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

Abandon All Pope

Today's column for the Daily Banter takes a look at what kind of changes we can expect for the Catholic Church in the wake of Pope Benedict XVI's decision to step aside. The short answer: not much.

Here's the opening shot:

"I suppose it would be too much to ask for the Catholic Church to simply close up shop once Pope Benedict officially steps down, eh?

The important thing to keep in mind in the wake of the once-and-future Joseph Ratzinger’s surprise announcement that he’ll be abdicating the papacy is that it’s likely going to change nothing about the Catholic Church. Yes, it’s an interesting and eyebrow-raising development, one that caps off a tumultuous eight year run for the current pontiff and the church in general, but let’s face it: Expecting that a new man at the top of the Catholic food chain will mean the sudden embracing of new ideas of right and wrong, of morality and modernity, would be sheer folly. The church has existed in its present state, for the most part impervious to human enlightenment and the march of progress, for centuries. Maybe the next pope will deliver the traditional canon and ancient edicts of Catholicism with the kindly smile, avuncular tone and all-around media savvy of John Paul II — rather than through the thoroughly creepy Galactic Emperor sneer Benedict has terrified the world with for almost a decade — but in the end the canon and edicts will be exactly the same. The messenger will change — the message will stay the same."

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.

Quote of the Day

"Anonymous decided today to besiege your site in response to the doctrine, to the liturgies, to the absurd and anachronistic concepts that your for-profit organisation spreads around the world."

-- Anonymous, via its Italian outlet, addressing the Catholic Church and claiming responsibility for the hacking attack that took down the Vatican's website yesterday

Scientology and now the Catholic Church -- what does that tell you?

By the way, I can see the t-shirts already: "Anonymous > God"

Goodbye, Purgatory

Somebody tweeted a link to this recent story yesterday afternoon along with the question, "Has the Catholic Church lost its mind?"

NBC 4 Washington: Girl Scout Troops Banned from Virginia Church/1.23.12

The answer to that is, of course, yes and no. Yes it's lost its mind, but no, not recently or anything -- because it never really had one to begin with, a fact which has been proven again and again over hundreds of years. We're lucky the church no longer has the imperial authority to wage actual blood-and-guts wars in the name of converting heretics to its way of "thinking," but it's still doing plenty of damage just by lobbing archaic edicts from the Vatican like psycho-bombs all across the globe. The Catholic power structure says birth control is verboten because the almighty creator of the universe says so and, surprise, hundreds of thousands -- possibly millions -- of unnecessary deaths and AIDS orphans in the Third World becomes a reality.

The only thing interesting about one Catholic church and school's audacious decision to target a bunch of Girl Scouts over the group's supposed link to Planned Parenthood -- and indeed the church's recent inserting of itself squarely into the ridiculous political fight over contraception -- is what it says about the entire organization's view of itself these days. Consider it a kind of subtle State of the Church address, and if you're listening closely you can hear exactly how the Catholic hierarchy, particularly in the United States, feels like its done its time and, in its own parlance, paid its penance after a metric ton of devastating press and lawsuit after lawsuit in the wake of the priest sex scandal -- and now it's ready to reassert itself as the moral authority that it is. That old Catholic swagger has returned in spades. The pride is back, baby.

The problem? The church may have conveniently forgiven itself -- what with being in the forgiveness business after all, especially when it comes to its own sins -- but most Americans haven't forgiven it, nor have they forgotten. Rick Santorum may be a beaver-shit crazy Catholic hardliner, one who hates birth control and who thinks Satan is making a play for the heart and soul of the United States, but he's part of a dwindling statistic: people who give a damn what the Catholic Church has to say about anything. Anything at all.

The Born Ultimatum

"Cousin Avi," who's a regular reader and commenter here and at Cesca's site, wrote a piece for his own blog yesterday that's getting a pretty good amount of traction -- and deservedly so. In it, he eviscerates the religious argument against providing co-pay free contraception to women, as laid out -- no pun intended -- in the Obama administration's Health Care Reform Act.

But that's really kind of burying the lede. In reality what he does is take on the entirety of the ridiculousness that is the Catholic church and its ongoing crusade to force humanity -- even those who don't count themselves among its ranks -- to submit to its wack-job dogma and the 2,000-year-old superstition that spawned it.

My favorite quote:

"If anyone believes the horrid, crushing ratbag of insane, morally repulsive gibberish that constitutes Catholicism, they are absolutely welcome to it. At the moment, the very instant, they demand that anyone else conduct any element of their life in accordance with that hogwash, they shall find themselves not merely opposed but crushed. There is a legal maxim that says one’s right to swing one’s arms about ends at the tip of my nose... and so it is with belief and conduct within the secular law: your right to pray ends when you order me to kneel, and your right to eschew birth control goddamn well ends when you tell me I must also abide by the restrictions you set for yourself."

Fuck yeah.

It's a must-read.

Veritas Nihilum Vincet: Stupid Jesus Freaks/2.12.12

Picture of the Week

From an official letter written in 1997 by the Vatican and issued to the bishops of Ireland, who at the time had proposed a new policy of reporting abusive priests to law enforcement. The basic translation: the Vatican is insisting that the current policy stay in place -- that the bishops keep cases of sexual abuses to themselves and within the church.

Evil fuckers.

Don't Bend Over for the Pope

I was gonna make this an upcoming Sunday Sacrilege, but it's too good to hold -- plus I get this impression that this is just another day at the Vatican.

(via The Superficial)

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

Quote of the Day

"I admit that I often feel a sense of injustice these days. Why is the church being excoriated? Isn't there also abuse elsewhere? And then I'm tempted to say: 'Yes, the media just don't like the church! Maybe there's even a conspiracy against the church?' But then I feel in my heart that no, that's not it."

-- Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna, doubling down on the victimization card on a day that saw coordinated verbal attacks on the media, specifically the New York Times, by the Vatican

Taibbi's right. It's just staggering to think that that's their defense: "Well, it's not like we're the only ones molesting kids."

And holy hell the sheer audacity it takes to blame the media for daring to uncover the fact that you've been raping little boys. The nerve of those guys in the press.

"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

Quote of the Day

"(Jesus Christ guides us toward) the courage that doesn't let us be intimidated by the chatting of dominant opinions."

-- Pope Benedict XVI during yesterday's Palm Sunday mass

The comment is a thinly veiled reference to the current shit-storm swirling around the pope as accusations that implicate him personally in priest sex abuse cases in both the U.S. and Europe continue to make headlines, with some now calling for his resignation.

It's so great to see the pope -- who as you know is the little guy in all of this and not the head of one of the richest and most powerful organizations in the world -- put everybody on notice that he won't be pushed around, not by the media and definitely not by a bunch of guys who were essentially gang-raped by priests as kids.

Man, arrogant defiance and a laughable attempt at claiming victimization. From the Catholic Church. Who'd have thought it?

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.

Could It Be... Satan?

Literally, "the devil made me do it."

The Times UK: Chief Exorcist Says the Devil Is in the Vatican, Blames Pedophilia Scandal on Satan/3.10.10

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."

Quote of the Day (Bonus Edition)

"People are not born homosexual, they become homosexual, for different reasons: education issues or because they did not develop their own identity during adolescence. It may not be their fault, but acting against nature and the dignity of the human body is an insult to God... Transsexuals and homosexuals will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

-- Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan at the Vatican Wednesday

Says the guy dressed like Liberace whose organization helped cover up thousands of cases of priests molesting little boys.