Suffer The Children

In a surprise move Joseph Ratzinger, AKA Pope Benedict XVI, AKA Benny The Rat-zinger, decided he was not going to follow the example of Karol Wojtyla and slowly, painfully fade away in office. With Benedict XVI riding off into the sunset, this is as good a time as any to not only review his time in office but John-Paul II’s as well.

While both had a hand in helping Soviet Russia’s final death rattle, both also had a hand in the scandal that has laid the Roman Catholic Church low: Pedophile Priests.

Ratzinger was the doctrinal enforcer during John-Paul’s Papacy, and when Ratzinger took up the throne of Peter, he also had to deal with the issue of Priest gone wild. In neither case did either man cover themselves with glory.

The prolonged coverup and lack of accountability of the matter has had  a highly corrosive effect on the ethos of the Church. Bluntly put the faithful have lost trust in the hierarchy of the church. Hundreds of children were molested, abused and yes raped by trusted men in clerical garb. Nothing was done to protect the children, everything was done to shield the Priests.

Ratzinger, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was instrumental in  the church response to the scandal of Pedophile Priest. The charge against Ratzinger was that he was also instrumental in an attempted cover-up that came close to obstruction of justice.

What the whole affair pointed out was the Roman Catholic Church’s problem with both sex and power. Let’s deal with sex first, not only the act but also with gender roles.

Ratzinger and Wojtyla were throw-backs when it came to sex and gender. The were were very much anti-secular, anti-feminist, and anti-sexual. They were rigidly anti-modern, attempting to reenforce a tradition firmly grounded in early 20^th Century mores. They wanted a return to tradition. Unfortunately Catholic tradition has taken a hell of a beating from the early 1960’s onward. Being anti-sex is not the route to popularity in the 21^st Century, at least not in the developed world.

The whole Catholic attitude to sex has become more rigid and more repressive as the secular world has become more lax and liberated. The insistence on monogamous, heterosexual, procreative sex being the only “correct” form runs at right angles to the sexual liberation movement that has been gathering pace since the release of the pill.

More damaging to Catholic Dogma has been the changing role of women. In developed, Post Modern nations the option of Mother/ Virgin/ Whore as the only possibilities out there is no longer accepted. The toxic misogyny of the church is causing its most important adherents to desert the fold. Women in the Post Modern world have no truck with a role where they are to be subservient dutiful wives spitting out babies at a prodigious rate. They demand options.

But the Church only doubled down on the reactionary misogyny. It had nothing to say about the modern understanding of sexuality. The Roman Catholic Church rejected this understanding. It rejected the messy, conflicting realities of human sexuality as it exists in the modern landscape and retreated to the “traditional” understanding. Unfortunately that understanding was and is poisoned with fear, ignorance, patriarchy, misogyny, and sexual phobia. 

Which brings us to the other obsession of the Church: power. I have often said that the Vatican is the last Absolute Monarchy left standing because it is. To truly understand the Vatican you have to go back to the High Middle Ages, which was the true salad days for the Holy See. The Vatican is still stuck in that time. 

The hierarchy, the concentration of power, the justification for the whole structure, is hermetically sealed in the idea of the Divine Right Of Kings. If anything, the loss of an actual land to rule, the loss of the Papal States, has made this tendency only worse. Cloistered away in the Curia, the Princes of the Church attempt to accumulate ever more power to themselves, become ever more absolutist. There is no check on the Pope, no way to reign him in. In the bad old days the Pope had to worry about a peasant uprising or the invasion of a foreign power. Today, there is no check, no counter to the Pope. No one is going to storm the Vatican, no foreign leader is going to invade Vatican City. Within the confines of Holy Mother Church all power flows upward to the Pope, the final arbitrator of the Faith. And it is this truth, this process, that has been the most toxic to the See of Peter.

For both John Paul II and Benedict XVI the prerogatives of the Vatican, the top-down approach, the assertion of hierarchy has been the overriding concern. Both have been deeply reactionary. Both have been deeply anti-democratic. 

In insisting of hierarch, on a rigid  top down ideology, both men have given short shrift to the most vulnerable, children. In a hierarchal structure children will always come dead last, being the very lowest rung on the ladder, just below women. It should come as no surprise that in the scandal of the Pedophile Priests the Vatican championed the cause of the adult male Priests over the victimized youth. It is no surprise that the Vatican, via its Bishops and Archbishops, shuffled Priests from parish to parish. In the hierarchal view of the Curia the Priest matter much more that the lowly parishioners. The hierarchy is quite serious about its faithful being sheep; dumb, ignorant, sinful sheep that must be lead their betters. The laity are still seen as Surfs by the Princes of the Church.

In many ways what we are witnessing is the Church’s inability to adapt to the realities of the Modern. It has been fighting a rear-guard action every since the French Revolution exploded on to the scene. The Church had barely come to a modus vivendi with Protestantism when it was viciously mugged by the Age Of Enlightenment and it’s bastard offspring The French Revolution. 

Floored by the changes brought on by that Revolution, the Church has never really regained its footing. The Church kept  on loosing ground to Modernity; kept loosing ground to the handmaidens of Modernity-- Science and Technology; kept loosing ground to the ideas of Modernity: egalitarianism, rationalism, utilitarianism, materialism, individualism, empiricism. Long before George W. Bush and his Republican Party showed up, the Vatican was in a twilight struggle with the Reality Based Community.

There is no easy exit from the dilemma. The hierarchal, monarchal, Vatican can not suddenly turn democratic and collegial. No absolute ruler has ever given up power of his own accord. It’s even worse for a man who has been declared “infallible” by fiat. How do you walk that back? How do you pry the Holy Father out that particular bit of fetal positioning and thumb sucking?

Not being Catholic or even sympathetic to the Roman Catholic Church, I have no particular need for Holy Mother Church to cut this Gordian Knot. The Church has had a good 1700 year run but it has no particular right to last one more day. Maybe, as in other times of crisis, it will find a way. Maybe, it will have enough plasticity of mind to adapt. Or maybe, it will abandon the Developed world for the possibilities of Africa and other areas more attuned to its conservative doctrines. Or maybe, it will continue to drift as it did with Ratzinger and Wojtyla, hunkering down and hoping that somehow Modernity will just go away. Or maybe, Catholicism will throw down a wild card, a game changer that crusty materialist rationalists cannot predict. It’s happened before, no one could have predicted Francesco Bernardone, and the profound changes he wrought as Saint Francis of Assisi. Never underestimate the ability of those darn Catholics to pull a game-changing mystic out of their hats when the chips are down. 

If the Church is to thrive and flourish it does need reboot. The current Roman Catholic Church is rotten. It’s head is rotten. It’s body is rotten. Too many scandals have rocked it to the core. From the Magdalene Laundries, to the horror show that was the Boston Archdiocese, to the tacit support for all forms of right-wing Authoritarian evil, the Vatican has failed one moral test after another.  It has changed “suffer the children to come unto me” to “suffer the children because they came unto me.” That is the issue in a nut shell.

The Ratz Calls It Quits.

This is the first time any Pope has resigned in six hundred years. And it is the first time I think any Pope has resigned of his own free will. I think Ratzinger learned a few things from the last years of John-Paul II. Karol Wojtyla in his twilight years was not really running the Church. His infirmities had so wasted him that he could barely celebrate Mass. Without the vigorous man Wojtyla had been, the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church drifted. It was quite tragic to see both the man and the Church waiting for death’s release.

I also think Ratzinger found out that the job of Pope was not all he had envisioned. Don’t believe the hype, Ratzinger wanted the office. His sermon to the Cardinals just before the vote was a naked bid for the Holy See. In the beginning Ratzinger loved the job, but later found out what a burden it truly is. The Pope is the last Absolute Monarch standing, and as such he is responsible for the one billion souls attached to the Roman Catholic Church. 

Being such an Absolute Monarch is an administrative burden that no other world leader can contemplate. Not even the President Of The United States has that kind of administrative case load. The Irony of the office is that it has so much power that it leaves its occupant a slave to that office. The awful illogic of centralized power is that the Pope cannot devolve power, be more collegial, the Curia has its own agenda. 

The agenda of the Curia is to gather even more power to itself, to become ever more powerful. Thus the reality of the Papal See is that it is a daily grind of paperwork with no break. The Pope does not get Sundays off after all. Benedict had enough of that. He wisely decided that he wanted the last years of his life just being an ordinary man. He also understood the precedent he was setting. I find it interesting that this very reactionary Pope made this radical choice.

Again I think it has a lot to do with the precedent set by John Paul II. Benedict XVI is saying “no, you do not have to hold on to the last gasp. If the Holy See becomes too much of a burden, lay your burden down. Lay down the burden and let Holy Mother Church have a strong and vigorous leader.”

Safe, Legal, and Rare? I don't think so.

I’ve always had a problem with the formulation of legal, safe, and rare. Why should abortions be rare? No one insists that blood transfusions should be rare. No one insists that chemotherapy should be rare. No one insists that childhood vaccinations should be rare. Abortion is a medical procedure; full stop. It is part of panoply of treatments and procedures that are covered by Reproductive Health Care. No sane person would argue that epidurals should be rare; that other forms of pain management should be rare. That is decision best left to the woman and the doctor.

Far too many people are hung up on the supposed moral dimension of Abortion. The mushy middle still believes that Abortion is still “wrong” and shameful. What they do not get is that one third of US women will end a pregnancy via abortion in their lifetime. Many of these women are either already mothers or will be mothers in their lifetimes. They want children, but not right now. Abortion is a legitimate means of family planning, especially when done in the first trimester.

And turning to the real world, Abortion will always be with us; and it will never be rare. I once looked up abortion rates in the EU to see what the minimum set might look like in the US. Remember these are nations that are doing everything “right”: they have comprehensive sex education from grade school on up, they have free subsidized health care that includes free birth control, they have a much more mature attitude to sex. Yet even in the EU, nations like Germany are having abortion rates in the high hundreds of thousands. That is not even close to rare.

A more honest approach would be to say you want to make Abortion safe, legal, and accessible. I really do not see any point in arguing otherwise. A women’s right to agency trumps any “moral” concerns a uninvolved bystander may have. Keep your morals to yourself and have a nice day.

And since we are talking about morals, we can now talk about the oxymoronic Moral Majority.
Actually their name is doubly oxymoronic since they are neither moral nor a majority.  Their whole ideology is a perversion of Christianity. They take the message of Jesus and flip it around 180 degrees. From meekness and love they pull out hate and oppression.

The religious reactionaries of the Republican Party only really care about two things: sticking it to the poor (read the nig-CLANG) and sexual repression. Denying women the right to control their own bodies is all about patriarchy, and punishing the evil sluts for having (and enjoying) sex. That is why the Religious Reactionaries blew a gasket over Obama’s BC decision. Now all those evil no good sluts can have their wanton sex with no consequence; they will get off scot free! That is why it all of a sudden became vitally important that the RC church (and others) get some kind of religious exemption from the AHCA’s BC requirement; never mind Catholic Institutions were already providing health care with full reproductive health care benefits (read Birth Control for preventive health) before the Bishops went into high dungeon about the Obamacare rules.

Remember, for far too many of the Republican Party it is all about the sex, and punishing woman for enjoying sex by having it on her own terms.

Meanwhile At The Holy See

 http://bit.ly/MVVA8q

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- The Vatican on Tuesday sought to put the widening scandal over leaked documents into a very different light, saying the stolen papers didn't just concern matters of internal church governance but represented the thoughts of people who in writing to the pope believed they were essentially speaking before God.

{Break}

Drip, Drip, Drip

{Break}

The Vatileaks scandal broke in January when Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi broadcast letters from a former top Vatican administrator who begged the pope not to transfer him for having exposed alleged corruption that cost the Holy See millions of euros (dollars) in higher contract prices. The prelate, Monsignor Carlo Maria Vigano, is now the Vatican's U.S. ambassador.

The scandal widened over the following months with documents leaked to Italian journalists that laid bare power struggles inside the Vatican over its efforts to show greater financial transparency and comply with international norms to fight money laundering. There was even a leak of a memo claiming that Benedict would die this year.

 {Break}

Meh, still not up to the "standards" of the "Rule of Harlots" Let's hear it for the early 10th Century and the Pornocracy! 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeculum_obscurum

The Limits Of Faith, Roman Catholic Edition.

I’m not Catholic. For me, the Roman Catholic Church is an interesting institution that has survived for over sixteen centuries with many ups and downs. As the last Mediaeval and absolute monarchy left standing, it is an always a fascinating, if frustrating, anachronism. Battered and bruised by modernity, diminished by secular society, it struggles to be relevant in a zeitgeist soaking in materialism. The Catholic Church has a few shreds of moral authority to wave about; but the authoritarian nature of the Papacy is its own worst enemy in keeping that moral authority relevant.

The church limps into the 21st Century as an institution diminished by the slings and arrows the 20th. The last part of the 20th Century was a really bad patch, as the church failed to meet the challenge of the Nazi terror, and then was called on the carpet for the failings of its Priests and charitable organizations in the last decade of the 20th.

With a new Millennium at hand, the Church that Peter and Paul built is a deep funk in the developed, post-industrial world. It keeps trying to play defense, but the social revolutions of the 20th Century, especially the sexual liberation of the 1960’s, have left its moral teaching in tatters. While increasingly authoritarian, the papacy has ever less authority among the laity.

This brings us, by an admitted long, circuitous route, to the Roman Catholic Church’s attempt to get a carve out an exemption for Reproductive health services for it’s hospitals and other institutions in the US. The Church’s insistence on following a deeply flawed teaching on birth control has once again brought in conflict with secular society. The church fathers are attempting to nullify the secular government’s prerogatives, and to carve out an illegitimate exception to the notion of the commons for themselves. This is ridiculous.

Let’s be clear, Catholic institutions that interface with the commons, Hospitals, Universities, Charitable organizations, etc. fall into the purview of governmental regulations. They are subject to Federal, State, and Local regulation just like any other institution. They are businesses, just like any other business. They are not special because their CEO hangs out in some very nice digs in Rome.

In the US, we live under the protections of a Constitution that separates church and state. The state in our nation is the final authority. Secular institutions have the final word about the most intimate details of family life. The state regulates marriage and family life; not the church. The church is allowed to participate in the institutions of marriage and family life, but the final answer, the rules for marriage, divorce, child rearing, are made and enforced by the secular state.

We live in a nation grounded in the notion of unalienable rights. These rights obtain by the very fact of our humanity. They are human rights, and to deny them is do violence to human beings. It is to do an act of evil.

But no right is absolute, they interact and are limited by other rights. Put simply, the right to swing your fist freely ends at someone else’s nose. What the Catholic Church is proposing is that it has the right to swing its fist into the noses of thousands of citizens who just happen to be women. The proposal is specious and wrong headed.

The church does not even have the right to impose it’s views on contraception by force on its own parishioners, never mind the general public. The insisting on the right to nullify the laws laid down by the Federal government is unacceptable. By offering its employees and others health services, by entering the commons, by serving the outside public, the Church has to accept the rules and regulation laid down by the state.

The church is not allowed to discriminate on account of sex. It can not create a second class, second tier cohort in its ranks. If a Catholic institution were to baring people of color from certain health benefits, the general public would demand immediate restitution from the government. Race bias is not allowed by the government in any institution that serves the public, neither should gender bias.

In one way the attempt by the Roman Catholic Church to get away with gender bias, its attempt to keep on wallowing in Patriarchy and Misogyny, is hardly surprising. The Catholic Church has become ever more reactionary, both politically and in matters of faith as the 20th Century wound down. The new century has not halted the retrograde activities of the church. If anything, the elevation of Benny the Rat-zinger has made the march rightward pick up speed.

What is surprising though is how the Church is getting away with this utter nonsense. The willingness of bobble head pundits to be spear carriers for the Roman Catholic hierarchy is mind bending. That an aid to the Speaker of the House does not get how the church is trying to do an end run around the constitutional protections of women is depressing. Is this a sign of creeping senility, or has Chris Mathews always been this dense?

This is all about equal protection under the law. You cannot have one level of care for the male of the species and then have a lower, more restrictive level of care for the female.That is flat out wrong, and no appeal to rosary-bead fiddling can ever change how wrong this kind of backwards thinking is.

The church has a right to teach on every subject under the sun. It has a right to expound on any weird notion that strikes its fancy. It can lock itself in any number of cloisters, and attempt to count the numbers of Angles sitting on a pin. It can continue its regard action against modern science. It can continue to rail against modernity in all its forms. It has that right. What it has no right to do, is shove its retrograde notions down the throats of millions of women in the US, and billions of women throughout the world.  The fundamental right of women to control their own bodies trumps Humanae Vitae.

In a world were the struggle against religious extremism is a a real concern, the only true bulwark against Theocratic rule is secularism.  The bar against the rule of zealots and fanatics of all stripes is a strict separation of church and state. If you wish to bar Sharia law from our governance, then you must also bar Roman Catholic Hierarchy from gaining a carve out on birth control. It is not the governments concern that the Bishops have issues with women’s sexual agency. The government is only concerned with bending the cost curve of health care via sound preventive medicine. The Catholic Church can either comply with the rules as written, or it can remove itself from the requirement by no longer participating in the public sector.

Final words. Every idiot pundit out there is indulging in heavy breathing about First Amendment protection for this outrageous move by the US Bishops. The First Amendment is not a get out of jail free card. The state would stop the Roman Catholic Church flat if the Holy Father attempted to restart the Auto Da Fe' of the Inquisition. The State these days has zero interest in persecuting Christian Heretics. This is because the state has made it clear it has no interest in establishing a religion. It is right there in the First Amendment : Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

We have no official Church in the US. Faith has its limits. In public governance, it is excluded. In the public sphere, the church is strictly regulated.  It has to follow the rules of any other employer. It has to answer to the state for any and all egregious malfeasance; which is why the Roman Catholic Church got clobbered in the tort courts when the hobbies of certain priests were revealed. The Roman Catholic Church is not a law to itself. It does not earn a carve out for birth control any more than it earns a carve out for child raping priests.

You Just Knew This Was Going To Happen

(GENOA) — The latest sex-abuse case to rock the Catholic Church is unfolding in the archdiocese of an influential Italian Cardinal who has been working with Pope Benedict XVI on reforms to respond to prior scandals of pedophile priests.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2072613,00.html#ixzz1NWapxuS5

How Did I Miss This? The Pope Gets Real About Condoms? Say Again?!

Reuters) - The use of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS may be justified in certain cases, Pope Benedict says in a new book that could herald the start of sea change in the Vatican's attitude to condoms.

In excerpts published in the Vatican newspaper on Saturday ahead of the book's publication next week, the pope cites the example of the use of condoms by prostitutes as "a first step toward moralization" even though condoms are "not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection."

While some Roman Catholic leaders have spoken in the past about the limited use of condoms in specific cases to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS as a lesser of two evils, this is the first time the pope has mentioned the possibility himself in public.

The Vatican newspaper unexpectedly published significant excerpts from the book on Saturday night, days before extracts were initially due to be made public.

The pope's words appeared to be a major shift in the Vatican's attitude. While no formal position existed in a Vatican document, the majority of Church leaders have been saying for decades that the use of condoms was not even part of the solution to fighting aids.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AJ1CC20101120

Snip

Is this the same Benny the Rat that I have grown to know and love? He is dealing with the facts on the ground. After only thirty years of head-in-the-sand denial the Vatican is taking a pragmatic approach to STD's? Knock me over with a feather! I do declare I must perambulate to my fainting couch, for I feel an attack of vapors coming on. Oh my stars and garters, common sense prescriptions coming from the Curia. Has the seventh seal opened up, should I be monitoring for signs of the Beast Of Babylon or listening for the hoof-beats of the four horsemen?

Catholic priest in America 'stole church funds to pay for male escorts'

The Guardian: "A Roman Catholic priest has been arrested over claims he stole $1.3m in church money over seven years. He allegedly spent it on male escorts, clothing, luxury hotels and restaurants.

Police in Waterbury, Connecticut, said the Rev Kevin J Gray, 64, was charged today with first-degree larceny. Gray is the former pastor at Sacred Heart/Sagrado Corazo'n parish in Waterbury."

The Lady Doth Protest Too Much.

What is it with these darn Catholics? A snarky tossed away comment by a journalist whose stock and trade is snarky tossed away comments get some poor defender of the faith's head to explode. The complainant, a Ms. Charlotte Allen, goes round the corner, jumps the shark, and then belly flops into the deep end over one line offered up by the always supercilious Maureen Dowd.

Check out the screed in the Opinion section of the L.A. Times: (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-allen-20100502-14,0,4040027.story), we will wait.

There might be more dishonest attempts to distract the reading public with totally peripheral issues. There might be other Op-Ed pieces that take umbrage on totally trivial and non-germane items in the discussion about the scandals surrounding Holy Mother Church, but I am hard pressed to find them. Dig out the smelling salts, poor Ms. Charlotte Allen is about to fall into a swoon because someone made fun of priestly garb.

The blatant dishonesty of the article is flabbergasting. The stance of wounded and put upon poor soul is ridiculous. The transparent, bad faith, attempt to appear balanced is manifest. This is yet another irony-free attempt to use the bull horn of the media to smear the media.

The media is not working at undermining the Roman Catholic faith, it does not have to. The Church is doing the job quite well all by itself. It is amazing that an institution with a long and storied intellectual history and memory has forgotten the lesson made manifest by the crimes of Richard Nixon; it is not the bad deed that gets you, it is the cover-up.

As horrific as the crimes the assorted priests committed were, and they were some of the most evil things ever committed by men in a position of great trust, what was worse was the systematic cover-up committed by the Roman Catholic Church. There is a grave and systemic institutional failure with any organization that allows one of members to rape and abuse over 200 hundred deaf children with no consequences. The argument that the present Pope was somehow out of the loop, or that this issue is now somehow fixed, holds no water.

Even if the present Pope was somehow out of the loop on this particular item; by organizational responsibility—by the position he held at the time, he should have acted sooner, and with much more alacrity. That priest should have been defrocked at the first incidence of child abuse; he should have been shot out of the priesthood with a cannon. After the second incident he should have been turned over to civil authorities. After the treatment failure, the failure to involve civil authorities was a gross violation of the Church's moral responsibilities. That the priest in question was never held accountable by neither Church, nor civil authority, after decades of abuse and malfeasance, is an evil that can never be forgiven. The Roman Catholic Church acted less like an institution of high moral virtue, and much more like a Criminal Organization. If a secular charitable organization had acted in this manner, the Federal Government would have long ago shut it down—with prejudice. Unfortunately it is really bad politics to frog-march bishops into criminal proceedings. No Prince of the Church is going to be perp-walked into any court in the land if the civil authorities have any other options on hand.

This is not about Maureen Dowd's or any other ink-stained wretch's objection to Catholic Dogma. It is about a pattern of abuse and cover-up that if any other group of people participated in, they would be facing Federal RICO laws. It is about what in any other case would be prosecuted as a criminal conspiracy. Thousands of Catholic parishioners were beaten, abused, raped, tortured and other wise violated by men in a position of trust. That these men used a sacrament of the Church, the confessional, to further these crimes only adds to the horror.

This is not a question of Catholic Dogma, this is a matter of how Holy Mother Church's own sacraments were violated and abused by the very people who were supposed to uphold them. What part of "the priest used the confessional to further acts of rape" does Ms. Charlotte Allen fail to understand? What part of "this was going on for years" did she miss? What part of "instead of turning over the priests over to civil authority, the priests were transferred to other parishes, where they raped again," is unclear to her? What part of "massive violation of trust by the entire hierarchy of the Church" is beyond her comprehension?

Instead of dealing with the manifest failures of the Church, Ms. Charlotte Allen would rather set up straw-men arguments about mean old media types, who are nefariously trying to impose their unclean notions on Holy Mother Church. It is all about the secularist wanting to change Church policy on Homosexuality and Women Priests; so says Ms. Charlotte Allen. Leave those good men in Cassocks alone! Leave them alone! Stop being so mean to them; you bad old Meany!!

What absolute rubbish is this Op-Ed piece. What manifestly dishonest red herrings it drags into the conversation. What an epic illustration of flop-sweat and desperation. What a feeble attempt to toss sand in the eye of the reader of her piece. What an insult to the intelligence of that same reader.

It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the Media may be chewing on this particular bone because of all the horrific and salacious details. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the Media is overindulging in schadenfreude in this matter. Despite that; there is a real story here. There is a story of a major institution and the massive violation of trust it participated in over decades. It is a story of abuse, cover-up, buck-passing, and institutional failure. It is a story of systemic rot that looks to have gone all the way to the very pinnacle of the organization. It is a story of how one of the oldest and most powerful institutions in the world had an accountability moment; and how it abjectly failed to pass that test. It is a story of how the Roman Catholic Church managed to vaporize the trust of millions of the faithful. All the happy talk the Church, its flacks, its laity, and its independent supporters; supporters like Ms. Charlotte Allen, cannot begin to heal that self-inflicted wound. Trust in the institution is lost. The details of how that trust was violated keep staggering in like drunken sailors from shore leave. It is no longer a question of if a new horror will be discovered; it is only a question of when. What is worse is the sneaking suspicion that the Pope is now dealing with the mess he managed to fob off when he was head of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The media has every right to run with that suspicion. It is a story much loved by the scribblers, hacks and morbidly curious readers of purple prose; it is the story of an ignored alligator biting its negligent keeper in a tender spot. It is the story of a formerly sleeping dog waking up and being very belligerently. As this dog was allowed to go feral, is it any wonder at the carnage it is inflicting on its supposed master? How could the Media not report on this event? At the very least it has the theater of a very bad train wreck.

This is not about some secular inquisition of Holy Mother Church. It is manifestly about the revelations concerning unresolved violations of trust by the Church. It is about the apparent violators that have slipped through the cracks of Pope John-Paul's reforms of 2001. What guarantees do we have from the Holy Father that criminals in cassocks will be turned over to civil authority, or at least dealt with harshly? There appear to be rather large fissures; large enough for several bishops to slip through. One wonders if the recently resigned Belgian and German bishops would still be at their posts had not the Media shown such a harsh light on his moral failures. Would the Pope be so concerned about the Vatican's Ship of State if he did not see the Media sharks circling round in such profusion?

The calls for Papal resignation have many motivations. Some of them are less than pure and are rooted in a dislike of the Holy Father's staunch conservativism. There is however a pure and honest desire for an accountability moment. There is a burning need for a serious act of contrition. A few tears shed in Malta are barely the beginning of the Mea Culpa required by the Holy Father. The complaint that Benedict XVI was not in charge when most of these crimes and misdemeanors happened is a dodge. He is manifestly in charge now; his is the penance, both private and public, that must be performed. It is passing strange that the Church and its supporters fail to understand the need for the admission of sin and the plea for forgiveness required from Holy Mother Catholic Church. After two thousand years one would think that the Church would understand the absolute need for grace and humility that are part of the basic teachings of Christ.

The Last Refuge of Roman Catholic Scoundrels--Antisemitism

A furious transatlantic row has erupted over quotes that were attributed to a retired Italian bishop, which suggested that Jews were behind the current criticism of the Catholic church's record on tackling clerical sex abuse.

A website quoted Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto, as saying he believed a "Zionist attack" was behind the criticism, considering how "powerful and refined" the criticism is.

The comments, which have been denied by the bishop, follow a series of statements from Catholic churchmen alleging the existence of plots to weaken the church and Pope Benedict XVI.

Allegedly speaking to the Catholic website Pontifex, Babini, 81, was quoted as saying: "They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers."

Snip

More At The Guardian UK

Next up, how the present scandal of the Pedophilia Priests is tied to “The Protocol Of The Elders Of Zion.”

And The Hits Keep Coming, More Pedophilia Priests Problems

Pope Benedict. Photograph: Chris Helgren/Reuters

Pope Benedict XVI was hit by fresh allegations yesterday that he failed to crack down on sexually abusive Catholic priests before becoming pontiff.

A letter written in 1985, when the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the head of the Vatican's doctrinal unit, resists a request for the defrocking of an American priest with a record of molesting children, for the "good of the universal Church".

The letter, published by Associated Press, also notes the "detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke within the community of Christ's faithful, particularly considering the young age". The priest, Father Stephen Kiesle, was 38 at the time.

Father Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, confirmed the cardinal's signature on the letter, but added: "The press office doesn't believe it is necessary to respond to every single document taken out of context regarding particular legal situations."

But the letter does switch the spotlight back to Benedict as a wave of sex abuse scandals involving priests, as well as alleged cover-ups by their bishops, sweeps Europe and the US. The Vatican has previously denied reports suggesting Benedict failed to tackle cases of abuse in Munich and Wisconsin before he became pope. Kiesle was sentenced in 1978 to three years' probation after pleading no contest to charges of lewd conduct for tying up and molesting two young boys in a San Francisco rectory.

Snip

More, if you can stomach it, at the Guardian UK

Suffer the little children to come unto me; the Pedophilia Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church

Over the last months the Catholic Church has been suffering the death of a thousand cuts. Not a fortnight passes before some scandal involving priests sexually abusing children does not bubble up to the news cycle, and cause the Prada Pope more sleepless nights. The former chief enforcer of the faith is like a repairman dealing with a poorly set up wallpaper; every time he smoothes over one bubble on the surface, another one pops up somewhere else. The Church and its supporters have been in full damage control mode. Unfortunately for the Pontiff and his supporters, they have been very much like firefighters trying to put out an oil refinery blaze, with nothing more than super-soakers.

The part of the story that everyone seems to be missing is how this flare-up was inevitable. The story was inevitable because of the structure of the Roman Catholic organization. It was inevitable because of the dogma and teachings of the Roman Catholic faith. It was inevitable because of large historical trends that the Church has little to no control over.

Let us deal with the items in the order they were presented, beginning with a structural analysis. The Roman Catholic Church's major structural deficiency is that it is the last absolute monarchy on the planet. This is an institution that still takes seriously the idea of the divine right of kings. It helps to believe in such notions when your leader is seen as an actual divine. By Catholic dogma the Bishop of Rome is the representative of Saint Peter, the holder of the keys of heaven on earth. Through him, and his acolytes, is the only path of salvation. Of course, the reality of the situation is in stark contrast to the stated ideal. There is no way one man can rule over even the spiritual lives of one billion people. Pope Benedict XVI is the head of a vast and sprawling bureaucracy that is both hidebound and hard to direct. As the world's oldest and one of the largest transnational bureaucracies, the Roman Catholic Church is a huge and ponderous vessel to steer. The various cardinals and bishops of the Church are very much like the old aristocratic princes of Europe in the Middle Ages; quite often they are more than willing to go off in their own directions.

It is an organizational structure that does not communicate well. The top-down decision making and the unwillingness for the lower levels to pass up bad news to the top, make for dysfunctional communication. The tendency to ignore or hide issues, especially issues with priests, is amplified by a system with no real structure of accountability. Thus, bad-actors were passed from parish to parish with zero consequence. Far too often, it was the secular authority, law enforcement or common law civil suits, which finally imposed a righting of wrongs. By that time the damage was truly appalling.

Structurally speaking, the Church is finally coming to grips with what Western European nation-states found out all the way back in the days of the French Revolution: Absolute Monarchies fail when they have anything less than the most stellar leadership. The divine right of kings shattered against the rocks of Murphy's Law. This particular hard and fast rule is that, sooner or later, a dynasty is going to produce a dud. The consequences of producing a dud in the modern era are rather stark for the aristocrats who would be absolute rulers: death and dismemberment. While Benedict XVI will not suffer the fate of Louis XVI or Nicholas II, he may, at the end of this, beg his Maker for such a quick and final resolution of his problems.

If the structural problems of the Roman Catholic Church were not enough for the Pope to overindulge in the sacramental wine, the problems of Dogma are even thornier. From the very beginning, from Peter and Paul the founders of the church, the faith has had some real issues with sex. Paul especially was very clear about this: celibacy was preferred; marriage was tolerated, but just barely. The disconnect between the Dogma of the church on human sexuality, and the reality on the ground has always made the church vibrate with tension. Not even the priesthood could stay faithful to celibacy, and as for the Popes; the less said about their deviance from dogma, the better. To an outside observer, the Church's teachings about sex made it inevitable for perversion to occur. The Church's inability to deal with human sexuality in general, and with human female sexuality specifically, sets it up for all sorts of Sub Rosa nastiness.

One does not have to be a radical atheist or a dyed-in-the-wool secularist to notice that strains of misogyny, repression, dominance, submission, authoritarianism and patriarchy are shot through Roman Catholic attitudes about sex. By making all sex sinful, the church flattens the gradations and bright lines separating sexual practices. When the default is heterosexual sex, in the missionary position, only for procreation, natural sex drives are going to find other outlets. When all sex is considered dirty, nasty and vile, it is very easy to conflate all sexual acts as being equally vile. The raping and molesting of children becomes much more likely when all human sexuality is considered beyond the pale.

The Church's inability to deal such a primal human motivation in any type of realistic fashion does it major harm. In the past, especially in the Renaissance, it gleefully observed the idea of celibacy mainly in breach. It was not uncommon for one pope to be the father of another pope and for prelates' sons to follow their biological fathers' positions by becoming clerical fathers themselves. Back in those cynical times everyone knew the deal when a bishop of the church introduced some "cousin" into the folds of Holy Mother Church. It was only after the eruptions of Martin Luther that the Roman Catholic Church got serious about the need for clerical celibacy. This reform of the Church has probably done more harm than any other move in the Counterreformation. It turned the priests loose on the Congregation like wolves among a flock of sheep.

It is, however, the last great issue mentioned that has caused the most problems for the Church of Rome. That issue is known by the short hand of modernity. Unlike many shifts in history, the turn toward modernity has a very exact date, that of the execution of Louis XVI. After the French monarch lost his head to the French Republic, all bets were off. The divine right of kings was put on notice and one of the great historical movements was born: nationalism.

The French Revolution and the following Napoleonic Wars totally reoriented the loyalties of the ordinary peoples of Western Europe. Governmental legitimacy shifted from the person of the Monarch or from the possession of great landed estates, from one's pedigree, to an idea of a people and an ethnic coherence. One was a no longer a subject of the King or Emperor of X or Y but a member of a great nation and a great people: the British, the French, the Dutch, the fill in the blank.

More importantly, nationalism replaced the loyalties and passions that were once the exclusive province of the church. Much of this was just history playing out. After the wars of religion that were part and parcel of the Reformation, Western Europeans were just not willing to slaughter people over hair-splitting theological notions. The outward expressions of religious zeal had transmogrified into inward dread and uncertainty. Protestants spent their last dying embers of passion chasing and burning their own congregants as witches. The Roman Catholic Church wound down the Inquisition until modernity, in the shape of Napoleon Bonaparte, finally ended it with a whimper.

In that one act, and in others by the Corsican, you can see the markers of modernity being laid down by one of the very first truly modern men. The Roman Catholic Church was slowly, gradually and inexorably being pushed to the periphery. Modernity was presenting a triple threat to the Church, a threat that it never found answer to. That threat was best described by the overarching idea of materialism and the troika that underlay it. While one horseman short of the four of the apocalypse, the three horsemen of materialism: science, technology and capitalism were more than sufficient to lay the Church of Rome low.

To this assault, the faith had no real answer. It did not have a philosophical rejoinder. It only had a slow, loosing, rear guard action. The Roman Catholic Church could not respond to modernity because it did not have the cultural or mental architecture to cope. The Church was not modern, it was the last great medieval institution left standing.

To understand this statement one must understand that the word "medieval" is not at all being used as a pejorative, but as a specific term that has a meaning beyond school yard taunts. The medieval mind, the medieval outlook, the medieval ecosystem is description of how people lived and believed. It describes an inward looking and spiritual understanding of the world. Its goals and suppositions are not our goals and suppositions; its base notions are not our base notions.

Before we get too romantic about the great spirituality of that long gone age, one must point out that much of this spirituality was observed in breach. While some cloistered monks were actually living the pure and saintly life, the great majority were carrying on in ways that would make even the most jaded of moderns blush. The grubby realities of peasant life guaranteed that everyone, included small children, knew the how's, why's, where's and when's of all sorts of embarrassing biological functions, especially sex. Most of the priesthood where right in there with the mass of the peasants; working, shacking up, breeding and dying. Most priests had wives of one sort of another. Still the ideal was that of a holy contemplative. It was of a man or woman who, via a great spirituality, and great devotion, escaped this world of pain and suffering and found God. For medieval man and medieval woman, truth lay within. God, in His glory and wisdom, had revealed all in His holy book, and in the teachings of Most Holy Mother Church. Happy and fortunate were those few cloistered in the monastery that had the time and the vocation to contemplate these things. It was via their prayers and holy offices that everyone else could do the dirty jobs that needed doing.

Against this notion of contemplation, of an inner directed life, came materialism. Materialism looked outward, to the physical world itself for answers. Materialism was not concerned with great truths handed down by higher authority; it was not concerned with revealed truth. It looked outward, to the physical world for answers. It was the very beginning of the reality-based community. Materialism had always lurked with the great merchant princes of the Middle Ages. It had rested, like a sleeping mastiff, at the feet of great dynastic power. Born of the great medieval conflict and cross pollination of Europe's struggle with Islam, materialism bided its time. It waited for Europe to recover from the collapse of Rome and then the collapse of the Black Death. It grew out of the Renaissance and took off during the age of discovery. The outward looking aspect of materialism brought results, material results, results that were self evident. Self denial was easy in the Middle Ages; spirituality was simple, because the material lives of just about everyone were hideous. Death, disease and disfigurement were routine events. Lives were perilously short, especially the lives of children. Life could be seen as a veil of tears because, for most, it was. Materialism changed all that. It shifted the realities of life. Life, even for the masses, became more comfortable.

By shifting people's focus to this world, to the rewards available in the mortal life, materialism ate away at the underpinnings of the Catholic Faith. Individualism replaced communitarianism. Inquiry trumped faith. Change overcame tradition. At least Protestantism shared the view with the Roman Catholics that faith and the questions of religion were paramount; materialism via science, technology and capitalism offered no such quarter. Materialism's hand-maid, modernity, just kept pushing all faiths to the periphery. It offered new institutions and ideas for peoples loyalties; it offered new solutions to old conundrums. It offered new understandings of the human condition. One can see the very beginnings of this in the age of discovery; the paradigm was to go out into the world to find out what was out there. No more sitting in cells or scriptoriums and musing over philosophical reality or Platonic ideals; no, one made discoveries by going outwards, by exploring the material world. In this mind set, faith and obedience no longer had primacy. Eventually, in the post World War One world, they would have no relevancy.

And this is the central problem for the Roman Catholic Church, the rock of Peter, the faith and obedience of the parishioners, is dissolving in the acid of modernity. The sustenance and support the church once provided has been either taken over by the state, or are no longer of such great import to the broad swaths of people. In the Middle Ages, to be excommunicated from Holy Mother Church was to be placed in grave peril. Today, it barely rates as a minor inconvenience. The teachings of the prelates no longer have the impact that they once had. The church's medieval world view has less and less grounding in the modern realities it inhabits. Telling the faithful to do as the Church says, not as it does, is less and less persuasive.

The Church is in its current pedophilia predicament because it cannot admit that its central teaching on sex is flawed. It cannot admit the very teachings of the first auto-declaimed, Infallible Pope were and are suspect. It has been forced to double down on those teachings and condemn birth control. This absolutely insured that the laity would greet those same teachings with the one-fingered salute. Nothing has harmed the discipline of the church more than the encyclical humanae vitae. With this pronouncement, Pope Paul VI added millions to the Congregation of The Cafeteria Catholic. The parishioners chose to ignore the teachings of the Holy Father the way customers at a cafeteria usually ignore the jello mold. Millions of Catholics took the church and its teachings a lot less seriously after Paul VI's pronouncement on birth control. It was the loss of prestige to the Church that eventually would further damage it when the crisis of the Pedophiliac Priest finally reared its ugly head.

The Pauline instructions set up that inevitable disaster when the Vatican, in bunker mentality, insisted on absolute loyalty to the teachings of the Pope. Obedience became the watchword; obedience of the parishioners, obedience of the priests, obedience of the bishops, obedience of the cardinals. The drift to authoritarianism, absolutism, and autocracy became more marked. Infallibility crippled one of the Church's greatest strengths; its very Catholic nature, its dynamism and flexibility, its adaptability to local realities. It made the Roman Catholic Church unable to really respond to the sea change in attitudes to sex. The pill, and later the crisis of AIDS, left the Church flat-footed and unable to offer anything practical to these large, looming facts on the ground. The sanctimonious lectures on chastity were less than helpful and became objects of ridicule once the dirty secrets of what priests were doing in their spare time came out.

The drift toward absolutism and irrelevance became manifest with the election of Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger to the Papacy. Ratzinger had been the theological muscle to John Paul II papacy. As the head of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, it was his job to stamp out heresy, and all other forms of disobedience in the Church. The former Hitler Youth took to this job the way a duck takes to water. The forces of reaction and Orthodoxy had no better advocate. Thus, when John Paul II's infirmities finally separated his soul from his suffering body, Ratzinger made a bold move for the top slot. Offering up a prayer to his fellow electors, he opened up his campaign for the Papacy with a benediction that was catnip for the retrograde forces in the Roman Catholic Church. The Cardinals swooned and voted for the dream date that would finally bring order and orthodoxy back to the church. Little did the reactionaries remember the ageless Chinese warning of being careful what you wish for. The reactionaries got Ratzinger alright, every last stinking bit of him.

They forgot that this consummate Church bureaucrat would be neck deep in the scandal that has caused the Church so many sleepless nights during John Paul II Papacy. It is the scandal that just will not go away; that of the raping priests. In their obsession for rigid top-down leadership they missed the obvious signs that Ratzinger was nothing but a huge stink bomb waiting to go off. They were blind-sided because Ratzinger was everything they thought they wanted in a Pope; micromanaging, top-down, orthodox, fiercely opposed to modernity, fiercely opposed to any and all change, fiercely wedded to tradition, fiercely Marian with all the vicious misogyny that lies beneath the mother-whore complex of Marian devotion. This was a Patriarchal authoritarian after their own hearts, with the bonus of a manic homophobia that make outside observers wonder if the Pope may have some sexual self-loathing issues of his own. Here was a man that was definitely tightly wound around the obsessions of pain, suffering, sensual denial, rigid conformity and twisted sexual obsession that inform the more reactionary strains of the Roman Catholic faith like Opus Dei. Most importantly, here was a man that was obsessed with absolutism, with hierarchy and control. Here was a man that has absolutely bought into the medieval idea that the Church is the only proper higher authority that all men and women should bend a knee to. Here, unfortunately for the retrograde orthodox prelates, was a man who would become the sine qua non of everything that was wrong with the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Here was moral turpitude, written in letters of fire 20 meters across in a clear blue sky.

The crisis of the Roman Catholic Church begins at its head. The Faith is being battered because it chose, as its head, a man singularly unable to deal with the three prong attack that is assaulting the See of Peter. He does not have the intellectual requirements to deal with the deficiencies of Catholic Dogma in the modern era. The man does not even admit to any deficiencies. He is unable to deal with the structural and organizational problems caused by excess centralization. He wants even more centralized control, even more absolute despotism from the center. He most certainly does not have any real response for the challenges of modernity. He is a fierce and uncompromising opponent of modernity. Through his rigid leadership the Church has become even more brittle.

The results of this failure of leadership are easy to spot. You can see the shards of the brittle Catholic edifice being knocked off with every wrecking-ball blow of the Pedophilia Crisis. It is a hideous sight: one of the great sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, the confessional, has been converted into a possible criminal act. The physical violation of the most vulnerable, children, only pours more salt in the wound. The violations of one priest, raping two hundred deaf children, were an exclamation point on this whole sorry page in the Church's history. It certainly made the Sisyphean task of the usual suspects, like Bill Donovan, of defending the actions of the Roman Catholic Church that much harder. The usual response of blaming and shaming the victims is seen as particularly sleazy and despicable when contrasted with the harsh reality of a monster in a Roman collar. This was a monster who raped children, who on top of everything else (the shame, the guilt, their powerlessness against authority), were physically unable to communicate the offense to others. That this man was allowed to rape and rape again, in different parishes, these self-same disadvantaged and vulnerable children, only adds to the horror. The contrast between the Church's claims of moral rectitude, and the reality of a criminal conspiracy of silence that would make Mafiosi blush, is gravely damaging the church's spiritual authority. It is hard to be a shining light of moral superiority when you look more like a candidate for United States RICO laws.

And that, gentle reader, is the rub. The church is approaching an accountability moment. It is running up against a hard wall of parishioner disgust and abandonment. The very pinnacle of the church, the Holy Father, is a gravely damaged man at best, and is most likely a dead prelate walking. The Church is finding exactly the same position it found itself in the waning years of John Paul II: it is waiting for the Holy Father to shuffle off his mortal coil so it can move forward into a new reality. Until that time, until Benedict XVI lies in Prada-clad repose, the Church cannot deal with the rot that, fish-like, begins at the head.

Rinse, Lather, Repeat-- Vatican Hit With Priest Scandal in Germany

Vatican accused over German sex abuse allegations

Germany's justice minister has criticised the Vatican for what she called a "wall of silence" over recently-emerged abuse allegations.

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said Vatican secrecy rules were complicating investigations of the cases.

Allegations of sexual abuse are being investigated in 18 of Germany's 27 Roman Catholic dioceses.

Former students from a number of Catholic schools have alleged sexual abuse by teachers.

Ms Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger referred to a Vatican rule dating to 2001 that requires abuse cases to be investigated internally.

Papal meeting

She expressed dismay at the fact that prosecutors were not called in "as soon as possible".

Allegations of abuse in Germany first emerged in January at the Jesuit-run Canisius College in Berlin, and former pupils at other schools have subsequently come forward.

Last week, the Regensburg Diocese said a former singer in a church choir that was run by Pope Benedict XVI's brother, the Reverend Georg Ratzinger, from 1964-1993, had alleged there was abuse there in the early 1960s.

Father Ratzinger has been quoted as saying the allegations dated from before his tenure.

The head of the German Bishops Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, who has apologised for cases of abuse, is due to discuss the scandal with the Pope later this week.

The cases have led to a discussion over whether to alter Germany's statute of limitations to allow for the prosecution of priests.

The German scandal comes after the Pope led talks last month with Irish bishops over allegations of abuse at schools, orphanages and other institutions in Ireland over several decades.

Report from the BBC

Do You Believe In Magic? Then What Are You Doing Here?

The BBC reports on a 1st Century Common Era burial shroud just unearthed by archeologist.

A team of archaeologists and scientists says it has, for the first time, found pieces of a burial shroud from the time of Jesus in a tomb in Jerusalem.

The researchers, from Hebrew University and institutions in Canada and the US, said the shroud was very different from the controversial Turin Shroud.

Some people believe the Turin Shroud to have been Christ's burial cloth, but others believe it is a fake.

The newly found cloth has a simpler weave than Turin's, the scientists say.

The body of a man wrapped in fragments of the shroud was found in a tomb dating from the time of Jesus near the Old City of Jerusalem.

The tomb is part of a cemetery called the Field of Blood, where Judas Iscariot is said to have killed himself.

The researchers believe the man was a Jewish high priest or member of the aristocracy who died of leprosy, the earliest proven case.

They say he was wrapped in a cloth made of a simple two-way weave, very different to the complex weave of the Turin Shroud.

The researchers believe that the fragments are typical of the burial cloths used at the time of Jesus.

As a result, they conclude that the Turin Shroud did not originate from 1st Century Jerusalem.

The Turin Shroud has been the subject of much controversy.

Tests 20 years ago dated the fabric to the Middle Ages, but believers say the cloth bears the imprint of a man's face that is an authentic image of Christ.

Snip

The BBC is overly kind in reporting the controversy. On one side there is the hard science that dated the Shroud of Turin to the middle ages. Now there is an actual shroud dating to the early part of the 1st Century of the Common Era. That shroud bears no resemblance to the shroud of Turin. It is of a much simpler weave. Thus we now have at least two hard science reasons to dismiss the shroud of Turin as authentic.

What is on the other side? People's belief. Any hard evidence? Sorry, none of that please, we are devout Roman Catholics. The best possible scenario is that the faithful of Turin somehow had the original but natural processes of decay destroyed the relic. A new shroud was then made to replace the old one. This is not a very likely scenario but it is best possible one for the faithful. More likely it was a purpose made fraud. It was once said that there were enough pieces of the true cross floating around Europe in the Middle Ages to build a house. Sorry, but science trumps faith almost every day of the week except Sunday.

You're Kidding, Right?

Weakland says he didn't know priests' abuse was crime

By Annysa Johnson of the Journal Sentinel

In the early years of the sex abuse scandal in Milwaukee, retired Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland says in his soon-to-be released memoir, he did not comprehend the potential harm to victims or understand that what the priests had done constituted a crime.

"We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature," Weakland says in the book, "A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church," due out in June.

Weakland said he initially "accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would 'grow out of it.' "

H/T to Jonathan Turley for finding this whopper.

Is It The Message, The Messenger or Something More Profound?

The Holy See is struggling to contain international anger over the Pope's claim on his first official visit to Africa that Aids "cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems".

The Pope's remarks about condoms, and a recent furore over his lifting of the 20-year excommunication of a British bishop who has questioned the Holocaust, has left him looking isolated and out of touch, prompting calls for a radical shake-up of the way the Holy See delivers its message.

The Pope is isolated and fails to adequately consult his advisers, said a Vatican source with 20 years' knowledge of the Holy See.

Another Vatican insider described Pope Benedict's four-year-old papacy as "a disaster", recalling the pontiff's previous inflammatory remarks on Islam and homosexuality.

"He's out of touch with the real world," the Italian insider said. "On the condom issue, for example, there are priests and bishops in Africa who accept that condoms are a key part of the fight against Aids, and yet the pope adheres to this very conservative line that they encourage promiscuity. The Vatican is far removed from the reality on the ground."

The Vatican's traditional culture of secrecy has made it ill-equipped to communicate its message in the internet age.

The Holy See claimed that the Pope had no idea that British bishop Richard Williamson had denied the extent of the Holocaust, but critics have pointed out that a simple Google search would have uncovered the maverick's anti-Semitic views.

"Until recently the Vatican was secretive and their way of controlling the message of the Church was to release information slowly and highly selectively through carefully worded documents," said Francis X Rocca, Vatican correspondent for Religion News Service.

"The problem now is that the internet and the blogosphere won't wait for the Vatican, so its message gets swamped."

Snip

More at The Telegraph UK

Could the central flaw be Benidict himself? The former Cardinal Ratzinger was the dream date of Conservative and reactionary Catholics. As the Chinese once pointed out: be careful of what you wish for, you might just get it.

Because Pragmatic Solutions To AIDS are Heretical

Pope rejects condom use in Africa

Pope Benedict XVI has said that handing out condoms is not the answer in the fight against HIV/Aids, as he makes his first visit to Africa as pontiff.

Speaking en route to Cameroon, he said distribution of condoms "increases the problem". The Vatican urges abstinence.

The Pope will also visit Angola on his week-long trip, where thousands are expected to attend open-air masses.

According to Vatican figures, the number of Catholics in Africa has been rising steadily in recent years.

Baptised Catholics made up 17% of the African population in 2006, compared with 12% in 1978, the Vatican says.
“ HIV/Aids is a tragedy that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem ”

Pope Benedict said on the eve of his trip that he wanted to wrap his arms around the entire continent, with "its painful wounds, its enormous potential and hopes".

Before arriving in Cameroon's capital, Yaounde, the Pope said HIV/Aids was "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem".

The solution lies in a "spiritual and human awakening" and "friendship for those who suffer", the AFP news agency quotes him as saying.

Snip

Story from BBC NEWS:

This Is Not Good

Sex claims against US Church rise

The number of new claims of sexual abuse made against US Roman Catholic priests rose by 16% to more than 800 last year, a Church report says.

It says the Church paid $436m (£313m) in 2008 for abuse cases. Most of the money was used to compensate victims.

The study covered almost 200 dioceses and religious orders across the US.

It found that more than one in five victims were under the age of 10 when they were abused.

Although the number of claims made against the Church rose in 2008, the total cost dropped by 29% compared to the previous year.

The Associated Press news agency said 2007 was an unusually high year, when the Archdiocese of Los Angeles began paying a $660m settlement to about 500 people.

The annual review tracks progress made in implementing the Charter for the Protection of Children, adopted by US bishops following a scandal in Boston in 2002.

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago said the Church was "on the right path" in its quest to better protect "all children in society".
Story from BBC NEWS:

Published: 2009/03/14 03:40:38 GMT

© BBC MMIX

“ In this case, the medical profession was more right than the Church ”

The Brazilian president has criticised a Catholic archbishop for excommunicating several people who helped a young girl have an abortion.

The nine-year-old child underwent the abortion of twins she conceived after alleged abuse by her stepfather.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, himself a Catholic, said he regretted what he described as the cleric's deeply conservative attitude.

Brazil only permits abortions in cases of rape or health risks to the mother.

Doctors said the girl's case met both these conditions, but the Catholic Church said the law of God was above any human law.

“ In this case, the medical profession was more right than the Church ”
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, said the excommunication would apply to the child's mother and the doctors, but not to the girl because of her age.

But his actions were criticised by President Lula, who said: "As a Christian and a Catholic I deeply regret that a bishop of the Catholic Church has such a conservative attitude.

"The doctors did what had to be done: save the life of a girl nine years old.

"In this case, the medical profession was more right than the Church," AFP news agency quoted him as saying.

Stay Classy Curia

A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help.

The nine-year-old had conceived twins after alleged abuse by her stepfather.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re told Italian paper La Stampa that the twins "had the right to live" and attacks on Brazil's Catholic Church were unfair.

It comes a day after Brazil's president criticised the Brazilian archbishop who excommunicated the people involved.

Brazil only permits abortions in cases of rape or health risks to the mother.

Doctors said the girl's case met both these conditions, but the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho said the law of God was above any human law.

More at BBC News