement in.
Jay C
@daveNYC:
The RCC has had about a thousand years to hone their management practices: after all that time, it’s not so hard…
Culture of Truth
This also helps explain their opposition to birth control. As George Carlin might say, it cut in on their piece of the action.
The Moar You Know
Where’s joe from lowell to tell us that facts are anti-Catholic?
geg6
@Loneoak:
As a victim of one of those US adoption mill operations, I can tell you why I don’t mention it here any more. It’s the church’s apologists here who tell me to shut up about it because I’m too blinded by hatred of what was done to me to think straight about it. They, personally, didn’t contribute to my situation (though they did, whether they want to admit that financing an institution that does this qualifies as support or not) and it was just a few bad apples.
Loneoak
@The Moar You Know:
All the moar reason to like facts, imao.
Sly
The Church did the same thing with Jewish families going back into the medieval period, particularly orthodox ones who strictly followed the “no work on the Sabbath” rule. Such families hired nannies, who were almost always Catholic. So if the Catholic nanny, who feared for the soul of a heathen child she cared for, did a little impromptu baptism one Saturday morning, the Church would recognize it and steal the kid from its parents. For its own protection, you see. Can’t have a couple of Christ Killers jeopardizing the immortal soul of one of the faithful.
@daveNYC:
It’s members think they’re God’s anointed sovereign on Earth, and have since the first Pope crowned the first king. You know that saying about how absolute power corrupts absolutely? Who do you think Lord Acton, the guy who first said it, was talking about? He was talking about the man who claimed that it was impossible for him, and anyone who held his office, to ever be wrong.
PeakVT
@daveNYC: Generically, the problem isn’t unique to the Catholic Church. Big, hierarchical bureaucracies fuck up all the time, and then circle the wagons at the first sign of trouble. In practice, the CC has been worse than most because of how deeply and intimately it is involved in people’s lives. And there’s no check. Followers can’t vote the bums out.
Lockewasright
And the followers of “god” just keep doing good for the species.
Yevgraf
@Culture of Truth:
I said it before and I’ll say it again – if I ever find a working time machine, I’m learning Aramaic, dialing the pig back to 0 AD for Israel, and whispering “does she REALLY think you’re stupid enough to believe that shit?” to Joseph as I hand him a large rock….
Villago Delenda Est
@Yevgraf:
“I don’t see any tigers around here, do you?”
geg6
@Yevgraf:
Heh.
daveNYC
@FormerSwingVoter:
Yeah, except it’s thought they were doing this in the 80s and 90s.
wrb
This kind of collusion must make hard to get ahead in the free-market baby bidness.
David Koch
The obvious way to prevent this is the future is through deregulation and tax cuts.
Interrobang
Here’s what I’d like to know — we’ve currently got hundreds of thousands of people worldwide camping out in financial districts all over the world, trying to bring down that international crime syndicate; when do people start marching on the Vatican?
Keep in mind, not only are those evil motherfuckers responsible for everything we’ve heard of, but they’re also sitting on billions of dollars in treasure and priceless artifacts that they use to finance their evil shit.
(Also, they’re sitting on a treasure trove of priceless artifacts which they’re deliberately not sharing with the world because we lesser mortals are simply unworthy.)
Isn’t that enough?
Alex Milstein
Read ‘The Kidnaping of Edgardo Mortara,’ a National Book Award nominee by David Kertzer, provost and professor at Brown University.
It tells the story of a sick Jewish child in Bologna, tended to by a young Catholic girl while his parents were out. Fearing the child was dying, the girl decided to baptize him, and in the mind of the Vatican that made the boy a Catholic, so they took him from his parents. Kertzer questions whether said baptism actually took place.
The case caused an inteernational furor, with governments around the world critical of the Vatican action. The pope was said to have responded: “I couldn’t care less what the world thinks.”
Mortara actually became a priest, and passed away in 1940.
wrb
@David Koch:
We’ll sure, if you gave private baby merchants a tax exemption, the playing field would be more level, but what about discounted baptisms and shit?
The honest entrepreneur doesn’t have a chance. The game’s rigged.
daveNYC
@PeakVT:
Oh I get that. You work in an office, you can see that at the petty level, and if you work in finanace, you can see it at the macroeconomic level.
It’s what they’re covering up in the first place that kills me. Who the hell comes up with a master plan to steal babies, tell the parents that they’re dead, and then sell them? The pedophile scandel I can get. Pedos exist, and the church cares far more about their PR than about their congregation. The Irish laundries I can understand, you get a bunch of powerless people who you already consider ‘bad’ so you treat them as slave labor. These things are evil, but it’s evil that I can understand how it might come about. A multi-decade long plan of stealing babies though, it’s cartoonish in the scope of it’s evilness.
Seriously, why hasn’t someone over there snapped and just popped a cap in a priest or two?
wrb
Clearly the church invented the MBA.
Roger Moore
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
Somebody who’s desperate to be a parent but can’t be otherwise. And I’ll bet that many of the are perfectly willing to lie to themselves about what’s going on in order to preserve their self-image. Call it a contribution to the church, or payment to defray the costs of caring for orphans, or whatever and people who want to believe they’re too good to buy a baby will buy it lock, stock, and barrel.
Chris
@daveNYC:
I can perfectly understand it. The child-molesting is a human sin which they sweep under the carpet for the sake of their PR. But the child-kidnapping-and-raising-Catholic scheme… that’s saving souls. To them, that’s not an inconvenient sin, it’s a holy crusade.
I’m the other way around: I find the child-kidnapping perfectly believable and even more in character than the other two things you mentioned.
aimai
Imagine a world in which you have to demand to see the dead body of your baby before you can be certain that your nurses and doctors haven’t stolen it? And in which they are prepared to show you a frozen, fake? That is grand guignol at a level that just boggles the mind.
aimai
Suffern ACE
@FormerSwingVoter:
I kind of have to agree with that. It almost would have been better if the Church would have come out and said “We’re taking your child and there’s nothing you can do about it-mwah ha ha ha.”
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Regarding the Secular corporation/RCC comparison:
I’ve yet to hear of any secular corporation that tells its clients they’ll spend an eternity writhing in agony if they don’t buy every product it produces or question the quality of its products.
Corpsicle
A lot of people have tried to be tolerant of Catholics, with their endless litany of excuses, but can we just give it up? At this point anyone giving money to this organization is worthless piece of shit, and the rest of the world would be a better place if they all died in a fucking fire.
wrb
Will the church now be sued by the right-wing adopting parents who ended up with leftist children?
Odie Hugh Manatee
I’m surprised that the usual Defenders of the Catholic Faith haven’t chimed in here to give us the usual defenses. Maybe there is a level of evil where even they can’t bring themselves to defend the indefensible?
Naaah, they’re on a coffee break or something like that.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
@Suffern ACE: Be fair. Sometimes the Church lied to the kids:
Warning: Further reading will make you want to smash shit.
handsmile
Centuries of genocide, torture, oppression, political corruption, sexual abuse, child-trafficking.
The Roman Catholic Church: Too Big to Fail.
SuzieC
Benjamin Black, dark alter ego of Man Booker prize winning Brit author John Banville, wrote a brilliant crime novel on this subject. The novel is “Christine Falls.” It is savage in its portrayal of the crime of baby-stealing and its coverup by the church.
PeakVT
@Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen: Note that it wasn’t just the Catholic Church there. Another big “The Church” was involved, too.
Nathaniel
@Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen:
Oh. My. Jippity. Hell.
The evil is making my skin crawl with hate and loathing. Fuck everyone involved in the ear.
And there will never be justice. Ever.
FUCCCCKCKCKCKCKKKK!!
wrb
@Corpsicle:
Dostoevesky lives.
Some think he was anti-semitic. Problem is he hated Catholicism and Frenchness even more.
The people would be fine as soon as they converted to the true church and gave up their foppish ways.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
@Odie Hugh Manatee: They’re all rubbing their smacked asses after the last attempt to defend the indefensible.
Which reminds me – I can’t remember who had this idea but someone suggested leaving a gentle reminder to hand over the rapists to the cops in the collection plates at RCCs. I thought this was brilliant. If you can’t stomach a Mass, every church I’ve ever been in has at least one area where you can light candles and stick a donation in a box.
If you’re D.C./Metro the Basillica of the Immaculate Conception has several of these little shrines scattered about the building.
Jay C
@daveNYC:
Been there, done that; didn’t actually work out all that well.
Warren Terra
@Alex Milstein:
You left out the parts where (1) the Pope at the time, Piux IX, stole the baby personally – adopted him as his own son; and (2) the current Pope is trying to get Pius IX made a saint (Pius IX was a loathsome human being in other ways as well; he’s also the guy who invented papal infallibility, a surprisingly recent development).
JR in WV
It’s all a RICO case waiting for a prosecutor with balls and a district where he can be elected without catholic voters.
The popes and monsigneurs and monks and all are grim crime lords who kill to protect their racket, threaten unsophisticated folks with terrible unending agony to squeeze money from them, steal children to “save their souls” and make a buck.
This is today’s list of crimes, in the past they enslaved natives to certain death in mines, tortured people to force them to confess to insane crimes, for which they were then burnt at the stake, burned towns to eliminate some heresy or another, and so forth. Much like the Lord’s Army in Uganda, that Rush is defending, actually.
I think the infrastructure should be confiscated to repay those who were tortured in one way or another, senior leaders should be incarcerated for covering up crimes and facilitating the actions of pederasts they hired to run the local establishments.
Their bosses should be personally responsible for payments to their victims, and also imprisoned for their cover-up and participation in the RICO crimes.
The same goes for the fundamental semi-mormons, etc, who use threats and brainwashing to make a living. It’s fundamentally dishonest, and we know that there is a portion of the population that cannot resist this kind of pressure.
I’m not a big believer in TV advertising either… but that’s a different rant.
JR
r€nato
@wrb: it’s called ‘leverage’, baby.
Chris
@JR in WV:
That’ll happen around the same time Wall Street, the Bush Administration and the Republican Party are prosecuted under RICO, yes? The entire political and economic system’s a giant avalanche of RICO cases waiting to happen.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
@PeakVT: C of E. Which is essentially THE Church only with divorce, right?
PeakVT
@Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen: And no Pope, but with married priests. My point was that both are big, hierarchical organizations, and being one is what enables fuckups to spread and grow.
wrb
@Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen:
Next you’ll be claiming that the Mafia and the Irish mob are the same because of the utility of confession and forgiveness for a guy trying to raise a good family while working as a hitman.
Ash Can
@Yevgraf:
@geg6:
@Villago Delenda Est:
So the solution is…violence against women. Nice.
(And if any of you had any idea of what that scriptural passage actually said, you’d know that Joseph himself would be the first to hit you in the head with the rock. So, misogyny plus ignorance. Double nice.)
Jebediah
@JR in WV:
Wait…what? Limpballs is actually defending the LRA? Does he have any clue about their behavior? And is there any chance that will cut into his popularity? Maybe not. His loyal dittoheads don’t seem to mind his trips to the DR to fuck little boys.
bob h
The undesirable parents having been dropped, in many cases, from airplanes into the Atlantic.
Li
@Yevgraf: So, you are reacting to a story about a church that has strayed so far from Christ that they would crucify him again if they met him in the road, by proposing to. . . go back in time and murder him in the crib?
You have more in common with the ‘Holy’ See than you might realize.
Lockewasright
@Li:
Not so far off as you might think.
But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me. ~ Jesus (Luke 19:27)
LRA in Uganda isn’t far from scripture either. It’s not that these miscreants are warping the word. It’s the reverse. Yevgraf is right. The world would be a much better place. My time machine would be set for a young Abraham though. Supernatural belief systems are humanity’s single most costly mistake.
Li
@Lockewasright: Insofar as you quote things out of context in order to bash people, you aren’t all that different from the fundamentalists I have debated in the past. In context, that passage makes a lot more sense, as isolated it seems to contradict the golden rule and the law of love.
Just before that line, is the parable of the talents. Now, money is not God’s (Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s) so what he was referring to was God’s currency, which is love. God gives you love, and if, in his absence, you don’t seek to increase it amongst your fellow humans, then you are to blame for burying what is a precious gift. Then, that line. Which seems odd, as no one is then executed, until you read the latter half of that chapter, in which he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey and then marches into the temple, where he tells the priests and moneychangers off so thoroughly that they are forced to flee the temple (lashing with a cord could mean a tongue lashing in that era). Once again, no one is killed, because he had slayed them in the way that he truly meant it. He killed their reputation with words, and did so with such vigor that they had to flee the temple, and then murder him, which only further debased their rep. Soon, that temple fell: he had won, even though it cost him his life.
Anyhow, reading off that line in isolation as if it proves anything is almost as caustic and stupid as those ‘christians’ who use the opening of Paul’s letter to the Romans to bash gays, even though the next line is “Therefore you are without excuse, O man, whoever you are who judge. For in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself.” Paul then proceeds to spend the rest of the letter tearing down the Jews dietary bias against the Gentiles, which was much more of a sticking point at that time to their acceptance than their sexual behavior. In other words, he was using a ‘devils advocate’ argument to tear down the Jewish Christians judgement and bias against the Gentile Christians, with whom they shared sexual deviations from Leviticus, but not dietary deviations.
Which is the supreme irony; when ‘christians’ use this passage to judge gays, they are actually arguing on behalf of the Adversary.
Paul in KY
@jayjaybear: That’s a good take on it. JP II was elected to put Vatican II back in the closet.
Pope Palpatine is a JP II man all the way.
Paul in KY
@Culture of Truth: Only living people can place an offering in the plate, dontchknow.
Paul in KY
@Ash Can: I think he was snarkily surmising that Mary had an affair (adultery) and that was how Jesus really came into being & Mary came up with a whopper of a story to conceal the truth.
Back then the legal sentence for adultery was to be stoned to death.
Paul in KY
@Lockewasright: There’d be another to take its place, IMO.
Lockewasright
@Li: I am interested to know in what context that call by Jesus for massacre would be magnanimous or even slightly good. The excuse you’ve made for it is not one that I am buying.
Lockewasright
@Li: It is you who are twisting the context. There is nothing in that bible quote regarding Jesus “killing their reputations”. Reread it. Jesus orders his followers to slay the nonbelievers in front of him.
Li
@Lockewasright: And yet, no one was slayed before him. No one was killed. Regardless of how you are interpreting this passage, an english translation of an ancient language removed from its context, It seems that his audience at the time interpreted his words differently.
Really, is it such a stretch? When I loose a debate horribly, it’s not uncommon for me to remark “He was killing me out there.” Or when I win, to say, “I totally slayed him.”
But, if you want to cling to this isolated passage in order to justify your hatred of Christians, and your desire to go back in time to murder a prophet, then that’s OK. However, you must know that you are misusing the Bible in exactly the same way that the fundies who have no doubt inspired that hatred have.