It was bad enough that Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Madrid cost $72 million dollars during a worldwide economic downturn. (I don’t understand why it costs so much. The Rolling Stones are just as famous and tour all of Europe for considerably less).
However, it is galling that the pontiff, who is presiding over a worldwide pedophile-scandal, claimed moral superiority over the majority of fiercely secular Europeans. At Sunday Mass, the Pope warned Catholics that they “will be swimming against the tide in a society with a relativistic culture, which wishes neither to seek nor hold on to the truth.”
That’s rich coming from a man who held a key leadership position in a church where a shocking number of clergy raped children, then were systematically shuffled around from church to church to protect the institution’s reputation. Can anything possibly be more relativistic and less truthful than the way the Vatican handled (and continues to handle) this sickening crisis?
Please, Mr. Pope — given your record, you are about the last person on earth that should be preaching morals and values. Furthermore, can anyone really argue that Europe is worse off since it has become less religious? As much as the Pope whines, he can’t escape the fact that a non-believing Europe has been remarkably peaceful, civilized, and prosperous. Sometimes, it seems like he yearns for the good ole’ days of religious wars, persecution, and sectarian intolerance.
It is ironic that the less influence Rome has had, the more Christ-like Europe has become.
The Catholic Church’s business model runs on gay bashing. The Church hierarchy is composed chiefly of two sorts; pedophiles at the top and then gays and lesbians doing slave labor for the bullying abusers. Here is how, historically, the Church has gotten its slave labor from gays and lesbians; it promulgates the most vicious anti-gay propaganda throughout society so that adolescent gay people are made to feel they are shameful, sinful, going to hell and have no hope of a fulfilling adult domestic life. Socially ostracized, the Church’s gay and lesbian victims thus have historically been primed to sign on for (allegedly) sexless lives as priests and nuns. Of course, the Church additionally is misogynist – the nuns get squirreled away doing the worst of the work. And, the nuns take vows of poverty while the misogynist, gay-bashing abusers like the Pope drink fine wine out of golden chalices. The fall-off in the number of victims signing on to be priests and nuns corresponds precisely to the increasing social acceptance of gay and lesbian human beings; the Church knows that, and is lashing out. Whereas some young Germans resisted the Nazis, the Pope was a Nazi collaborator. Had Hitler won the war, this Pope would still be working for the Nazis, presiding over a Judenrein Europe with all its gay people either killed or held in concentration camps.
The Vatican believes itself to be a supra-national body, beholden only onto itself.
THe Colyne report into child abuse in Ireland exposed the criminal behaviour of Bishops and the Vatican.
On 20 July 2011 the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Enda Kenny criticised the Vatican using unprecedented harsh words, deploring “the dysfunction, disconnection and elitism that dominates the culture of the Vatican to this day”
He said that the Vatican reacted “to evidence of humiliation and betrayal … with the gimlet eye of a Canon lawyer, [a] calculated, withering position.”
He also told the Dáil that “the historic relationship between church and state in Ireland could not be the same again. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and reputation.”
As ex-Catholic is hard to hold back the disgust I feel when the Pope opines on ‘moral authority’.
It is secular public bodies in the US, Ireland, Poland etc that have upheld the rights of children and are thus the real moral authorities in that regard.
The last sentence in the article was the best one!
The more he speaks, the more people say “choke on your hypocrisy” and leave.