Pope claims that child abuse is normal

I really have to wonder why anyone is still a Catholic these days. I mean, there's certainly no shortage of other religions, and most of them promise life after death and other wonderful, if imaginary, things. So why stick with one that's gone this completely loony?

Here's an article in the Belfast Telegraph about Pope Benedict's Christmas message, where he's still trying to excuse priest pedophiles:

Victims of clerical sex abuse have reacted furiously to Pope Benedict's claim yesterday that paedophilia wasn't considered an “absolute evil” as recently as the 1970s.

In his traditional Christmas address yesterday to cardinals and officials working in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI also claimed that child pornography was increasingly considered “normal” by society.

“In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” the Pope said.

You know, I remember the 1970s quite well, and neither pedophilia nor child pornography was ever considered "normal," not among any of the people I knew. Maybe it was different in the Catholic Church - which is kind of the point, I guess - but not among decent people, not in the 1970s and not today.

As usual, PZ Myers makes a couple of good points. The first:

I also am not impressed by his regret that the church was humiliated. That's not an appropriate response at all: church members were the perpetrators of the crime, and the Pope still can't seem to empathize with the victims…you know, the kids. They always seem to get forgotten when the pontiff pontificates on the abuses of his church.

That's always bothered me, too. Whenever the Catholic Church does admit wrongdoing, it always weeps and wails about how it's been humiliated. Really? It's the church which has been "humiliated," the church that covered up child rape, moving pedophile priests to new parishes where they could find new victims,... not the children who were raped by priests?

How self-centered can you get? I recognize the victims in all this, and it's not the Catholic Church! Church leaders - the Pope himself, in fact, in his former duties as cardinal - were the perpetrators, not the victims. Where they didn't rape children themselves, they helped other priests get away with such crimes and helped them find new, unsuspecting victims.

No, I don't think that Pope Benedict is a pedophile. I just think that he doesn't give a damn about children.

And the second:

The other night, I saw this ghastly little documentary called Hell House, about fundagelical nutcases who put on these elaborate morality plays around Halloween, to scare people into Christianity. They have this same moral blindness. I was struck by all the horrible little scenarios they put on: woman goes to rave, is given date-rape drug and is raped; woman gets pregnant, has abortion, bleeds to death; etc., etc., etc. In every case I was struck by the fact that it is the victim who suffers and is abused and dies, and who is then sent to hell for eternal punishment because she doesn't believe in Jesus. I was expecting in these cases to see them end in an orgy of punishment for the drug-dealer, the rapist, the abortionist (all played by men, by the way), but no…they all get forgotten in the denouement, their behavior isn't damned, it's all about the victim being punished for her victimization. That's religion for you.

Yes, it's always "blame the victim." Awhile back, a child in Brazil was raped by her father, which resulted in a life-threatening pregnancy. When the fetus was aborted, to save this poor little girl's life, the Catholic Church excommunicated everyone involved - everyone, that is, except for the rapist. The church had no punishment for him at all.

Ancient patriarchal cultures, like the Catholic Church (and like Islam, too), have always been very eager to blame women for everything. If a young woman is forcibly raped, it's always her own fault. And if anyone gets punished, it's her, not the rapist. Often enough, in many Islamic countries, the victim is even sentenced to death, while the perpetrators of the crime go free to rape again.

The Catholic Church isn't quite that bad - not these days, at least. They can't even burn women alive anymore. Damn these modern times, huh? Yet the celibate old men who run the place always blame women for everything. Children, too, sometimes. I heard at least one priest blame child rape victims for "wanting it." But ordinarily, they just don't care about women and children. They only care about their own organization. They only care about themselves.

After all, women and children are a dime a dozen, right? But there's only one Catholic Church.