Posts Tagged ‘ Catholic church ’

“The corrupt political process in New York State”

Jun 28th, 2011 11:12 am | By

The Catholic bishops of New York state are upset. They are displeased about this pesky new same-sex marriage bill. They think it’s most unfair to them, the Catholic bishops of New York state.

“The passage by the Legislature of a bill to alter radically and forever humanity’s historic understanding of marriage leaves us deeply disappointed and troubled,” the state’s bishops said. “We strongly uphold the Catholic Church’s clear teaching that we always treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with respect, dignity and love. But

Ah yes “but.” Good old “but.” You saw that “but” coming a mile away, didn’t you. The instant they produce the bit about “we always treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with respect, dignity and … Read the rest



Whited sepulchre

Mar 24th, 2011 11:04 am | By

But hey, then again, why worry about religious privilege and entitlement when the Vatican is busy telling the UN Human Rights Council that people who dispute its vicious homophbia are “attacking” it and interfering with its human rights? Why bother? Why not just give up, since we’re obviously outnumbered?

People who criticise gay sexual relations for religious or moral reasons are increasingly being attacked and vilified for their views, a Vatican diplomat told the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday.

Or to put it another way, gay people are increasingly being attacked and vilified by reactionary religious fanatics who think they should have the power to tell everyone everywhere what to do down to the smallest detail.

“People are

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Ratzinger’s finest hour

Jan 19th, 2011 4:47 pm | By

Brothers and sisters, join with me once again in reading the holy and most sanctified letter of the bishop of Rome to his beloved members of The Church in Ireland, and see with your own weeping eyes how he places all the blame gently but firmly on them, pretending with all the oiliness of a can of sardines and all the unction of a tube of BenGay that the higher ups in Rome knew nothing whatever about it and were going about their business in innocent piety and pious innocence while those Celtic ruffians were making a dog’s breakfast of things over there on the edge of the known world. We have read it before, my dear siblings, we … Read the rest



There was an arrogance, an independent and defiant air

Dec 30th, 2010 12:18 pm | By

Maniacal Catholics are still explaining that the bishop was right. Gerard Nadal even explains that the bishop was right to “push back against a culture of death.” By insisting that a woman should have been allowed to die along with her fetus, the bishop was pushing back against a culture of death. How does that work?

Nadal explains the “principle of double effect” to our wondering eyes.

In essence the principle states that a lifesaving procedure that cannot be delayed, such as the removal of a cancerous uterus before the baby can be taken in a Cesarean section at viability (~25 weeks gestation), is permissible so long as the death of the baby is the indirect and unintended effect…

Such

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The pope’s plans

Jun 30th, 2010 5:43 pm | By

The pope has plans to fight the good fight against secularization and re-impose Catholic theocracy in developed countries where it has lost a lot of popularity lately.

Pope Benedict XVI announced the new Vatican department dedicated to tackling what he called “a grave crisis in the sense of the Christian faith and the role of the church”…

The new department, to be called The Pontifical Council for New Evangelisation, will try to reinvigorate belief among Catholics in rich, developed countries — or, in the Pontiff’s words, “find the right means to repropose the perennial truth of the Gospel”.

Do we detect a note of sarcasm? Anyway, one wonders how this pontifical council will go about the reinvigorating. Posters on … Read the rest



Heads I win tails you lose

Jun 29th, 2010 4:06 pm | By

The Vatican seems to want to have it both ways. It wants to tell everybody what to do, especially all Catholics, especially especially all priests. It wants to tell everybody what to do about abortion and condoms and assisted suicide. It wants to tell all Catholics what to do about that only more so, and on pain of excommunication. It wants to tell priests not to marry or have sex with women (children are ok) or go to the police when they know a colleague has been raping children. It wants to be the boss of everyone. But – then when people get angry about what its priests have been getting up to, it wants to say no no … Read the rest



Put your hands out where I can see them

Jun 24th, 2010 5:37 pm | By

Belgian authorities heightened pressure on the Roman Catholic Church in a sex-abuse scandal on Thursday, raiding the Belgian church headquarters, the home of a former archbishop and the offices of a commission established by the church to handle abuse complaints.

Police arrived at the church headquarters, the palace of the archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, on Thursday morning while the monthly bishops meeting was in progress, a church spokesman said, questioning all of those present, from bishops down to staff members such as cooks and drivers.

Now that’s more like it. That sounds as if someone actually realizes that raping children is a crime, and not a little foible that can be gently discouraged by one’s colleagues without anyone’s hair having to … Read the rest



Vatican to clamp down on liberal secular opinion

Jun 9th, 2010 12:01 pm | By

And how about those fun-loving guys at the Vatican?

Vatican investigators to Ireland appointed by Pope Benedict XVI are to clamp down on liberal secular opinion in an intensive drive to re-impose traditional respect for clergy, according to informed sources in the Catholic Church.

Uh…what? The investigators have been appointed to go to Ireland by the pope to investigate the church’s long history of tormenting children and shielding child-raping priests from the law. Why then do they think the job is to re-impose traditional respect for clergy? And why the fuck do they think the way to do that is to “clamp down” on secular liberal opinion (which frowns on practices like sticking children in prisons and then starving … Read the rest



A duel at sunrise

Jun 5th, 2010 10:58 am | By

Seriously. Cristina Odone must feel very sure that Richard Dawkins won’t sue her for libel, or she wouldn’t say “Richard Dawkins is responsible for peddling a lot of lies about faith” in her blog at The Telegraph, and the Telegraph wouldn’t let her, either. She wouldn’t just casually risk a money-devouring and time-devouring lawsuit just for the hell of it, or for the tiny fun of accusing Dawkins of peddling lies in a Telegraph blog. She writes for the national press in the UK, so she can’t possibly be unaware of the UK’s insane libel laws and how they are used. She can’t possibly be unaware of Simon Singh and the BCA and the word “bogus” – so it’s … Read the rest



Don’t mess with the Vatican

Jun 2nd, 2010 12:28 pm | By

Okay, I give up – why is the Obama administration siding with the Vatican against people who think it should be accountable for its many crimes?

Faced with a number of court cases in the United States that have named the pope himself as a defendant in the enabling and covering up of many rapes, the Vatican has evolved the strategy of claiming that the Holy See is in effect a sovereign state and thus possessed of immunity from prosecution. It has now been announced that the Obama administration will be advising the Supreme Court to adopt this view of the matter.

Why? What’s the thinking? Why should a church be declared a sovereign state? Why especially should the Obama … Read the rest



Another bit of postmodernist irony from the Vatican

Jun 2nd, 2010 11:12 am | By

You have to admire the Vatican for sheer effrontery. Which archbishops did it choose to send on an ‘apostolic visit’ to Ireland to look into the way Catholic priests and nuns have been tormenting Irish children for generations? Why, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who decided

in 1985, when he was bishop of Arundel and Brighton, to move the priest Fr Michael Hill to a chaplaincy at Gatwick airport. Eighteen months previously the cardinal had removed Hill from ministry because of child abuse allegations but then allowed him back to work at the airport where Hill abused a child. Hill was jailed in 2002.

And Seán O’Malley:

in his diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, the district attorney in 2002 was so disturbed at

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The elites who run the Empire State Building

May 15th, 2010 5:05 pm | By

Bill Donohue is in a huge giant rage again, this time because he ordered the people who manage the Empire State Building to illuminate it with blue and white lights one day in order to celebrate the birthday of “Mother Teresa” and it didn’t obey.

Well – there are only 365 days in the year and the people who run the ESB can’t obey every single time someone orders them to illuminate the building in order to celebrate X, so why is Donohue all tied in knots? Because “Mother Teresa” is obviously one of the 365 most important and wonderful people of all time and therefore should get one of the 365 days there are in the year? Please. … Read the rest



The pope visits Fátima

May 14th, 2010 3:05 pm | By

The pope is telling everyone what to do, again – not that he ever stopped, but still it’s interesting to see that he apparently feels no shyness or hesitation, no doubts about his moral authority, even now that it has been searchingly and thoroughly revealed that he and his church have been protecting child rapists and bullying their victims for many decades.

This is interesting, in its way. I think ordinarily people who have been morally compromised the way the pope has become a little bashful about pretending to be moral bosses. It’s interesting that the pope doesn’t, especially since the content of his moral bossing is so godawful – so harmful for actual existing people, so fretful about … Read the rest



The Christian churches are the conscience of our country

Apr 27th, 2010 10:01 am | By

Lawrence Lessig notes that the pope told victims of priestly rape in Malta last week that the church “was doing all it could to investigate abuse accusations and find ways to safeguard children in the future.”

But it’s not, Lessig says. In fact it’s doing the opposite. It’s defending a New Jersey statute immunizing charities against negligence even if their employees acted “willfully, wantonly, recklessly, indifferently — even criminally.”

What was truly astonishing was the appearance of the New Jersey Catholic Conference in the case. As its Web site explains, the conference “represents the Catholic bishops of New Jersey on matters of public policy,” because “the Catholic Church calls for a different kind of political engagement: one shaped by the

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The church is campaigning to block compensation *

Apr 27th, 2010 | Filed by

It is lobbying hard against statute of limitation reform.… Read the rest



Put out an APB for Cardinal Bernard Law

Apr 25th, 2010 11:09 am | By

Hitchens gently suggests that the pope should be questioned like anyone else.

His apologists have done their best, but their Holy Father seems consistently to have been lenient or negligent with the criminals while reserving his severity only for those who complained about them.

As this became horribly obvious, I telephoned a distinguished human-rights counsel in London, Geoffrey Robertson, and asked him if the law was powerless to intervene. Not at all, was his calm reply. If His Holiness tries to travel outside his own territory—as he proposes to travel to Britain in the fall—there is no more reason for him to feel safe than there was for the once magnificently uniformed General Pinochet, who had passed a Chilean law

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Masons bring down innocent Catholic church

Apr 25th, 2010 10:50 am | By

It gets crazier and crazier every day. Now a Colombian Cardinal tells us what’s what.

A senior cardinal defended the Roman Catholic Church’s practice of frequently not reporting sexual abusive priests to the police, saying Thursday it would have been like testifying against a family member at trial…

“The law in nations with a well-developed judiciary does not force anyone to testify against a child, a father, against other people close to the suspect,” Castrillon told RCN radio. “Why would they ask that of the church? That’s the injustice. It’s not about defending a pedophile, it’s about defending the dignity and the human rights of a person, even the worst of criminals.”

The cardinal seems to be confused. The … Read the rest