Pope Goes the Weasel

Today's column for the Daily Banter takes a look at what's at first glance a real bombshell of a news story currently making the rounds.

Here's the opening shot:

"Since I get all my information these days from the always reliable Facebook News Service — basically whatever links my Facebook friends, in their infinite wisdom, decide to circulate and express an opinion about — I now know the real reason for Pope Benedict XVI’s hasty and startling resignation last week. Turns out he was about to be arrested."

Read the Rest Here

Assistant to the Quote of the Day

"People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to -- a psychopath. But that's not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster -- 14, 16, 18 -- is the seducer... Here's this poor guy, Sandusky -- it went on for years. Interesting: Why didn't anyone say anything? Apparently, a number of kids knew about it and didn't break the ice. Well, you know, until recent years, people did not register in their minds that it was a crime. It was a moral failure, scandalous -- but they didn't think of it in terms of legal things."

-- Father Benedict Groeschel, popular TV host and director of the Office for Spiritual Development for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, in an interview with the Catholic National Reporter (which has, for obvious reasons, since been taken down)

"Yes, suppose you have a man having, let's say, a nervous breakdown. We'll call him Fathe.. uh... Fra... Francis... um... Francis Bene... Benjamin... Francis Benjamin Goooorrrrriswold. Yes, Francis Benjamin Griswold. Now it's perfectly reasonable to believe that Francis Griswold would be a prime target, in his weakened emotional and mental state, for the advances of that most wily of sexual tempters -- a 14-year-old boy. Would you really call Francis Griswold a psychopath? Ha! I think not! Not so long ago, he wouldn't even be breaking any laws by succumbing to the... the supple, young flesh, smooth skin and tight hard muscles of that young siren."

Meanwhile, back at the offices of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York: "Yeah, thanks for doing us that big PR favor, asshole."

Just figured I'd take a minute out from all the political talk to bring you a feel-good story.

Now I'm going to go call Benson and Stabler and suggest they run a methane probe through Father Groeschel's basement.

Caption This Shit!

What appears to be the Catholic Church's version of the Andy Card-George W. Bush-"My Pet Goat" moment from the morning of 9/11.

Have at it, kids.

Quote of the Day

"Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relation between celibacy and pedophilia. But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relation between homosexuality and pedophilia. That is true. That is the problem."

-- Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's second-in-command

My favorite part of this quote is the amusingly vague "I have been told recently" line. Because when you're talking about a guy who believes he's in direct communication with God, you've got to wonder who exactly "told" him.

To her credit, Mary Elizabeth Williams over at Salon has put together a quick primer on the ongoing whack-a-mole-like game of deflection the Catholic Church has engaged in over the past several weeks -- the litany of boogeymen it's trotted out in an effort to deflect attention away from the real culprits behind the priest child molestation scandal.

Quote of the Day

"They were very... touching words for the victims."

-- Vatican spokesperson this morning on NBC's Today show, on Pope Benedict XVI's personal letter responding to the current priest sex abuse scandal

"In God We Trust"

The Catholic Church summed up pretty brilliantly by Matt Taibbi:

"When I see a Catholic priest chanting his ridiculous incantations and waving his holy smoke over someone’s gravesite or at a wedding, the vibe I get is exactly the same as the one I get watching a plumber groan and moan and babble gibberish about all the different things wrong with your kitchen pipes, when in reality all he had to do was replace a washer. It’s the same as picking up your car after an oil change and listening to the mechanic rattle off a list of charges totaling thousands for the nineteen extra things he looked at under your hood, just out of concern for your safety… And when you protest, no, there was nothing wrong with my alternator, I’m not paying for that, he tries to bullshit you — oh, yes there was, trust me, if we hadn’ta fixed that, your car woulda died on the highway within a week.

That’s all the church is. They’re a giant for-profit company using predatory salesmanship to sell what they themselves know is a defective, outmoded, basically unnecessary product. They’ll use any means necessary to keep their market share and if they have to lie and cheat and deflect and point fingers to keep the racket going, they’ll do it, just like any other sleazeball company."

That's just my favorite excerpt from a must-read piece that's as incisive as it is incendiary.

True Slant: Taibblog: The Catholic Church Is a Criminal Enterprise/3.27.10

Picture of the Week

From Alert Reader Joaquim, taken outside a Catholic center in Barcelona.

Hey, nobody can argue it's not truth in advertising.

Hear No Evil

The New York Times: Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed To Defrock American Priest Who Molested Deaf Boys/3.24.10

There are so many possible jokes here that it's time for another game of "Tasteless Comment Roulette" where you choose your favorite from the following or make up one of your own:

1. "I don't know, sounds like this guy was defrocked quite a bit to me."

2. "Hmm, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany choosing to look the other way while atrocities are being committed -- where have I heard that before?"

3. "Hear the one about the priest who molested a bunch of little deaf kids while the Vatican did nothing? Yeah, neither did the victims."

4. "Oh well, the pope can always keep with tradition and run off to Brazil if it looks like the law is closing in."

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.

Hot Under the Collar

Via Andrew Sullivan, the most amusing thing you'll see all day: an Amazon page offering host wafers, ostensibly for purchase by priests.

But scroll down after clicking the above link and take a glance at what was also bought buy those customers who frequently pick up the wafers. (Hint: look in the center of the row of items.)

I personally don't see what the big deal is. Both products can be used to give young boys their first "Communion."

Heaven and Head

Via Andrew Sullivan, the admirably honest logo for the Catholic Church's Archdiocesan Youth Commission, circa 1973.

Hey, don't say they didn't warn us what was going on.