The front page of the NY Times was fascinating on Saturday February 2, featuring, as it did, two stories, told from opposite points of view, with each capturing the abject failures of the Roman Catholic church and organized religion, in general to deal with the real, contemporary world.
On the far left side of the page was a story by Jennifer Medina & Laurie Goodstein about the unearthing of more documents attesting to the Catholic Church’s failure to even attempt to do the morally correct thing in dealing with the enormous pedophile abuse situation that has almost torn it apart.
What came to light ten years ago as a shocking revelation on a grand scale in the Northeast has now blossomed into an international pox on the Church and, unfairly, all its clergy.
Of course this didn’t start ten years ago. It has gone on since the beginning of recorded Church history. Incredibly it has been written about, illustrated and otherwise recorded throughout the history of the Church and still it persists. Why, maybe, because the basis of the clergy in the Church is not worship of God, but the accumulation of power. How else could this cancer have gone unrevealed and untreated for all thesecenturies? The power of the priesthood parallels the power of any totalitarian secret police force ever seen in the history of the planet.
We are told that the power of the Papacy is unrivaled and that the Pope speaks with the voice of God on matters of faith and morals. Must be some God, considering that the current Pope was in charge of the pedophile problem before he became pope and didn’t do squat about it.
What makes these men, and they are all men, there isn’t a single woman in the entire Church hierarchy, think that they can hide their acts behind the cloth? In fact they don’t. More to the point they don’t care to. The hubris of the cloth
priesthood, was thinking that they coukdn’t be touched, This is true, no matter how heinous the act. And yet these are the men who think they have a divine right to lead us along paths of morality, when the truth, is that they are men who can’t even lead themselves out of the swamp of degeneracy.
The real touchstone of disgrace is, that it isn’t the pedophiles that are the greatest sinners. These are men who are driven by demons, sometimes beyond their control to do what they do. No, the real sinners, the real degenerates are those who shield these pedophiles under the banner of controlling scandal. Better all the children should be abused than the Church should get a bad name. The enormity of this kind of idiotic thinking is almost beyond comprehension.
It goes without saying that all priests are not pedophiles and all Monsignors and Bishops are not enablers, but the problem seems to be that they are all under control of the Papacy, which throughout history, has made it its goal to protect the Church instead of its children. Its own actions have condemned the Papacy more than any accusation from any other source.
Given its actions or lack hereof the Church, having become a moral cesspool, has in fact, forfeited any authority to speak for anyone else in matters of morality.
That’s why the story on the far right column seems to flash across the page and slap us in the face. This story by Robert Pear, speaks to the attempts to compromise on the issue of medical coverage for women with regard to contraception. Hard to believe; over here the Church has abandoned its children to cadres of abusers and over there they are fighting a government edict that will be beneficial to all women because it offends the Church’s sense of morality. What sense of morality? This is a Church, that by its actions, has abandoned any right to speak to anyone’s sense of morality. This is a Church that doesn’t want to pay the bill for women’s health but doesn’t mind when public institutions have to pick up the check and uses a baseless moral argument to avoid its responsibility. This is a Church whose hospitals and colleges drink at the public troth, but feels that it is exempt from many obligations that their public competitors must support. Then it uses the phony excuse of morality to avoid its own obligations. This fight isn’t about morality. Ninety percent of Catholic women use or have used contraception. The concept of contraception being somehow immoral is as outmoded as not eating meat on Fridays.
In fact contraception is the strongest answer the problem of aides and when the Pope says otherwise, he is lying. It is also a solution to the Church’s other more complicated hang-up, abortion. I have no intention of dealing with the pros & cons of abortion here; suffice it to say, that people who use contraception don’t need abortions.
Of course the Church’s opposition to contraception comes from its support of the bizarre concept that any indulgence in sex except for the production of children is a “mortal sin.” It would follow that using a condom to prevent conception is as wrong as any other sex that didn’t produce children. The second part of the construction would make sense if the first part weren’t such malarkey. It’s basically contrary to human nature, in which the sexual urge is second only to the will to live, to expect that an urge as strong as sex will not be practiced for other than conceptive purposes. If one believes in God, why would one think he would create such an impelling urge and then forbid us to use it? God gave us logic to figure this out. The Church countered with faith to deny it. But I digress.
The point here is that a Church that has acted in such a way as to deny any acceptance of morality has no place denying, on the basis of morality, anything that is intended for the public good . The Church is guilty in the first instance and fraudulent in the second. All in all, positions from which it would be smart to withdraw. But no one ever said the Church was smart, only powerful.