News from The Associated Press

The future Pope Benedict XVI refused to defrock an American priest who confessed to molesting numerous children and even served prison time for it, simply because the cleric wouldn't agree to the discipline. The case provides the latest evidence of how changes in church law under Pope John Paul II frustrated and hamstrung U.S. bishops struggling with an abuse crisis that would eventually explode.

News from The Associated Press:

The Pope is busily pretending to be concerned about communicating with atheists (Link). I can speak for exactly one atheist. Make amends to the people who you and your organisation harmed before you try to tell atheists how to live.

'I never covered up abuse', says Archbishop Philip Wilson | The Australian

THE Catholic Archbishop of Adelaide, Philip Wilson, has defended his conduct during the past 35 years in response to allegations aired on ABC TV that he was involved in a "conspiracy of silence" about sexual abuse cases involving fellow clergy in NSW.

Archbishop Wilson maintained he had not mishandled or covered up sexual abuse cases during his time in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese, north of Sydney, in the late 1970s and 80s.

'I never covered up abuse', says Archbishop Philip Wilson | The Australian

We Can't Let the Pope Decide Who's a Criminal

It must be noted, also, that all the letters from diocese to Ratzinger and from Ratzinger to diocese were concerned only with one question: Can this hurt Holy Mother Church?

Slate:

Hitchens on the guilt of the pope in enabling the sexual abuse of children.

Hungry Beast: Catholic Church Sex Scandals

They would like us to think that this is a new problem caused by homosexuals and secularization of society but the Catholic Church is going to have to face up to the fact that they've had this problem from the start.

The 7 Craziest Things Ever Blamed on Homosexuals

In light of the Catholic church blaming homosexuals for the child rape they are committing, here are the 7 most inane, ridiculous and idiotic things that have been blamed on homosexuals. People in a position of power, including various world leaders and fundamentalist Christians, have been blaming the minority with the least amount of power in the state for a whole slew of insane problems that they were either responsible for or couldn't explain for a long time now. People don't seem to blame homosexuals for something unless they have an agenda to push, and that agenda is usually that of hate.

Link:

Pope's No. 2: Pedophilia linked to homosexuality

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said

"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," said Bertone. "That is the problem."

His comments drew angry reactions from Chile's gay rights advocates.

"Neither Bertone nor the Vatican has the moral authority to give lessons on sexuality," said Rolando Jimenez, president of the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation in Chile.

Jimenez also said no reputable study exists to support the cardinal's claims.

"This is a perverse strategy by the Vatican to shirk its own ethical and legal responsibility by making a spurious and disgusting connection," he said.
At least one of the highest-profile pedophiles in the Chilean church victimized young girls, including a teenager who became pregnant."

Many? Really? Where are the peer reviewed studies on this? Revelation and authority just don't cut it anymore guys. You have to come up with a hypothesis, your's is that gay people rape children, then gather all the evidence, not just eh evidence that supports your point. You have to analyse all the evidence and determine whether it supports your hypothesis. So, where's your evidence? These priests may very well have been gay but that is different to being a pedophile. Someone may very well be attracted to children of the same gender but that makes them a homosexual (same sex) pedophile (child fucker).

In the end it doesn't matter what anyone says to the Catholics. They are just trying to shift the blame for their own twisted lives and actions onto an easy target. They have been demonising minorities like to consolidate their power for years. They wont stop doing just because it is evil. They don't care about being evil in this world because they think that this world doesn't matter. all that matters to them is sucking up to their supernatural friends.

The "Pedophile's Paradise"

Alaska Natives are accusing the Catholic Church of using their remote villages as a "dumping ground" for child-molesting priests-and blaming the president of Seattle University for letting it happen.

Link:

One spring afternoon in 1977, 15-year-old Rachel Mike tried to kill herself for the third time. An Alaska Native, Rachel was living in a tiny town called Stebbins on a remote island called St. Michael. She lived in a house with three bedrooms and nine siblings. Rachel was a drinker, depressed, and starving. "When my parents were drinking, we didn't eat right," she says. "I just wanted to get away from the drinking."

Just WTF!? Why do people attend these churches? How could anyone still think that it is appropriate to hold anyone involved in this organisation up as a moral, community leader. Why isn't saying: "I'm a Catholic Priest" a social liability?

Bishop of Tenerife blames child abuse on the children

Bernando Álvarez said that there are 13 year olds who are wanting to be abused, and 'if you are careless they will provoke you'

There is outrage in parts of Spanish society following declarations made over Christmas from the Bishop of Tenerife, Bernardo Álvarez.

His comments were that there are youngsters who want to be abused, and he compared that abuse to homosexuality, describing them both as prejudicial to society. He said that on occasions the abuse happened because the there are children who consent to it.
'There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what's more wanting it, and if you are careless they will even provoke you', he said.

Read more:

... every lemon meringue pie, every velvety wrinkle in the Pope's cassock, all just taunting and teasing and tantalizing you, begging you to stick your penis in them.

LOL - PZ Myer's Comment:

Which part of "Don't fuck children" do priests not understand. If a 13 year old came up to them and pestered them for a machine gun, would they give it to them? No! Why not? Because you're the adult and you know it wont end well. How can these people not see this.

Enough already! Apologize and fix the problems with your system instead of trying to blame everyone else.

To Sinead O'Connor, the pope's apology for sex abuse in Ireland seems hollow:

When I was a child, Ireland was a Catholic theocracy. If a bishop came walking down the street, people would move to make a path for him. If a bishop attended a national sporting event, the team would kneel to kiss his ring. If someone made a mistake, instead of saying, "Nobody's perfect," we said, "Ah sure, it could happen to a bishop."

It's excellent to see someone not pulling any punches. If we don't push this home we will just be seeing another round of child abuse cases in 20 years time. What ever is wrong with the catholic system needs to be repaired. This wont happen while they refuse to take responsibility for their actions and keep trying to deflect blame onto others or saying they will have a little pray and it will all go away. It's not going away this time. Catholics need to get in and retake their church from child abusers.

O'Connor goes on to say:

Benedict's apology states that his concern is "above all, to bring healing to the victims." Yet he denies them the one thing that might bring them healing -- a full confession from the Vatican that it has covered up abuse and is now trying to cover up the cover up. Astonishingly, he invites Catholics "to offer up your fasting, your prayer, your reading of Scripture and your works of mercy in order to obtain the grace of healing and renewal for the Church in Ireland." Even more astonishing, he suggests that Ireland's victims can find healing by getting closer to the church...

Link:

Vatican blasts anti-Catholic 'hate' campaign

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican heatedly defended Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday, claiming accusations that he helped cover up the actions of pedophile priests are part of an anti-Catholic "hate" campaign targeting the pope for his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

Vatican Radio broadcast comments by two senior cardinals explaining "the motive for these attacks" on the pope and the Vatican newspaper chipped in with spirited comments from another top cardinal.

Link:

They really just don't get this:

They are claiming to have moral authority over 1/6th of the planet.
They claim that one can only be good through submission to their pope.
They claim to have been guided by their god through their pope.
Yet, something self-evidently wrong to anyone who isn't a creepy 50 year old muslim, having sex with children, did not result in being excommunicated from their church.

They insist on sticking to their story that sexuality and sexual urges can be prayed away. This flaw in logic and ethics reveals itself in a number of ways:
1) The shuffling around of child abusers instead of banning them from all contact with children. They honestly believed that these people would not offend again. This is totally at odds with systems in place in Australia where by a sex offender is never allowed to have contact with children again. If you can't get a blue card you can't teach or mind children. If they were serious about protecting children they would have sacked the offending priests and called the police immediately. I don't believe in god/s and I know to do that.
2) Their insistence that being gay is a sin and that the sexual orientation model is flawed. They presume to tell two adults what they can do in the privacy of their own bedrooms whilst protecting child abusers from the law. They claim moral authority, standing in a church, standing in front of the parents of an abused child, getting a hard on while the choir boys are singing, yet somehow they don't understand that this is wrong. I would have been too ashamed to breath!
3) They insist that they can instruct people on sexual issues such as the use of condoms, divorce, virginity of girls and extra marital affairs while they are raping children. They are probably sitting there with the residue and blood of injured children on their cocks while lecturing other people on sexual issues. WTF?!

Then their leaders have the audacity to accuse people who are trying to stamp child abuse out of society of being anti-catholic. If it is anti-catholic to not want children sexually abused then sign me up.

The mind boggles!

At Vatican Service, Persecution of Jews Is Invoked

ROME - A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church - which have included reports about Pope Benedict XVI's oversight role in two cases - to the persecution of the Jews, sharply raising the volume in the Vatican's counterattack.

Link: NY Times

A leading advocate for sex abuse victims in the United States, David Clohessy, called comparing criticism of the church to persecution of the Jews "breathtakingly callous and misguided."

"Men who deliberately and consistently hide child sex crime are in no way victims," he said. "And to conflate public scrutiny with horrific violence is about as wrong as wrong can be."

Hey Vatican! Dig Up!

These people are ridiculous. They just cannot get it. Their arguments from moral authority are totally worthless and useless. They took their moral authority and flushed it down the toilet when they enabled child rapists year after year then showed no sign of remorse. They have this model in mind that you can take a pedophile, pray at him for a while and his sexual drives will magically go away.

U.S. Bishops Quietly Reinstate Accused Priests : NPR

U.S. Bishops Quietly Reinstate Accused Priests : NPR

While the Roman Catholic sexual abuse scandal unfolds in Europe, the Catholic Church in the U.S. is under renewed scrutiny.

In the wake of its own scandal almost a decade ago, the U.S. church says it has reformed its policies for handling sexual abuse allegations and will remove from ministry every priest who is credibly accused of abuse.

They are trying to foist the blame onto atheists in the SMH (see a couple of posts ago) and all the while they were generating the next crop of broken people by sneaking pedophiles back into positions of power.

Cardinal Pell to the rescue!!!

Cardinal Pell tipped to tackle Church's sexual abuse scandal

IRISH and British media, and Catholic Church officials, are speculating that Australia's Cardinal George Pell will be sent to clean up the mess over church abuse in Ireland.

In his pastoral letter to the Irish people, the Pope wrote: "I intend to hold an apostolic visitation of certain dioceses in Ireland, as well as seminaries and religious congregations."

The Belfast Telegraph and British newspaper The Independent reported Cardinal Pell could be called on for help during the abuse scandal.

But a spokesman for Cardinal Pell said he had not heard anything about the visitation teams to Ireland.

Link: The Australian

Here's my hit prediction. He'll go over to Ireland and spread more anti-secular hatred. Link: SMH Here he is accusing atheists of never giving to charitable causes. This explains why atheists have vast wealth stacked all over the world, controlled by an unelected structure in a city state somewhere in Italy... wait, that's not atheists!

We are atheists. We sponsor 2 kids through World Vision. Not for supernatural reward but because it is the right thing to do. We have much. Two little girls go to school because of us. One in Chad (Muslim country) and one in Vietnam... dunno what Tan's views on religion are. It doesn't matter. They are going to school and have a chance at a better life because of it. we don't know what they will make of it.

The church says it spends it's tithes on charity. That explains why they have vast wealth because spending every penny on charitable works makes you vastly rich.

The Catholic church might believe their own spin but I don't. Hard working, community minded Catholic people achieve charitable actions despite the influence of their church.

Only God Can Fire Pope Benedict After Scandals

As outrage mounted over the latest Catholic Church sex scandal, writer Christopher Hitchens called for the arrest of Pope Benedict XVI, and singer Sinead O'Connor said the pope should face a criminal investigation.

Link:

Come on Pope. Sinead O'Conner said walk. Out you go.

If only God can appoint or fire a Pope, and God is omniscient and omnipresent, then God must approve of child abuse.

Do Twilight, Harry Potter open door to the Devil?

THE appointment of a new exorcist by Sydney's Catholic Church precedes a warning by a senior clergyman that generation Y risks a dangerous fascination with the occult fuelled by the Twilight and Harry Potter series.

Julian Porteous, the auxiliary bishop of Sydney, warns that pursuing such ''alternative'' relaxation techniques as yoga, reiki massages and tai chi may encourage experimentation with ''deep and dark spiritual ideas and traditions''.

Link SMH:

Why does crap like this get in the paper? What could possibly be gained by giving idiotic ideas like this the credibility of printing them in the paper?

We could have used this print space to further dig into the rape culture of the catholic church instead of giving them a platform for making deranged excuses.

Why don't they stand up and take a bit of fucking responsibility for their own actions. Something like: "Lots of Catholic Priests raped and destroyed the innocence of children. We're gonna find every one of these bastards and excommunicate them. Then we're gonna gather up all of these people we broke and look after them for the rest of their lives with the billions of dollars a year that we are given by people who attend our churches and the vast government tax breaks we receive."

Instead, we get an "it's you're own fault for doing yoga".

Fuck Off!

Vienna Boys' Choir caught up in sex abuse scandals

The most famous choir in the world has been caught up in the wave of paedophile scandals sweeping Germany and Austria, with eight former choristers denouncing their teachers in the past few days.

An open letter from the management of the Vienna Boys' Choir to parents expressed regret at the incidents, which were recounted by former singers now aged between 40 and 70.

Roger Boyes (no really!) reports:

The reporter's name just has to be made up.

Anyway, the Vienna Boys' Choir. Of course! That would have been a total shag-fest for your bog standard Catholic rock spider.

The Pope Is Not Above the Law - Hitchens

One by one, as I predicted, the pathetic excuses of Joseph Ratzinger's apologists evaporate before our eyes. It was said until recently that when the Rev. Peter Hullermann was found to be a vicious pederast in 1980, the man who is now pope had no personal involvement in his subsequent transfer to his own diocese or in his later unimpeded career as a rapist and a molester. But now we find that the psychiatrist to whom the church turned for "therapy" was adamant that Hullermann never be allowed to go near children ever again. We also find that Ratzinger was one of those to whom the memo about Hullermann's transfer was actually addressed. All attempts to place the blame on a loyal subordinate, Ratzinger's vicar general, the Rev. Gerhard Gruber, have predictably failed. According to a recent report, "the transfer of Father Hullermann from Essen would not have been a routine matter, experts said." Either that-damning enough in itself-or it perhaps would have been a routine matter, which is even worse. Certainly the pattern-of finding another parish with fresh children for the priest to assault-is the one that has become horribly "routine" ever since and became standard practice when Ratzinger became a cardinal and was placed in charge of the church's global response to clerical pederasty.

Slate Article:

The Catholic church is running out of excuses on the child abuse front.

Focus is on Benedict in sex abuse scandal

Germany: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger aware of transfer of a known paedophile in 1980. More than 170 former students in Catholic schools make sexual abuse allegations.

Link:

This might finally be starting to stick to the leaders of the Catholic church. It starts to look more and more like the rape of children was widely known of by church leaders.

The Pope Ignored Child Rape. THE POPE

The New York Times reports that Cardinal Ratzinger (aka THE GUY WHO IS NOW THE POPE), as head of the organization that was supposed to investigate and defrock molester priests, personally ignored cries for help from Milwaukee in 1996 when Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy was engaging in a 200-child no-holds-barred rape-a-thon. Oh yeah and the kids were deaf.

Skepchick link:

Pope's letter protects church, not its victims

Michael Nugent:

Having read the full letter, the following seems clear:
1. The Pope's main priority is to protect the church, not its victims
2. The Pope wrongly blames secularism for priests raping children
3. The Pope's apologies are incomplete and his appeals are self-serving
4. The Pope's "concrete initiatives" are a distraction not a solution
5. The Pope is evading the church's responsibilities to civic society

Is this religion teaching people to be good?

Link: