Misplaced Catholic Church Priorities

Several news stories today serve to underscore the severely misplaced priorities and sensibilities of the Roman Catholic Church. The first is a story from the Belfast Telegraph that reports on the outrage from the victims of clerical sexual abuse in Ireland in response to the Vatican's do nothing approach to bishops and high clergy who knowingly covered up the sexual abuse of children and youth - literally for many decades. While the Vatican's supposedly "unprecedented" meeting with all 24 bishops from Ireland caused many to have high expectations that at long last corrective action might occur, the reality has been more crocodile tears from Pope Benedict XVI and no meaningful punitive action toward guilty bishops. Here are some highlights:

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Victims of clerical sex abuse last night accused the Pope of “washing his hands” of the scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church in Ireland. Abuse survivors condemned the Pope Benedict XVI for not acknowledging that senior clergy covered up decades of sickening abuse.

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They said the Pontiff's unprecedented two-day summit with the 24 Irish bishops in the Vatican in Rome was “a charade” that had achieved nothing. . . . in a Vatican statement, the Pope specifically failed to acknowledge the cover-up or formally apologise for the abuse — leading to widespread condemnation from victims last night.

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The Pope also failed to sack under-fire Bishop of Galway Martin Drennan — or even formally accept the resignations of other bishops, who were criticised in the Murphy Report for their mishandling of cases of sexual abuse. The Pontiff also ignored the failure of the Papal Nuncio to co-operate with the Murphy Commission's investigation into abuse in Dublin.

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Maeve Lewis, of support group One in Four, hit back and said the Pope's response was inadequate. “It is deeply insulting to survivors to suggest they were abused due to failures of faith, rather than because sex offending priests were moved from parish to parish, and those in authority looked away while further children were sexually abused,” she said.

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Even as the Vatican found itself unable/unwilling to take justified punitive action against clerics guilty of criminal offenses or at a minimum acting as accessories to crimes, elsewhere the Catholic Church continued its anti-gay jihad and in the case of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., threw children under the bus rather than comply with the District's soon to be effective gay marriage laws. At the Vatican, Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna made the statement that public officials who recognize the separation of Church and state and openly support same-sex marriage cannot consider themselves to be Catholic. Indeed, the good cardinal said that such officials needed to be excommunicated. Here are highlights from the Boston Pilot, a leading Catholic newspaper:

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It's impossible for the Catholic faith and support for putting homosexual unions on equal footing with marriage to coexist in one's conscience -- the two contradict each other," said the note. Even more serious would be the case of a Catholic lawmaker who introduces a measure or votes in favor of a law that supports gay marriage, he said. "This is a publicly and gravely immoral act," he wrote.

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Cardinal Caffarra, who holds a number of positions in the Roman Curia including as a member of the Pontifical Council for the Family, the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Vatican's highest tribunal, known as the Supreme Court of the Apostolic Signature, wrote that the consequences of same-sex marriage would be "devastating."

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I guess the dear Cardinal doesn't believe being sexually abused wasn't devastating to abuse victims. Thus, the Church's position seems to be that covering up the sexual abuse of thousands of children and youth merits a slap on the wrist, but supporting gay marriage - something supported by legitimate medical and mental health experts - is grounds for excommunication. Something is seriously f*cked up in this analysis. As if anything else was needed to further confirm that the Catholic Church cares literally nothing for the welfare of children, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., announced that it has ended its 80-year-old foster-care program in the District rather than license same-sex couples to care for children needing a stable and loving home. Here are some highlights from the Washington Post:
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The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington has ended its 80-year-old foster-care program in the District rather than license same-sex couples, the first fallout from a bitter debate over the city's move to legalize same-sex marriage.
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The church and some experts said the city's measure has narrower exemptions for religious groups than other same-sex marriage laws across the country, particularly when it comes to requiring benefits for the same-sex partners of employees. City officials knew of no other faith-based groups that said their city contracts were in jeopardy.
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The Catholic Church seems Hell bent on marginalizing itself in the developed world and becoming a third world religion where ignorance and lack of education continue to leave members of the laity unable to see the failings and moral bankruptcy of the Church. Meanwhile, I hope the media will continue to shine the spotlight of day on the dark moral sickness of the Church leadership, including Benedict XVI.