Why does the Pope want to screw your child?

Because he can.

I have been remiss in not posting on the pope’s year end message but I continue to hope that the man and his organization will simply disappear after every supporter justly walks away from it.

I can dream, can’t I?

Christopher Hitchens once described the entire career of this current pope, Pope Benedict XVI, aka Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Palpatine, aka The Rat, as having “the stench of evil about it.” He was writing specifically about the depth of responsibility carried by this man towards creating and maintaining the catholic church’s ongoing child abuse scandal and protecting those criminals who participated in the raping of children. Clearly, Ratzinger’s concern has been and continues to be focused on insulating the hierarchy of the catholic church from its deeds by sidestepping responsible accountability rather than instituting meaningful change to protect the health and welfare of children in its care.

It is richly hypocritical then to read pope Palpatine’s latest attempt to try to deny gays and lesbians equality in civil law and social policies, in what The Rat calls settings… all in the name of protecting the family regarding child welfare! This is the evil Hitch describes, a pernicious and malevolent intent to harm others in the name of bigoted piousness and religious doctrine:

Among these (settings for teaching children), pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself. The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and States; hence there is a need for policies which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue. It is in the family that we become open to the world and to life…

In this context of openness to life, I note with satisfaction the recent sentence of the Court of Justice of the European Union forbidding patenting processes relative to human embryonic stem cells…the European Court of Human Rights upholding the presence of the crucifix in Italian schoolrooms… I am convinced that legislative measures which not only permit but at times even promote abortion for reasons of convenience or for questionable medical motives compromise the education of young people and, as a result, the future of humanity. There is a need to implement educational policies which ensure that schooling is available to everyone and which, in addition to promoting the cognitive development of the individual, show concern for a balanced personal growth, including openness to the Transcendent. The Catholic Church calls for respect for religious freedom. This freedom has individual, collective and institutional dimensions…Finally I would stress that education, correctly understood, cannot fail to foster respect for creation….

And so on, and so on. It positively reeks of duplicity and dishonesty.  

For example, note carefully how insidiously this vile man circumscribes his way completely around the gay marriage bush without coming right out and saying it and how pleasing it is to him when public institutions kowtow to the Catholic church’s ignorant anti-life and bigoted positions. As Macdonald describes so well,

No, the pope doesn’t mention gay marriage at all, but he does speak about “policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself,” in a context where the heterosexual family — as the place where education for the future is to take place – that is, the restriction of marriage to a man and a woman (and the issue of that relationship), is the issue, and we know, from what the bishops in New York were up to recently (as the most salient recent case that I can think of), that when Roman Catholics say this, what they’re saying is that the very idea of gay marriage undermines the family, threatens human dignity, and the places the future of humanity itself in danger.

In other words, please stop whinging and complaining about nothing meaningful being done about the global scandal that is the Roman Catholic Church. It’s the fault of everyone but us. Now get to work incorporating our bigoted anti-enlightenment, anti-knowledge death cult doctrine into your secular institutions, your secular legislatures, your secular laws and into your secular schools. We who are Roman Catholic don’t just want to screw with our own children; we want to screw with yours, too!

How shocked are you… really?

From the CBC:

A Roman Catholic order in Quebec was aware of allegations of sexual abuse by brothers in the religious group, according to evidence discovered by Radio-Canada.

A nine-page document, written by a long-term member of the Order of Holy Cross, chronicles specific allegations of abuse over the years at Montreal’s College Notre Dame. The document lists a dozen Holy Cross brothers from various institutions.

It also outlines how alleged abusers at the order’s flagship private school were not reported to the police and instead were allowed to stay on as teachers or support staff.

Wilson Kennedy, a former member of the religious order, told Radio-Canada in an exclusive interview that while he was with the order he spoke to a Vatican official about the problem.

“Rome was informed and the Superior General asked me for clarification on several cases,” Kennedy said. He said there was a culture of silence that protected alleged abusers.

Now just how shocking is this news? Or is it now so commonplace, so widespread, so endemic that the Vatican’s actual policy is clear: pay off those who have the best claims about abuse within church-run organizations while it continues to pay the legal bills for the pedophiles it maintains on staff but hold fast to the lie that the Vatican knew nothing while swearing that each new case is simply an isolated incident carried out by a few bad apples?

What’s surprising is that anyone – even devout die-hard life-long catholics who cannot comprehend how the institution itself can be so corrupt – continue to believe this tired spiel and that the pope has not been criminally liable for his active part in aiding and abetting these child rapists from secular authorities. That the pope himself has been an integral part of this ongoing cover-up for the past four decades seems to me to be very well documented while he avoids prosecution because he is immune as a ‘head of state’.

What a remarkable legacy for a life time of work for Pope Palpatine: helping a world wide organization to maintain a pedophile ring and helping the participants to avoid prosecution all the while claiming to be the moral voice for god. The arrogance and temerity and hypocrisy is profound, while the believers’ willful ignorance and trust and avoidance to seek the truth equally so.

Why is the pope a vicious authoritarian theocratic homophobic misogynist hierarchical thug?

Because, borrowing Ophelia Benson’s accurate description of him at her blog, he embodies his religion’s dogma, which just so happens to be vicious, authoritarian, homophobic, misogynistic, and hierarchical in need of of thuggery… and our favourite Pope Palpatine delivers in spades!

From his ‘welcoming’ speech at Hollyrood, Scotland:

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny” (Caritas in Veritate, 29).

Liar! Bald-faced liar! Your two-timing church WAS allied to Mussolini and Franco, you revisionist asshole, and you KNOW Hitler was a catholic by his own admission, you duplicitous despicable piece of human intellectual refuse. Yet you dare to blame atheism? Hitler’s political philosophy was NOT based upon atheism and had absolutely NO connection whatsoever with atheism, but that doesn’t stop the Darth Pope from spreading this disgusting lie when it serves his child-raping purposes.

Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society. In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate. Let it not obscure the Christian foundation that underpins its freedoms;

The lies just don’t stop with this deplorable excuse for an honest man – one who was an actual member of the Nazi party. Christianity underpins secular enlightened values?! Now we see what religious belief can do to addle the brain and distort history all at one fell swoop.

The man obviously suffers from dementia and is desperate need of prompt medical intervention. Wiring his lying mouth shut would be a reasonable start, putting him on trial for aiding and abetting heinous criminal acts against children would be what any responsible and respectable police force should do, and his speeches represent all the right reasons for good catholics to stay home from church and stop donating money to it if they wish to do the morally right thing… unless and until this lying-coward-who-is-pope is replaced by one that is willing to treat atheists and secularists with the human dignity we deserve.

Although his uniform has changed since the war, The Rat still harbours his inner Nazi… his irrational hatred aimed this time at secularists and atheists.

How does the Vatican plan on dealing with its abuse of Irish children?

By blaming the godless secularists, who are the REAL reason priests in Ireland raped and abused Irish children. (And don’t you love this picture gracing the cover of a catholic magazine?)

Come on people: you don’t think it can blamed on the catholic church or anyone in position of leadership from the Holy See, do you? Nope. Clearly, Irish catholics are getting too uppity and assertive in their indignation of being victims of organized abuse and need a visit from the Vatican version of ‘Special Forces’ to re-establish proper order, necessary hierarchy, and renewed respect for their abusers. This clean up will begin with getting the Irish clergy whipped into theological – meaning ‘roman catholic’ – shape. Excerpts from the Independent:

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.

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, the Irish Independent has learned.

Priests will be told not to question in public official church teaching on controversial issues such as the papal ban on birth control or the admission of divorced Catholics living with new partners to the sacraments — especially Holy Communion.

Theologians will be expected to teach traditional doctrine by constantly preaching to lay Catholics of attendance at Mass and to return to the practice of regular confession, which has been largely abandoned by adults since the 1960s.

An emphasis will be placed on an evangelisation campaign to overcome the alienation of young people scandalised by the spate of sexual abuse of children and by later cover-ups of paedophile clerics by leaders of the institutional church.

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.

Those damned secularists and materialists are everywhere… especially where pedophile priests have had free reign. Funny, that. What people who hold the church responsible need is a good dose of catholic discipline to fix everything.

Why is there a single catholic left in Ireland? Do they really think so little of themselves that they are willing to tolerate this colossal arrogance and disrespect from their religious leadership? How is it that catholic guilt runs so deeply in the laity but apparently not at all for real crimes at its highest leadership that caused so much suffering and so many victims… of children? What moral cowards, one and all.

Who will the church blame today?

Stay up to date on the latest catholic church blame game. Because we know for certain that no blame can be attributed in any way to the institution for aiding and abetting and covering up child abuse by clergy within the church on a global scale, and we know this to be true in spite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, we are left wondering: who is to blame? To our rationalizing rescue comes this site where we find we can find out the daily answers here.

Why is the pope a criminal? Consider these three strikes…

From Andrew Sullivan’s Atlantic article:

The AP’s story on Joseph Ratzinger’s direct involvement in delaying for six years the defrocking of a priest who had confessed to tying up and raping minors ends any doubt that the future Pope is as implicated in the sex abuse crisis as much as any other official in the church. The facts are as clear as they are damning.

The Pope cannot blame the local bishops this time – they desperately tried to get the priest fired.

He cannot claim he was out of the loop: his signature is on the letter.

He cannot get an underling to take the fall: it’s his name and his office behind the unconscionable delay and behind the actual, despicably callous and self-serving reasons to protect a man who tied children up and raped them.

It’s over now.

When we look at this Pope we see a man who knew that one of the priests he had authority to fire had restrained and raped children. Yet he did nothing for years, and finally sided with the priest. He had more sympathy for the relatively young age of the rapist, rather than the innocence and trauma of the raped children.

We see a man utterly corrupted by power and institutional loyalty.

Strike one.

From Richard Dawkins’ Guardian article:

Lashing out in desperation, church spokesmen are now blaming everybody but themselves for their current dire plight, which one official spokesman likens to the worst aspects of antisemitism (what are the best ones, I wonder?). Suggested culprits include the media, the Jews, and even Satan. The church is hiding behind a seemingly endless stream of excuses for having failed in its legal and moral obligation to report serious crimes to the appropriate civil authorities. But it was Cardinal Ratzinger’s official responsibility to determine the church’s response to allegations of child sex abuse, and his letter in the Kiesle case makes the real motivation devastatingly explicit.

This pattern of putting church PR over and above the welfare of the children in its care (and what an understatement that is) is repeated over and over again in the cover-ups that are now coming to light, all over the world. And Ratzinger himself expressed it with damning clarity in this smoking gun letter:

“This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favour of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the universal church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ’s faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner.”

Suppose the British secretary of state for schools received, from a local education authority, a reliable report of a teacher tying up his pupils and raping them. Imagine that, instead of turning the matter over to the police, he had simply moved the offender from school to school, where he repeatedly raped other children. That would be bad enough. But now suppose that he justified his decision in terms such as these:

“Although I regard the arguments in favour of prosecution, presented by the local education authority, as of grave significance, I nevertheless deem it necessary to consider the good of the government and the party, together with that of the offending teacher. And I am also unable to make light of the detriment that prosecuting the offender can provoke among voters, particularly regarding the young age of the offender.”

The analogy breaks down, only in that we aren’t talking about a single offending priest, but many thousands, all over the world.

Strike two.

And from Christopher Hitchens’ Slate article:

It must be noted, also, that all the letters from diocese to Ratzinger and from Ratzinger to diocese were concerned only with one question: Can this hurt Holy Mother Church? It was as if the children were irrelevant or inconvenient (as with the case of the raped boys in Ireland forced to sign confidentiality agreements by the man who is still the country’s cardinal). Note, next, that there was a written, enforced, and consistent policy of avoiding contact with the law. And note, finally, that there was a preconceived Ratzinger propaganda program of blaming the press if any of the criminal conduct or obstruction of justice ever became known.

One should not blame only the church here. Where was American law enforcement during the decades when children were prey? Where was international law while the Vatican became a place of asylum and a source of protection for those who licensed or carried out the predation? Page through any of the reports of child-rape and torture from Ireland, Australia, the United States, Germany—and be aware that there is much worse to come. Where is it written that the Roman Catholic Church is the judge in its own case? Above or beyond the law? Able to use private courts? Allowed to use funds donated by the faithful to pay hush money to the victims or their families?

Good questions and salient points one and all.

And the conclusion…? Again from Hitchens’ Slate article:

Ratzinger himself is now exposed as being personally as well as institutionally responsible for obstructing justice and protecting and enabling pederasts.

Strike three.

Deputy Dawkins?

From Marc Horne at the TimesOnline:

RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.

Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: “This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.”

Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, said: “This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment.”

Dawkins posted a comment about this article on his own blog here from which I have taken the following excerpts:

Needless to say, I did NOT say “I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI” or anything so personally grandiloquent. What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me out of the blue, and I repeat it here, is that I am whole-heartedly behind the initiative by Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to mount a legal challenge to the Pope’s proposed visit to Britain. Even if the Pope doesn’t end up in the dock, and even if the Vatican doesn’t cancel the visit, I am optimistic that we shall raise public consciousness to the point where the British government will find it very awkward indeed to go ahead with the Pope’s visit, let alone pay for it.

And that’s what makes the New Atheists different from previous atheists in general: we have decided to push back in various ways and means against the promotion and acceptance of religious belief in the public domain. Surely welcoming such a prominent and accused criminal with pomp and ceremony (and security) paid for by the state because the visitor is a high ranking religious figure falls into this category of unjustified promotion and acceptance.

Any push back – no matter how gentle but firm – will be presented as militancy by religious supporters and apologists , of course, and any public disagreement with the faithful’s unwavering support for the insertion of religious belief into the public domain will be described as strident and arrogant and a host of other negative but equally inaccurate terms. This is business as usual between the two groups. But the push back is necessary. By launching a legal challenge against the pope, the Hitch and Rich are doing what the British government and other secular states should be doing: holding  those accused of complicity in crimes legally accountable for their decisions and actions. Good on ’em, I say.

What does an idiotic argument look like?

George Neumayr is an editor of the Catholic World Report. He writes this brilliant example of what an idiotic argument looks like in The Washington Times. He opens his article with the following:

Since when have secularists and dissenting Catholics been experts on the protection of children? These self-appointed reformers of the Catholic Church preside over a debased culture that abuses, aborts and corrupts children.

This is a classic ad hominum attack called a tu quoque argument: a logical fallacy in which one attempts to defend oneself or another from criticism by turning the critique back against the accuser. In effect, this is exactly the purpose of Neumayr’s thesis and it’s an idiotic defense of the Catholic Church generally and the vicar of christ specifically regarding the handling of sex abuse scandals by priests and clergy.

Most of us learn during our early schooling why this childish argument holds no ethical sway with adult reasoning. Now, with defenders like George calling on idiotic and childish arguments to stop the thinning of its ranks of practicing catholics in western countries, the leadership of the catholic church is in deeper and more dire moral straits than ever. Somehow, and in spite of defenders like George, they must find a way to live up to the Ratzinger’s own advice so generously granted to the Irish bishops to stop the exodus: search their conscience, take responsibility for any sins they have committed, and conceal nothing. Blaming secularists, gays and lesbians, abortionists, liberal elites, and dissenting catholics for the church’s failure to address pedophilia as George attempts and fails to do with his article is just one more impediment to finding meaningful reform.

What’s this? (Groundless!) allegations that John Paul II was involved in the ongoing sex abuse scandal cover-up?

Tell me it ain’t so. How can this be? Every good catholic knows for certain that JPII was a saint, so there’s just no way he could ever be part of the ongoing problem of child rape in the church.The TimesOnline article must be mistaken.

Allegations that the late pontiff John Paul II blocked an inquiry into a paedophile cardinal, promoted senior church figures despite accusations that they had molested boys and covered up innumerable cases of abuse during his 26-year papacy have cast a cloud over his path to sainthood.

Oh, no! Not a dreaded cloud! Casting clouds is always a very serious business that sometimes results in… shadows. And they are the worst.

The most serious claims related to Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, an Austrian friend of John Paul’s who abused an estimated 2,000 boys over decades but never faced any sanction from Rome. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Groer’s successor, criticised the handling of that scandal and other abuse cases last week after holding a special service in St Stephen’s cathedral, Vienna, entitled “Admitting our guilt”. Schönborn condemned the “sinful structures” within the church and the patterns of “silencing” victims and “looking away”.

Sinful structures? A pattern of silencing victims and looking away? Does this sound to you as it does to me, dear reader, like the same kind of vicious antisemitism suffered by Jews under the brutal hands of the Nazis? Very similar, I know, except for the brutal part… and the suffering part… and the antisemitism part. But besides those, almost the same. Mind you, it sounds remarkably like a long-awaited but never officially enunciated reasonable criticism of a Vatican policy with a long history to me. But then, what do I know.

Michael Tfirst, 54, one of Groer’s victims, claims to have reported the abuse to highranking church officials from the 1970s onwards. He says the church paid him £3,300 in 2004 under a contract that obliged him to keep quiet.

“There is no question that Ratzinger knew all the details of reports on abuse within the church, as there is no doubt that John Paul, his superior, took part in a massive and systematic cover-up,” Tfirst said.

Oh. Well. I guess now I am in the know, unlike those who populate the most senior levels of the Vatican. And we in the know know for certain that there never was any official Vatican cover-up… because we’ve got the receipt of the money we paid to cover it up to prove that no such cover-up occurred. Duh.

John Paul also faced criticism last week from Poland for protecting Archbishop Juliusz Paetz, who was accused of abusing trainee priests.

Don’t you hate it when an entire country casts a cloud your way? Maybe that last part of about abusing trainee priests should read “…accused of training abusing priests.”

Letters detailing the charges were sent to John Paul’s office and to Ratzinger in 2000 but were ignored. Paetz resigned in 2002 when the allegations became public.

See what happens when you are covered by that cloud?I wonder how the allegations became public? “Never trust a secularist state to do the right thing and blame it when things go wrong,” is a good rule of thumb if you are involved in scandals and casting clouds.

Stanislaw Obirek, a Polish theologian and a former Jesuit priest, said: “I believe John Paul is the key person responsible for the cover-up of abuse cases because most of it occurred during his papacy. How can someone who is to blame for this be beatified?”

Finally, an easy question. Just watch. The Vatican will continue to soldier on in spite of these secularist attacks by petty and spiteful people so it will be business as usual, and JPII will be beautified to the cheering crowds of millions of adoring fans.

Why is Gordon Brown such a twit?

I have read the following bit from the Guardian several times and cannot for the life of me figure out how someone who presumably can read and is capable of rational thought can mean what this says unless one is complete twit:

Asked if religious faith is essentially “a private, personal pursuit” or has a role in the wider community, he says: “Our common realm is not and cannot be stripped of values – I absolutely reject the idea that religion should somehow be tolerated but not encouraged in public life. Our equality bill is specifically designed to protect religion and belief on exactly the same terms as race or gender or sexuality.

“I welcome the role that people of faith play in building Britain’s future – and the Catholic communion in particular is to be congratulated for so often being the conscience of our country, for helping ‘the least of these’ even when bearing witness to the truth is hard or unpopular.”

Brown makes nothing but errors in this piece of broken reasoning. Although certain religions uphold certain values some of the time, nowhere can it be shown that values derive from religious belief. Quite the opposite, in fact. Brown assumes that by making religious belief a private affair, this will “strip” the common realm of values. Why he think so may be evidence for a large brain tumor or early onset of some delusional psychosis. Rejecting the notion of  the state encouraging a particular kind of delusional thinking would be sound public policy, but Brown reject this absolutely. Why? If not brain damage, then surely this reveals the depth of his inability to think clearly. Protecting religious belief from discrimination like gender or race reveals a startling misunderstanding of why it is important that we protect equality of human rights. Religious belief, in stark contrast, can be changed by making a simple choice, say from catholicism to cabbage worship, whereas changing one’s race or gender or innate sexual preference is slightly different. Okay, it’s vastly different, but I feel a strong need to be sarcastic in the face of such stupidity, knowing that reasoning is the wrong tool to criticize Brown’s purposefully obtuse and proudly ignorant opinion.

And then we come to the second paragraph: that he welcomes religious belief in general and catholicism in particular to help build Britain’s future. Into what? A British Taliban state? A safe haven for pedophiles? Just how does religious belief help build anything when beliefs is based on either no concern for knowledge whatsoever, often a blatant disregard for what is true, and often is the main engine driving anti-intellectualism? And in case Brown hasn’t noticed, the catholic church in particular is undergoing a timely exposure to a massive global sex abuse scandal of “the least of these” adherents we call children. But rather than see what catholicism looks like in practice, Gordon “I’ve got my head stuck so far up my ass I can see my lips moving” Brown thinks this church under its current organization of doing whatever it can to hide what’s true between many robed clergy and innocent children is actually a champion of truth! One must be a twit of astounding proportion to actually believe what Brown says he believes. And such twits are a clear and present danger to building anything other than a delusion.