The HOLY Preisthood of the HOLY Catholic Church
Just a Few Bad Apples
Years ago the Catholic hierarchy would insist that clerical pedophilia involved only a few bad apples and was being blown completely out of proportion.
For the longest time John Paul scornfully denounced the media for “sensationalizing” the issue. He and his cardinals (Ratzinger included) directed more fire at news outlets for publicizing the crimes than at their own clergy for committing them.
Reports released by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (one of the more honest organizations in the Catholic Church) documented the abuse committed in the United States by 4,392 priests against thousands of children between 1950 and 2002.
One of every ten priests ordained in 1970 was charged as a pedophile by 2002.
Another survey commissioned by the US bishops found that among 5,450 complaints of sexual abuse there were charges against at least sixteen bishops. So much for a few bad apples.
Still, even as reports were flooding in from Ireland and other countries, John Paul dismissed the pedophilic epidemic as “an American problem,” as if American priests were not members of his clergy, or as if this made it a matter of no great moment. John Paul went to his grave in 2005 still refusing to meet with victims and never voicing any apologies or regrets regarding sex crimes and cover-ups.
With Ratzinger’s accession to the papal throne as Benedict XVI, the cover-ups continued.
As recently as April 2010, at Easter Mass in St. Peter’s Square, dean of the college of cardinals Angelo Sodano, assured Benedict that the faithful were unimpressed “by the gossip of the moment.”
One would not know that “the gossip of the moment” included thousands of investigations, prosecutions, and accumulated charges extending back over decades.
During that same Easter weekend, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, archbishop of Mexico City, declared that the public uproar was an “overreaction” incited by the doings of “a few dishonest and criminal priests.”
A few? An overreaction? Of course, the picture now becomes clear: a few bad apples were inciting overreaction by engaging in the gossip of the moment.
The church seems determined to learn nothing from its transgressions, preoccupied as it is with avoiding lawsuits and bad publicity.
Really Not All that Serious
There are two ways we can think of child rape as being not a serious problem, and the Catholic hierarchy seems to have embraced both these positions.
First, pedophilia is not that serious if it involves only a few isolated and passing incidents.
Second, an even more creepy way of downplaying the problem: child molestation is not all that damaging or that important. At worst, it is regrettable and unfortunate; it might greatly upset the child, but it certainly is not significant enough to cause unnecessary scandal and ruin the career of an otherwise splendid padre.
It is remarkable how thoroughly indifferent the church bigwigs have been toward the abused children.
When one of the most persistent perpetrators, Rev. John Geoghan, was forced into retirement (not jail) after seventeen years and nearly 200 victims, Cardinal Law could still write him,
“On behalf of those you have served well, in my own name, I would like to thank you. I understand yours is a painful situation.”
It is evident that Law was more concerned about the “pain” endured by Geoghan than the misery he had inflicted upon minors. In 2001, a French bishop was convicted in France for refusing to hand over to the police a priest who had raped children.
It recently came to light that a former top Vatican cardinal, Dario Castrillón, had written to the bishop,
“
I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil authorities. You have acted well, and I am pleased to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all the bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his ‘son’ and priest.” (The bishop actually got off with a suspended sentence.)
Castrillón claimed that Pope John Paul II had authorized the letter years ago and had told him to send it to bishops around the world. (New York Times, 4/22/2010.)
There are many more like Cardinal Law and Cardinal Castrillón in the hierarchy, aging men who have no life experience with children and show not the slightest regard or empathy for them.
They claim it their duty to protect the “unborn child” but offer no protection to the children in their schools and parishes.
They themselves are called “Father” but they father no one. They do not reside in households or families. They live in an old-boys network, jockeying for power and position, dedicated to the Holy Mother Church that feeds, houses, and adorns them throughout their lives.
From their heady heights, popes and bishops cannot hear the cries of children. In any case, the church belongs not to little children but to the bedecked oligarchs.
The damage done to sexual victims continues to go unnoticed: the ensuing years of depression, drug addiction, alcoholism, panic attacks, sexual dysfunction, and even mental breakdown and suicide - all these terrible after-effects of child rape seem to leave popes and bishops more or less unruffled.
Circling the Wagons
The Catholic hierarchy managed to convince itself that the prime victim in this dismal saga is the church itself.
In 2010 it came to light that, while operating as John Paul’s über-hit man, Pope Benedict (then Cardinal Ratzinger) had provided cover and protection to several of the worst predator priests.
The scandal was now at the pope’s door - exactly where it should have been many years earlier during John Paul’s reign.
The Vatican’s response was predictable. The hierarchy circled the wagons to defend pope and church from outside “enemies.” The cardinals and bishops railed furiously at critics who “assault” the church and, in the words of the archbishop of Paris, subject it to “a smear campaign.” Benedict himself blamed secularism and misguided applications of Vatican 2’s aggiornamento as contributing to the “context” of sexual abuse.
Reform-minded liberalism made us do it, he seemed to be saying.
But this bristling Easter counterattack by the hierarchy did not play well. Church authorities came off looking like insular, arrogant elites who were unwilling to own up to a horrid situation largely of their own making.
Meanwhile the revelations continued. A bishop in Ireland resigned admitting he had covered up child abuse cases. Bishops in Germany and Belgium stepped down after confessing to charges that they themselves had abused minors. And new allegations were arising in Chile, Norway, Brazil, Italy, France, and Mexico.
Then, a fortnight after Easter, the Vatican appeared to change course and for the first time issued a directive urging bishops to report abuse cases to civil authorities “if required by local law.”
At the same time, Pope Benedict held brief meetings with survivor groups and issued sympathetic statements about their plight.
For many of the victims, the pontiff’s overtures and apologies were too little, too late. Their feeling was that if the Vatican really wanted to make amends, it should cooperate fully with law enforcement authorities and stop obstructing justice; it should ferret out abusive clergy and not wait until cases are publicized by others; and it should make public the church’s many thousands of still secret reports on priests and bishops.
In the midst of all this, some courageous clergy do speak out.
At a Sunday mass in a Catholic church outside Springfield, Massachusetts, the Rev. James Scahill delivered a telling sermon to his congregation (New York Times, 4/12/10):
“We must personally and collectively declare that we very much doubt the veracity of the pope and those of church authority who are defending him. It is beginning to become evident that for decades, if not centuries, church leadership covered up the abuse of children and minors to protect its institutional image and the image of priesthood”.
The abusive priests, Scahill went on, were “felons.”
He had “severe doubt” about the Vatican’s claims of innocent ignorance.
“If by any slimmest of chance the pope and all his bishops didn’t know-–they all should resign on the basis of sheer and complete ignorance, incompetence, and irresponsibility.”
How did Father Scahill’s suburban Catholic parishioners receive his scorching remarks? One or two walked out.
The rest gave him a standing ovation.
by Michael Parenti
May 13, 2010
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Since the institution of the papal office in 606 the Vatican has been plagued with Pope's who were adulterers, pedofiles, homosexuals, perverts and its HOLY office and the HOLY preisthood of this HOLY church is nothing but sexual perversions that characterized the Mystery Babylonian Religion).
