Just as during Bush the younger's administration the truth sometimes came out most clearly from Comedy Central's Jon Stewart (
The Daily Show) and Stephen Colbert (
The Colbert Report), the truth about the catholic church's cover-up of child-raping priests and the current Pope's involvement in that scandal can be quickly described by a couple of comics:
http://www.jesusandmo.net/2010/03/30/visit/ &
http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/archive/?c=355.
Sadly, as funny as those two comics are, I am not laughing.
(
Update - of course, The Onion has to get in their two bits:
The Onion's Take)
How can an organization that purports to do "god's work" and claim to be a tool for good let priests sexually abuse children, hide the fact that some priests did that, PROTECT those same priests from the law, and then reassign them to other dioceses to work with other children?
This happened in the US, UK,
Brazil, Ireland, Austria, The Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland, as well as the pope's native Germany. (ABC story about
the popes and the pedophile in Mexico.) There is no excuse.
I had a discussion the other day with a buddy who was raised and is still a Catholic. I asked him what he thinks about the pedophilia and how the church has handled it. I figured he is like most Catholics - disturbed by the priests who rape the kids, and disgusted at the church hierarchy for the cover-up. That is pretty much how he felt, he had said. You could tell the crimes really, really bothered him, but that he hoped the rest of the parishioners, clergy, and administration would help the church recover.
I was leaning towards that view - that the catholic church would recover and clean house, but then I read
this. Two instances - eight years apart, but all too similar. Folks so caught up in the wonderfulness of their guy, that they look right past the rapist part of that guy.
“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.”
Even if I believed in such a creature, I do not think any god would applaud a pedophile enabler. And to that parishioner who stated he had "done no wrong" - I can only hope that nobody "does no wrong" to a child he is close to.
As a reader of Andrew Sullivan notes, one-time Cardinal Ratzinger was a micro-manager. I find it hard to believe that he would call an American university about firing somebody, yet would not know anything about a child molester in his organization. The Pope has stated that his flock should not listen to "petty gossip". I've not heard any gossip. I've read stories of rape and pedophilia and cover-ups, but no gossip.
And for one final WTF approach to the whole priestly pedophilia/rape/cover-up situation, read this and try not to get sick to your stomach. That "not me - the devil made me do it" bullstuff did not work for Family Circus, and it shouldn't work for the child rapists and their enablers.
In a previous post about being raised catholic, I wrote that one action I may take is to contact the diocese where my parents had me baptized and where my first communion was, and request they remove my name from their records. That takes place Monday.
