Dowd on the Catholic Scandals

I'm not a fan of organized religion. The various scandals -- preachers with prostitutes, paedophiles, drugs, and extorting money from believers -- make it pretty clear that it is ideal for giving predators easy pickings.

Here are some bits from a Maureen Dowd article on the sex scandals in the Catholic church:

Two years after learning the extent of the depraved and Dickensian treatment of children in the care of the Irish Catholic Church — a fifth circle of hell hidden for decades by church and police officials — the Irish are still angry and appalled.

The only church leader who escapes their disgust is the no-nonsense, multilingual Martin. He was sent home to Dublin in 2003 after 27 years in the Vatican bureaucracy and diplomatic corps and found the Irish church in crisis, reeling from a cover-up that spanned the tenures of four past Dublin archbishops.

I went to see him at his office in Drumcondra in north Dublin because he is that rarest of things in the church’s tragedy: a moral voice.

In February, Martin held an unprecedented “Liturgy of Lament and Repentance” at a Dublin cathedral, where he asked forgiveness from God and victims of abuse and praised the courage of those who had come forward.

Wearing a simple black cassock, he helped wash the feet of eight victims and conceded that the church “will always bear this wound within it.”

The frustrated Martin has criticized the Vatican’s glacial pace on reform and chided the church: “Denial will not generate confidence.”

...

In return for doing the right thing, he has been ostracized by fellow bishops in Ireland and snubbed by the Holy See.

Showing again that it prefers denial to remorse, the Vatican undermined Martin’s call for accountability. In 2009, after the Irish government’s 700-page Murphy report on sexual abuse came out, Pope Benedict XVI refused to accept the resignations of two Irish bishops who presided over dioceses where abuse cases were mishandled.

The following year, when Martin expected to be named cardinal, the pope passed him over.

“Martin is standing alone against the tide right now, but he’s on the right side of history,” said Jason Berry, who has written two books on the church scandal. “I think he is probably the single best hope for the church within the hierarchy.”

Yet Martin, famous protector of victims, is an outlier of the club, while Cardinal Bernard Law, notorious protector of pedophiles, has a cushy Vatican sanctuary. And Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who was in league with the notorious abuser of seminarians and inseminator of women, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, is the dean of the College of Cardinals in Rome.

Garry O’Sullivan, the managing editor of The Irish Catholic in Dublin, told me that Martin “has had a prophetic role in the church.”

“And all the prophets were stoned or murdered or ignored,” he said. “The big question is, why would the Vatican be indifferent to a guy who’s so brilliant at identifying with the victims? They should put him in charge of a protection office in the Vatican, a global watchdog against sexual abuse.”

It is pretty clear that the Catholic church won't reform. It needs to be disbanded. It is a cesspit of scandal with an ex-Nazi in charge of it. All the officials in Rome are corrupt. The Vatican should be torn down, the land plowed with salt, and all the hangers-on inside the church should be forced to get an honest job.