Holy See, Holy Do

"Any attempt to draw the Pope and the entire Church into the abuse scandal is an act of violence and a sign of incivility. Benedict's story, his life and his writings, speak for themselves."

-- Archbishop Rino Fisichellal, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, on the revelation that the Catholic Church hid the sexual abuse conviction of a Bavarian pastor and that one-time Archbishop of Munich Joseph Ratzinger, known now as Pope Benedict XVI, had knowingly funneled that pastor from parish to parish before he was arrested

Bill Maher once called the Catholic Church the Bear Stearns of organized pedophelia -- too big to fail. At the height of the priest abuse sex scandal here in the states, I might've agreed -- and admittedly, the church is so massive, so firmly and historically entrenched in world culture, and so damn good at subterfuge when it comes to hiding its own sins that I seriously doubt that anything could actually bring it down. But the disease of rampant and serial sexual abuse of children by priests is apparently much more virulent than the Vatican would ever be willing to come right out and admit, and the scandal is now at the point where the Pope himself has been implicated in it.

Sure, it's barely raised an eyebrow among the somewhat myopic U.S. media -- the news legs of the controversy having seemingly run their course years ago -- but what's going on right now in Europe is, in reality, much more damaging to the Catholic Church as an entity than anything that unfolded in America, both openly and secretly, over the past few decades. That's because Europe is Catholicism's castle keep; if it's proven that priests there wantonly indulged in sex with young boys and that the Catholic power structure covered it up, the Vatican won't be able to dodge the bullet by shamelessly pinning the blame for such behavior on the endemic evils of American culture.

The fact is that many European Catholics are now staging a revolt -- demanding to know why, at face value, the church seems to have been running the world's largest illegal operation designed specifically to put pedophiles in contact with potential victims while hiding any crimes they might be committing. It's almost as if, as Louis C.K. once jokingly uncovered, the whole "worshiping God" thing is incidental to the church's mission of having sex with young boys. Stateside Catholics were forced to come to terms with the rotten underbelly of the priesthood when the whole thing blew up in the church's face several years ago. Now it's Europe's turn to realize that the Vatican can't continue doing what it's been guilty of for years: compartmentalizing a serious, criminal problem that in reality reaches all the way to the core of the Catholic Church.

The priest sex abuse scandal was always much bigger than the United States, and it just touched the Pope -- which is sort of ironic, when you think about it.