So while schools, parole officers, judges, lawyers and therapists may have been deficient in their understanding of child abuse back in 1962 (although I’m sorry — it could have been 1562, if someone molested my child and was allowed back in the priesthood, I’d be reaching for an axe), the Catholic church is alone among all of them in continuing to not get it since then. Despite massive public scandal over the course of what now is decades, they continue to deflect and shield child molesters as a matter of institutional routine. The ugliest part of the New York Times story wasn’t even the involvement of Ratzinger in this mess but the fact that three successive archbishops failed to do anything about Murphy, a man who apparently molested upwards of 200 children.
I was raised Catholic but stopped going to church at the age of 12. I was a complete idiot at that age with regard to almost every other area of human knowledge, but even I knew back then that the church was a scam. There are good and decent people working as individual priests, but the institution as a whole is a gang of cheap charlatans preying on peoples’ guilt feelings (which of course are cultivated intentionally by the church, which teaches children to be ashamed of their natural sexuality) in order to solicit a lifetime of contributions.
When I see a Catholic priest chanting his ridiculous incantations and waving his holy smoke over someone’s gravesite or at a wedding, the vibe I get is exactly the same as the one I get watching a plumber groan and moan and babble gibberish about all the different things wrong with your kitchen pipes, when in reality all he had to do was replace a washer. It’s the same as picking up your car after an oil change and listening to the mechanic rattle off a list of charges totaling thousands for the nineteen extra things he looked at under your hood, just out of concern for your safety… And when you protest, no, there was nothing wrong with my alternator, I’m not paying for that, he tries to bullshit you — oh, yes there was, trust me, if we hadn’ta fixed that, your car woulda died on the highway within a week.
Hmmm. Speaking as a mechanic who would never pull that kinda shit both because I just ain't built that way and because honesty brings repeat business, I'm damn glad mechanics don't have a pope and an institutional mentality to cover up the crimes of a few that give us all a bad name.
That’s all the church is. They’re a giant for-profit company using predatory salesmanship to sell what they themselves know is a defective, outmoded, basically unnecessary product. They’ll use any means necessary to keep their market share and if they have to lie and cheat and deflect and point fingers to keep the racket going, they’ll do it, just like any other sleazeball company.
We don’t permit countries that harbor terrorists to participate in international society, but the Catholic Church — an organization that has been proven over and over again to systematically enable child molesters, right up now to the level of the Pope — is given a free pass. In fact the Church is not only not sanctioned in any serious way, it gets to retain its outrageous tax-exempt status, which makes its systematic child abuse, in this country at least, a government-subsidized activity.
Another thing I'm paying for that I don't like.
Somewhere underneath all of this there is a root story that has to do with celibacy. The celibate status of its priests is basically the Catholic church’s last market advantage in the Christian religion racket, but human beings are not designed to be celibate and so problems naturally arise among the population of priests forced to live that terrible lifestyle. Just as it refuses to change its insane and criminal stance on birth control and condoms, the church refuses to change its horrifically cruel policy about priestly celibacy. That’s because it quite correctly perceives that should it begin to dispense with the irrational precepts of its belief system, it would lose its appeal as an ancient purveyor of magical-mystery bullshit and become just a bigger, better-financed, and infinitely more depressing version of a Tony Robbins self-help program.
Therefore it must cling to its miserable celibacy in order to keep its sordid business scheme going; and if clinging to its miserable celibacy means having to look the other way while children are serially molested by its sexually stunted and tortured employees, well, so be it.
Much more.
I'm a convert to Catholicism from my natal religion as an Episcopalian, called Anglicans by some, almost Catholic but not quite, and much saner. I did that in homage to my late Catholic Mom and because the mystery and ritual appealed to me. I kinda liked the services in Latin (and a little Greek). I shoulda went right to Voodoo. I dropped the Church like a hot rock when, like Taibbi, I realized what a crock it was. When you think of the vast wealth and trappings of the Vatican on the one hand, and then think of the poor Mexican lady who crawls twenty miles on her knees to put her last peso on the altar as an offering, and then think about the Vatican letting millions of impoverished people who could be helped by all that wealth languish in misery, you realize that at the corporate level, the 'vow of poverty' is a flat fuckin' lie.
The Church used to rule Europe and a pretty good bit of the rest of the world. It acts like it still does and can get away with whatever it wants to. Just like Repuglicans.
I've got no use for the Roman Catholic Church or Repuglicans. Both of 'em are made-up scams that invented things that don't exist to get wealth and power and their time's nearly up. May God speed their demise.
Addenda:
The one thing the Vatican is reported to have that I would like to see in widespread distribution is an apocryphal book containing descriptions and effects of some 800 psychotropic plants that grow in Mexico and points south. Think of the tourist business! The Mexican lady could drive to the church in an Escalade to offer her peso!
Also, on the philosophical level, Martin Luther was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right about this:
Luther strongly disputed their claim that freedom from God's punishment of sin could be purchased with money.
Not something the Pope wanted to hear in the Vatican boardroom.
