The first and last lines of this Times piece on the Catholic sex scandal in Germany say it all:
The priest at the center of a German sex-abuse scandal that has embroiled Pope Benedict XVI was suspended Monday, more than 30 years after the church first heard allegations that he had molested children.
[…..]“If you get divorced and remarry you can’t take communion, but someone convicted of molesting children can hold mass for the rest of his life,” Ms. Wankerl said.
I don’t have anything to add.
Ash Can
The more publicity this shit gets, the better.
WereBear
Hey, Galileo had to wait 359 years for justice.
beltane
And this is one of humanity’s many institutions that claim to be the One True Path to Eternal Salvation and God’s Grace.
West of the Cascades
I think that Jesus pretty much said it in Matthew 18:6:
“But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
That seems rather unequivocal, and would seem to suggest a deeply-sunk priest rather earlier than has happened. The Catholic church seems not to take Jesus very seriously.
Also, forgive me: “Ms. Wankerl” = heh
PaulW
At what point do governments start revoking the Catholic Church’s tax-exempt status? At the very least the church has proven it’s a criminal conspiracy and doesn’t deserve religious protection under the First Amendment. Any other organization – a school, a business, anything – would have had its collective ass under 1000 criminal indictments by now and driven into twenty levels of bankruptcy.
Dave C
With all due respect to the religious folks here at BJ, fuck the fucking Catholic Church.
Mojotron
So between LA and Alaska that’s 900 kids molested.
Ash Can
As a practicing Catholic, I have to say that I would LOVE to see the Catholic Church’s tax-exempt status be revoked for this whole clusterfuck. It’s about goddamned time this shit got cleaned out, once and for all.
West of the Cascades
@Dave C: Impossible to disagree with that. One of the things that’s hard for liberal Christians is the profusion of insanely shitty examples that others claiming that name set.
Kryptik
Can we get some Voodoo artists to bring back JPII?
chopper
good on the guy who stood up and started screaming about it before his wedding. can you imagine finding out you were married by that guy after the fact? shit.
tyrese
I would like to see them rescind the requirement that priests be sexually abnormal. That would probably fix a lot of the problem.
Oh wait actually I don’t. If child molesters have to exist, I want them to be concentrated in institutions I despise, like the catholic church.
Corpsicle
@Dave C: And all the people who support this disgusting organization.
Mike Kay
It’s not that they were waiting, rather, they were backlogged.
Ash Can
@Kryptik: If they can bring back JXXIII, I’ll buy them all a Sazerac. Or three.
James K. Polk, Esq.
My favorite exercise: Replace “Catholic Church” with “ZOMG ACORN !!1!!1”
DougJ
@Dave C:
Saying “fuck the fucking Catholic Church” is respectful of religious people, IMHO. The reason this makes me as mad as it does is partly because I was Catholic for years. I’m sure that a lot of people who are still Catholic are twice as mad.
Nothing anti-religious about being mad about this. Quite the contrary.
Dave C
@DougJ:
Thanks. I agree. Just wanted to say what I had to say without (hopefully) starting a flame war. Looks like I needn’t have worried. :)
SiubhanDuinne
O/T, O/T, O/T alert!
Sherrod Brown, J. D. Hayworth, and Michael Allen are ALL on Rachel tonight! W00t!
arguingwithsignposts
@West of the Cascades: quoting the scriptures is useless for these folk. The CC overrides scriptural refs. constantly. It’s a feature, not a bug, to them.
Bad Horse's Filly
So much win in that statement.
SiubhanDuinne
@Siubhan5uinne #22: Duh. Michael LEWIS, not what I said. DUH.
/palm to forehead, repeatedly
But yeah, ole J. D. is about to come on. Should be pretty amusing. I’m counting on Rachel to eviscerate him on live national teevee.
Corpsicle
It’s really time for American Catholics to step up, unless they want to be known as a bunch of scumbags who support beating and molesting children. Remember that whole Martin Luther thing? When it became obvious that the Catholic Church was just a decadent scam he said, (I’m paraphrasing) “Go fuck yourself, Vatican” and refused to be a part of it anymore. A shitload of people agreed and followed him to make a new variety of christianity with a lot fewer bribes and child molesting.
Leelee for Obama
Frankly, this is the sort of thing that made me run, not walk away from the Church years ago. This is only the most recent bout of scandal with child predation in the Church. To my knowledge, there were no child molesters in my parish, but maybe the priests were busier than I knew. Most of the priests I knew were busy screwing the mothers of my Catholic school friends, or having live-in mistresses in the Rectory who were palmed off as sisters. I was 14 when I got out of the Elementary school, and I drifted away from the Church very quickly after that. The hypocrisy was just too much to swallow, and staying in was complicity. To this day, I find myself drawn to one or another faith, and just when I’m thinking I’ll go check one out, that sense of not trusting them comes roaring back, and so there is no visit to a church. I can’t tell you how much that pisses me off. As agnostic as I am, fellowship would be nice.
West of the Cascades
@Dave C: Nope – I suspect all the religious people at BJ agree with you wholeheartedly (I am, I do), because molesting children isn’t compatible with any religion I’m familiar with (not saying there isn’t one out there, just that I’m not familiar with any). Certainly it should be anathema to “truly religious” Christians – apologies for annoying people with more scripture: “True religion is this: to look after widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” James 1:27
What sucks is those parts of the Catholic Church that are paying attention to that part of the Bible (say, for example, Catholics who are responding based on faith and 24/7 to the earthquake devastation in Haiti and Chile) are swamped by the scuzzbags running the institution and setting its doctrine (agreeing with arguingwithsignposts that scripture has essentially become meaningless because establishing and maintaining power and preserving the institution are paramount, widows and orphans be damned).
Just Some Fuckhead
I will never forgive the Catholic Church for making child molestation jokes seem inappropriate and out of bounds.
HRA
“If you get divorced and remarry you can’t take communion, but someone convicted of molesting children can hold mass for the rest of his life,” Ms. Wankerl said.
Maybe you would be surprised and then maybe not to know people who are divorced and remarried take communion often in the Catholic church. Especially if they are at a service not held at their church.
Ann B. Nonymous
The Catholic Church follows Augustine closely on its position regarding the Donatist heresy–it’s the office, not the man, who could have pissed on the Bible in front of an S&M orgy, or burnt it for his pagan overlords (which actually happened under Diocletian) as long as he underwent penance afterward.
I doubt the Church’s view on this will change just because some disturbingly high fraction of the priesthood has sex with children. And men. And women. Maybe even with Church Lady.
BonnyAnne
@Dave C: I joined up as an adult, of my own free will, not even raised in the tradition, and to you I say–hear hear. Fuck all those who hid this.
(Stopped going years ago, and can you imagine why? Now I am wondering when I will get around to permanently leaving the damn thing, if that’s possible…)
Redshirt
Bottom line – because that’s where we live now – these scandals are doing terrible damage to the CC’s brand and is going to deeply impact donor numbers in N. America – Europe for several generations. In the negative, of course. Couple that with legal payouts, and maybe the Church can declare financial bankruptcy, to go along with the other kinds.
Thus, our strong recommendation is to continue pushing heavily in Africa – S. America – and especially Asia, as it is in Asia the greatest “untouched” market lies.
Brian J
I don’t think individual Catholics have anything to be ashamed about, because, like any reasonable person, religious or otherwise, they wouldn’t let this sit if they knew about it. The leadership, on the other hand, should be ashamed of itself in every which way. It’s appalling beyond belief. You obviously can’t control what individuals do, but you can make changes once something happens in order to make sure it’s stopped. Yet it doesn’t seem like the higher ups are doing that.
Vincent in CA
The sarcasm on this blog is lacking. I think it’s pretty obvious who Jesus loves.
Ross
The narrative of the Catholic sex scandal, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Meanwhile, the R.C.C. D.C. is having kittens, cows and vapors because the icky gays are ruining marriage.
Let’s see. On the one hand we have two consenting adults affirming their commitment to one another and getting on with their lives without bothering anyone.
On the other we have not just an organization full of baby rapists, but an organization where superior members are well aware that there are baby rapists in their ranks and their response has been to threaten anyone who complains with an eternity on Satan’s pitchfork while they help the baby rapists continue raping babies.
Gosh. Which group has a better lock on morality and Christian values?
Corpsicle
@Brian J: They have known about it for decades (if not 2,000 years). How many times does this have to happen before individual Catholics stop supporting the church?
tyrese
As an atheist, I wonder what the reaction would be if an international atheist group had been found to have molested thousands of kids in dozens of countries, then covered it up, at every level, for decades, transferring people, moving people to different jurisdictions, paying hush money….
I don’t think the response would have been as tepid as the response to the catholic church.
gex
@Corpsicle: American Catholics did not do this because they fell lockstep in with the Vatican’s scapegoating of gays for the problem and subsequent hardening of their stance toward gays.
Joel
Apologists like Ross Douthat should be ashamed, for certain.
El Cid
For all my life, I considered myself the most cynical anti-religious fucker imaginable.
Turns out, I hadn’t even dreamed the extent to which (simply remaining on the specific topic) the Catholic Church was dedicated to facilitating & protecting child-rapers.
I really, really wouldn’t have guessed this much extent of the problem. I would have thought much fewer percentages of Catholic priest etc. child rapists would have been horrific enough, along with the occasional protection.
I’m starting to think that that South Park episode on the Catholic child-raping ‘scandal’, like the one on Joseph Smith and Mormonism, was more documentary than satire.
El Cid
@tyrese: Fuck, no need to wonder — look how they treated ACORN with entirely made-up allegations!
If ACORN had been shown to have a multi-generational pattern of widespread child-rape along with institutional protection of the child-rapists, there would have been nation-wide beheadings of people who simply looked like they might have at one time worked with, for, or beside ACORN.
Ms. Wankerl
I hate to say that anything good came from child rape, but this is a great handle.
r€nato
If the Catholic Church is tax-exempt, I don’t see why NAMBLA shouldn’t be. They can just put on those funny robes and collars and erect (ha, ha) a giant crucifix at their meetings, that should meet the criteria.
ksmiami
“Dear Lord save us from your followers…”
Signed an atheistic ex-catholic –
keestadoll
“If the Catholic Church is tax-exempt, I don’t see why NAMBLA shouldn’t be. They can just put on those funny robes and collars and erect (ha, ha) a giant crucifix at their meetings, that should meet the criteria.”
Can we make this comment of the day?
Martin
@HRA:
Heh. Little do they know that some day all of that ill-gotten Jesus is gonna pop out of their chest like that critter from alien.
Brian J
@Corpsicle:
Individuals knew about it for decades, or the leadership did?
Martin
@r€nato: NAMBLA probably even remembers to break out the crackers and juice.
Roger Moore
@PaulW:
I would love to see a federal prosecutor put together a RICO case against the Catholic Church. Too bad there isn’t a chance in hell of it happening.
jacy
I just don’t get why more people don’t run the other way from the Catholic Church. My S/O is a devout Catholic, and I love him dearly, but I I just don’t get it.
I told him the other day: suppose you had a job in a profession you loved and you were working for a company you’d been with for years. One day, you find out that the CEO and at least a fair slice of management was conducting human sacrfices every day before office hours, and they’d paid off the police, so they weren’t even going to be prosecuted. Would you stay with the company because you liked the ambience of the cafeteria?
You don’t have to quit your profession, but wouldn’t you sure as hell go to work for another company or start your own business at home? Why on earth would you stay?
He can’t explain it to me, and seriously, I can’t grasp it.
Mike S
This was the last straw for me regarding the church:
tyrese
I’d go even further. I’d like to see them put together a RICO SUAVE case against the catholic church.
suzanne
@jacy:
I’m having this problem with some of my friends, as well, who are LDS and fancy themselves as very concerned with social justice. (The Mormon Church concerned with social justice? Yeah fucking right.) Yet they don’t DARE to criticize the Church, and aren’t exceptionally vocal about their beliefs. They just keep tithing and filling the pews. Which causes me to hold them in contempt for their hypocrisy.
In my view, if you’re gonna stay in an organization like that, you need to at least be vocal about changing it, otherwise, you’re complicit in torture.
BC
When the sexual predations were unearthed in the US, it was because of the moral decline in US. Then the molestations and abuse were unearthed in Ireland and the dots were connected – it was the Irish in US and Ireland! Now it’s Germany – and the Pope and his brother are tarnished by the scandal because they were in leadership positions within the church at the time the scandals occurred. Just wonder which country is going to be the next one to unearth sexual predations . . .
liberal
@Martin:
ROTFLOL!
liberal
@Roger Moore:
Was telling my wife, a Catholic and a lawyer, this today—how does it not fall under RICO?
Brachiator
@Brian J:
Sorry, this doesn’t fly. Catholics have known about this for some time, and although some have stood with the victims, especially in Boston, other areas, Los Angeles for example (an area with which I have some direct knowledge) desperately grasp for any reason to excuse predator priests and those who protect them.
I’ve had people, including a former good friend, straight up tell me to my face that their personal need to be a part of the Church is greater than any responsibility to seek justice for those who were victimized by priests.
The Church understands this and nurtures this. Clearly, their view is that once a man has had a calling to become a priest, then it becomes necessary to defend and protect a priest who preys on children or women. Perhaps they truly believe that the priest can be rehabilitated in some way.
Church officials also clearly believe that the defense of the Church as an institution is worth the occasional sacrifice.
You also see this in the weasel words the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland uses to wriggle out of his personal responsibility for getting rid of pedophile priests.
To Hell with all of them.
liberal
@jacy:
Oh, come on, there’s lots of things to “not get” about religion.
I’ve gone to a few masses since marrying a Catholic, and the biggest offense is that RELIGIOUS SERVICES ARE F*CKING BORING!.
liberal
@Brachiator:
Yeah, the really distinguishing issue here isn’t the crimes per se but the consistency with which they’re covered up.
Ruckus
@BonnyAnne:
(Stopped going years ago, and can you imagine why? Now I am wondering when I will get around to permanently leaving the damn thing, if that’s possible…)
It’s just like voodoo, if you believe it then it’s real. If you don’t believe then there is no hold on you. You stand up and walk away. It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t affect you in any way, except to make you wonder why you didn’t walk away before. Stand up and walk away. Faith has no reality, only submission.
John O
I remember way back when a lot of my pals and their parents told me The Exorcist was, like, the scariest movie EVAH.
I saw it and went, “Huh?”
The indoctrination process is time tested. I’ll give them that.
Shaun
fuck religion. Join a softball league.
jacy
@liberal:
Yeah — I used to go with him every once in a while, just as a show of support, but after the first few years, I just couldn’t do it any more. The smaller children still go sometimes, but except for the smallest one, they’re old enough to balk. As the 9-year-old says, “It’s boring and the snacks aren’t even any good.”
I hate to tell my S/O but I think the indoctrination stops with him…Well, actually, that was my evil plan all along…..
forked tongue
Well. uh, there’s Mormonism, at least in its fundamentalist form (i.e., what its founder actually said and did.)
Ash Can
@jacy:
It’s because we laity, technically, are the Church. Along with the ordained clergy. We’re all in it together. We can no more run away from the Church than run away from ourselves.
Nevertheless (and, actually, because of this), there’s no shortage of internal conflict between the two (often diametrically opposed) dynamics of clergy making the rules and laity being co-component of the entire religion. And, actually, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it might be the key to the ultimate survival of the Catholic Church. Really, it might be time for an immolation. Scorched earth, that sort of thing. Pull the tax exemption, haul all the pedophiles and all their accomplices in, sell off the church buildings and other assets, initiate times of extreme austerity. It’s all good. Purges can have significant benefits, and I’m of the opinion that today’s Catholic Church is long overdue for one.
Ash Can
@Shaun:
And then, there’s always this. Softball is good too. :)
Tattoosydney
@Ash Can:
This I would pay to watch.
/ex-catholic
asiangrrlMN
@Tattoosydney: Me, too, and I am not ex-Catholic, merely ex-Evangelical.
@suzanne: I agree with the bulk of what you say (actually, LDS are known for their concern for social justice. That’s part of their missions, as a matter of fact). If you have concerns with the way your church is handling something, speak up about it or leave.
@Brian J: Disagree. People know about abuse and don’t stop it all the time for a variety of reasons. They rationalize or dismiss or try to blame the victims. As long as their have been abusers, there have been cover-ups.
El Cid
@Tattoosydney:
Westerners weren’t too happy about it when the anarchists did the same to Spain’s church, and a good part of Wm F Buckley & Pat Buchannan’s jollies over the years were their fond admiration of their role model Franco for having restored the power and majesty of the Church.
I think the anarchists had it right.
As the last surviving member of the Durruti column fighting the fascists in the Spanish civil war explained a couple years ago and after surviving a Nazi camp after having been captured, as to why he had chosen to move to rural Bolivia:
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@El Cid:
Durruti was a piece of shit too, though. He once had a debate with a 14-year-old Fascist who’d been captured, trying to “convert” him from Fascism. He gave the kid the night to think it over, and in the morning, when the kid still hadn’t changed his mind, he had him shot.
Ideological divergence =/= moral superiority. Not necessarily, anyway.
El Cid
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: I hadn’t heard that particular story, but it wouldn’t surprise me — it was awfully easy for all sides fighting the civil war in Spain to convince themselves that the best solution in a variety of situations was to kill someone captured, young, old, infirm, or otherwise.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@El Cid:
True. As much as I like to root for the Republicans, they had almost as much innocent blood on their hands as the Nationalists had on theirs. Of course, the Nationalists instigated the war, and they were much worse; doesn’t change the fact that if the Republicans had won the war, there still would’ve been lots of mass-murders of all sorts of people.
rickstersherpa
Crooked Timber has a good blog on this subject.
http://crookedtimber.org/2010/03/15/i-really-dont-know-what-to-say/
Ratzinger under the last 10 years of JP II (JP II had adopted this policy and agreed with Ratzinger) filled the hierarchy with Conservative time servers who knew how to crack the discipline on priests who did not follow the keeping mum line. I knew a military chaplain who was removed from is position because he had championed victims of abuse and refused to protect fellow priests who were abusers. He also was seen as “soft” on Gays in the military. Hence, he was involuntarily retired. Brady and Ratzinger seem so far in their own bubble that they can’t even do the right thing for the institution they claim they love, the Church, and retire (in Ratzinger’s case the word is “Abidicate”) and let a Council of Laity and Clergy reform the Church.
By the way, Luther did literaly say “Fuck the Pope” on various occasions. Luther was a pretty earthy guy as well as being a brilliant theologian. I doubt he is on the reading list anymore, but I read him back in Notre Dame in the 1970s.
El Cid
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: Maybe. What we do know is that the Franquists slaughtered several hundred thousand after the war, and then hid the evidence of their graves and never told the relatives what happened. We know this because the Spanish stopped putting up with the post-war Franco ‘we must move on and forget’ bullshit, and they’re busy tracing down leads and giving the dead a decent burial.
suzanne
@asiangrrlMN:
To a (wo)man, every one of my friends who went on an LDS mission said the VAST majority of their mission was spent proselytizing rather than doing service-based mission work. They said at least 90% of their “working” time was spent knocking on doors, trying to get people to join the Church, and they were under a great deal of pressure to get people converted. They said that older members of the Church will sometimes go on service-based missions, but that that’s much more rare, whereas almost every college-aged man and many of the women are very highly pressured to go on a mission.
Meanwhile, women are not allowed to hold the priesthood in their Church, they organize discrimination against gay people, and blacks were denied full membership until the seventies.
So claiming the LDS Church is into social justice is, in my view, quite a stretch.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@El Cid:
True. Franco was the bigger piece of shit. But the Republicans were pieces of shit, too, for the most part.
The best people in the war were the Catalonian anarchists, as far as I can tell. The other Republicans (specifically the Communists) slaughtered most of them before Franco even had a chance to. But as Durruti demonstrates, they were no angels either.
It was an ugly, messy, nasty war, a war that the Nationalists started, and in which they were always the worst malefactors. But that doesn’t ennoble their adversaries any more than simply being a detractor of the Catholic Church would automatically make someone a 100% good person.