For God's Sake, Grow Up

You come to A Grey Area for the light-hearted whimsy, but you stay for the relentless religion bashing.

The Catholic Church is really getting it at the moment and all sorts of defences have started surfacing. My job as a loud-mouth atheist wouldn't be being attended to, if I didn't arc up and refute some of the egregious crap coming from certain quarters.

Miranda Devine wrote in defence of the Pope in the Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday, with the title of her article being “Evildoers, not Pope, to blame”. One of her demands was that we should stop picking on the head of the institution. (Let's just wait for her input on the F3 traffic jam and the NSW roads and traffic Minister, to see how consistent she is on that point.) But, leaving consistency aside, her main thrust is - It's not the Pope's fault - it's those fantastically clever paedophiles that tricked him.

“... for too long church leaders allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by paedophiles, who are by nature, brilliantly deceptive.” SMH. April 15, 2010. p.13.

She then tells us that the Catholic Church has been the most vocal and upright in the fight against moral breakdown in our society and that the Pope has been penitent, humble and frank about how this issue needs to be addressed.

Total and utter bullshit.

Miranda needs to see a 3 minute file story that played on Hungry Beast this week Catholic Church Sex Scandal  that logged the Catholic Church's response to paedophilia.

Paedophilia being brought up as a problem, was first documented in... drum roll... the year sixty.

Yes - 60 AD.

A two thousand year paper trail of denial and stupidity.

It has been a routinely reported problem and universally brushed under the carpet. I particularly liked the part where a Cardinal Ratzinger (that name ring a bell?) recommended that it be dealt with using the highest level of Vatican secrecy. I think it's called the “Eyes-only, top-secret, don't tell anyone or we'll send out the Swiss Guard to kill you with the can-opener on a Swiss Army pocket knife” level of secrecy. I might not be right about that last bit, but to pretend that the Pope has been hoodwinked, is ridiculous.

The Church removes itself from the criticism of us mortals by claiming to be the moral authority on earth. Not only is this preposterous (at times it seems we are ethical despite the church, not because of it) they are manifestly unable to perform the job role they have described for themselves. As soon as you start to get into it though, you get shouted out of court for being disrespectful.

There is nothing more disrespectful than putting yourself into the position of authority and trust, violating that trust, and then pretending that nothing is going on.

Is the incidence of paedophilia higher, per capita, within the priesthood than it is in the general public?

If it is, is it because the environment is thick with defenceless fodder? Is it because the priesthood attracts people who wouldn't naturally compete too well in the real world? Is it because they then ask them to be celibate? Is it a heady mixture of lost souls, celibate losers, crazy ritual and systemic weirdness?

Let's pretend that it was another institution that was continually caught with its pants down. Imagine we were talking about an institution that is not protected by tradition and man's need to avoid the reality of death. Imagine if we were talking about a large, secular government body that kept getting repeated cases of child abuse surfacing. We'd tear it apart. We'd treat it like DOCS.

Devine blames modernity for the breakdown of morals and tempting these poor priests. She virtually quotes the Pope himself in his letter to the Irish Catholics last month,

“If paedophilia seems to be on the increase, it has been enabled by the eroticisation of our culture over decades, and even priests themselves are not immune.”

More incredible bullshit. Sixty AD they started to notice the problem! And, Miranda, in case you haven't noticed, the people coming forward to recount their abuse as children, are adults. See, there's a time delay there? See it?

It's not a young problem. It's a mature one.

The mature taking advantage of the the immature. A mature, secular society running up against an immature set of beliefs. Ancient problems being dealt with by people who have immature responses because they have been left in a state of adolescence by being, literally, cloistered.

Dear Church,

Take a good hard look at yourself and have the courage to grow up. In fact, do us all a favour and go away and die.