What's next?

Perhaps when you join a patriarchal church run by celibate old men, still following the top-down, authoritarian, and very Medieval divine right of kings governing philosophy, you shouldn't be surprised by any of this. But as an outsider, I never cease to be amazed at the Catholic Church.

Now they're going after the nuns who supported health care reform:

In the fierce closing debate over health care reform, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops charged that the legislation didn’t do enough to restrict insurance coverage of abortions. Many Catholic nuns and the Catholic Health Association of the United States, which represents hundreds of Catholic hospitals, looked at the same bill and concluded that it would have no effect on abortion financing. They signed a letter urging its passage, saying the reform was “life-affirming” and consistent with Catholic values.

Now one bishop is punishing the nuns who supported reform. Bishop Lawrence E. Brandt of Greensburg, Pa., has decreed that “any religious community” that signed the letter would be forbidden to use the diocese’s offices, parishes or newspaper to promote programs that encourage young people to consider the religious life. ...

Bishop Brandt accuses the nuns of taking “a public stance in opposition to the church’s teaching on human life.” The nuns did not challenge the church’s doctrine of life from conception to natural death. They saw the bill as a powerfully positive step, because it provided health insurance to millions of people without it, and hundreds of millions of dollars for the care of pregnant women. 

OK, so I don't suppose that this is any big deal, not compared to the child abuse debacle. I don't think church leaders get that, even now. For the rest of us, their complete unconcern for the children who were victimized, covering up the abuse and just moving child-rapists to some other parish, is just astounding.

But the concern of church leaders, from the pope on down, is entirely on preserving the organization itself, the organization that is, for them, family, lover, job, and religion all rolled into one. The people who worship there are just petty, often annoying, details compared to the overarching importance of the institution.

It's not surprising that celibate old men, who've given their entire lives to the church, would feel that way, I guess. Of what importance are children, anyway? Children are just those reproductive units some people have. Children come and go. The Catholic Church is forever. But what is surprising is how dumb they've been about this. Couldn't they at least pretend to care about the victims?

(Ed Stein)

Instead, they persist in casting the church itself as the real victim. So far, that I've seen, they've blamed Jews for the criticism (and, ironically, also compared criticizing the Catholic Church to anti-Semitic violence), the devil, the media (and the New York Times in particular, since they've been publishing embarrassing church documents), homosexuals, the secularization of society, sexual liberation (which "wants paedophilia accepted as just another sexual preference"), the victims' own families, and yes, even the victims themselves ("There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what’s more wanting it,...").

According to the Catholic Church, allegations of covering up child rape - and therefore helping pedophiles to new victims - are just "petty gossip," because issues like abortion, gay marriage, and the ordination of women are driving their critics mad. And besides, everyone else does it, right? Priests are no worse than anyone else. (Sorry, no link. Either I misplaced it, or the church edited that post after it received so much criticism.)

Again, the church seems tone-deaf. Everyone else does not do it, obviously. And if you believe the mythology, priests aren't supposed to be like everyone else, anyway. They claim to be your child's intermediary with God, for crissake! They're trusted, which just makes their opportunities for abuse all that much greater. And when they do abuse children, the church response is to threaten excommunication - not to the priests raping children, but to anyone who won't keep it a secret.

(Ed Stein)

So if child rape is just petty gossip, what really gets the church's knickers in a twist? The current pope was once known as "God's rottweiler." Why? Well, not because of any concern with priests raping children, but because of his eager attacks on any theology he considered too liberal. Yeah, gotta hate those liberals, huh? Considered a stern disciplinarian, he worked hard to keep priests from straying from the party line. You get the feeling that parishioners were just a necessary evil, hardly worth his concern.

So, what's next for the Catholic Church? How about priests raping nuns? According to this article, young nuns in Africa and Asia are the preferred choice for priestly rapists because they're less likely to have AIDS than other potential victims. And uneducated young women from the poorest families, taught from birth not to challenge men or anyone else in authority, are easy prey.

But don't worry. The church considers these allegations just "trivialities." Hardly worth bothering about, don't you think?