The Vatican Simply Just Doesn't Get It

Over the weekend I looked at the Vatican's incredible insensitive - can we say down right stupid - move in equating the sexual abuse of children by priests as equally heinous with the ordination of women as priests. Maureen Dowd, with her typical verbal flare, took on this idiocy in a New York Times op-ed column yesterday. Until such time as the Roman Catholic Church gets over its Medieval views of sex and the inferiority of women, I suspect that more and more Catholics will listen less and less to the Church's hypocritical and sexually obsessed moral lectures. Add that to the still ongoing disclosures of sexual abuse and high clergy cover ups of it and it all equates to waning Church influence in the developed and educated parts of the world. Indeed, Catholicism is headed for a third world religion status. Here are some highlights from Dowd's column:
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If the Vatican is trying to restore the impression that its moral sense is intact, issuing a document that equates pedophilia with the ordination of women doesn’t really do that.
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The church still believes in its own intrinsic holiness despite all evidence to the contrary. It thinks it’s making huge concessions on the unstoppable abuse scandal when it’s taking baby steps.
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The casuistic document did not issue a zero-tolerance policy to defrock priests after they are found guilty of pedophilia; it did not order bishops to report every instance of abuse to the police; it did not set up sanctions on bishops who sweep abuse under the rectory rug; it did not eliminate the statute of limitations for abused children; it did not tell bishops to stop lobbying legislatures to prevent child-abuse laws from being toughened. There is no moral awakening here.
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In a remarkable Times story recently, Laurie Goodstein and David Halbfinger debunked the spin that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been one of the more alert officials on the issue of sexual abuse: “The future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction.
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In The New Republic, Garry Wills wrote about his struggle to come to terms with the sins of his church: Jesus “is the one who said, ‘Whatever you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest, you did to me.’ That means that the priests abusing the vulnerable young were doing that to Jesus, raping Jesus. Any clerical functionary who shows more sympathy for the predator priests than for their victims instantly disqualified himself as a follower of Jesus.
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I cannot begin to understand the warped thinking of the Church hierarchy - and I am glad that I can't comprehend it since it is utterly sick.