Catholic Church Equates Priestly Sexual Abuse of Children With Female Ordination

OMG! Sometimes I have to wonder what alternate universe the bitter old queens in Roman Catholic Church hierarchy dwell in. In its latest WTF move, the Vatican has formulated new rules that state that priests who rape little boys and ruin their lives are in the same criminal category (under church law) as are Catholic bishops who ordain women as priests and are the women who participate in ordination ceremonies. Yep, that's right: ordaining women is as bad as raping children. I always knew that the Church was seriously f*cked up when it came to all matters sexual and the hierarchy's abiding hatred of women (for a phenomenal analysis of this check out Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, which I read some years back), but this takes the insanity up a notch even for these folks. The old good news is that this insane move will likely undermine what little moral authority the Church retains and we will see more and more countries like Portugal and Argentina that utterly ignored the Church's protestations and demagoguery on the issue of gay rights and gay marriage. U.S. News & Report has a column that looks at this latest mind numbing insanity. Here are some highlights:
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I had to reread the first paragraph of the following story three times until I was sure I’d read it correctly. The Vatican believes that priests who rape little boys and ruin their lives are in the same criminal category (under church law) as are Catholic bishops who ordain women as priests and are the women who participate in ordination ceremonies. According to the Guardian:

The Vatican today made the "attempted ordination" of women one of the gravest crimes under church law, putting it in the same category as clerical sex abuse of minors, heresy and schism. The new rules, which have been sent to bishops around the world, apply equally to Catholic women who agree to a ceremony of ordination and to the bishop who conducts it. Both would be excommunicated. Since the Vatican does not accept that women can become priests, it does not recognize the outcome of any such ceremony.
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The penalty is the ultimate one issued by the church: excommunication. Of course excommunication can be appealed but it is rarely so. It comes at a time when the Anglican Church is moving closer to the ordination of female bishops.
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Oddly enough the revision which brought about an equalization of the penalties for female ordination and pederasty came while the Vatican was trying to toughen penalties for priests accused of sexually abusing young Catholics.
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Bob Felton tries to make some sense out of this lunacy over at Civil Commotion, but I'm sorry it is just plain f*cked up:
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Ordaining a woman to serve as a priest, like supporting gay marriage, arises, on the church’s terms, from something in the neighborhood of heresy. It is an error of belief, on a matter that the church considers settled. But child sexual abuse — again, on their terms — is an instance of human weakness.

This is a vital distinction. On the Vatican’s terms, making child sexual abuse akin to ordaining a woman priest elevates the gravity of the offense, raises it from the terrain of understandable human weakness to something near to heresy.

However clumsily and stupidly they’ve handled it, however repellent the misogyny, it is a step — again, from the Vatican’s perspective — in the right direction.
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Once again, why does anyone listen to these hateful nut cases? They are in need of serious mental health care intervention if they equate the ordination with raping children and youths.