What is the vatican’s underlying problem with facing and changing its child raping ways?

It’s really just a problem with language, you see.

Whereas clear documentation has shown smoking gun after smoking gun – a smoking arsenal these days – linking vatican authorities to actively and intentionally and criminally covering up systemic child abuse within the institution of the catholic church, the problem I think may stem from a simple linguistic misunderstanding.

For example, the vatican’s ”ambassador’ to Ireland, Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, assures us of  “the total commitment of the Holy See for its part in taking all the necessary measures to ensure the protection of children.”

Now doesn’t that sound reasonable? Who doesn’t want to protect children? So what might that protection look like, let’s say, in the case of Ireland?

What this actually has meant on the Emerald Isles is the active protection of abusers from legal prosecution, while taxpayers pay out nearly 1.5 billion dollars in damages to some 13,000 victims. The vatican, through its then-ambassador Archbishop Luciano Storero, warned Irish bishops in a 1997 letter that a powerful church body, the Congregation for the Clergy, had ruled that such mandatory reporting of abuse claims to civil authorities conflicted with canon law (clarified in no uncertain terms by the catholic’s Dear Leader, version XVI.0, aka ‘Pope Palpatine’, Himself). Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, “must be meticulously followed.”

See? That’s what the protection of children looks like to the vatican.

The confusion as I see it is between the very similar looking words ‘children’ and ‘the church’.

When we revisit ambassador Leaza’s statement with the confused word removed and the correct words inserted, we can see how it lines up beautifully with the evidence that “the total commitment of the Holy See for its part (is) in taking all the necessary measures to ensure the protection of children the church.” That that includes the taxpayers funding the damages caused by child raping clergy is just so much sweet icing on the vatican’s cake, which the vatican has not only been able to have, but has eaten (along with other criminal acts), too. It’s all somebody else’s problem, you see, and so these somebody else’s can pay for the privilege of holding the vatican to account for its criminal agents. The church – no matter how evil and corrupt and criminally liable it may be – must be left with enough secular power to determine which laws it may or may not follow but none of the responsibility for exercising it. As I mentioned, a very sweet deal. God is apparently pleased with this compromise. After all, the church means well in its insistence that it is the moral voice of god even if its actions show – century after tedious century – that it does not. As I like to say, never let what’s true interfere with good belief.

But perhaps the times, they are a’changin’.

Ireland’s Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore said, “”There’s one law in this country. Everybody is going to have to learn to comply with it. The Vatican will have to comply with the laws of this country.”

How very bold. No doubt he’s up for excommunication for that one.

Now imagine… the catholic church operating under and beholden to secular law. End of days must surely be upon us when priests can’t just rape children and then go on their company’s mandatory vacation.

Meanwhile, good little catholics continue to go to church and pay their tithes and fund this criminal organization in the name of catholic ‘morality’. Now I am left to wonder what that term has been confused with?

(From AP)

 

 

 

Who (or what) is to blame for sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church?

This sound suspiciously like the pope is suggesting that that old bugaboo secularism lies at the root of this Irish problem! Leave it to the pope to set us all straight:

In almost every family in Ireland, there has been someone – a son or a daughter, an aunt or an uncle – who has given his or her life to the Church. Irish families rightly esteem and cherish their loved ones who have dedicated their lives to Christ, sharing the gift of faith with others, and putting that faith into action in loving service of God and neighbour.

In recent decades, however, the Church in your country has had to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society. Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people’s traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values. All too often, the sacramental and devotional practices that sustain faith and enable it to grow, such as frequent confession, daily prayer and annual retreats, were neglected. Significant too was the tendency during this period, also on the part of priests and religious, to adopt ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel. The programme of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted and indeed, in the light of the profound social changes that were taking place, it was far from easy to know how best to implement it. In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations.

It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse.

How refreshing it is to see that the Vatican has taken on its fair share of the responsibility. Oh, that’s right; it is blameless, of course. Silly me. Why should senior leadership in any organization take any responsibility whatsoever for the actions taken under its policies and procedures, right? It’s not like the two are associated in any way if the effect of those policies and procedures is negative; that’s always the fault of middle management… which helps explain why, after all, this whole Irish problem of sex abuse brought about by rapid secularization  is obviously a problem for Irish catholic churches to overcome their failure.

Good grief.