End Private Catholic Priest Access to Minors

As I often note, I was raised Roman Catholic and went all in on being Catholic, not the least because I was desperately trying to "pray away the gay" given the psychological damage the Church's 12th century dogma on sexuality and homophobia had done to me. I first became an altar boy at age 8 and prior to Vatican II.  I remained one until I graduated from high school,becoming one of the :senior" altar boys along the way.  While I was never sexually molested, I understand why and how easy it would be for a predator priest to prey on altar boys in particular and also children in Catholic schools. The priest of that time - and perhaps still so - were treated as demigods and never questioned or challenged.  And making matters worse, women were NEVER allowed in the church sacristy - where priest and altar boys donned their grab for mass - other than to drop off laundered altar linens. If one were going to molest an altar boy, the church sacristy was the perfect venue, especially at an early mass with perhaps a single altar boy attending at mass. This ease and unquestioned private access to children and youth combined with the Church's sick dogma on sexuality, is, in my view, why the sex abuse problem in the Church has been so rampant and why boys were disproportionately targeted.  Without such private access, the abuse would been far less.  A piece in The Advocate argues that this private, unquestioned access to would be victims must end.  Here are excerpts:

Cardinal Walter Kasper, a liberal reformer in the Catholic Church, recently spilled the beans about the state of Pope Francis's shaky papacy, telling a German interviewer that, "There are people who simply don't like this pontificate. They want it to end as soon as possible to then have, so to say, a new conclave."

While Pope Francis is on thin ice with conservative Catholics, for a host of reasons, he is arguably one of the most politically shrewd men on the planet. The 82-year-old is showing signs he's aware that if his papacy comes undone it will be because of movements from the Catholic right, the faction of the Church that insists homosexual men in the priesthood are the root cause of the clerical sex abuse crisis.
 As one of the most powerful religious figures on the world stage continues to makes his clever, byzantine moves to slander all homosexual men as mentally deranged and in need of psychiatric intervention — via bullhorn, dog whistle or that Bergoglian amalgam of both — and all to save his own hide, it's time for lay Catholics, at least those who aren't stakeholders in global slander, to step up to the plate and nip the clerical sex abuse of minors in the bud. Namely, to help end all private priestly access to minors, including child and adolescent participation in the sacrament of confession.

Readily available statistics show that the vast majority of Roman Catholic priests are not child molesters and in and of themselves present no danger to children and teens. But the church structures that enable grown men's private access to minors are demonstrably a danger to the young, and for continuing that reality, priests can be held to moral account.  Ultimately, it is ordinary Catholic parents, not the bishops, priests, and assorted lay Catholic power brokers/hangers-on who have the power to end private priestly access to minors, not merely by ending their children's participation in the sacrament of confession, but by putting that decision in writing to their parish priests, copied to their local bishops.

Biases, positive or negative, are a far cry from peer-reviewed social scientific data. With attorneys general in various states investigating Catholic dioceses, and with more clerical sex abuse scandals propping up in every corner of the globe — Australia, Chile, Germany — is it asking too much of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to, at minimum, provide the American public with some hard social scientific data, from objective non-Catholic sources, on child conscience formation to justify ongoing private access to minors by Catholic priests? Or will Catholics, indeed the American public at large, content themselves with yet another "oversight board" or "safe practices model" every time another clerical sex abuse scandal hits the news cycle, especially in light of the recent admission by German Cardinal Reinhard Marx that Catholic Church officials simply destroyed documents on child sexual abuse to cover-up for the crimes of priests?

Of course, there is a rather simple alternative that all Catholic parents can take who wish to instill gospel values into their children and teenagers, and to ensure their kids can look to the saints of history, official and unofficial, as role models. Be they parents in same-sex or opposite-sex relationships, single, liberal, conservative, or what have you, the safe alternative for Catholic parents is this: reading, praying and talking together as a family about life, about the virtues, and about the importance of examining conscience on a daily basis. Absolutely none of that requires a level of personal intimacy with strangers, and most certainly not the kind of intimacy that attends, especially for impressionable minors, calling a grown man outside of the family "Father."

If we can confront the degrees to which those of us who identify as Catholic sustain, by active commission or unexamined patterns, the ecclesial structures that are still, at present, endangering children and teens while serving as a springboard for the slander of innocent adults, we can ensure that future generations will look back on this one and feel what should come naturally — a sense of total mystification that we ever tolerated this trash heap of sexual abusers, enablers, and assorted slanderers for one second. 

Apologists for Religion are the Problem

Bill Maher, Reza Aslan, Richard Dawkins (Credit: HBO/Malin Fezehai/AP/Akira Suemori)

Throughout history religion has unleashed untold hate, misery and bloodshed.   Yes, some religious groups engage in charitable works, but even then many engage in proselytizing at the same time.  It's always about winning others over to their belief systems and often punishing those who don't yield - e.g., the Salvation Army's anti-gay policies and past rejection of gays needing shelter.  Meanwhile, we see ISIS demonstrating just how evil fundamentalist religion can be even as anti-Muslim Christians forget Christianity's own ugly past that has included the Inquisition, the extermination of the Cathars in France and many other acts of genocide against those deemed to hold heretical beliefs.  Yet despite this horrible track record we still see apologist defending religion, including Reza Aslan whose book (which I read) calls into question some of the main manufactured storyline of the Christian construct of Christ.  A lengthy piece in Salon looks at the refusal of apologists to open their eyes.  Here are excerpts:

Bill Maher’s recent monologue on “Real Time” about the failure of liberals to speak out about the routine atrocities and violations of human rights carried out in the name of religion in the Muslim world has unleashed a torrent of commentary, much of it from progressives advocating more, not less, tolerance of Islam.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who sided with Ben Affleck against Maher in a follow-up segment a few days later, calls ISIS rebels, in an op-ed, “barbarians” who “give all Islam a bad name,” and asks us to take into account the religion’s diversity, lest we slip into “Islamophobic bigotry.” Fareed Zakaria, in his Washington Post column, cautions us to recall that Islam, Christianity and Judaism once peacefully coexisted, but acknowledges that Islam suffers from a “cancer” – extremism that incites acts of terrorism. This he views, though, as a problem of “Islam today.”

One pundit in particular, though, has busied himself opining on Maher and nonbelievers in general — Reza Aslan, Islam’s most prominent apologist of late. Delivered via multiple media outlets, his remarks, brimming with condescension, tinged with arrogance and laden with implicit insults to thinking people, deserve special scrutiny for one main reason: among well-intentioned liberals who don’t know much about religion, his words carry weight.

Aslan accuses the benighted critics of religion of a far more grievous misapprehension: the assumption that words mean what they actually mean. Here I’ll quote him at length.

“It is a fallacy to believe that people of faith derive their values primarily from their Scriptures. The opposite is true. People of faith insert their values into their scriptures, reading them through the lens of their own cultural, ethnic, nationalistic and even political perspectives. . . .  After all, scripture is meaningless without interpretation.

 Aslan is essentially taking a postmodernist, Derrida-esque scalpel to “scripture” and eviscerating it of objective content. This might pass muster in the college classroom these days, but what of all those ISIS warriors unschooled in French semiotic analysis who take their holy book’s admonition to do violence literally? As they rampage and behead their way through Syria and Iraq, ISIS fighters know they have the Koran on their side – a book they believe to be inerrant and immutable, the final Word of God, and not at all “malleable.” Their holy book backs up jihad, suicide attacks (“martyrdom”), beheadings, even taking captive women as sex slaves.

Moreover, the razor-happy butchers of little girls’ clitorises and labia majora, the righteous wife-beaters, the stoners of adulterers, the shariah clerics denying women’s petitions for divorce from abusive husbands and awarding sons twice the inheritance allowed for daughters, all act with sanction from Islamic holy writ. It matters not a whit to the bloodied and battered victims of such savagery which lines from the Hadith or what verses from the Koran ordain the violence and injustice perpetrated against them, but one thing they do know: texts and belief in them have real-life consequences. And we should never forget that ISIS henchmen and executioners explicitly cite their faith in Islam as their motive. Tell that to Derrida – or Aslan.

Not just belief in the Koran leads to mayhem, though. Open the Book of Leviticus (in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament) and read the prescriptions of death (often by stoning or burning) as punishment for, among other things, cursing your parents, committing adultery, practicing bestiality (with mandatory slaughter of the unwitting animal as well), engaging in prostitution or sodomy, worshipping another god or taking God’s name in vain, and being the (female) victim of rape. The New Testament is somewhat less vicious, but even gentle Jesus, meek and mild, warned in Matthew (10:34): “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” and preached “unquenchable fire” and damnation for sinners.

That the faithful have always been acting on the words in their holy books may not accord with how Aslan would like us to see religion, but it is hardly news.

[I]ntentionally trying to obscure cause and effect where faith is concerned, as Aslan does, is morally reprehensible, is insensitive to the victims, and provides cover for their butchers

The problem with religion lies not with, as Aslan would have it, interpretation – postmodern or otherwise – but with, for starters, the founding texts themselves. The canonical writings of Islam, Christianity and Judaism all contain a plethora of macabre fables and explicit injunctions for vile, sadistic behavior that no civilized person would or should accept, but which far too many do take as literal truth.

The so-called “New Atheists,” including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, have tried to do the opposite: get people to examine religion and help them understand it as innately backward, obscurantist, irrational and dangerous. Their aggressive secularism has, of course, stirred controversy and resentment. It was bound to do so. For millennia, the faithful have held the high moral ground virtually unopposed.

Aslan said much more in his interview worthy of refutation, but what transpires through all the rhetorical dodges, whitewashing and clever distortions of fact he (and others defending religion) have offered us since Maher delivered his anti-Islamic monologue is not that one faith is better or less violent than another, but that religion itself is to blame. Religion, in interfering with the free exercise of our critical faculties, in setting out an outlandishly untrue history of the cosmos and humankind’s position in it, and in purporting universality that some are willing to die and kill for, is more than just what the physicist Steven Weinberg called “an insult to human dignity;” it is, in our age of weapons of mass destruction and increasing global instability, a threat to us all.

[R]eligion must be dumped, ushered out of the public arena and back into the private, personal realm for those still inclined to harbor it or too weak to do without it. No thinking person need feel pressured into condoning or excusing faith-based brutalities out of well-meaning but incorrect liberal sentiments.

Nonbelievers need to approach faith as a subject like any other, one we can talk about and criticize without fear of causing offense – or, in the case of Islam, concern for our physical safety.

This is in fact our constitutional right. The First Amendment forbids Congress from establishing an official religion and protects free speech – including speech that offends the sentiments of believers. If we disbelieve what religion’s canon tells us, we need to say so openly, and in mixed company, pointing out that no rational person could believe it or accept it as true and valid, were it not for indoctrination, immaturity, willful abandonment of reason, fear, or simple feeblemindedness.
We can also cease displaying knee-jerk respect for those who propagate faith. 

There's more, but in sum, the piece makes a case that I have tried to make often: religion deserves no deference nor do its adherents regardless of their particular faith.  Logic, reason and intellect should hold the "godly" accountable for their atrocities and daily abuse and discrimination against others. 

U.S. Pulls Embassy Out of the Vatican

I have long thought it a farce that the United States - not to mention many other countries - has an embassy to the Vatican in recognition of the Mussolini/Pope Pious XII brokered deal that created the fiction that the Vatican is a separate sovereign nation.  The Vatican is the headquarters of a church, plain and simple and if the U.S. were to be consistent, there should be embassies for Islam - perhaps in Mecca - and other world religions.  Thus, it make sense that the U.S. is closing its separate freestanding embassy to the Vatican and down grading it to the status of an annex to the Embassy to Italy.  A far better move would be to simply close the embassy to the Vatican completely and relegate the Catholic Church to the status of other world religions.  Needless to say, far right American Catholic are NOT happy campers. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the move:

Citing security concerns without naming a specific threat, the U.S. State Department is planning to shutter its embassy to the Holy See inside the lush Villa Domiziana overlooking the Circus Maximus and Palatine Hill in central Rome.

The embassy, which has been in operation since 1984 when Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II signed an accord, will essentially be swallowed up by the larger, more influential U.S. embassy to Italy.

After the move to the American embassy to Italy, scheduled for January 2015 when remodeling work is expected to be completed, the embassy to the Holy See will inhabit a small annex with a separate entrance, but it will be far less independent than it is in its current position across town. 

The move is not sitting well with conservative Catholics who prefer to maintain diplomatic distance from United States policy on issues in direct defiance with Catholic teachings, including same-sex marriage and abortion. Vatican expert John Allen, who first broke the news of the downsize this week in his column in the National Catholic Reporter, quotes a former American ambassador to the Holy See calling the move “a massive downgrade.” . . .  Though unconfirmed, the Holy See ambassador is reportedly being shunted to an apartment not far from the embassy.

Creating a larger American diplomatic compound on Rome’s swishy Via Veneto will follow the lead of other major countries that have also consolidated their diplomatic properties. Israel has always had consolidated embassies, even sharing staff and services. In 2006, the United Kingdom moved its embassy to the Holy See to its embassy to Italy grounds, creating a similar uproar among British Catholics who wanted to maintain diplomatic distance. A few years later the Netherlands followed suit. In 2011, Ireland closed their embassy to the Holy See entirely, and rely on visiting envoys to keep up diplomatic ties.

The Vatican has not publicly commented on the reports of the American diplomatic consolidation, but given Pope Francis’s own reform-minded approach to running the Catholic Church, it is unlikely he will object to the shake-up.