Gather ’round, children, and listen to a tale of the Good Old Days, as told by Pope Benedict nee Ratzinger. He’s a Man of God, so he obviously wouldn’t lie! You’ll remember that when we left off, he was about to tell us that
paedophilia wasn’t considered an “absolute evil” as recently as the 1970s.
Oh, you have got to be kidding me.
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.
BY WHOM?
[By the way, it should tell you how stung the Catholic Church is over its loss of moral authority when the Pope is making excuses, in his Christmas address, for the fact that the corporation over which he is the CEO has become, in the words of Sara Benincasa, "the world’s oldest and largest child-fuckery concern."]
Moving on…
“It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than’ and a ‘worse than’. Nothing is good or bad in itself.”
When, pray tell, was this taught in any orthodox corner of Christendom? Please, senile former Hitler Youth child-rapist protector man in flowing robes and pretty headdress, ‘splain some more how back in the good old days, child rape was simply ”not the best option,” but certainly not evil.
The Pope said abuse revelations in 2010 reached “an unimaginable dimension” which brought “humiliation” on the Church.
I know, I know, it’s so embarrassing when people find out about this huge child raping problem the Church has, I mean, it was such a surprise and all, not least of which to the Pope. Oh wait. My memory’s not failing me completely yet, so let’s all remember another story.
ONCE UPON A TIME there was a priest in Wisconsin named Lawrence Murphy! He used his position of power to rape over 200 children, but there’s a twist! These children were deaf. When the abuse came to light, at least in the inner sancta of the Roman Catholic Church, they of course defrocked him immediately and made sure he was never near a child again. HA HA, JUST KIDDING:
Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.
The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.
The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.
But, you see, it only became shocking, embarrassing and humiliating in 2010. Why? Because the child-rapists got caught, and Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope, is having to answer for the fact that he, in an official capacity, did everything in his power to protect what is apparently the holy right of priests to have sex with the kids in their parishes.
Here’s what the Church is doing in Wisconsin to make amends for distract local Catholics from the inconvenient facts about the 200 deaf children and the rape and whatnot:
Well, the Vatican has finally found it in its black (but gold-plated!) and shriveled husk of a heart to do something for Wisconsin: they’ve blessed a ghost sighting as genuine. Woo hoo! That’ll fix everything right up!
The church has declared that a sighting in 1859 of a blond Mary hovering between two trees was real and worthy, and the local Catholic church is now busily expanding their parking lot to cope with the expected influx of gullible suckers pilgrims who will flock to the site to imagine a floating cheerleader for Jesus.
…[O]n October 9, 1859, the Queen of Heaven manifested herself to Adele Brise in Champion (Robinsonville), Wisconsin, USA.
[...]
“As they approached the hallowed spot, Adele could see the beautiful lady, clothed in dazzling white, with a yellow sash around her waist. Her dress fell to her feet in graceful folds. She had a crown of stars around her head, and her long, golden, wavy hair fell loosely around her shoulders. Such a heavenly light shone around her that Adele could hardly look back at her sweet face. Overcome by this heavenly light and the beauty of her amiable visitor, Adele fell on her knees.
” ‘In God’s name, who are you and what do you want of me?’ asked Adele, as she had been directed.
“ ‘I am the Queen of Heaven, who prays for the conversion of sinners, and I wish you to do the same. You received Holy Communion this morning, and that is well. But you must do more. Make a general confession, and offer Communion for the conversion of sinners. If they do not convert and do penance, my Son will be obliged to punish them’
“ ‘Adele, who is it?” said one of the women. ‘O why can’t we see her as you do?’ said another weeping.
“ ‘Kneel,’ said Adele, ‘the Lady says she is the Queen of Heaven.’ Our Blessed Lady turned, looked kindly at them, and said, ‘Blessed are they that believe without seeing. What are you doing here in idleness…while your companions are working in the vineyard of my Son?’
Oh, for god’s sake. The woman was either hallucinating or lying. Or on drugs. She certainly wasn’t laying the foundations for the the Vatican to, 150 years later, distract all the faithful morons from the fact that 200 DEAF CHILDREN WERE RAPED BY A PRIEST. PZ Myers ties this little fairytale up with a bow:
That settles it. It must have been a magical manifestation if it was invisible. Invisible and blond, just like I always imagined a Middle Eastern Semitic peasant woman. And the statement that you’re blessed if you believe without seeing is pitch-perfect Catholicism.
Dear, dear Catholics: Stop. Just stop. I know many of you are fervent in your desires to change the Catholic Church from the inside out, but until and unless the entire patriarchal institution — the celibate priests, the secretive power structure, the lack of women in any positions of power, and all the rest — is changed, this will continue.
As it stands, the Church, for this and many other reasons, is one of the most evil forces on God’s Green Earth, and no one with a sense of morality or dignity should support it.
As a survivor of “ex-gay” therapy, I was mortified to learn that Exodus International is shifting its focus in 2011 to children and teens. These are the people most vulnerable and defenseless to Exodus’ attacks on healthy development and psychological well-being.
As I first became aware of my sexual orientation at the age of 12, I was drawn into the web of Mike Jones, one of Exodus International’s unlicensed, unqualified, untrained, unregulated, and unsupervised counselors. For the next 10 years, a man who had no business counseling anyone, and who certainly should not have had access to children, set the tone for how I viewed my orientation and myself as a person.
Jones passed on to me the “facts” that my attractions were sinful, that no gay person was happy, and that every gay person was addicted to drugs, alcohol and random sexual encounters. I lived in a homogeneous religious world, didn’t know any LGBT people and had no reason to believe otherwise. I fully believed Mike Jones for years. He assured me that my sexual orientation could and should change, leading me to suffer through years of shame and self-hatred when no such change occurred.
Later, when I was 19, he subjected me to prolonged hugs and even “holding therapy”, where I was instructed to lay in his arms for a solid hour to “feel the strength of another man”. He asked me inappropriate questions about my genitals and suggested I use handyman tools to become more masculine.
Last year, Jones was largely discredited – his board of directors dissolved, many local churches ceased supporting his work, and he was removed as an “approved outreach group” with the Michigan Department of Corrections. But the entire time he was victimizing me, Exodus International supported Jones’ work and continued to refer people to his “ex-gay” operation.
This week, Exodus International unveiled its plan to put targets on the backs of thousands of innocent children around the country, many who already sit in pews each Sunday feeling scared and alone. The “ex-gay” group plans to utilize social media, YouTube videos, booklets, an IPhone App, and a re-branding to make sure every one of these kids hates a part of themselves and believes their orientation is perverse and an abomination.
The reality is their orientation is a natural and beautiful part of who they are. Exodus International has proven they are content to sacrifice children’s identities, happiness, self-confidence and mental health, to further their lies and messages of intolerance.
What is particularly insidious about Exodus’ ministry is that it hides behind the fallacy that it desires helping only those who face what they cynically call “unwanted same-sex attraction”.
The reality is the “ex-gay” industry works day and night to create cultures in families, churches, communities and governments when possible, where folks who are not heterosexual are left ostracized, alone, judged and condemned. When the lies spread by Exodus International and the “ex-gay” industry lead people to believe change is possible and necessary for God, their church or their family to love them, naturally their attractions become “unwanted”.
Thankfully, there is a happy ending to my story. I escaped the destructive lies of the “ex-gay” industry and with time, good friends, and therapy, came to love and accept myself the way I am. I have been an out and proud gay man for almost 5 years and have found healing through sharing my story and connecting with other survivors of the “ex-gay” industry.
But my heart breaks imagining other children naively falling for the same lies that ruled my life all those years. Children deserve to be loved and supported for who they are. Their young, fragile self-esteems deserve to be protected and their identities nurtured.
It is my sincere hope that more and more families and churches will see the real danger Exodus International represents and choose to distance themselves and their children from Exodus’ materials, counselors and programs.
Before the organization does enormous harm, it should abandon its disturbing plan to target children and teenagers in 2011.
A Catholic priest, facing criminal charges and a lawsuit alleging that he sexually abused a teenage boy, is now charged with attempting to hire someone to kill the youth, authorities said Tuesday.
The Rev. John M. Fiala was in the Dallas County, Texas, jail on Tuesday, charged with one count of criminal solicitation to commit capital murder, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety and the jail’s website. He also is charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child. His bail totals $700,000.
Fiala, 52, of Dallas, was out on bond on other sexual assault charges involving the youth, now 18, when he allegedly attempted to negotiate the boy’s murder, said Tom Rhodes, the teen’s attorney.
Not only that, but he’s accused of raping the teen at gunpoint! Moreover, the lawsuits state that the archdioceses and religious orders Fiala was under ALL covered up his sexual abuse.
It’s not often that the Catholic Church can shock me these days, since child rape and Catholicism are so inextricably linked in the public mind, but this one…
Contact: Wayne Besen, TWO Executive Director
Phone: 917-691-5118
E-Mail: wbesen@truthwinsout.org
Given Awful Record, Exodus Should Stay Away From Youth, Says TWO
Burlington, Vt. – Truth Wins Out (TWO) expressed alarm today that the world’s largest “ex-gay” organization, Exodus International, announced that its top priority in 2011 was to target students, including those in Middle School. The organization plans to lure youth though slick social media programs and offering high tech gadgets, including an I-phone App.
“We are alarmed because Exodus has a substantial predator problem and a history of placing youth with unsavory characters who are often unqualified as counselors,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “Exodus’ message is also destructive because it tells vulnerable youth that they are sexually broken, sinful, and perverse. Hearing such harmful messages can increase the likelihood for depression, substance abuse and even suicide.”
In an online letter to members and donors, the organization’s Executive Director, Alan Chambers, writes,
“…the greatest area of need in our culture is outreach to young people. We will be changing the name of Exodus Youth to Exodus Student Ministries in order to encompass middle school thru [sic] college age students. We have listened to youth pastors, parents and especially students and we want to amplify our message in a way that they will best receive it: via web communication, YouTube, podcasts and short to the point booklets. We are also in the process of creating an App for iPhone users.”
Many Exodus “counselors” have virtually no professional training and the organization does not employ rigorous standards when they pair up youth with adults. The results of such unprofessional and unethical behavior have, at times, been devastating, including the placement of youth with sexual predators.
“Parents should be extremely cautious and take great care to avoid the programs of Exodus International,” said TWO’s Besen. “The fact that Exodus is now targeting eleven year old Middle school students is horrifying and unacceptable.”
Truth Wins Out is a non-profit organization that defends the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community against anti-gay misinformation, counters the so-called “ex-gay” industry and educates America about the lives of LGBT people. Our goal is to fight for a world where LGBT individuals can live openly, honestly, free of discrimination and be true to themselves.
Citing a shortage of priests who can perform the rite, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops are holding a conference on how to conduct exorcisms.
The two-day training, which ends today in Baltimore, is to outline the scriptural basis of evil, instruct clergy on evaluating whether a person is truly possessed, and review the prayers and rituals that comprise an exorcism. Among the speakers will be Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston, Texas, and a priest-assistant to New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan.
“Learning the liturgical rite is not difficult,” DiNardo said before the conference, which is open to clergy only. “The problem is the discernment that the exorcist needs before he would ever attempt the rite.”
Signs of demonic possession accepted by the church include violent reaction to holy water or anything holy, speaking in a language the possessed person doesn’t know and abnormal displays of strength.
The full exorcism is held in private and includes sprinkling holy water, reciting Psalms, reading aloud from the Gospel, laying on of hands and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Some adaptations are allowed for different circumstances. The exorcist can invoke the Holy Spirit then blow in the face of the possessed person, trace the sign of the cross on the person’s forehead and command the devil to leave.
Hmm, just like that — PRESTO — the church reentered Medieval times. How, exactly, is this church still relevant on moral issues? And, do we really need more Catholic priests blowing people…in the face.
If you ask me, I’d say the Catholic Church is in need of a serious exorcism.
Bill Donohue is a sick, twisted individual. Herein, the latest proof of that statement, as Bill Donohue explains that a young boy molested by a priest wasn’t “raped,” but merely “rubbed,” that since the abuse started when the victim was thirteen, it wasn’t pedophilia, and that really, if the victim had a problem with it, he should have said something:
On September 28, the Chicago Tribune reported that “former Chicago priest and convicted sex offender Daniel McCormick sexually abused him [Doe] while he was a grammar school student.” We then learn that the student was really a middle-school student, in the eighth grade, when the abuse began. The abuse reportedly continued for five years. According to the lawsuit, “McCormack inappropriately sexually touched, hugged, rubbed and/or abused Doe.”
It’s time to ask some tough questions. Why did this young man not object earlier? Why did he allow the “abuse” to continue until he was 18? The use of the quotes is deliberate: the charge against the former priest is not rape, but rubbing. While still objectionable, there is a glacial difference between being rubbed and raped.
Here’s what we know. We know that this case, like most of them, was the work of a homosexual, not a pedophile. And like most of the cases of priestly sexual misconduct, there was no rape involved. Inappropriate touching is morally wrong, and the offenders should be punished, but the time has come to object to all those pundits who like to say that the scandal is all about child rape. Most of the cases did not involve children—they were post-pubescent males—and most weren’t raped.
Why does this matter? Because those looking to sue the Catholic Church for being inappropriately rubbed decades ago are not exactly the poster boys for the victims of child rape. And because those who hate the Church continue to use the term child rape as a way of discrediting the Church. They lie about this being a pedophilia problem and they lie about the nature of the misconduct. That’s reason enough to call them on it.
Bill Donohue is a pig who defends rape. And yes, Bill, that is rape. My god, what kind of moron doesn’t understand that inappropriately touching a child in any way is child rape?! I understand why Bill Donohue is completely devoid of morality, though; he was raised under the abusive thumb of the Catholic Church, where child rape is so prevalent as to be mundane.
Investigators, working with the support of the Belgian Catholic Church received 475 complaints of child abuse committed in the 1950s through to the late 1980s by Catholic clergy.
“We can say that no congregation escapes sexual abuse of minors by one or several of its members,” the commission concluded.
The 200-page report, published on Friday, contains testimonies from some 124 anonymous victims, revealing that abuse for most began at the age of 12.
It noted a “high number of suicides” with 13 deaths and six attempts attributed to “sexual abuse by a cleric”.
“We are talking here about anal and oral abuse, forced and mutual masturbation,” said Peter Adriaenssens, the psychiatric specialist in paedophilia who chaired the commission.
There’s your moral authority for the world, the Roman Catholic Church.
P.Z. sums it up:
Every congregation has a horror story about an abusive priest. That says something. This isn’t about a rare event — it’s about a common risk associated with growing up Catholic in Belgium.
Sick and scary, isn’t it? And unless further investigation reveals a nefarious Vatican plot to send all the child molesters to Belgium, it’s frightening to think what similar investigations in other nations will turn up.
Read it and marvel/vomit over the fact that this man runs free, still able to hurt little boys like the one described here:
What do you do with a little boy who likes cross-dressing and playing with dolls? If you’re George Alan Rekers, you “extinguish” the boy’s feminine behavior with a sometimes violent Pavlovian regimen while your scientific team observes through a one-way mirror.
(…)
In 1974, Rekers, a leading thinker in the so-called ex-gay movement, was presented with a 4-year-old “effeminate boy” named Kraig, whose parents had enrolled him in the program. Rekers put Kraig in a “play-observation room” with his mother, who was equipped with a listening device. When the boy played with girly toys, the doctors instructed her to avert her eyes from the child.
According to a 2001 account in Brain, Child Magazine, “On one such occasion, his distress was such that he began to scream, but his mother just looked away. His anxiety increased, and he did whatever he could to get her to respond to him… Kraig became so hysterical, and his mother so uncomfortable, that one of the clinicians had to enter and take Kraig, screaming, from the room.”
Rekers’s research team continued the experiment in the family’s home. Kraig received red chips for feminine behavior and blue chips for masculine behavior. The blue chips could be cashed in for candy or television time. The red chips earned him a “swat” or spanking from his father. Researchers periodically entered the family’s home to ensure proper implementation of the reward-punishment system.
After two years, the boy supposedly manned up. Over the decades, Rekers, who ran countless similar experiments, held Kraig up as “the poster boy for behavioral treatment of boyhood effeminacy.”
At age 18, shamed by his childhood diagnosis and treatment, Rekers’s poster boy attempted suicide, according to Gender Shock, a book by journalist Phyllis Burke.
I believe the scientific term for George Alan Rekers is “you sick, sadistic bastard.”
It’s one sort of evil to take your own seething self-hatred out on adults. It’s yet another to rape the innocence and identity out of a child whose only crime is that he doesn’t fit into the gender-binary construct that George Rekers, apparently, has never been able to attain for himself.
But let’s be clear about one thing: the reason organizations like Truth Wins Out exist, why Jeremy spends countless hours chronicling the anti-gay movement at Good As You, why Amanda Marcotte takes the time to analyze and explain patriarchy in words any can understand but few have heard before at Pandagon, why Pam Spaulding and her crew and Joe Jervis and the Box Turtle guys (AND SO ON) — and the reason why I make a point of mocking these people as dismissively as they truly deserve — is that this story, while grotesque, should not be shocking. Yes, it’s appalling, but it is only the natural result, taken to its extreme, of Religious Right teachings on sexuality and on gender. And these stories, in all their varying degrees, are myriad, but they all have one simple common denominator: the overarching, bellyaching desire of heterosexual religious men (and those who wish to God every night that they might one day be heterosexual) to control the lives, the gender expression, the sexuality, of all people they view as lesser. This includes women, children, racial minorities, and certainly LGBT people. Again, this is the natural conclusion of the notion of the junk science of “reparative therapy.” This is what happens when people who have been trained like show ponies to repress everything authentic about themselves in the pursuit of the lifeless, unhappy “ideal” of the fundamentalist worldview are allowed to flourish unhindered by modernity. (I mean, look at Saudi Arabia, for god’s sake. Yeah, it’s the same.) This is what happens when those people’s ideas are accorded an ounce of respect. We all have freedom of speech, at least in the United States, but part of that freedom is the responsibility for those of us who live in verifiable reality to do everything we can to ensure that the sadism of the Religious Right, and its concomitant junk science, are granted all the respect they deserve in the marketplace of ideas. (Hint: That would be “none.”) It’s our responsibility to do everything we can to help as many people understand that when people like George Rekers, Tony Perkins, Peter LaBarbera, the entire staff of Focus on the Family (including the chipper young cretins they’ve hired to “reach out to millenials,” a battle they’ve long lost), Matt Barber, Elaine Donnelly, Laurie Higgins, Maggie Gallagher, or any of their buttbuddies in bigotry open their maws and spew forth, their words amount to nothing more than long disproven, hateful, ignorant lies. It’s our responsibility to make sure that those who come across our words are armed with the resources (our side being the only one which actually relies on research and reason, citations, real science, etc.) to know the Religious Right is lying, only and always, and to know precisely how and why they’re lying.
This is a big part of why we do what we do.
Our adversaries hurt people. They drive their own to decades of depression and despair, and they drive their own children to substance abuse, rejection, depression and sometimes even suicide.
At the end of the piece quoted above, it’s stated that, even though George Rekers was caught in flagrante diddle-fingers coming back from Europe with a young male whore, that the brain trust at NARTH still stands by Rekers’ “science.” Of course they do. They will never let something like reality, or trails of blood leading to the bodies and souls of kids hurt by their “science,” get in the way of their obscene, wrongheaded, and wholly self-loathing vendetta against those citizens of the world who dare to survive, to love authentically, to dream, to fly, to fuck, to question authority, to laugh, to breathe, to celebrate, to mourn, to rage against the dying of the light…in short, to live, and to do so without asking the permission of the self-appointed religious police. NARTH and similar groups do not care about people. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that they have clear and palpable contempt for people, much as most right-wing organizations have clear, palpable contempt for their readers, knowing as they do that their intended audience is too stupid, too abused, or too brainwashed to know any better. They simply don’t care about the human beings involved.
So yeah. We do this to fight for the kids like Kraig, those many years ago, and those who still are vulnerable to an enemy which sees them not as people but as notches on their Culture War belts.
Can. I. Get. A. Witness?
Okay, I’m done spitting daggers now, so if anybody needs this soapbox…
A Springfield, Mass.-area Roman Catholic priest has publicly called for Pope Benedict XVI (a.k.a. Joseph Ratzinger) to resign.
According to today’s Boston Globe, Rev. James Scahill of St. Michael’ Parish said the pope’s untruthfulness constituted a violation of an important tenet of Catholicism. The Globe added that Scahill “has long been outspoken on the need for accountability among church leaders.”
Unfortunately, his superiors are far less courageous.
Mark Dupont, a spokesman for the Diocese of Springfield, was quick to distance the diocesan leadership from the comments made by Scahill.
“It in no way represents the position of the bishop,” Dupont said. “We find his statements to be unfortunate.”
I am no Maureen Dowd fan, but her op-ed today has me cheering:
The church gave up its credibility for Lent.
HA. And:
Canon 1404 states that “The First See is judged by no one.” But Jesus, Mary and Joseph, as my dad used to say. Somebody has to tell the First See when it’ blind ‚Äî and mute ‚Äî to deaf children in America and Italy.
And, number four in the Vatican’s playbook on handling the scandals:
Demonize gays, as Karl Rove did in 2004.
In an ad in The Times on Tuesday, Bill Donohue, the Catholic League president, offered this illumination: “The Times continues to editorialize about the “pedophilia crisis,’ when all along it’ been a homosexual crisis. Eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and most of them are post-pubescent. While homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior, and most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been gay.”
Donohue is still talking about the problem as an indiscretion rather than a crime. If it mostly involves men and boys, that’ partly because priests for many years had unquestioned access to boys.
Gather ’round, children, and listen to a tale of the Good Old Days, as told by Pope Benedict nee Ratzinger. He’s a Man of God, so he obviously wouldn’t lie! You’ll remember that when we left off, he was about to tell us that
According to today’s 
