On Papacy and predation

As a former recovering Catholic myself (yes, ‘former’ because I am so over it), I can’t say I’m surprised by allegations that the current Pope helped shuffle pedophile priests around earlier in his career. Probably roughly half-way between Hitler Youth and the Papacy.

Of course, everyone forgives him his Hitler Youthdom because in Nazi Germany when he was a kid, you were either with Hitler, or in a cattlecar on the way to a “relocation center.” So he gets a Mulligan on that one.

But that’s as generous as I’m willing to be.

My guess is that the Catholic church hierarchy works somewhat similarly to the way the Nazi hierarchy did, at least where it comes to keeping the organization’s dirty little secrets secret: Lead, follow or name of next of kin, please? Except the church doesn’t ship you off to a concentration camp, just a parish in deepest Bumfucked Egypt (no pun intended, it just happened).

But these latest appalling revelations put the Catholic church in a pretty pickle. Can they weather the P.R. shitstorm if they don’t throw their top guy to the wolves? Is there even a mechanism for removing a Pope besides death from old age? Even if there is, and they do, where are they going to find a Cardinal to replace him who has never shuffled at least one pedophile priest around to keep his unholy crimes from blowing up in the church’s face?

This is what happens when your religious order forbids you to have sex, to ignore one of mankind’s strongest, most basic, primal urges. Either good people get twisted under the pressure to adhere to an unnatural, wholly unreasonable standard (even Jesus is alleged to have struggled with celibacy, and Hello, He’s God!) or you attract people who are already twisted and looking for the perfect cover to practice their perversions. Or gay guys who in good conscience think that the church’s fabled vow of celibacy will be enough to keep them from acting on what they’ve been taught are unnatural urges.

Anyway you look at it, it’s a picture of predatory activity just waiting to happen.

And when you’ve been condoning, enabling and expediting predatory activity for as long as the Catholic Church has, when it’s been a part of the day-to-day responsibilities of running a parish for as long as it’s been, they’re gonna have to look pretty far and wide to find a high-ranking clergyman who hasn’t enabled child predation somewhere along the path to his lofty position in the upper echelons of the church.

The next time white smoke escapes the Vatican chimney during a meeting of the college of Cardinals, it’ll probably just be church records being burned.