The church fails to punish child rapists, or hand them over to authorities.
The church systematically covers up for the rapists and moves them around so they have new victims.
This goes on for decades.
Victims come forward, the story gets some traction in the media, and becomes a bomb that keeps exploding.
Church’s response is to whine that it is being persecuted. Vatican says the media is out to get them and is abusing this story to do so.
One Vatican priest likens the outcry to anti-Semitism (please try not to die from irony here) and intimates that the church is a “victim of collective violence.”
FINALLY Ratzi says the problem is one of sin in the church and, um, they’ll have to work on that.
Last November, a nun on the board of a Catholic hospital agreed to allow doctors to abort the 11-week fetus of a woman who would otherwise die (taking said fetus with her, by the way). Well, the Holy See jumped right on this situation and **excommunicated **her.
(I’m not alone in noticing that the rapists and their protectors are all men, while this case involved a woman allowing another woman to be saved, am I?)
Seriously, this is so insane and the motherfuckers involved are so removed from reality and ensconced in their own masturbatory power structure, I’m having trouble really believing this shit. Brain-damaged Martians with Aspergers would have a better feel for public sentiment and socially appropriate responses than these professional virgins.
Viewed from an objective standpoint, the hierarchy of the RCC are a despicable bunch and their judgements bigoted and self-serving.
Individual catholics may well be good people because most people are. The cardinals and the pope however…well, an organisation promotes people of a certain mindset who then are in a position to promote people of a certain mindset who then are…you get the picture.
It will take a brave man to break that chain…Or a fucking great lawsuit!
Ratzi et al are a bunch of fucking looney pedo-protectors. One wishes they’d get sent to prison, where they’d be used as currency (among other things) by inmates who are decidedly unimpressed by their nice red uniforms.
I noticed the language he used when he came out with that declaration. I couldn’t help but note that he never mentioned the damaged and destroyed lives of the victims. He cast the entire thing in terms of the church’s persecution. Motherfucker.
I’m really not, because in my experience “canon law” is merely a boot-strapping, question-begging, double-talking load of horse shit* that’s as relevant to real life as two geeks arguing about the significance of midichlorians.
*my apologies to horse shit, which actually has beneficial uses
You know what? I am sick of the complaints that being pissed off about the systematic coverup of criminal offenses against children by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is Catholic-bashing. I suspect the OP feels the same.
We will thanks. The head honchos are opposed to equal rights for women, homosexuals, non-Catholics and hold to a policy of secrecy, coercion and the proscription of condom use. That by itself is enough to warrant 34,652 threads at least.
Or perhaps that isn’t what the heads of the Catholic church actually think? Wow! if you can tell me I’m wrong on that then great, I think we can make progress.
Well, to be fair, I’m frankly no more surprised with the Catholic heirarchy excluding non-Catholics as I am with, say, the exclusion of a feline from the Westminster Dog Show or guy waiters employed at Hooters.
Bricker’s (apparent) attempt at generating interest in an institutional Catholic apologetic is reminiscent of a defense mounted by a (Catholic) former professor of mine, in response to the sort of criticisms mounted here by the OP.
His argument? When you look at the statistics (number of pedophile priests vs. number of pedophile teachers/doctors/whatever), priests are actually pretty safe to have around children.
Whether he was willfully ignoring the actual issues at hand, or was just fucking stupid, I don’t know.
I couldn’t find in the OP’s link anything at all about the Pope, much less the Holy See. I’m also coming up blank on a date that Bishop Olmstead declared her to excommunicated, or an assertion that the church took any affirmative disciplinary action at all against Sister McBride. For all I can tell from the text of the story (it’s not really practical for me to listen to the story as broadcast at the moment), Bishop Olmstead merely remarked that by her action, Sister McBride had effectively excommunicated herself. Although I suppose if that were actually the case, it would have been more accurate to have said that she apostasized herself.
Anyway, speaking as an apostate my own self, if that is what she did, I can only say: “You go, girl.” And that she’s better off without them.
If ever there was an organization that you’d think would fall under respondeat superior, it’s the Catholic Church!
And really, is anyone going to “defend” the church by saying, “Nonononono, the *people *running the church aren’t evil and stupid. See, there are all these *rules *for how the organization runs, and they say if you even think inside your head that a single abortion could ever be OK, you’re automatically kicked out, but they don’t say much of anything about child rape and pimping, so the priests had discretion there.”
At this point, Bricker, the church deserves to be bashed. Not Catholic individuals, but the institution itself. And I say this as a lapsed Catholic. If there is a hell, Ratzinger and co. will end up there.