More great moments in religion

UPDATE: The church jury has passed its verdict. This hero has been suspended for thirty days and told that at the end of that time he's going to have to publicly state his willingness to knuckle under. As a friend of mine put it, "confess, or call for "more weight.""

After the jury pronounced its sentence, Schaefer's supporters began overturning chairs in the courtroom — symbolizing the biblical story of Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers — and held an impromptu communion service.



Just so you don't think I'm singling out any one religion, here are a couple of highlights showing modern religions living up to their holy principles.

The most current first. Today a Methodist minister was convicted in a religious church of violating church principles by performing a wedding ceremony for his son. You guessed the reason, right? The son married another man.

As reported in the Los Angeles Times:

The jury will reconvene Tuesday morning to decide the penalty for the Rev. Frank Schaefer of Lebanon, Pa., the Associated Press reported. Schaefer faces punishment ranging from a reprimand to losing his ministerial credentials.
. . . 
The United Methodist church, the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denomination, rejects homosexuality as contrary to Christian teaching and bars its clergy from performing same-sex marriages. However, gays and lesbians are allowed to be full members of the church.

Feel free to try to engage your brain in a system of reasoning that accepts gays and lesbians as "full members" while it disrespects and condemns their families. Just don't complain to me if it gives you the mother of all headaches.

********************

And another story I came across today relates to a crime we've seen all too much of in recent years: clerical child rape. The twist is that it's not just for Catholic priests anymore.

It's reported in Vice:

Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg—who is 63 with a long, graying beard—recently sat down with me to explain what he described as a “child-rape assembly line” among sects of fundamentalist Jews. He cleared his throat. “I’m going to be graphic,” he said.

. . .

 The victims, like those of Catholic priests, are mostly boys. Rabbi Rosenberg believes around half of young males in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community—the largest in the United States and one of the largest in the world—have been victims of sexual assault perpetrated by their elders. Ben Hirsch, director of Survivors for Justice, a Brooklyn organization that advocates for Orthodox sex abuse victims, thinks the real number is higher. “From anecdotal evidence, we’re looking at over 50 percent. It has almost become a rite of passage.”

Ultra-Orthodox Jews who speak out about these abuses are ruined and condemned to exile by their own community. Dr. Amy Neustein, a nonfundamentalist Orthodox Jewish sociologist and editor of Tempest in the Temple: Jewish Communities and Child Sex Scandals, told me the story of a series of Hasidic mothers in Brooklyn she got to know who complained that their children were being preyed on by their husbands.

It's tempting to say, as so many did in the Catholic rape crisis, that this is the actions of a minority of depraved individuals. The key here, though, as in the Catholic Church, is that the institution has stood together to protect the perpetrators and isolate and compound the crimes visited on the victims.

All we need now is aggressive action in behalf of these children.

Ratzinger Out: What Next?

Okay, so this isn't news anymore, but it's still a big deal. Ratzinger announced he's gone at the end of the month, which leaves a vacancy for god's vicar on earth.

The question is, what's next?

Who next to replace this venomous old man, the man who engineered and institutionalized the coverup of child rape by Catholic priests? The commissar who determined that to report the rape of a child by a priest would be a sin punishable by excommunication. (Thanks to Christopher Hitchens, who also pointed out in 2010 that "Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children.")

Still, it's not quite fair to say that the church conducted a coverup of child rape by its employees. No, not fair at all, because what the church actually did was a much greater crime than a mere coverup. A coverup would be one thing, but Mother Church not only concealed the rapes of children by her officials, Mother Church transferred the rapists to other parishes, other territories, where new victims would be delivered to them.

Yes, what the church did with the assistance of Ratzinger was much worse than a mere coverup, but the question now, as I said, is how to replace him, and with whom?

So a few of the details. The election is carried out in the College of Cardinals, but not every cardinal is eligible to vote, just those under eighty years of age. Of those, a majority were appointed by Ratzinger himself, and can be expected to follow his doctrinal conservatism. Of the voting members, only five are younger than sixty. One of those voting members, incidentally, is Roger Mahony (or to use the Catholic construction, "Roger Cardinal Mahony"), who was recently stripped of all his public duties because of his involvement in the coverup; he remains a member in good standing, and says, "I look forward to traveling to Rome soon to help thank Pope Benedict XVI for his gifted service to the Church, and to participate in the conclave to elect his successor." One wonders if he will take the opportunity to stay at the Vatican in an effort to duck extradition, should the United States seek to charge him for his crimes.

So the electorate is a group ranging in age from fifty-three to seventy-nine, with the great majority seventy or older. The eligible candidates are largely the same group. All of these men have been priests, bishops, and cardinals during the same decades that the church has concealed thousands of rapes by its priests. The John Jay Report, a 2004 investigation into the extent of child sexual abuse in the United States from 1950 to 2002, found that there were nearly 11,000 allegations of some form of sexual abuse by over 4,000 priests just in the United States. Of course, the problem extends to every continent.

Generations of priests committing crimes against children. Generations of bishops and cardinals who knew about these crimes and who failed to protect the children from their subordinates.

How many of these men who were priests, bishops, and cardinals during these years have clean hands? How many participated in the crime, either directly and actively or passively? Or, to put the question another way, where is the bishop or the cardinal who stood against the tide?

Can any bishop or cardinal be a credible choice? Can any person elected by this group be accepted as a legitimate moral leader?

This is a fucking surprise.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced President Barack Obama's compromise over whether to require religiously affiliated institutions to provide contraception to female employees, saying the proposal raises "serious moral concerns," according to a statement posted on its website late Friday.

"Today's proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deploy held convictions," the statement said.

First off, we all knew that the bishops wouldn't go for this, right? Contraception is inimical to the central value at the heart of the Catholic Church: the oppression of women.

The statement released by the Catholic Bishops conference said the proposal requires "careful moral analysis,"

CAREFUL MORAL ANALYSIS??????? Excuse me, but I'm not much interested in being schooled in moral analysis by a group that asserts a scruple against contraception but doesn't hesitate to transfer known child rapists around the country for fresh meat.

Catholic Diocese: Give us our freedom!

Freedom of religion is an important value in American society, right?

This week, if you're the Catholic Diocese of Burlington, apparently freedom of religion means the freedom to rape little boys with impunity.

It's hard to believe, but that's exactly what they're arguing. According to the Burlington Free Press, in a brief filed in the United States District Court this week, here's what they say: “The State cannot infringe on a protected freedom by imposing damages and penalties that the church cannot pay,” . . .

“If the protections of the First Amendment are to mean anything, the government should not be allowed to shut the doors of a church and put it up for sale,” church lawyers Kaveh Shahi and Tom McCormick wrote.

Yes, you read that right: if they are required to pay damages to the victims of their criminal conspiracy to cover up rapes by their employees, and to move their employees around to where they could rape more victims, that would be a violation of their freedom of religion.

In the view of their lawyers, making the church pay damages is taking away the right of Catholics to practice their religion.

Is it just me, or does this seem to put the Catholic seal of approval on child rape to an unprecedented degree?

Color me unsympathetic.

Who's the victim here?

The classic definition of chutzpah is of a defendant who murders his parents and then asks the judge to have mercy on him because he's an orphan.

We have a new contender.

According to today's Times:

ROME — The Vatican recalled its ambassador to Ireland on Monday, citing reaction to a recent Irish government report that said the Vatican had discouraged efforts by bishops to report cases of sexual abuse to the police.

If you're wondering, the report of the Irish government, over 400 pages, is very strong in its condemnation of the church's responsibility for the rape of children all around Ireland by Catholic priests.

Last week, the Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, denounced “the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day,” in a speech that represented the government’s sharpest-ever direct attack on the Roman Catholic leadership.

The prime minister told Parliament last week, “The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation.’ ” Mr. Kenny added that the Vatican had not listened “to evidence of humiliation and betrayal” with compassion, but had instead chosen “to parse and analyze it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer.” The Irish Parliament also passed a motion denouncing the Vatican’s role in “undermining child-protection frameworks.”

Any decent human being, or any organization with the slightest regard for human rights and human dignity, would be so humbled the the only possible response would be abject apology, or, in the case of the organization, to dedicate all its resources to compensate the victims and help them to heal.

Of course, the Catholic church, having no regard for human rights and human dignity, takes the opposite approach, recalling its ambassador in affront over the Taoiseach's comments, noting that, "the decision “does not exclude some degree of surprise and disappointment at certain excessive reactions.”

Yes, believe it or not, in this situation, the injured party is not the rape victims, or the government officials who stand up for them, but the criminals who were at the receiving end of "certain excessive reactions".

Chutzpah, anybody?

A tale of two bishops

How an organization treats is employees can be instructive as to that organization's core values.

Especially if that organization is the Catholic Church.

That thought is occasioned by the treatment of the bishop of a place called Toowoomba in Australia. You've probably never heard of the place, or the bishop, but the story is worth knowing about. That's because this particular bishop, William Morris, has recently been fired.

People get fired all the time, although not usually bishops. It's not unheard of for someone to be hired for a job, turns out not to be very good at it, so they get rid of him. No big deal, right?

In this case, though, the bishop got fired for a thought crime, the crime of entertaining the idea that the church might be well served if it considered the idea of women or married priests.

UPDATE: Last night the Vatican confirmed the resignation of Catholic Bishop William Morris and released him from the governance of the Diocese of Toowoomba in an official statement from Pope Benedict XVI.

“Catholics stand with the Pope as the successor of Peter and his role is to strengthen his brothers and to defend the apostolic tradition, and it’s now Catholic teaching that women cannot be ordained priests. That’s not an optional belief; it’s now part of the Catholic package,” said Cardinal Pell.

So that's pretty clear: the church has said that it will not tolerate disagreement when it comes to its core principles and values. It doesn't care what people think, to be in the club you need to think whatever they tell you to think.

It's a private organization, they have the right to set their own membership standards.

But who doesn't get fired?

How about serial justice obstructer and aider and abettor of child molesters Bernard Law?

Also a bishop who climbed the greased pole to cardinal, but when things got too hot for him not only did they not fire him, they arranged a sinecure for him in Rome. A guy who by rights should be spending the rest of his days in a dank prison, wondering when the next assault would meet him, instead gets to live in luxury in a palace, apparently with the high regard of the congregation.

Well, given that his current boss told bishops that they'd better STFU about what they knew of child rape or risk being kicked out, I guess it isn't surprising.

More evidence of the evil influence of the Catholic Church

This time it's thanks to Wikileaks.

Newly released, confidential U.S. diplomatic cables indicate that Ireland caved in to Vatican pressure to grant immunity to church officials in the investigation of decades of sex abuse by Irish clergy.

The Murphy Commission's requests offended many in the Vatican, the Holy See's Assessor Peter Wells (protect strictly) told DCM, because they saw them as an affront to Vatican sovereignty. Vatican officials were also angered that the Government of Ireland did not step in to direct the Murphy Commission to follow standard procedures in communications with Vatican City. Adding insult to injury, Vatican officials also believed some Irish opposition politicians were making political hay with the situation by calling publicly on the government to demand that the Vatican reply. Ultimately, Vatican Secretary of State (Prime Minister equivalent) Bertone wrote to the Irish Embassy that requests related to the investigation must come through diplomatic channels via letters rogatory.

This brings to mind a couple of thoughts:

First, it proves that Ratzinger's claims to being sympathetic to the victims of child rape by Catholic priests are a lie.

Second, it illustrates the danger of ceding government power to religious organizations. People who argue that the United States is a Christian nation, or that our law is based on Judeo-Christian principles, should consider how willing they are to sacrifice their children to child rapists in black robes.

Ratzinger on child rape: STFU

Yes, another day, another chance for the Catholic Church to come out strongly against child rape and for the child victims.

Oh, well. Maybe tomorrow.

Instead, today the Pope's anger was directed at news organizations that have the temerity to report on the crimes of the church and its employees, agents, and officers.

Warsaw Archbishop Kazimierz Nycz said the church should take notice of individual tragedies and treat sex abuse cases very seriously, but at the same time he criticized the media for "targeting the whole church, targeting the pope, and to that we must say 'no' in the name of truth and in the name of justice."

National Catholic Reporter vs. Ratzinger

Who would have thought?

I'm told that tomorrow's Palm Sunday (actually, someone told me yesterday that Easter is a week from tomorrow, so I just figured the Palm Sunday thing out), and even Catholics are starting to challenge Ratzinger to come clean on the child rape story.

The Holy Father needs to directly answer questions, in a credible forum, about his role -- as archbishop of Munich (1977-82), as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1982-2005), and as pope (2005-present) -- in the mismanagement of the clergy sex abuse crisis.

We urge this not primarily as journalists seeking a story, but as Catholics who appreciate that extraordinary circumstances require an extraordinary response. Nothing less than a full, personal and public accounting will begin to address the crisis that is engulfing the worldwide church. It is that serious.

They go on:

Like it or not, this new focus on the pope and his actions as an archbishop and Vatican official fits the distressing logic of this scandal. For those who have followed this tragedy over the years, the whole episode seems familiar: accusation, revelation, denial and obfuscation, with no bishop held accountable for actions taken on their watch. Yes, there is a depressing madness to this story. Time after time, this is a story of institutional failure of the deepest kind, a failure to defend the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a failure to put compassion ahead of institutional decisions aimed at short-term benefits and avoiding public scandal.

The strategies employed so far -- taking the legal path, obscuring the truth, and doing everything possible to protect perpetrators as well as the church's reputation and treasury -- have failed miserably.

It's high time that people within the church are taking this issue seriously, and holding the church management responsible for their crimes.