A word of advice for schoolteachers: don’t ever seek a job in Cincinnati Catholic Archdiocese schools. You’d have to sign a contract that makes you their slave.

The Archdiocese has a new contract for teachers, one that’s twice the size of previous contracts, to accommodate the many things it tells you not to do.

The contract for the 2014-15 school year explicitly orders teachers to refrain “from any conduct or lifestyle which would reflect discredit on or cause scandal to the school or be in contradiction to Catholic doctrine or morals.” It goes so far as to ban public support of the practices.

Principals in the 94 Archdiocese-supervised schools in Southwest and Central Ohio began receiving the new employment

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Jennifer Collins at Religion News reports on Ireland’s little problem with Catholic saturation of the public state-funded schools.

The Catholic Church runs 90 percent of primary schools in Ireland. The rest are mainly Protestant, and about 4 percent are managed by the nonprofit Educate Together, which is nonsectarian.

The arrangement is unsettling to some parents who have little choice in where to send their children.

“They integrated religion into every subject in the school,” said Martijn Leenheer, an atheist who moved from the Netherlands to a small village in west Ireland eight years ago. “For instance, in biology, they would say ‘God created these flowers.’ Even in math they do it. They basically make religion part of everything in

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There’s a hearing on institutional responses to child sexual abuse in the Catholic church going on in Sydney now. It started off with a bang on Monday…

Victims of child abuse and their supporters walked out of a public hearing at the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse after the Catholic church’s legal representative quoted the Bible in his opening address.

…

Peter Gray, representing the church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council began his opening statement by quoting a passage from the gospel of Mark, prompting cries of shock and disgust in the hearing room.

“Many will remember, from their own childhoods, the ageless words from the gospel of Mark,” said Gray.

“Let the little children

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Timothy Dolan again. Remember Timothy Dolan? Former archbishop of Milwaukee? Now archbishop of New York? Also a cardinal?

The Timothy Dolan who whined and complained, in March 2010, about the unfair and meany way journalists would keep reporting on the Catholic church’s habit of protecting priests who rape children. He seems to have removed that post from his archepiscopal blog now, but the Internet archive still has it.

So Friday’s headline, only the most recent, stings us again:  “Doctor Asserts Church Ignored Abuse Warnings,” as the psychiatrist who treated the criminal, Dr. Werner Huth, blames the Church for not heeding his recommendations.

What adds to our anger over the nauseating abuse and the awful misjudgment in reassigning such a

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Oh, brilliant – another encroachment by the Catholic church on a secular bit of society.

High-performing Catholic schools are to be given considerable influence over the running and performance of struggling secular schools under plans being drawn up by the Church and government.

Catholic schools are currently bound by strict rules that mean they cannot form federations with their non-faith counterparts. But with the growth of the academies programme and the diminishing influence of local authorities, the Church wants to make a “greater contribution” to the running of different types of schools.

Well of course it does. That way it gets to impose its horrible reactionary anti-woman anti-human dogma on people who are formally outside its “magisterium.” It gets … Read the rest

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Cardinal Keith O’Brien, after saying “I never!!” for several days, has given a delicate admission that he was sexually…well he doesn’t say exactly, apart from admitting that it wasn’t quite the done thing. Well he’s a Catholic priest, and a high-ranking one, you can’t expect him to just come right out and say he fucked goats or had affairs with slabs of liver or raped children in the confessional.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, formerly Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric, today admitted his sexual conduct had “fallen beneath the standards expected of me”.

The Northern Ireland-born cleric stepped down from his post as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh last month, a day after three priests and one former priest made

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Frank Bruni wrote a pretty blistering op-ed in the NY Times last week on the Catholic church’s funny way of veering between theocracy and secularism depending on which is most convenient at any particular moment. He pointed out things that don’t get pointed out nearly often enough, especially by hyper-respectable newspapers like the Times.

On the one hand, he notes, you have the bishops shouting about contraceptive coverage in health care plans, and on the other hand, you have lawyers for a Catholic hospital chain arguing that fetuses aren’t persons. And then you have those pesky child-raping priests…

We’ve been getting a fresh and galling peek into that with the court-compelled release of documents from the Los Angeles Archdiocese, which

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Jen Gunter is also disturbed by what the Irish bishops said.

Terminating a pregnancy is “gravely immoral in all circumstances.” All circumstances includes 17 weeks and ruptured membranes. Unless I misunderstand the meaning of “all,” then Irish Catholic Bishops also view ending a pregnancy at 17 weeks with ruptured membranes and sepsis, either by induction of labor or the surgical dilation and evacuation (D & E), to be “gravely immoral.” They must also view ending a pregnancy for a woman who previously had postpartum cardiomyopathy and a 50% risk of death in her pregnancy as “gravely immoral.” So if you have a medical condition that is rapidly deteriorating because of your pregnancy, too bad for you if you live

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A reader pointed out an article at “Catholic Health World” -

Interjection: what the hell is “Catholic health”? I know, that’s not what they mean, it’s just the name of a publication of the CHUSA, the Catholic Health Association of the US. But that’s stupid too. We’re deadened to all this because of habituation. We’re used to it so we don’t notice how ridiculous it is, let alone how dangerous it is. Catholic health? Catholic health care? What the hell, man? There is no such thing. Health is health, it isn’t Catholic or Jewish or Baptist. Health care is health care, it isn’t Lutheran or Muslim or Hindu.

An article at “Catholic Health World,” I was saying. Pregnancy complications can … Read the rest

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