For Catholics, women priests are akin to child molesters

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Just in case you needed another reason to detest the Roman Catholic Church:

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 recognise the outcome of any such ceremony.

With all due respect to you Catholics out there, perhaps the Church you place as the intermediary between you and your God, the Church to which you confess your "sins," the Church that you allow to govern so many aspects of your lives, could do with some perspective, don't you think?

Then again, this is a Church that did its best to cover up the sexual abuse that was rampant in its ranks, a Church with a long and bloody history at the center of a bigoted and bloodthirsty religion, a Church that has long oppressed women (and so many others), so I'm not sure perspective of the kind we expect in civilized, liberal society is likely.

Pope complains about sex abuse investigation in Belgium

By Michael J.W. Stickings

From the AP:

The pope on Sunday called the raids carried out by Belgian police investigating priestly sex abuse "deplorable" and asserted the right of the Catholic Church to investigate abuse alongside civil law enforcement authorities.

Pope Benedict XVI issued a message Sunday to the head of the Belgian bishops' conference, Monsignor Andre-Joseph Leonard, expressing his solidarity with all Belgian bishops "in this sad moment."

The June 24 raids targeted the home and office of a retired archbishop and also the graves of two prelates. The Vatican has slowly ratcheted up its criticism of the searches, with the Vatican No. 2 on Saturday complaining they were unprecedented even under communism.

On Sunday, Benedict took the criticism to a new level, issuing a personal message of support to the Belgian bishops for the "surprising and deplorable way" in which the raids were carried out.

I understand where Benedict is coming from -- it's called circling the wagons, and he wants to be in control -- but the Roman Catholic Church and its Dear Leader don't exactly have a great deal of credibility on this issue, or scandal, and can't exactly be trusted to conduct a proper investigation. If anything, all they'd find, and hand to civil authorities, are a few scapegoats. They are all about self-preservation, after all, not justice. (And don't tell me they're about divine justice. There's no need for any more nonsense, and the Church's historical myth of absolute righteousness is very much part of the problem here, with the Church essentially holding that it can do no wrong.)

Otherwise, this is just typical, the same old unwillingness to accept responsibility for what has happened in the Church, and for the horrors that priests have inflicted, mostly on young boys. And, lest we forget, sex abuse is a crime, and civil authorities have every right to investigate and prosecute.

If Benedict really wants to see what's deplorable, he need look no further than the actions of some of his own priests, not to mention the actions of those higher up who have covered up the abuse.

Nuns for Obama

By Michael J.W. Stickings

More specifically, Catholic nuns for Obamacare:

A group of Catholic nuns is urging Congress to pass health care reform, breaking ranks with bishops who say the current bill does not do enough to block federal money from being used to fund abortions.

"We write to urge you to cast a life-affirming 'yes' vote when the Senate health care bill (H.R. 3590) comes to the floor of the House for a vote as early as this week," a group of nuns wrote in a letter to members of Congress released Wednesday by NETWORK, progressive Catholic advocacy organization.

NETWORK said the 55 signatories represent tens of thousands of Catholic nuns in the United States.

The letter argues that the legislation "will make crucial investments in community health centers that largely serve poor women and children."

"And despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions," the letter reads. "It will uphold longstanding conscience protections and it will make historic new investments – $250 million – in support of pregnant women. This is the REAL pro-life stance, and we as Catholics are all for it."

The nuns are siding with the Catholic Health Association, a group representing Catholic hospitals, which offered its support for reform earlier this week.

Well, there you go. Those are some enlightened nuns, and while I may disagree with their views on abortion, I applaud them for breaking from "the powerful U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which stepped up its criticism of the bill in recent days."

The bishops, and the rest of the Roman Catholic Church, should get over it. Even without the Stupak anti-abortion amendment, the Senate bill isn't pro-choice legislation, it's legislation designed to make an unjust system more just and an unfair system more fair.

I realize there are elements of American Catholicism that are deeply loyal to the Republican Party and that generally have their heads up their asses (see, especially, William Donohue and the Catholic League), but shouldn't the Church welcome reform that, if enacted, would take life-and-death power away from the insurance industry and provide coverage, or better coverage to those who already have it, to tens of millions of Americans? Even with conservatives prevailing in the Vatican (Ratzinger et al.) and in the College of Cardinals (which turned Ratzinger into Benedict XVI), isn't there enough progressivism in the Church to guide it away from extremist American conservatism, much of which is some fanatical combination of libertarian and fundamentalist?

One would think. At least the nuns seem to get it.

Whom would Jesus blackmail?

By Capt. Fogg

A high proportion of the atheists and agnostics I know are, or have been Roman Catholic and I have to say a good number of my favorite comedians as well. The sense of alienation and the sarcasm of such people no mystery to me when I read stories like The Washington Post's piece on the Archdiocese of Washington D.C. and its threat to discontinue being all charitable and Christ-like about feeding and sheltering the homeless and hungry if a proposed bill allowing same-sex marriage passes.

Although the Church would not, of course, be required to perform or to lend their floor space to such unions, they would be required to obey the same laws forbidding discrimination against gay men and lesbians as the rest of us:

The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that's really a problem.

said Archdiocese spokeswoman Susan Gibbs. No, the city is saying that to be a partner with a publicly-funded service, you don't hold the city hostage until they deny civil rights to law-abiding citizens. Consider the homeless of the streets: Shall we let them starve if only two gay men are allowed to marry? Shall we let them die if we allow people to divorce? What other taboos must we as citizens observe before the Archdiocese of Washington will deign to obey Biblical commandments to help others?

I do understand that they have a problem recognizing certain lay employee's right to share employment benefits, I just can't see Jesus making an issue of it or attempting to use the homeless as a hostage if the Romans refused to implement Jewish law.

Of course, the peanut gallery will respond with nonsense about religious persecution and freedom and there will be no reasoning with them, but if a religious test to receive public services is repugnant, the demand that the public go along with their dogma or the poor will not be served is more so. It's another example lending credibility to all the warnings about "faith based" initiatives. It's another example illustrating just why Congress shall make no laws concerning an establishment of religion.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Headline of the Day (Pope Benedict XVI edition)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I couldn't help but chuckle when I read this one at the BBC today:

Gay groups angry at Pope remarks

Really. You don't say.

Now, these "gay groups" have good reason to be angry not just at the pope's remarks but at the pope himself:

Speaking on Monday, Pope Benedict said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was as important as protecting the environment.

The comments were "irresponsible and unacceptable", the UK's Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM) said.

Vladimir Luxuria, a transgender former Italian MP, called his words "hurtful".

What Pope Benedict said -- and the BBC has the "key extracts" here -- was that any blurring of the man/woman "order," including any efforts at "human auto-emancipation from creation and from the Creator" (whereby humans make themselves on their own), is "against the truth." It seems to me that this has more to do with transsexualism than with homsexualism, but the pope's point is clear: In nature, and by God, there are men and there are women and there is an order to gender and sexuality, namely, that gender is fixed (or ought to be) and that, sexually, only a man and a woman ought to copulate (and reproduce), each according to his natural, God-given purpose.

Now, I'm with the "gay groups" on this, more or less, whatever my concerns about humanity's efforts to conquer, by overcoming, nature. We are all little Nietzscheans now, perhaps, but that's not necessarily a good thing. What I recognize, unlike the pope, is that nature is flexible and that it is part of our nature, as rational creatures, to seek to shape it according to our desires. And the fact is, gender and sexuality are rather complex. (I'll defer to our co-blogger LindaBeth on this.) There aren't just men and women and we aren't all straight.

But here's why I couldn't help but chuckle: What did these "gay groups and activists" expect? This is the Roman Catholic Church we're talking about. It may be more "modern" than it used to be, but it's not exactly a bastion of progressive thinking on anything, let alone on gender and sexuality. And the head of the Church is Benedict XVI, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, hardly a liberal. (Even the liberals in the Church are pretty conservative on such matters.) It's a wonder his remarks weren't much harsher.

So, fine, they're angry. I suppose they have a right to be, and I suppose I applaud their efforts to protest what is the Church's (and the pope's) "irresponsible and unacceptable" positions. Maybe one day, if it still exists, genuine liberals will take over the Church and bring it forward into Enlightenment. In the meantime, all we're going to get is more of the same from the same old narrow-minded fools and bigots (sorry, "true believers"). They're far too influential to ignore, but they're also far too ridiculous to take too seriously.