From the Huffington Post:

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, two of the world’s most prominent atheist intellectuals, are seeking means to try the pope for crimes against humanity, their lawyers confirmed this weekend.

The pair are said to be working with British lawyers to see if the pope can be arrested for his part in the alleged cover-up of widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church during a visit to the United Kingdom in September

The Vatican has suggested that the pope is immune to prosecution as he is a head of state – Dawkins and Hitchens suggest that he is not immune as the Vatican is not represented at the United Nations.

Hitchens told the Sunday Times of London: “This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalized concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment.”

Dawkins and Hitchens are correct to assert that the Pope is not above or outside the law. Anyone connected to covering-up child rape ought to pay the societal consequences.

In my column this week I wrote:

Whether it’ groping by priests or greed on Wall Street — institutions that don’t change in the face of crisis and public indignation will eventually become irrelevant. If history has shown one truism, it is that nothing is too big to fail.

It seems the disintegration of the church is happening faster than I had imagined. Consider the following stories in the past two days:

The Associated Press

A German man who says a priest sexually abused him as an altar boy is demanding an apology from Pope Benedict XVI and compensation “even if the church goes bankrupt.”

Wilfried Fesselmann said then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is ultimately to blame for allowing the priest to continue in his pastoral duties.

“It is an insolence that the Catholic Church was only busy with covering-up and moving the priest around for years instead of dismissing him,” Fesselmann said in an interview this week with The Associated Press.

Fesselmann claims a chaplain, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, forced him to sleep with him and practice oral sex when he was an 11-year-old boy in the western city of Essen.

The New York Times

The priest, convicted of tying up and abusing two young boys in a California church rectory, wanted to leave the ministry. But in 1985, four years after the priest and his bishop first asked that he be defrocked, the future Pope Benedict XVI, then a top Vatican official, signed a letter saying that the case needed more time and that “the good of the Universal Church” had to be considered in the final decision, according to church documents released through lawsuits.

What is important to consider is that these are not isolated incidents. The unrelenting faucet of facts keeps dripping and shows no signs of slowing. The more people speak out – the more other victims are emboldened to do so.

The Papacy of Benedict XVI is essentially over. He has lost his moral authority and the trust of Catholics and others worldwide. Each day he remains, the Pope strains the credibility of the Catholic Church and exacerbates the public relations nightmare. If Pope Benedict XVI loves his church, he will step down.

This is the type of disaster that can happen when hard-headed social conservatives run a church. They are so unwilling to compromise, change their ways or accept reality – that they continue to repeat the same devastating mistakes – even as they go through contortions to play the victim or blame others for their own personal failures.

Not even finger pointing at innocent gay people will work this time. The Pope is left swimming on his own in the middle of the ocean without a life-vest. As the sordid and tawdry headlines continue unabated, this most uninspiring pontiff is headed towards inglorious infamy.

The New York Times Reports

As hundreds of new allegations of sexual abuse surface in the German church alone, a top Vatican official acknowledged Tuesday that, with only 10 people handling such cases, his office might not be adequate for the task. The ratio of 10 people handling 300 cases a year did not go over well in some quarters. “It seems like an extraordinarily paltry effort, given the scope of the crisis,” said David Clohessy, the national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.

It is amazing that the Catholic Church had the manpower and funds to vehemently oppose marriage equality in Maine and other places, yet they only have 10 people to investigate the avalanche of sexual abuse charges. This is all you need to know about the sexual morality and priorities of this Pope. It is absolutely insulting and disgraceful for the Vatican to throw money at marriage referendums, while underfunding child abuse investigations. Shame on the Pope.

BBC Report:

The head of Ireland’s Catholics has apologised for his role in mishandling the case of a serial child abuser.

As a priest in 1975 Cardinal Sean Brady was at meetings where children signed vows of silence over complaints against paedophile priest Fr Brendan Smyth.

He said he wanted to apologise to “all those who feel I have let them down”.

Meanwhile, Pope Benedict XVI has announced that on Friday he will sign his long awaited pastoral letter dealing with paedophilia in Ireland.

He said in recent months the church in Ireland had been “rocked by the crisis of abuse of minors” and hoped his letter would “help repentance, healing and renewal”.

And these people are going to preach to me about sexual morality? Please.

From The New York Times:

A singer in an elite Vatican choir and a jailed Italian public works executive who served as a papal usher were let go by the Vatican this week amid allegations that they were involved in what prosecutors believe was an organized network of gay prostitution, Italian news media reported.

Ghinedu Ehiem, a Nigerian who sang in a choir that performs at St. Peter’ Basilica, was dismissed after the center-left daily newspaper La Repubblica reported Wednesday that he had procured men, including seminarians, for Angelo Balducci, a former member of the board of Italy’ public works department who was arrested and jailed last month on corruption charges.

After his arrest, Mr. Balducci was removed from his Vatican post in The Gentlemen of His Holiness, an elite group of ushers who serve at the Apostolic Palace when visiting dignitaries meet the pope, the ANSA news agency reported Thursday, citing Vatican sources.

Well, there’s not much I can really add to this. We have a rabidly homophobic Pope hell-bent on imposing his anti-gay views. Under his leadership there has been an upswing, particularly in America, of political activism in an effort to “purify” the church and keep discrimination against LGBT people legal.

Yet, the Pope’s lovely home is turned in to a red light district by staffers when he presumably is not looking. This is what you can sometimes expect with Vatican sexual values – which are often based on repression, the closet, secrecy, hypocrisy and dishonesty.

It is time Rome reevaluates its stringent rule book and stops living in Medieval times. They should join the modern age by:

1) Allowing openly gay priests

2) Allowing female priests

3) Allowing priests to marry

Until these common-sense changes are made, expect more tawdry headlines and shocking scandals, of all kinds, to flow from the musty chambers of the Vatican.

Last week, TWO’s Evan Hurst reported that House Minority Leader John Boehner joined right wing Catholics to attack the Human Right’s Campaign’s Harry Knox as an “anti-Catholic bigot” and called on him to resign from President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Why?

They were allegedly upset that Knox correctly stated that the Pope is hurting people in the name of Jesus by actively working against honest sex and contraception education in sub-Saharan Africa, and is thus contributing to the spread of HIV/AIDS on that continent.

The attacks on Knox over old comments seemed oddly timed and forced – as if those leveling the bogus charges were desperately groping to find a political issue to serve as a smoke screen to distract the world. It was unclear at the time why these pious henchmen wanted us to avert our gaze.

Well, today the other Prada shoe fell.

It became sickeningly obvious why the Church needed to quickly find a Boogie Man. A new child abuse scandal rocked the Roman Catholic Church in Pope Benedict’s XVI native Germany. According to The New York Times:

The widening public scandal began last month with allegations that three priests at the elite Canisius Jesuit high school in Berlin had sexually abused students in the 1970s and ’80s. In the midst of a steadily growing uproar over the handling of that case, the German magazine Der Spiegel published an article that said nearly 100 clerics and laypeople had been suspected of abusing children and teenagers nationwide since 1995.

Der Spiegel said that at least 94 clerics and laypeople had been suspected of abuse since 1995, based on a poll of 27 of Germany’s 30 Catholic dioceses. The magazine’s cover this week was illustrated with an image of a priest reaching suggestively under his robes.

Making matters worse for Rome, Irish victims of the church’s rampant sexual abuse wrote a letter to the Pope asking him to take responsibility for the church’s concealment of child molestation by forcing out bishops implicated in the decades of cover-up.

Exactly, why hasn’t The Pope done this already? Why isn’t punishing child rapists a top priority, rather than the Vatican’s outrageous campaign against marriage equality, where consenting adults commit their lives to each other?

The way I see it, conservative Catholics, such as Boehner, Thomas Peters of the American Papist Blog, Dr. Kevin Roberts of Catholic Families for America, and Larry Cirignano of Faithful Catholic Citizens tried to pick a fight with America’s largest LGBT rights groups last week over condoms only days before the German report and Irish letter were publicly released. They knew this week’s shameful news would turn stomachs and they needed to find a scapegoat.

Fortunately, their conjured anti-gay dust-up fooled no one and the world’s eyes are firmly fixed on the real issue — the church’s continued exploitation of youth and the heartbreaking cover-ups.

Before the Roman Catholic Church preaches about values and points fingers, I believe it must clean up its own house. At the moment, it has no moral authority to talk about sexual matters – from condoms to birth control to homosexuality.

The Vatican has a priority problem. I suggest it take a break and spend the next year devoting all of its energy, time and financial resources to healing the hurt it has caused to its own members. Indeed, Germany has lost 3 million Catholics since 1990. Today’s tawdry revelations won’t help reverse this trend. Nor will launching fake attacks on LGBT people and leaders as a diversion from perversion that has brought the church to its knees.

It’s that time again, apparently.

No, not for movies or whatever, but (I think?) those are coming soon.*

Peter LaBarbera has been nominating people for his inaugural “Gay Grinch” award**. He’s picked all kinds of people, like our own Wayne Besen, some couple in California whose Halloween decorations aren’t to Pete’s liking, Rachel Maddow…just, you know, random people who have messed with Peter’s mind over the past year. Or whenever. The meaning of the Grinch reference isn’t clear, unless, in Peter’s mind, it’s actually the gays who have stolen Christmas. Anyway, it’s boring, who cares?

The point is that Joe Jervis (another Grinch nominee) is having his own contest, and unlike The Peter, Joe believes in deciding the winner democratically, so here are your choices for the Anti-Gay Douchebag Bigot of 2009:

Bishop Richard Malone
Carrie Prejean
Harry Jackson Jr.
Maggie Gallagher
Matt Barber
Peter LaBarbera
Pope Benedict XVI
Tony Perkins

Now, they’re all fame-seeking malcontents, obviously (especially Ratzi), so we don’t really want to encourage them, but this is funny, so GO VOTE.

*I know, I know, I need to turn in my gay card and be put on probation.

**Ceremony to be held at some hitherto unannounced bathhouse/leather convention, I presume. Stay tuned, I guess?

In a harsh rebuke of the increasingly extreme United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, a major Catholic health group backed the Senate’s health-care compromise on abortion. The Catholic Health Association said that the most important thing that Congress could do was pass a bill that would cover the nation’s uninsured.

Needless to say, the uncompromising, obstinate Bishops proclaimed the compromise “morally unacceptable.

I suppose the Bishops believe that leaving people uninsured to die in the cold in order to use health reform as a platform for abortion politics is the moral and ethical route.

The current crop of conservative Bishops appear hardhearted and clueless to the concerns of real people who desperately need help. They seem to believe that priestly polemics will solve the health care problem in this country.

“The Catholic Health Association does not represent the teaching of the Catholic Church on the non-negotiable defense of innocent life,” the conservative Catholic activist Deal Hudson said in a statement, calling the association’ move “utterly offensive.”

The difference between The Catholic Health Association and ideologues like Hudson, is that the hospitals actually deal with uninsured sick people. Well, Hudson and his ilk also deal with sick people – but in their case, a good shrink and medication is all that is needed.

Good for the Catholic Health Association for standing up to the extremists in the Catholic Church and the Republican Party.

In other Catholic News:

The Associated Press reports that two more Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland have resigned in the wake of a damning investigation into decades of church cover-up of child abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese.

The bishops, Eamonn Walsh and Ray Field, offered an apology to child-abuse victims as they announced their resignations during Christmas Mass on Friday. Priests read the statement to worshipers throughout the archdiocese, home to a quarter of Ireland’ 4 million Catholics.

In his Christmas sermon, Archbishop Martin said the church for too long had placed its self-interest above the rights of its parishioners, particularly innocent children. “It has been a painful year,” he told worshipers. “But the church today may well be a better and safer place than was the church of 25 years ago ‚Äî when all looked well, but where deep shadows were kept buried.”

Of course, we know this is nonsense. Until the Catholic Church does the following, there will be abuse:

1) Allow openly gay, sexually active priests. Doing so will attract psycho-sexually healthy gay men who will not use the priesthood to hide their sexuality – and in many cases use their power to take advantage of the young and vulnerable. Out gay priests will look for age-appropriate partners.

2) Allow women into the priesthood. This would immediately break up the good old closet boys network.

3) Allow married heterosexual priests. Just as it is imperative to attract sexually mature gay people, it is just as key to attract sexually healthy heterosexuals. Having a team of immature, pent-up priests is a recipe for disaster.

Until these rule changes are made, the Vatican is just spinning us.

Photo by Samantha Contis

(Weekly Column)

A feature article in this week’ New York Times Magazine refers to Princeton professor Robert P. George as the “intellectual architect” of the extreme right. This is hardly an honor, considering the main competition for “Values Valedictorian” is Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Mike Huckabee. One also has to consider admiration comes from the likes of George W. Bush and FOX instigator Glenn Beck, who calls George “one of the biggest brains in America.”

George’ primary accomplishment has been denying gay couples the right to marry, by forming an unholy political union between conservative Catholics, like himself, and Evangelical Christians. He is the chairman of The National Organization for Marriage, the group that most recently worked to strip marriage rights from LGBT couples in Maine.

Quite frankly, I’m hardly impressed with George’ cognitive abilities. If one looks at the numbers in Maine, his allegedly intellectual arguments against same-sex marriage failed miserably in cosmopolitan Portland and in Orono, home of The University of Maine. His primary talent, it seems, is to trick the unschooled and easily fooled. Given this reality, George is more back woods propagandist than deep professorial thinker.

Indeed, one of the simplest ways to succeed in America is to rabble rouse and scapegoat. It takes no brains to peddle belligerence and play the gay card by pandering to people not playing with a full deck. George exploited an undereducated constituency and fed them red meat, which is no more than a cheap shortcut for those incapable of the more difficult task of bringing Americans together. In a diverse nation paradoxically frightened by diversity, demagogues such as George are a dime a dozen and unworthy of praise.

What George offers is sophistry disguised as scholarship. For example, his opposition to gay people having sex or marrying rests on his version of “natural law”, allegedly based on “practical reason.” In the Times Magazine article, Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali parrots George’ idea of “natural law” at a press conference, with George at his side, cheering on his prot?©g?©.

“Sexual relations outside the marital bond are contrary not only to the will of God but to the good of man,” said Rigali. “Indeed they are contrary to the will of God precisely because they are against the good of man.”

The “good” of which men (and women) might Rigali and George be referring to?

Is it the teenage boys who were molested in the Catholic Church because such conservative ideologues insisted on turning gay men into sexually repressed and emotionally stunted shells and then placing them in the priesthood?

Is it “good” for the gay youths who commit suicide in disproportionate numbers because men like George and Rigali tell them their love is inferior?

Perhaps, they can illuminate how such “practical reason” was “good” for Welsh rugby legend Gareth Thomas who came out of the closet this weekend after hiding his sexual orientation for two decades.

“Sometimes I felt so alone and depressed,” said Thomas. “I’ve stood on so many cliff edges. I used to go to the cliffs overlooking the beach near our cottage in St Brides Major and just think about jumping off and ending it all…I was like a ticking bomb. I thought I could suppress it, keep it locked away in some dark corner of myself, but I couldn’t. It was who I was, and I just couldn’t ignore it any more.”

Maybe George can explain how his philosophy was somehow “good” for Gareth’ wife Jenna, who is about to be divorced?

If “practical reason” has proven one thing, it has shown the closet, particularly for the Catholic Church, to be destructive on so many levels. George has demonstrably failed to articulate how openly gay people harm heterosexuals or how living a lie helps homosexuals be more productive members of society. His entire presentation is a ruse meant to rally the rubes.

Interestingly, George believes in restricting marriage because, in his view, only a husband and wife can experience, “comprehensive unity” and become a “one-flesh union.” He blatantly ignores that millions of people can achieve this state only through homosexual relations. By forcing GLBT people to conform to his views and presumably marry the opposite sex, he is creating the conditions to achieve the polar opposite of what he claims is necessary for a healthy marriage.

George is equally disingenuous in claiming that marriage is based on procreation. These days, the vast majority of people marry for love. Many couples choose not to have children, while others are unable to. To suggest otherwise is to proffer an incoherent and intellectually dishonest view of modern marriage.

George is an intellectual lightweight without an original idea in his head. His claim to fame is organizing like-minded conservatives and providing a veneer of education to mask his goal of discrimination. This is not the pride of Princeton, but a paean to prejudice.

Additional TWO Commentary by Evan Hurst

Scott Long of Human Rights Watch reported today that The Vatican said it opposes discriminatory penal legislation against gay people during a United Nations panel discussion on sexual orientation. Long says the people in attendance were “stunned”. According the Vatican’s statement, delivered by Father Philip Bene, legal attach?© to the Holy See’s UN mission:

“Thank you for convening this panel discussion and for providing the opportunity to hear some very serious concerns raised this afternoon. My comments are more in the form of a statement rather than a question.

As stated during the debate of the General Assembly last year, the Holy See continues to oppose all grave violations of human rights against homosexual persons, such as the use of the death penalty, torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. The Holy See also opposes all forms of violence and unjust discrimination against homosexual persons, including discriminatory penal legislation which undermines the inherent dignity of the human person.

As raised by some of the panelists today, the murder and abuse of homosexual persons are to be confronted on all levels, especially when such violence is perpetrated by the State. While the Holy See’s position on the concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity remains well known, we continue to call on all States and individuals to respect the rights of all persons and to work to promote their inherent dignity and worth.”

Religious “morality” is once again on open display with the news that more than 500 people have filed claims accusing Jesuits of sexually abusing children across the Northwest.

The Jesuits claim to have so far spent about $25 million and have settled 200 sex-abuse claims. In bankruptcy documents the Jesuits claim to have $4.8 million in assets and liabilities of $61.8 million.

The amount of money they are spending to clean up this moral mess is staggering. And, all the cases aren’t even settled!

In other news, the New York Times reports on the disgusting cover-up of sexual abuse in Connecticut and the lengths the Catholic Church went to in their unholy efforts to conceal documents related to the cases. This went to the top of the chain and even included Bishop Edward Egan.

Interestingly, while settlements on child seduction, abuse and rape are occurring, The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue is in a tizzy over a PETA ad that features model Joanna Krupa holding a crucifix over some dogs with the caption, “Be an angel for the animals. Always Adopt. Never Buy.”

“The fact is that cats and dogs are a lot safer in pet stores than they are in the hands of PETA employees,” Catholic League President Bill Donohue said in a statement. “Moreover, pet stores don’t rip off Christian iconography and engage in cheap irreligious claims. PETA is a fraud.”

How typical of Donohue and his useless organization, which is no more than a PR firm for hypocrisy. The Catholic League always finds fluffy pet issues, no pun intended, instead of fixing the moral depravity within the church’s walls. Deflection is the specialty of The Catholic League, which is used to stifle genuine reflection and having to face up to the unspeakable facts.

Millions of dollars are being shelled out because of priest scandals and the main thing Donohue is concerned about is finding a sensational issue so he can get his mug on TV.

Outrageous, isn’t it?

It shows you what The Catholic League truly values – and it’s not families. I’m not saying one has to agree with the PETA ads. But, I am pointing out that Donohue and the Catholic hierarchy in general under Pope Benedict has their priorities skewed.

I never again want to hear a Catholic priest lecture GLBT people on sexual morality. There simply is no moral authority for these priests – or Donohue – to discuss sexuality of any kind. It is time they clean up their own act before pointing fingers.

Short of murder, there is nothing worse than child sexual abuse – the primary sin of this Church. Given their sordid history, it is astounding that they would even consider entering the debate on allowing healthy gay couples the freedom to marry.

Have these “holy men” no shame? Have they no sense of decency and honor? I think the answer is self-evident.