If one puts aside the moral bankruptcy of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy demonstrated by its many decades - possibly centuries - of protecting child rapists and sexual predators within the clergy, the Catholic leadership still comes up morally deficient in the way in which it has now thrown away the goal of social justice. Now, the sexual obsessions of the bitter old men in dresses at the Vatican and in bishoprics around the world (San Francisco's new archbishop is a case in point), trump what had been perhaps the Church's most noble endeavor: social justice for the down trodden and unfortunate. A letter to the editor in the Spokesman-Review sums up well the face of Catholicism has become under Benedict XVI and his Nazi like lieutenants:
A Catholic priest invented the term social justice in the 1830s and, for a time, especially from the 1930s through the 1970s, the Catholic Church was a refuge and a beacon for oppressed people, workers, peasants, women and minorities because the Sermon on the Mount was taken seriously as Jesus’ guide for living a spiritual life.
Unfortunately, the hierarchy of the church, and some of the laity, have visibly retreated from this role, and the public face of the Catholic Church now is that of a medieval institution whose only concerns are abortion, birth control, opposition to gay rights, the bashing of women and nuns, and the stifling of theological dissent.
The Catholic Church has acknowledged the broad consensus of science that homosexuality is innate, but that acknowledgment has not prevented it from oppressing gay people at every turn and doing everything in its power to prevent them from living fulfilled lives. That’s exactly comparable to kicking someone because he was born blind. Where’s the social justice in that? Where’s the “Jesus-inspired-life” in that?
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