Cornered Eggs or Local Yolkels
When I was a kid we were taught that one easy way to demonstrate the superiority of the American system of capitalism over the Soviet system of communism was to compare farming in the USA to that in the USSR.
My teachers made the same compelling case, nearly word-for-word, year after year.
They taught us how Soviet-style collective farming was fraught with flaws, such as:
If Soviet sod-busters made a mistake on one acre of land, the blunder was repeated throughout the giant system.
In the Soviet-style collective or "factory" farming system, if some sort of crop blight or livestock malady struck part of the food supply, it would likely contaminate the entire supply of the agricultural commodity in question.
Because of its enormity, the collective farm system was nearly impossible to adroitly maneuver through or around meteorological challenges, changes in consumption habits or national emergencies.
The collective farm system was run by bureaucrats who knew little or nothing of farming. When problems came they were adept at one thing and one thing only: passing the ruble. You'd no more want your food grown by farmers who answered to a paper-pusher than you'd want your medical care controlled by someone who didn't know one end of a stethoscope from the other!
We were taught that our system was built on the responsiveness and accountability of local farmers. If curdled milk turned up in Soviet kitchens, it was nearly impossible to trace the milk to its source to make sure the problem was dealt with and alleviated. In America, we buy our milk from Farmer Brown. We know Farmer Brown and he knows us. If Farmer Brown messes up, he'd better straighten things out quickly or we will start buying our milk from Farmer Jones! In America there is nowhere for the farmer to pass the buck.
We were taught that because Farmer Jones and Farmer Brown had to compete in a free market, both had the incentive to deliver nutritious and delicious foods at the fairest price to the townsfolk. And so they did.
I didn't buy a lot of what I was taught in school but it always seemed to me that the accountable local farmer vs. the bureaucratic factory farm lesson had more than a few grains of truth in it.
Decades later, diversification and accountability in agriculture is still for me. When it comes to farming there is a cliche that perfectly summarizes what I believe about agriculture: Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Cath-22 pt 4: Good News for Postmodern Man!
Above- Priests Party Down!
Below- R -Thomas Neary -- Serial rapist
Below L- Charles Bailey and his photo as a kid
Below C- Bad news, Pontiff, some of the kids are starting to fight back
By Barry Crimmins
Anyone who has read the previous three parts of this series has likely surmised that my enmity for the Catholic church is personal. It certainly is.
A problem I have with most church critics is that they almost always stop and genuflect at the altar of “all the good people in the church.” These "good people" are often well-intentioned but they serve as the phony front for a corrupt organization -- they run the flower shop in front of the bookie joint. Some know what they're doing, some don’t but they all help provide a smokescreen.
As I stated earlier, Catholic clergy either participated in the abuse of children, participated in the coverup of crimes against children or knew of the crimes and coverup and remained silent and therefore became accessories during and after the fact. The few priests who didn’t know what was happening, must know by now. If they are truly men of conscience, they need to raise hell about this, which will get them excommunicated - a good and righteous place to be.
The same can be said of nuns and other church workers and volunteers. They either participated, helped cover-up, knew of the crimes and conspired in silence or now know and must take a stand.
This is also true of the rank and file membership of the church. Forever the so-called "faithful" have looked the other way at blatantly sinful behavior by their spiritual leaders. When the church is obviously wrong, they unquestioningly accept whatever weak alibi clerics provide. They don’t bother to challenge the church over its ridiculous dogma and edicts, although some take or leave the church's tenets as the so-called cafeteria Catholics do.
The faithful have turned a perpetual blind eye to the abuse of children at the hands of the clergy. I know. I was abused on the altar, during mass, before the assembled faithful almost every day for three years before anyone spoke up. Even then the church wasn’t challenged. The problem was simply brought to my parents’ attention.
What upset me last Palm Sunday wasn't the fact that it marked the 39th straight year I would fail to make my Easter duty. This meant, according to church teaching, an extension of my sentence of eternal damnation. Fortunately, I long ago saw such threats for the utter bullshit they are.
What bothered me were all the parishioners who were interviewed outside St. Patrick's Cathedral after Bishop Timothy Dolan’s intellectually and ethically bereft defense of Pope Benedict’s role in the clerical child abuse scandal. They aped Dolan's unjustifiable outrage at anyone who would question the pope about a scandal Ratzinger had facilitated via coverup for many years.
Rather than running as quickly as they could to escape Dolan’s twisted take, the parishioners stood in line to bleat things before cameras and into microphones such as, "It's about time someone defended the Holy Father!"
And, "This stuff happened years ago, when will these people get over it?"
These pope-protectors are are exactly kind of “good Catholics” who ignored my suffering as I dealt with one of the worst predator
Twice Neary began to put his hands on me in the privacy of the sacristy. Twice I threw an elbow, squirmed free and fled. I had already been raped when I was much younger by a man the babysitter brought into our home so I guess I had developed emotional antibodies to rapists. Otherwise, I think, Neary would have had his sadistic way with me.
Once he realized I wasn't a good bet for molestation, he made my life a living and public hell. He wanted to drive me off so that he could have a fresh supply of boys to prey upon. So every day, on the altar and in the sacristy, he heaped abuse upon me. This came at that difficult period when childhood is passing and adolescence is blooming. My days began with an emotional pummeling by a spiritual authority on the altar right in front of the most devout of Catholics. Good morning!
He couldn’t force me out because as a good Catholic boy, I was terrified to go home and tell my parents that a priest despised me. I was sure my mistreatment was deserved. I’ve written about this experience on this blog in a 2007 piece entitled Mea Maxima Culpa.
In the years since writing about Neary, I've been amazed at how deep and painful the memories of his emotional and verbal abuse remain. To relive this period of my life is to dredge one of the darkest corners of my soul. It sends me into unfathomable funks. Then I think of the boys who weren't as lucky as I. The ones Thomas Neary sexually terrorized for months and even years.
I wonder how many of those innocent kids could have been saved if someone stood up in the church and told him to stop his daily humiliation of me. I wonder how much more emboldened Neary became when he saw no one make the slightest move to defend me in my defenseless innocence.
Then I think of those assholes outside of St. Patrick’s expressing relief that someone has finally defended the pope. They are quick to run to his defense but when I was just a child, alone on an altar with a cruel priest who subjected me to malicious humiliation again and again, they didn’t so much as clear their throats. They left me alone in my agony to do the Catholic thing and decide I had it coming.
The church already knew what Neary was long before he got to Skaneateles. He'd already been reassigned a few times, always finding a new comfortable seat before the pipe organ stopped in the sick game of musical chairs the church employed as a policy for predator priests.
The man who hated me and questioned my common decency on the altar so many mornings was among the worst of the worst of the child abusing priests. His sexually criminal behavior against children and adolescents included some of the most unimaginably vile conduct that has come to light in this scandal. For instance:
He would orally rape a boy and then order the child to swallow every drop of semen because as God's representative on Earth, he was sacred and his semen was the equivalent of the eucharist so it must never be spilled onto the ground.
He would anally rape boys while praying very loudly in Latin so that a child's screams of pain could not be heard above Neary’s counterfeit spiritual petitions.
After raping boys he would make them confess their sins to him so he could absolve them for having been raped. This of course served to underscore the lie that the kids were complicit in their own degradation and not hapless and helpless innocents who'd been overwhelmed by a serial rapist. It also fortified Neary’s coverup, which was reinforced by threatening the boys that they'd never see their parents again if they disclosed what really went on during the supposed educational sessions.
On his way out of many victim's homes, Thomas Neary would collect payment from boys' mothers for the “special instruction” he had given them because he was sure the kids had vocations to become priests. That’s right, he raped kids and charged their parents for it. Are you puking yet?
Ever the preemptive pervert, the diabolical Neary told boys' mothers to be unconcerned if their children acted oddly or expressed a desire to end
Neary was confident in parental gullibility, especially considering how he would rape some boys in their own bedrooms while their mothers knelt dutifully praying the rosary in their living rooms, per his instructions.
Neary didn't just rape kids in their bedrooms, he also violated them in church sacristies, rectories and basements. He assaulted children and adolescents in cars and private homes, in schools and anywhere else the monstrous urge overcame him.
Charles Bailey never entered the seminary but he did, after a lifetime of anguish, overcome post-traumatic stress disorder and a great deal of understandable trepidation to blow the whistle on what the abominable Thomas Neary had done to him. In fact he literally wrote the book on Neary. It's called In the Shadow of the Cross and you need to read it.
Thanks to my friend Charles Bailey's brave public disclosures about the horrific crimes Neary committed against him, I’ve gotten to know several of the rabid priest's victims. Actually I already knew some of them, I just didn't know he had assaulted them until they disclosed their stories to me after reading my 2007 essay on the matter.
The truth is slowly unwinding. I’ve learned that among his Skaneateles victims, one suicide by shotgun and another by drugs and alcohol can be traced directly to Neary. The young man who killed himself with a shotgun was a dear friend of mine. The other fellow was enough older than me to only be a passing acquaintance but he left behind a devastated family and scores of heartbroken friends.
Charley Bailey and I decided we should form an unofficial organization for those of us who survived Neary. We call it the Hell Alumni Association -- Thomas Neary Branch. We fought the same war, against the same enemy, just not together.
I can't tell you how much these people mean to me. Some are middle-aged, some nearly senior citizens but all of us are children when we discuss the human jackal who terrorized us when we were young. It's such a relief to be in touch with these folks. Neary is dead and we're alive. Hurray!
Charles Bailey is everyone's hero -- he broke the conspiracy of silence and dozens of us have benefited from it. When the church attempts to spin the scandal into an opaque tapestry of lies, he is there to shred it. In Central New York when the church speaks about child sexual abuse by priests, people immediately wait for Charley's reasoned and knowing refutations. He never lets them down.
Charley and his wife Sue are tremendous people. Neither would blink an eye in a hurricane if it meant it might allow the church to slip past with a lie. The Baileys have directly confronted mental reservation -- the church's clause that allows priests to lie for the supposed good of the church.
Charley emailed this to me the other day:
My experience with mental reservation was when I asked the bishop [Moynihan of the Diocese of Syracuse, now retired - BC] to see neary's "secret archive" file. I was sitting in his office with Sue and asked to view his secret archive file.
I was told by the bishop, "There is no such thing."
I said, "The one mandated by canon law."
He said, "There is no such canon law to my knowledge."
I said, "I know you have two files on each priest. One 'public' record personnel file and then the 'secret archive' file that you store in the basement and only you have the key except for one other undisclosed person."
He said, "I am confused by what you are saying, I know of no such file."
So, I open my paperwork and lay the below article in front of him. [it quoted the canon law that mandated the documents Charley demanded - BC] After he reviewed it he said, "Oh, THAT Secret Archive. No, you can't see it. Anyway we destroy them after a priest dies"
(an aside to this -A Philadelphia grand jury found 45,000 pages of secret archives in the basement of the bishop's office, I don't think they are ever destroyed)
Faith is just another word for loyalty and loyalty must be earned and then maintained. When loyalty is betrayed all bets are off. The Catholic church has betrayed its membership to the point where the institution is, in my opinion, beyond redemption. What person with a child could be foolish enough to ever leave that child under the care and influence of a church that is responsible for a crime wave against children? People who are still leaving their children in the hands of this derelict organization have no one but themselves to blame if and when their children are harmed.
They say a church is really just the people who attend it but the Catholic church is nothing more than a 2,000 year-old corporation run by the equivalent of an unresponsive, absurdly greedy and distant front office. In other words, it's the world’s first and worst multinational. It deserves no more loyalty than Verizon or General Electric.
The Catholic church cares about our well-being about as much the average corporation cares about leaving us on hold for 40 minutes while we attempt to straighten out a bill. Even if you do get through to someone, they are arrogant and impolite and treat you as if their mistake is your fault. Corporate is as Catholic has done for centuries.
There is only one way for the Catholic church to make a perfect act of contrition for all of its misdeeds. It must open up its finances, including an audit of its vast treasure trove of precious art, artifacts and architecture. Then it must put ten billion dollars in escrow for the victims of its predator priests (and nuns and administrators). The rest must be turned over to the poor people of the world via churches and institutions that rightfully belong to them anyway.
Of course this is never going to happen so there is no hope of redemption for the odious institution. Therefore it is incumbent upon all Catholics and former Catholics of actual good faith to break for good with the church that claims to be embodied by the Vatican. The Vatican isn’t a church, it’s a vault. We should not worship vaults.
There is the one and only mercy I beseech the Catholic church to bestow upon me -- formal excommunication. Let me out and make it official. Granted I am already what they call “silently excommunicated” because I have violated church laws concerning church attendance, sexual behavior and blasphemy. According to its rules, I'm doomed to hell. But that threat doesn’t work on me because I've been to hell and it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Roman Catholic church. So those robed frauds better watch themselves when they threaten my soul. It has beaten them before. It was my soul that allowed me to endure them in the first place and I will be damned if I ever let them lay their greasy paws on it again.
If these psycho-sexually criminal creeps and the wealth-worshiping frauds who cover for them think they can threaten me with banishment, all I can say is, “Please don’t throw me into the eternal brier patch!”
I beg for formal excommunication because I have standards to maintain and a reputation to uphold. I have sinned mightily in my day but my sins were human and I have worked hard to rectify my mistakes. I’ve made a lot of progress. To continue my reform, I need to disassociate myself from certain negative influences from my past. Among them there is none more negative than the Catholic church. It was a large minus sign that hovered next to me for far too long.
So I am out and haven’t an iota of guilt over my departure. I still have a conscience but it is a sensible one that operates on its own and not at the behest of a demonstrably sinister organization. Now that my conscience holds me responsible for my own behavior, I can no longer alibi that I looked the other way because I was just following the rules set down by some arcane and fraudulent institution. It’s a little more work but a much lighter load to carry.
I walked out of the church long ago but only recently have I come to understand what it is all about. Only now do I see how it implanted self-loathing in me so that I would remain in fearful compliance with its edicts, or failing that, at least maintain a scared silence. Well no more.
This scandal is far from over. We are just beginning to learn about priestly abuse of children in Europe. Some stories have filtered in from Central and South America. Asia, Africa and various far-flung islands will chime in sooner or later unless the church’s propensity for reassigning perpetrator priests knew some boundaries and you know that it didn’t. The church leans so heavily on its phony nationhood because it knows that it will need to continue to employ diplomatic immunity to avoid prosecution as a criminal cabal. We’ll see how long the world puts up with that bullshit.
I won’t put up with it at all. I’ll go in peace only if and when the Catholic church goes to hell. Until then I promise to tell the pope or any of his minions they are liars whenever a falsehood slips from their mentally reserved tongues. You should, too.
Cath 22: Part Three -- The Legion of Indecency
By Barry Crimmins
As a weekend waned last March, I wouldn't have even known it was Palm Sunday had I not left the local news on after a college basketball game concluded. A top story featured Archbishop Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York unleashing a sadly predictable perpetrator/facilitator-as-victim defense of the pope, concerning the still-exploding priest/child sexual abuse scandal.
Dolan began his St. Patrick's Cathedral rant with an ass-backwards acknowledgment of Catholicism's odious mess, when he asserted, "The recent tidal wave of headlines about abuse of minors by some few priests, this time in Ireland, Germany and a re-run of an old story from Wisconsin, has knocked us to our knees once again."
Were I attempting to gloss over this massive scandal, I wouldn't be calling to mind knocking anyone to their knees. That said, all you need to know about Dolan is contained in his assessment that the headlines were a "tidal wave" but the perpetrators were "some few priests." By claiming the problem was the scale of the coverage and not the vastness of the crime wave, he established himself as a braying liar.
Thousands of child rapists/molesters hid behind collars (and that is a very, very conservative estimate) and preyed on generations of children. Where? In and around churches! And then church leadership ignored and/or covered up the scandal for decades. The story couldn't be overstated, nor could the outrage it provoked be fairly labeled as hyperbole. Bishop BS knew he was spouting untruths but he also knew his audience, the blindly faithful, would swallow his mentally reserved mendacity. He was confident parishioners would take his lies and pass them along as gospel truth. This is what the so-called propagation of the Catholic faith is all about. Spreading and repeating lies.
Dolan's argument self-destructed with his passing reference to Ireland. No one who knows what has happened to Irish children would use the term "some few priests" in relation to it. No one, that is, but a liar. The archbishop couldn't have missed the headlines about how the Irish church had finally been exposed for a sixty year reign of terror. It was a crime spree that touched almost every child in that long-troubled nation. (And by "touched" I mean some or all of the following: beat, savagely beat, employed as slave laborers, starved, humiliated, molested, raped, terrorized, emotionally abused, verbally abused, drove to suicide and/or killed.) Tens of thousands of Irish children were raised as prisoners in church/government-run (for all intents and purposes) child labor/rape camps for crimes such as 'illegitimate' birth, poverty, being orphaned, getting in trouble in school for having shown resistance to assaults by the clergy, and dozens of other mild or manufactured offenses.
The church was at every institution an Irish child passed through: schools, reformatories, orphanages, playgrounds, workhouses, you name it and more than 'some few priests' were there. In fact a whole lot of priests made kids' lives miserable.
New York's archbishop scoffed at the German case because it tied in the current pope, a man he would liken to Jesus Christ in his execrable sermon. The same was true of the Wisconsin case in which Pope/Ratzinger squelched the cries of the deaf victims of priestly sexual abuse when they petitioned his then Vatican office for justice.
Dolan continued his eruption (found in full here) saying,
Anytime this horror, vicious sin, and nauseating crime is reported, as it needs to be, victims and their families are wounded again, the vast majority of faithful priests bow their heads in shame anew, and sincere Catholics experience another dose of shock, sorrow, and even anger.The first passage of the above excerpt is classic contradictory mental reservation gibberish. He tells us such crimes must be reported but it's terrible for the victims of these crimes when they're reported. So we're supposed to conclude that it is very dangerous for the victims, or anyone, to expose child molester clerics. Dolan's mention of danger seems like an implied threat. Talk and misery will revisit you.
What deepens the sadness now is the unrelenting insinuations against the Holy Father himself, as certain sources seem frenzied to implicate the man who, perhaps more than anyone else has been the leader in purification, reform, and renewal that the Church so needs.
Next Dolan claims such disclosures hurt innocent priests. Of course he mentally reserves the fact that clergymen would have had to have been deaf, dumb and blind, with no sense of smell, to have not known what was going on. Almost every priest conspired in silence with a massive crime wave against kids. Therefore they deserve, at the very least, to hang their heads in shame.
As far as the put-upon Catholic laity is concerned, it's earned its queasiness until it finds its conscience and walks out of a church that has allowed and facilitated atrocities to be committed against innocent children all over the world for generations. If people are too stupid or cowardly to walk away from the church's hopelessly implausible dogma, unforgivable arrogance and malicious fear-mongering, they deserve no sympathy.
The second passage is a blatant lie. When these "nauseating crimes" were reported for 25 years, it was to an office run by the current pope, who was the Vatican's chief facilitator of the modern cover-up.
Pope Benedict/Ratzinger/Jesus came of age in Nazi Germany. He may well have learned the value of cold-hearted soullessness, prevarication and betrayal of innocents from watching Hitler's functionaries in action. Whatever the case, he grew up to do something no other German child ever had before: he rose to the top of a genuine 2,000-year Reich.
As coverer-up-in-chief, Ratzinger helped facilitate the continued nefarious activities of countless priests who otherwise would have been brought to light and justice. Had he not kept secret these pervasive crimes, it would have saved thousands of kids who were harmed by hundreds of predators (again, an ultra-conservative estimate) who had remained active in the church despite having been reported to the Vatican hierarchy as sexual criminals. Since such revelations would have hurt the church's image and worse, cost it a lot of money, mental reservation once again came to the rescue.
This current pope's complicity is nicely summarized in this Evening Standard piece about a BBC documentary on the matter:
Before being elected as Pope Benedict XVI in April last year, the pontiff was Cardinal Thomas Ratzinger who had, for 24 years, been the head of the powerful Congregation of the Doctrine of The Faith, the department of the Roman Catholic Church charged with promoting Catholic teachings on morals and matters of faith. An arch-Conservative, he was regarded as the 'enforcer' of Pope John Paul II in cracking down on liberal challenges to traditional Catholic teachings.
Five years ago he sent out an updated version of the notorious 1962 Vatican document Crimen Sollicitationis - Latin for The Crime of Solicitation - which laid down the Vatican's strict instructions on covering up sexual scandal. It was regarded as so secret that it came with instructions that bishops had to keep it locked in a safe at all times.
Cardinal Ratzinger reinforced the strict cover-up policy by introducing a new principle: that the Vatican must have what it calls Exclusive Competence. In other words, he commanded that all child abuse allegations should be dealt with direct by Rome.
Patrick Wall, a former Vatican-approved enforcer of the Crimen Sollicitationis in America, tells the programme: "I found out I wasn't working for a holy institution, but an institution that was wholly concentrated on protecting itself."
And Father Tom Doyle, a Vatican lawyer until he was sacked for criticising the church's handling of child abuse claims, says: "What you have here is an explicit written policy to cover up cases of child sexual abuse by the clergy and to punish those who would call attention to these crimes by the churchmen.
"When abusive priests are discovered, the response has been not to investigate and prosecute but to move them from one place to another. So there's total disregard for the victims and for the fact that you are going to have a whole new crop of victims in the next place. This is happening all over the world."
The church and the media often refer to the priest child abuse story as a crisis. It's not a crisis, it's a scandal. Crisis is for victims. Scandal is for discovered perpetrators. A crisis occurred when children were being abused and there was no one there to help them. The crisis occurred when children were made to believe they were complicit in the heinous crimes done to them by savage and soulless priests. The children's crisis continues throughout their lives if they don't get treatment, compassion and unequivocal confirmation from society that what happened to them was wrong. What they don't need is bullshit, this-is-tough-on-the-church-too stories from the media. That kind of nonsense is best left to the old ill-advised Saturday Night Live sketch about rape crisis centers for rapists who are upset after committing heinous crimes.
Catholic church leadership isn't sorry about any of this horror but it sure is scared of it. The men in charge know if people really look into this scandal, they'll find the Rosetta stepping stones of mental reservation, greed-based implementation of celibacy and a history of convenient changes in church law. This scam has been imposed upon the Catholic faithful at the end of a flamethrower pointed at their allegedly immortal souls. Well some of us have shed our manacles and danced across those stepping stones to a greatly improved vantage point. From it we see that despite all of its wealth, power and connections, the Catholic church is nothing more than a creepy cult. It's as if 1.2 billion people belonged to Scientology, only worse. Scientology typically preys on adults. If only the Catholic church would instill a 21-and-over policy, with usher/bouncers checking ID's at the door, it would be a far less of a worry. But people are still handing their children over to this dangerous and dastardly institution. So long as this continues you can bet that both the crisis for kids and the scandal for the church will continue.
Next: The Conclusion Of Cath-22: Off The Reservation
Manic Compression
If you read my previous post you know the Catholic church has started a campaign aimed at bringing back people who have left the wretched institution.
These so-called fallen-away Catholics either:
Spit the patriarchal bit of an arcane religion
Or associated it with damaged/deranged relatives who had imposed Catholicism upon them and so escaped both dysfunctional family and church by walking out of the cathedral once and for all.
Or they found another religion better suited to their spiritual/mental health needs on a Sunday morning. Religions such as the
Or they grew too embarrassed and/or morally outraged to remain part of a religion possessed of a history that has for centuries been based on fear and real estate topped with a gigantic helping of child abuse, as well.
Or they were one of the abused children to whom the church had exposed its despicable contempt.
Or they left the church when beloved elderly relations were no longer capable of keeping spiritual tabs on them.
Or some combination of the above along with any of a zillion more great reasons for leaving Catholicism and never once doubting the decision.
Since the church will dwindle without a large flock to fleece, it's incumbent upon its leadership to staunch the flow of runaway sheep. Since declining membership hurts the Catholic church, all a cleric needs to do is internally invoke the church's 700 year-old mental reservation clause and he can tell us anything he deems necessary to con people into returning to Rome's local affiliates. Mental reservation means the alleged 'good of the church' always makes it out of triage before truth. Confession, after all, is bad for the soulless.
Mental reservation is usually obfuscated by church explanations of exactly what it is. This is because mental reservation is employed when officials convey definitions of it. Here's my definition: mental reservation is nothing more or less than the Catholic clergy's self-issued license to lie.
When church officials, speaking of the abuse scandal, remind us to not judge, lest we be judged, they mentally reserve that it was the church that came up with the concept of original sin -- a plan that stamped babies as spiritual criminals long before they so much as skipped one Sunday mass. So babies are labeled as sinners and must go through a long process to be cleansed of their embryonic crimes at their first communion. Priests who rape babies must be forgiven immediately lest we bring judgment upon ourselves. Uh huh.
When they tell us that clerical abuse of children was isolated and has been dealt with they mentally reserve the fact that new scandals are developing all over Europe and the United States--not to mention the rumors of even worse epidemics of priestly abuse of children in Third World nations.
When they tell us that new policies are in place to drastically reduce the incidence of priestly child molestation, they mentally reserve the fact that such claims should be only made by the pope while standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier under a "Mission Accomplished" sign.
When they tell us that continued discussion of this enormous scandal only serves to re-violate the victims, they mentally reserve that why they make such an unfounded claim is because there are still plenty of fools who will accept any excuse, no matter how ridiculous, the church offers. So what the hay, why not announce that pulling the tarp back over the cesspool and ignoring it is the best way to eliminate its toxic contents?
When they tell us that dioceses ordered to pay settlements to victims of abuse that took place within diocesan auspices are suddenly bankrupt and cannot pay the judgments, mental reservation is hard at work. What they fail to tell us is that they make such preposterous claims because they must first protect church wealth without any concern for the ethical cost.
These nonsensical bankruptcies may be the church's baldest faced lies of all. For starters, the church isn't broke even when it assesses its holdings at their value at the time of acquisition. And that's what it does-- if an oceanfront church was bought and paid for $5,000 150 years ago, the church values the now multimillion dollar property at $5,000. So even their bookkeepers exercise mental reservation! Regardless of this mathematical humbug, ornate Catholic wealth screams at us from basilicas, cathedrals, clerical residences, convents, compounds, retreats, colleges, universities and elementary, middle and high schools, not to mention sports facilities, commercial real estate holdings ... well you get the idea. The allegedly impoverished church undobtedly owns the largest collection of architectural, artistic and fiscal riches of any organization in the world. No one could overestimate the value of the precious antiquities and earthly treasures the church has accumulated and socked away in what must be a vaulted version of the catacombs.
Job One for the pope is to protect and enlarge that immense treasure. Even though the church could lavishly pay off every victim of its perverse parsons with a few handfuls of ancient change scooped from a priceless piece of pottery, it chooses instead to make the ridiculous case that we shouldn't believe our lying eyes when they tell us that the Catholic church makes Microsoft look like a mendicant. We are instead expected to believe that it is a struggling institution, barely able to keep its platinum doors open.
Catholic greed is the genesis of both its enormous child abuse scandal and the absurd attempts to cover it up.
Long ago, in its first millennium, the church was a gritty, rough and tumble operation. Its clerics were drawn to it not just for an opportunity to claim to be the only legitimate source of earthly divinity but also because clerics could live like royalty and party like Vikings. Priests commonly had wives and multiple mistresses and/or male and/or child sexual partners. The Vatican had no problem with any of this except that priests issued progeny. And so did bishops, who tended to live abundantly while cruising down the fast cart path. Their offspring were heirs and heirs could be left property that the Vatican felt had been acquired/stolen in its name. As far as Rome was concerned, these bequests belonged to the church and the church alone.
In 1139, in a move to eliminate heirs, the materialistically lustful Pope Innocent II (and you must admire his brass) not only imposed celibacy on all new priests, he also forced all married priests to get divorced. The term 'community property' didn't turn up during the legal proceedings. In one fell swoop, Innocent performed a reverse Reverend Moon-- a mass dissolution of marriage.
Celibacy raised a lot of questions and plenty of resistance -- particularly from priests. The church manufactured rationales to retrofit celibacy as its most ancient principle. These assertions were of course Grade A horseshit. This horseshit fertilized centuries of inane justifications -- most were intended to promulgate the canard that priests were superior to the laity because they were above dirty, dirty, dirty sexual desires. Ignorant and obedient Catholic laypersons learned to despise themselves for having any sexual feelings, except of course in marriage, where they were to be acted upon solely for purposes of procreation. Once they'd salted the earth with their seed, serfs were expected to emulate the impossible and abandon frivolous carnal activity, one of the only comforts available to the poor of any era. To fail to deny the most basic of human instincts meant sure damnation.
The Vatican Old Boys Club constantly scapegoated woman as the villains responsible for the sexual confusion and frustration the church itself fomented. What with their feminine wisdom, gentle ways, soft curvy flesh, and satanic caverns of pleasure, they were natural enemies to the earthly anguish all good Catholics should withstand each day. And so misogyny became an integral part of church teaching. So long as women in their full and powerful sexuality were not thought of as demonic agents, their natural allure attracted more earthbound souls than celibacy. So the church demonized women, forcing men to, in the slightly paraphrased words of Barking Bobby Weir: go to hell in a bucket but at least enjoy the ride.
The 'good women' of faith were (at least supposed to be) neutralized when they realized sex for them either equaled procreation or damnation. The travails of pregnancy, the pains of childbirth and the wear and tear of raising large families were additional preventatives to desire. The church's sexual sabotage also helped promote secular misogyny because it provoked men to feel contempt for women for luring them down the evil path of carnality, regardless of the fact that men built and maintained that well worn trail. Pushing women aside also placed boys front and center, often kneeling directly in front of a priest for 'special instructions.'
The repressive teachings of the church led to centuries of extreme sexual ignorance and self-loathing among the faithful. This set up ideal circumstances for collared perps to operate with shameless disregard for their supposed roles as protectors of the flock. Ignorant Catholic children, generally boys, were handed over to creepy clerics by ignorant Catholic parents. Prohibited from the honor of serving as altar boys, girls were home-schooled by repressed/depraved relations in the deserved indignities of their gender. (of course many girls also suffered clerical abuse in church, school and so on) Child rape and other forms of sexual assaults became commonplace at home and in and around church. Children, conned into believing they were responsible for the shame they felt after being broken by sexual, physical and emotional abuse, grew up and passed along the contents of their confused and ruined hearts to their children. Always, always, always the priest loomed nearby to encourage self-hatred because it proved just how helpless the victims were without benefit of the church's absolution. The constant need to be forgiven for being a human being made the church essential. Anyone who questioned this system was labeled a heretic. For centuries heretics were executed. In modern times they are simply character assassinated. Ah, progress!
To call this a compressed version of more than a millennium of history is about as large an understatement as you can make. (providing you're not a church spokesperson presenting an assessment of the abuse scandal) I have places to go with this writing and we'd never arrive at them without at least a bit of historical context. Thus this installment. I'm no
The point of this installment was to establish how churchly greed was at the root of all the evil that is now associated with Catholicism. Next we'll return to the church today. We just won't come home to it.
NEXT: The 2000-yr Reich and me.
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