I checked the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' blog on the papal visit this morning to see if my comment had been published. Not surprisingly, it has not and I suspect that it will never be published. I will continue to visit the blog from time to time and fully expect to only see servile and pandering comments that never take a serious look at the Roman Catholic Church's cancerous problems. In respose to my post, however, I did receive an interesting e-mail from a reader who is quite the European history buff and with whom I have had many exchanges on history. His message included some references to more dirty laundry the Church hierarcy pretends does not exist. In my opinion, in many ways, the Roman Catholic Church has to be one of the most corrupt and hypocritical institutions in the world. Here are my reader's comments:
Interesting comments on the Pope and the Catholic religion. It reminded me of an article I read a while ago in Le Nouvel Observateur, a French magazine from Paris, kind the French equivalent of Time, but that's a very rough comparison (maybe you know the mag?). Anyway, the comment about the church not doing any house-cleaning at the higher levels brought to mind the fact that after WW II, the church didn't do much house-cleaning or atonement for siding with the Nazis, and apparently, right up in to the 1970s, some catholic churches were used to hide clergy who should have been brought to trial for war crimes, but were protected instead by Catholic hierarchy.
I haven't looked, but there might be articles on the Net about this now. The Catholic Church has never taken responsibility for any of the crimes it's committed throughout the ages - no wonder some radical Muslims think that they're just getting back at what the West has perpetrated against them "in the name of Christ..." If there's no atonement for war crimes among the clergy, why should there be atonement for any other kind of abuse? They've always gotten away with it, and people's memories are just too short for the Church to be brought down. Maybe a better way to look at it is that if people don't seek justice, there won't be any. "The opium of the people" is still legal trade in many communities in the world. And not just among Catholics. Sad...
One story that looks at a rare instance of an apology by portions of the Catholic hierarchy can be found here. Sadly, as my reader points out, it is the exception to the rule: http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_yad/magazine/data5/jedwabne.html
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