kelly09 said:

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bearister said:

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The Opus Dei tRump collaborators (Barr, Mulvaney, and judges) and supporters have as much respect and compassion for those underaged girls as they do for the altar boys sodomized by priests, bishops and Cardinals.

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Anti Catholic bigot.

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I'm 100% Irish and still attend Mass because it's in my DNA but the hierarchy and those Conservative Catholics that enable and cover up misconduct are dead to me because of this:

"The Ryan Commission (In Ireland) published its 2,600-page report in 2009. Despite government inspections and supervision, Catholic clergy had, across decades, violently tormented thousands of children. The report found that children held in orphanages and reformatory schools were treated no better than salves in some cases, sex slaves. Rape and molestation of boys were "endemic."

...government report revealed that from 1925 to 1961, at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, in Tuam, County Galway, babies who died early 800 of them were routinely disposed of in mass graves or sewage pits. Not only priests had behaved despicably. So had nuns.


In Germany, a leaked bishops' investigation revealed that from 1946 to 2014, 1,670 clergy had assaulted 3,677 children. Civil authorities in other nations were launching investigations, moving aggressively to preempt the Church. In the United States, also in 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury alleged that over the course of 70 years, more than 1,000 children had been abused by more than 300 priests across the state. Church authorities had successfully silenced the victims, deflected law enforcement, and shielded the predators. ....Still, this record of testimony and investigation was staggering. The charges told of a ring of pedophile priests who gave many of their young targets the gift of a gold cross to wear, so that the other predator priests could recognize an initiated child who would not resist an overture. "This is the murder of a soul," said one victim who testified before the grand jury.

With maddening equilibrium, Pope Francis acknowledged, in response to a reporter's question early this year, that the rape of nuns by priests and bishops remains a mostly unaddressed Catholic problem. In Africa, once AIDS became common, priests began coercing nuns into becoming sexual servants, because, as virgins, they would likely not carry the HIV virus. It was reportedly common for such priests to sponsor abortions when the nuns became pregnant. "It's true," Francis said calmly. "There are priests and bishops who have done that." Nuns have come forward in India to charge priests with rape.

In February, a Washington Post report suggested that early in his pontificate, Francis learned about the systematic priestly abuse of institutionalized deaf children in Argentina, decades ago. The abuse had originally been brought to light not by Church officials but by civil authorities. The deaf victims reported that they were discouraged from learning sign language, but that one hand sign often used by the abusive priests was the forefinger to the lips: Silence.

Coming like a punctuation mark the day after the Vatican gathering adjourned was a full report from Australia on the matter of Cardinal George Pell. Formerly the head of Vatican finances and one of Francis's closest advisers, Pell had been found guilty of sexually violating two altar boys in a sacristy right after presiding at the Eucharist.


In the Americas and Africa; in Europe, Asia, and Australia wherever there were Catholic priests, there were children being preyed upon and tossed aside. Were it not for crusading journalists and lawyers, the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests would still be hidden, and rampant. A power structure that is accountable only to itself will always end up abusing the powerless. According to one victim, Cardinal Law, of Boston, before being forced to resign because of his support for predator priests, attempted to silence the man by invoking the sacred seal: "I bind you by the power of the confessional," Law said, his hands pressing on the man's head, "not to speak to anyone else about this."

Ratzinger is still defending the old order. In April he published, in a Bavarian periodical, a diatribe that was extraordinary as much for its vanity as for its ignorance. Benedict blamed sex abuse by priests on the moral laxity of the 1960s, the godlessness of contemporary culture, the existence of homosexual cliques in seminaries and the way his own writings have been ignored."

James Carroll, Abolish the Priesthood, The Atlantic*

*A priest friend of mine emailed this article to me