Tag: Catholic church

  • “The corrupt political process in New York State”

    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 love,” you know for a certainty what will immediately follow. But. But we won’t have it. But it’s an outrage. But God said. But we strongly affirm. But one man and one woman (and never, by golly, the other way around). But lifelong loving union that is open to children. But but but.

    This definition cannot change, though we realize that our beliefs about the nature of marriage will continue to be ridiculed, and that some will even now attempt to enact government sanctions against churches and religious organizations that preach these timeless truths.

    Self-pity much? Complain about inability to impose your church’s “teachings” and its “timeless truths” on unwilling other people much?

    “We worry that both marriage and the family will be undermined by this tragic presumption of government in passing this legislation that attempts to redefine these cornerstones of civilization,” the bishops added.

    No, you don’t. You worry that your power and authority and privilege will be undermined by this unremarkable good sense of government in passing legislation that benefits some people and harms none.

    “Our society must regain what it appears to have lost – a true understanding of the meaning and the place of marriage, as revealed by God, grounded in nature, and respected by America’s foundational principles.”

    No, it mustn’t. That’s the very thing it must not do. There is no “God” to do this revealing; Catholic bishops don’t know a damn thing about this “God,” any more than anyone else does. It’s all “church teachings” all the way down, and we don’t have to buy into it, much less obey it.

    A Brooklyn bishop played the populist card.

    “Today, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state legislature have deconstructed the single most important institution in human history,” Bishop DiMarzio said. “Republicans and Democrats alike succumbed to powerful political elites and have passed legislation that will undermine our families and as a consequence, our society.”

    The shit. That’s Nazi-talk, that “elites” shit. What does he think he is? What does he think bishops are? They’re an elite if you like. They have masses of illegitimate power and authority; they’re wholly unaccountable; they rigorously exclude women from power and ferociously punish anyone who tries to get a woman admitted; they shield each other from the law and the police; they tell governments what to do. They wear special elite clothes; they perform magical elite ceremonies; they have special elite knowledge. Teh gaze have nothing to match that.

    And he didn’t stop there.

    At a time when so many New Yorkers are struggling to stay in their homes and find jobs, we should be working together to solve these problems. However, the politicians have curried favor with wealthy donors who are proponents of a divisive agenda in order to advance their own careers and futures.

    Right; this is all about rich people trampling on the faces of the poor.

    I have asked all Catholic schools to refuse any distinction or honors bestowed upon them this year by the governor or any member of the legislature who voted to support this legislation. Furthermore, I have asked all pastors and principals to not invite any state legislator to speak or be present at any parish or school celebration.

    The above request is intended as a protest of the corrupt political process in New York State. More than half of all New Yorkers oppose this legislation. Yet, the governor and the state legislature have demonized people of faith, whether they be Muslims, Jews, or Christians, and identified them as bigots and prejudiced…

    Ugly, ugly stuff.

  • Whited sepulchre

    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 being attacked for taking positions that do not support sexual behaviour between people of the same sex,” he told the current session of the Human Rights Council.

    “When they express their moral beliefs or beliefs about human nature … they are stigmatised, and worse — they are vilified, and prosecuted.

    “These attacks are violations of fundamental human rights and cannot be justified under any circumstances,” Tomasi said.

    What attacks? He means criticism and disagreement. Criticism and disagreement are not violations of fundamental human rights. Furthermore, the Vatican’s concern for human rights is…let’s say incomplete, and self-regarding, and cynical, and a joke.

    Tomasi also said the Vatican believed in the inherent dignity of all human beings and condemned all violence against people because of their sexual orientation or behaviour.

    “But states can and must regulate behaviours, including various sexual behaviours,” he said.

    “Throughout the world, there is a consensus between societies that certain kinds of sexual behaviour must be forbidden by law. Paedophilia and incest are two examples.”

    Says an archbishop of a church that has shielded paedophiles from, precisely, state law, the very state law he appealed to.

  • Ratzinger’s finest hour

    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 it when it was first issuéd last March, when the shit first hit the whirling blades of the air-circulator, but let us read it again, that its wisdom and compassion may strengthen us in these our great tribulations and griefs as we behold the agony of our Irish flock.

    Part 11: To my brother bishops

    It cannot be denied that some of you and your predecessors failed, at times grievously, to apply the long-established norms of canon law to the crime of child abuse. Serious mistakes were made in responding to allegations. I recognize how difficult it was to grasp the extent and complexity of the problem, to obtain reliable information and to make the right decisions in the light of conflicting expert advice. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that grave errors of judgement were made and failures of leadership occurred. All this has seriously undermined your credibility and effectiveness. I appreciate the efforts you have made to remedy past mistakes and to guarantee that they do not happen again. Besides fully implementing the norms of canon law in addressing cases of child abuse, continue to cooperate with the civil authorities in their area of competence. Clearly, religious superiors should do likewise. They too have taken part in recent discussions here in Rome with a view to establishing a clear and consistent approach to these matters. It is imperative that the child safety norms of the Church in Ireland be continually revised and updated and that they be applied fully and impartially in conformity with canon law.

    Is that not touching and holy and beautiful? You would not know butter had ever melted in the mouth of the utterer. You would not know he had ever had the faintest idea that priests had been raping children in Ireland. You would not know he had known all about it for years and years or that he knew perfectly well that it was the church in Rome itself that told the Irish bishops to keep the whole mess in house or else.

    Ad maiorem dei gloriam, my dear siblings.

  • There was an arrogance, an independent and defiant air

    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 circumstances are extremely rare, given how early a baby can be delivered before full term at 40 weeks. The mother’s life must be in immediate danger and the treatment of her disease, which would also result in the death of the baby, cannot be forestalled.

    Do you see what Nadal is doing there? He’s saying that if the woman’s life is in danger that is less than immediate, it is not permissable to do an abortion in order to remove or reduce the danger. He’s saying that doctors and hospitals should force women to risk their lives rather than abort an early fetus.

    Keep constantly in mind that Nadal himself will never be put in danger by this policy. Neither will the bishop of Phoenix. Neither will a single one of the members of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Neither will any of the Vatican honchos who pronounce on these matters. These rules and laws and policies are created entirely by men and they apply entirely to women. Women are a subject race when it comes to the Vatican.

    Patients who seek Catholic healthcare do so because of the assurance that the facility and its clinicians adhere to the ERD’s. They do so because they seek the assurance that they will be told the truth and treated in accord with Catholic moral norms, and not railroaded down the disastrous path American medicine has decided to follow.

    Bullshit. Not everyone in a Catholic hospital does “seek Catholic healthcare”; lots of people are stuck with it because it’s all there is; others want some features of Catholic healthcare without signing up to every crazed item of Vatican dogma.

    I opined, and was pilloried for it, that Sister McBride was presiding over a shadow healthcare system that was active in promoting an agenda that ran counter to the mission of the Church. Nobody commits first-degree murder as a first crime. No Catholic hospital administrator, especially a professed religious, signs off on such an abortion for the first time in the manner in which Sister McBride conducted herself.

    He’s implying, in a deniable sort of way, that McBride committed first-degree murder.

    There was an arrogance, an independent and defiant air about it that pointed to something deeper and darker, something that would eventually come to light.

    Aha! Now we have it! A god damn woman had an arrogant independent defiant air, and that points to something deeper and darker, which is female independence in general. Kill the beast! Mark its forehead!

  • The pope’s plans

    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 buses? Exciting new youth programs? Stem-winding sermons at malls? Hip hop at mass? Better-tasting crackers? Archbishop Fisichella, the Vatican’s top bioethics official who will head the new council, appearing on Oprah?

    “Bioethics official” nothing, anyway – that’s not bioethics, it’s just authoritarian religious dogma. It’s just theocracy. Here come the theocrats, offering more theocracy. Yee-ha.

  • Heads I win tails you lose

    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 that is nothing to do with us, we don’t employ these priests, you cannot haul us into court and make us give you money like any peasant.

    Jeffrey Lena, the American attorney for the Holy See, argued the Vatican is not responsible for individual priests in dioceses, saying the existence of the priest in the case “was unknown to the Holy See until after all the events in question.”…”The Holy See does not pay the salary of the priest, or benefits of the priest, or exercise day-to-day control over the priest, and any of the other factors indicating the presence of an employment relationship,” Lena said.

    It tells the priest what to do, and what not to do; it issues rules, it consigns people to hell…but then when the bailiff shows up at the door, suddenly the priest is way off in the distance where the Holy See can’t even see it.

    According to the lawsuit, Ronan, who belonged to a religious order, began abusing boys in the mid-1950s as a priest in the Archdiocese of Armagh, Ireland. He was transferred to Chicago, where he allegedly admitted abusing three boys at St. Philip’s High School.

    Ronan was later moved to a parish in Portland, Ore., where he was accused of abusing the person who filed the lawsuit now under appeal. He was removed from the priesthood in 1966, according to the Archdiocese of Portland…

    Which of course is entirely independent from the Holy See.

  • Put your hands out where I can see them

    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 get mussed.

    The authorities’ decision to search church property, question bishops and seize documents and other potential evidence represented a major departure in such investigations and a sign that in criminal matters the church will not be afforded special treatment here. This sort of activity “Is extremely rare, very rare, especially in the house of a cardinal,” said Andrea Tornielli, a Vatican expert at the Italian daily Il Giornale. “It’s enormous.”

    …Barbara Dorris, outreach director for the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said in a statement that the raid was “precisely what’s needed, not just in Belgium but in other church offices across the globe.”

    “Law enforcement officials must stop giving the Catholic hierarchy a ‘free pass’ when it comes to clergy sex crimes and cover-ups,” Ms. Dorris said. “Police and prosecutors need to step up, and promptly and thoroughly investigate allegations against predator priests and corrupt bishops, and use their full powers to gain access to and control over church records that likely document the crimes and cover-ups.”

    No more special treatment. That’s all. Not an unreasonable expectation.

  • Vatican to clamp down on liberal secular opinion

    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 and beating and terrorizing them, also on raping them) and replace it with traditional respect for the very shits who have been doing the tormenting and raping? And why do they think they get to “clamp down” on anything in Ireland anyway? Who do they think they are? What do they think Ireland is? What century do they think this is?

    The nine-member team led by two cardinals will be instructed by the Vatican to restore a traditional sense of reverence among ordinary Catholics for their priests…

    Which will presumably require explaining away the fact that some of “their priests” used their confessionals as pleasantly secluded spots to rape children in. That could be uphill work.

    A major thrust of the Vatican investigation will be to counteract materialistic and secularist attitudes, which Pope Benedict believes have led many Irish Catholics to ignore church disciplines and become lax in following devotional practices such as going on pilgrimages and doing penance.

    But that’s got nothing to do with anything! Even if you care, even if you think that’s a bad thing, it’s still got nothing to do with anything. It’s not the Irish Catholics who are at fault here, it is the church, the priests, the hierarchy that protected them and did not protect their victims. What the fuck is the pope worrying about the “laxity” of Irish Catholics for when he’s supposed to be, and pretending to be, doing something about the crimes of his employees in Ireland? What is he doing pretending it is the people of Ireland who are at fault? What kind of vile sanctimonious stony-hearted bastard is he?

  • A duel at sunrise

    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 surely fair to say that she simply would not use that word if she were not very confident that she and her paper would not be sued when she did. That’s fair isn’t it? I’m not being uncharitable? She can’t have thought “Risky word – libel – lawsuits – Singh – two years – hundreds of thousands – better not – oh what the hell, I’ll risk it, because it’s worth it.” Can she?

    No. So she must have felt safe. How could she have felt safe other than because she knows Dawkins was part of the campaign against the libel laws and for Singh’s right to say what he said? Or perhaps because she knows more generally what his principles are. At any rate she clearly did feel safe, and feeling safe, she went right ahead and accused him of lying.

    She’s not a good person. She is apparently a “good Catholic,” in the sense that she is blindly loyal to the Catholic church and will stoop to almost anything to defend it – but she is not a good person. She takes advantage of other people’s principles in order to defame them.

  • Don’t mess with the Vatican

    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 admin be taking that view at the very time when there is a push to prosecute that church for protecting child-rapists for decades?

    [T]he State Department is required by Congress to make an annual report on the human rights record of every government with which we have relations. Yet there is no annual human rights report on the Vatican—or Vatican City or the Holy See, if you prefer. When questioned on this rather glaring lacuna, officials at Foggy Bottom say that for human rights purposes, the Vatican is not a state.

    So it gets to be a state when that is convenient for it, and it gets to be not a state when that is convenient for it. Why? Why is the catholic church alone among religious outfits given such special privileges? Why is the rule of law not more important than the Vatican’s desire to escape any form of accountability for its cowardly self-regarding cruelty-perpetuating actions?

  • Another bit of postmodernist irony from the Vatican

    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 Cardinal O’Malley’s failure to inform the public of sexual offenders that he himself went public with a list of names of accused priests.

    And Timothy Dolan, who

    let a priest sue his accuser in St Louis and fought against reforming Wisconsin child sex abuse laws.

    Dolan is also the fella who wrote that nauseating self-pitying “they do it too!” blog post last March, the one that showed with such piercing clarity that church officials are incapable of even perceiving the wrong they have done to other people, much less giving a shit about it.

    And these three mafiosi are the enforcers the Vatican has picked to go to Ireland and look into the matter. It simply boggles the mind.

  • The elites who run the Empire State Building

    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. That must be why though, because nothing else fits. But what makes Bill Donohue think MT is all that important and wonderful? Apart from relentless PR by the short Albanian sadist, of course.

    Well – she’s Catholic – and – well she’s Catholic, and Catholics are like a totally persecuted minority, so if a Catholic doesn’t get her birthday celebrated on the Empire State Building when Bill Donohue says it should be, then…Well it’s an elitist plot, that’s what, and Bill Donohue and Bill O’Reilly (do we sense a theme here?) are going to make a big stink about it, so there.

    One wonders what world the elites who run the Empire State Building live in. Besides siding with the Communists and dissing Catholics, they are just plain stupid. If they think they can ride this out, they have no idea what they are dealing with.

    Ah – out come the threats. Suitable for a loyal Catholic perhaps – he must have grown up steeped in threats and bullying – but not very pretty to watch.

    Bill Donohue and George Pitcher: making religion look bad in every way they can think of.

    Hat-tip to Miranda.

  • The pope visits Fátima

    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 imaginary people and arbitrary rules.

    Benedict called for initiatives aimed at protecting “the family based on the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman, help to respond to some of today’s most insidious and dangerous threats to the common good.”

    Like that. Pretending that divorce and gay marriage are insidious and dangerous threats to the common good. (You can make a case that divorce can be partially harmful to the common good, but then you can also make a case that indissoluble marriage can be partially harmful to the common good.) Prating about divorce and abortion and gay marriage when he and his tyrannical church have done real harm to thousands of real children. Talking as if he were better than other people because he wears the white dress. Talking as if he were even minimally decent.

    Benedict has endeavored to shape a new identity for the church as a “creative minority” in an increasingly secular Europe. On Thursday, he denounced “the pressure exerted by the prevailing culture, which constantly holds up a lifestyle based on the law of the stronger, on easy and attractive gain.”

    The law of the stronger is it – as in the all-powerful church that gets to shelter criminals from the law and get away with it year after year? Easy and attractive gain is it – as in the children trained to revere the church and its priests, who are such easy pickings for men who enjoy raping children? That kind of thing?

    The pope also told the social service groups to find alternatives to state financing so they would not be subject to legislation at odds with Catholic teaching, urging them to “ensure that Christian charitable activity is granted autonomy and independence from politics and ideologies

    Meaning, of course, politics and ideologies that favor equality and frown on discrimination against people for arbitrary reasons. The pope can’t be doing with those politics and ideologies, he prefers “Catholic teaching” that gay people are sinful.

    Bust him! Read him his rights, cuff him, book him, let him phone his lawyer.

  • The Christian churches are the conscience of our country

    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 moral convictions of well-formed consciences and focused on the dignity of every human being, the pursuit of the common good and the protection of the weak and the vulnerable.”

    Yet the “well-formed consciences” of the conference had not entered the case on behalf of the weak and the vulnerable. The Catholic Conference had filed a brief in support of the insurance company, to defend a rule that would have left institutions — like the church — immune from responsibility even if employees “criminally” protected an abuser.

    Meanwhile in New York state there is an effort to reform the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse, which currently gives victims all of five years after turning 18 to sue.

    At the core of the opposition to this bill is heavy lobbying by the New York Catholic Conference; according to published reports, the conference has hired top-dollar lobbyists to kill the bill. At least one bishop is reported to have threatened to close schools and parishes in legislators’ districts if they vote for the bill. And as Marci Hamilton, a law professor at Cardozo University, has written, bishops “publicly rail against statute of limitation reform as though it were the equivalent of mandatory abortion.”

    Once again we find that there is no bottom to this story. It just keeps going farther and farther and farther down. The Catholic church is a sanctified Mafia, which means it is a Mafia with enormous political power and clout. It is a Mafia that gets to veto women’s rights in the US by writing health care legislation to exclude abortion. It is a Mafia that exhales endless fraudulent rhetoric about its concern for the weak and vulnerable, all the while grinding the weak and vulnerable to powder.

    Gordon Brown however is still telling us that

    The Christian churches are the conscience of our country, always ready to bear witness to the truth and to remind us of our responsibilities to what the Bible calls ‘the least of these’. I am incredibly grateful for all that you do to ensure our public square is more than a place of transaction and exchange and remains always, as it should be, a place of shared values and social justice.

    No bottom in sight; bullshit all the way down.

  • The church is campaigning to block compensation

    It is lobbying hard against statute of limitation reform.

  • Put out an APB for Cardinal Bernard Law

    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 that he thought would guarantee his own immunity, but who was visited by British bobbies all the same.

    The law is not at all powerless to intervene. This is very good to know.

    Also being considered are two international approaches, one to the European Court of Human Rights and another to the International Criminal Court. The ICC—which has already this year overruled immunity and indicted the gruesome president of Sudan—can be asked to rule on “crimes against humanity”; a legal definition that happens to include any consistent pattern of rape, or exploitation of children, that has been endorsed by any government.

    Now that is very interesting – because the Vatican wants to be considered a state, with Ratzinger as its (flagrantly unelected and unaccountable) head. Well if it is a state, then it is a state that has endorsed (by protecting) child rape, and apparently that makes it subject to the ICC. That is fascinating.

  • Masons bring down innocent Catholic church

    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 human rights of criminals are not taken to include the right not to be reported to the police by anyone “close” to them. The UDHR makes no mention of the human right to be shielded by colleagues when one has committed a crime. The worst of criminals do have human rights, of course, but not the ones the cardinal is claiming.

    While the church stands by “those who truly were victims (of sexual abuse),” he added, “John Paul II, that holy pope, was not wrong when he defended his priests so that they were not, due to economic reasons, treated like criminal pedophiles without due process.”

    More confusion, I’m afraid. That holy pope wasn’t making sure his priests had due process, he was making sure they would have no contact with the law at all. One hopes the cardinal has some vague sense of the difference, but one is not confident.

    The cardinal also accused unnamed insiders and enemies elsewhere of feeding the sex abuse scandals hurting the Catholic Church.

    Yes…Masons, Jews, fags, atheists, secularists, Protestants; we know. You keep telling yourself that, Cardinal. Blame Canada.