Pope-o-phobia Hysteria

When I was a child we had a document that my grandmother had gotten in her youth (Dallas Texas around 1900--there were still gun fights and cowboys on the streets then in this town). The paper told of a secret ritual that all Catholic priests were charged to undergo (the news of this had been smuggled out of the Vatican by a run away priest) it was one of their top secrets they guard so carefully (so carefully my grandmother had a copy).  In this ritual the priest cut himself with his dagger (all priests carry daggers of course) and vowed to do what? I don't remember but something I doubt very much that anyone would put in a ritual of a chruch, something to lie cheat and steal and fool everyone with their insane papist idiocy.

The Pope o phobia hysteria now running rampant reminds me of this early ant-Catholic propaganda. 


The sharks smell blood and they are circling. On every message board every pimply faced atheist 18 year old is calling for the pope to be shot or put in prison and have the Vatican dismantled as though the Pope is a U.S. Citizen and under the jurisdiction of American jurisprudence. It's hard to access any real facts as most of the trumped up crap spouted about the issues reminds me of the kind of anti-Catholic hysteria my grand mother echoed from her girlhood in the 1890s.

Come one come all atheists, this is the final battler and let's get in there and give the Catholics as blood a nose as possible. This is the perfect opportunity to get your licks in. Let's just pause to look at some of the opportunists taking their turn at character assassination against a figure they usually can't get near.

There's the London Evening Standard. There's a paper you hear about a lot. I've never heard of it. It's hardly the Guardian. I wonder what's on their page 3 (page is where the Guardian and the Sun usually keep their photos of naked women--both papers are fringe, the London Times is the real major paper). What's interesting is what else si in the standard. They use a picture of the that could be on a Republican campaign commercial if the Pope was as democrat--borrowing a page from American dirty campaigning to put the "opponent" in the worst possible light.


The article asserts that as early as 2001 the Pope issued a edict to be kept as top secret and stored in the vault of Bishops at all times. This said to put the interest of the chruch ahead of those of the children. Odd that I can't find this story in any major main line publication. it reminds me of the dagger and pledge thing above.

there is a satanist blog that seeks to set the record straight, satanists never never never harm children, of course not, but the Catholics have always done it... yadda yadda yadda.

then of course there is the most prestigious news source of all, something called "Raw Story" that asserts a number of allegations. Raw Story also carried advertising from an organization to make Pot legal. But that wouldn't have anything to do with their biases would it now? There's one where the Title of the blog is The Catholic Cover up that wouldn't be a biased source would it now?

Vatican controled Catholic News Service reports that:

Vatican authorities emphasized that it was the pope who, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, pushed for harsher measures against abusers and made it easier for the church to defrock them.

But of cousre their biased, they are working for the Pope, they are probably abused themselves. Of cousre those sources that are out to get the Pope, they are objective, fair and reasonable.

here is probalby waht is closer to the truth on the 2001 document:

On March 27, the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, ran the full texts of two landmark documents that in 2001 placed the sexual abuse of minors by priests among the most grave sins, and established that allegations be handled by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then headed by Cardinal Ratzinger.

from the same source, Catholic News Service.

"What of the role of Pope Benedict? When he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith he led important changes made in church law: the inclusion in canon law of Internet offenses against children, the extension of child abuse offenses to include the sexual abuse of all under 18, the case by case waiving of the statute of limitations and the establishment of a fast-track dismissal from the clerical state for offenders," Archbishop Nichols wrote. (Ibid)

NY Times Report by Laurie Goodstein in March 24 2010 talks about issues from 1974 and the most serious thing she mentions for Ben 16 is his failure to step in a affirmatively report the offenders. That was 40 years ago. The document mentioned in connection with the case are written by Bishops in America it's not clear that Ben 16 even knew about the case. That is still true. There is no validation for this secret Child Abuse approval policy reported in the tabloids.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.
The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.
The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.
In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.

But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger

protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.

These calls to arrest the Pope are so totally idiotic. The Pope is the head of a sovereign nation, Vatican city. He is not under the jurisdiction  of American law. Now this is hard because I applauded the arrest of Chilean Dictator Pinochet. But mass slaughter of 30,000 people just might be thought of as violation of International law, not reporting sexual molestation to the authorities in an American city might not be. In principle I oppose the move to try and arrest a leader of a foreign nation for violation of a local law or a national law of another country. How would it be if the Taliban tried arrest Obama (even though the Republicans would love it) or the Sandinista's tried arrest Regan (I would love it). It wouldn't work. We can't allow such goings on in the international community.

Another aspect of the problem is the hysterical people who are talking the opportunity to rail against Christianity on this count have exaggerated the reasons for Pope's sloth to act 40 years ago. The Pope-o-phobes put it bluntly, he wanted the chruche's interest to come before that of the children. I have seen atheists on message boards speak of "systematic molestation of Children by the institution" which is clearly a mountebank and a sham. In other words, to put it bluntly, it's an idiotic hysterical attitude. The reasons are not as simplistic as "we don't want negative publicity." The reasons sited from the actual documents involved (ala NY Times, see link above) have to do with the offenders age, poor health, state of repentance and rehabilitation.

I am the first to admit that the cove up stupid whatever it's reason. I agree that the crime of sexual molestation of child is hideous and evil, and even a total moral outrage when done by someone the child is told to trust. But these Pope-o-phoebes are working themselves into a frenzy. They are not using any sort of discretion, they are sharks at a feeding frenzy. Many seem to think that working up emotionalism about the crime justifies the extreme measure for which they call, with no reasoning about the length of time that passed, or the record of the Pope in the mean time.