Dang! Going to Hell after all...

When I blogged about this last week, I thought it would be funny to see how right-wing Protestants reacted. Instead, I should have anticipated a backlash from within the Catholic Church itself, huh?

Now, the Pope is supposed to be infallible when it comes to church doctrine, right? So how can some lowly reverend - "Vatican spokesman" or not - contradict him?

And that's quite a rollback, too! If you read that statement, it seems to claim that no one but Catholics - not even members of other Christian denominations - will get to Heaven. I guess Hell is going to be pretty crowded, huh?

But see, this is why the Catholic Church had such a pedophile scandal, too. The big problem (for them) wasn't so much the pedophile priests, but the fact that they tried to cover it up. Instead of protecting children, they moved those priests to unsuspecting parishes where they could find fresh victims.

That's because their primary goal was not to protect children, but to protect the church from scandal. The church itself, the institution, is far more important to the celibate old men who run the Catholic Church than anything else - more important than their parishioners, more important than children, more important even than their god. It's everything to them, because they've given up everything for it.

So when the Pope implied that people don't really need the Catholic Church, that probably set off alarm bells throughout the organization. Pope or not, that couldn't be allowed to stand.