Quote of the Day: AndrewSullivan on Catholicism’s Crimes Against Humanity

My first post today looked at the horrors coming out of Ireland involving the discovery of the bodies of at least 800 babies buried in a mass grave in a cesspool of a Catholic home for unwed mothers.  A home that treated the pregnant mothers, many mere girls, horrifically and their children even worse. All because the unwed mothers - a number of whom had been raped - failed to conform to the uptight, sexually obsessed rules laid down by the bitter and sexually frustrated  old men in dress both at the Vatican and in bishoprics across the globe.  Andrew Sullivan, who unlike myself cannot let go of his Catholic upbringing and see the true horror that is the institutional Roman Catholic Church summed the moral bankruptcy of the Church.  Here are excerpts:

A mass grave for eight hundred children, buried with no dignity, no humanity, no trace of decency. And the mass grave may well have been facilitated by rampant, disgusting and callous neglect.

Let us call this what it is: a concentration camp with willful disregard for the survival of its innocent captives, a death camp for a group of people deemed inferior because of the circumstances of their birth. When we talk of mass graves of this kind, we usually refer to Srebrenica or the crimes of Pol Pot. But this was erected in the name of Jesus, and these despicable acts were justified by his alleged teaching. 

To my mind, these foul crimes against women and children, along with the brutal stigmatization of gay people as “objectively disordered”, remain a testament to how the insidious, neurotic and usually misogynist fixation on sex has distorted and destroyed Christianity in ways we are only now beginning to recover from. For what we see here is the consequence of elevating sexual sin above all others, of fixating on human sexuality as the chief source of evil in the world, and of a grotesquely distorted sense of moral priorities, where stigmatization of the sexual sinner vastly outweighs even something as basic as care for an innocent child.

It seems to me that we have to move past the church’s current doctrines on sex if we are to fully seek justice for the victims of this pathology and if we are to ensure that never again is a phrase that actually means something. It is not enough to ask for a change in governance (and even that has been hard); what this evil signifies is the need to root out this pernicious obsession with sexual sin. This pathology – perpetuated by Benedict and the sex-phobic theocons – perpetuates the mindset that led to this barbarism. The nuns – and yes, this was abuse practised by women as well as men – did not ever seem to realize that Jesus himself was conceived, to all intents and purposes, out of wedlock – in a manner that may well have led his contemporaries to stigmatize him as illegitimate as well. They did not for a moment internalize Jesus’ emphatic insistence on the holiness of children as those most likely to enter the kingdom of Heaven. No, these precious images of God were consigned, after years of abuse and neglect, to unmarked early graves in a septic tank.

That is not a sign of a church gone astray. It’s a sign of a church given over to evil. A church that leaves young children to die of malnutrition and then dumps hundreds of them into a mass grave is not a church. It’s an evil institution that robs the word “church” of any meaning, and twists the Gospels into their direct opposite.

Sadly, Andrew finishes by arguing that the root problem is not Christianity itself.  He continues to be plagued, in my opinion, by the brainwashing of his youth.