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| Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League. Not paedophiles, just gay! |
As Pope Francis expresses his "shame and sorrow" over the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Interim Report that revealed that 300 Catholic priests had abused over 1000 minors in the last 70 years in the state of Pennsylvania alone, and that bishops and cardinals had been complicit if covering up and even facilitating the abuses, the American Catholic League was quick to assign blame, in the finest Catholic tradition.
It was the gays what done it!
The Vatican had said:
The Holy See treats with great seriousness the work of the Investigating Grand Jury of Pennsylvania and the lengthy Interim Report it has produced. The Holy See condemns unequivocally the sexual abuse of minors.
Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. however, was less contrite and sought to rubbish the interim report with a 'report' of his own with which he claimes to have debunked the Grand Jury report. He refers to 'the myths, and indeed lies, that mar the report'.
Although the Grand Jury report never claims 300 priest had been convicted of preying on youngsters, he calls this a 'myth' because they haven't been convicted. The Grand Jury specifically states that no convictions would be possible because of the local statute of limitations. Indeed, one of their recommendations is that this statute of limitations should be abolished for child-abuse cases, so it's hard to see how Donohue misunderstood this figure.
Donohue also complains that not all the 300 were in fact priests and points out that many of them were brothers, some were deacons and some were seminarians! So that's okay then, so long as it wasn't actual ordained priests every time. He further points out that maybe only half of them would have been convicted and anyway that is out of some 5000 priests working in the 70 years of the report.
So, only 150 priest out of 5000! That's not so bad then! What ever is all the fuss about?
Another 'myth' Donohue feels he has debunked is that there is any on-going crisis within the Catholic Church! In his words:
There is no on-going crisis—it's a total myth. In fact, there is no institution, private or public, that has less of a problem with the sexual abuse of minors today than the Catholic Church.
Astonishingly, Donohue seems not to have notices anything; not even the Pope himself expressing his personal sorrow at the on-going scandal, the conviction of Cardinal Wilson in Australia, the resignation of a high-profile cardinal in America, and the resignation of all 34 Chilean bishops! Nor has he noticed the haemorrhage of church members, the catastrophic decline in church attendance and the difficulty recruiting new trainee priests.
But it's two 'myths' that exercise Donohue most:
- The priests raped their victims. Donohue says they weren't raped, just molested. In fact, of course, the Interim Report does not say all the minors were raped.
- The abusive priests were paedophiles. He says they were not paedophiles; they were gay!
The blame lies with the gay community. If only priests weren't gay there wouldn't be a problem. The fact that studies have shown that gays present no more a danger to children than do heterosexuals seems to have been lost on Donohue. In Donohue's world gays molest boys and that that.
In one quite extraordinary passage, Donohue appears to condone sex with 15 year-old and 'teenangers', claiming that this isn't paedophilia.
...it is wrong to give the impression that we are talking about 5-year-olds when more typically they were 15-year-olds.
[...]
The Times is so dishonest that it mentions a "sadomasochistic clerical pedophile ring in Pittsburgh that photographed boys they had posed to look like Jesus Christ, then gave them gold crosses to show they had been groomed." The section of the report that discusses this alleged offense cites Father Gregory Zirwas as the ringleader.
Every person whom he groped was a teenager, meaning this was a homosexual ring.
Seriously! Grooming teenagers and giving them a badge to wear so other paedophiles could identify them easily, is not paedophilia, it's homosexuality and so not the fault of predatory paedophile priest abusing their trust and taking advantage of teenagers to whom they had trusted access!
It's them gays!
And to make that point and make the smear stick, Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League, has re-defined paedophilia so the age of consent is irrelevant. What matter is whether they were pre-pubescent or not.
Presumably, a priest having sex with a pubescent 13 or 14 year old girl is just fine because it's not homosexual sex.
As a former Catholic, I've been shocked to have discovered in recent years just how homophobic the Church is. Growing up (during the 1980s and 90s), I had no idea, in large part because my Catholic upbringing actually wasn't too bad - although I went to a Catholic school for a good many years, I was thankfully spared exposure to the Church's loopier teachings[*]. I was also aware that the Church had made some progressive-sounding pronouncements on how prejudice against LGBT folk was a bad thing, so yeah, overall I thought it had a pretty good track record when it came to the subject of homosexuality, certainly when compared to the fundamentalist churches!
ReplyDeleteIt was only later, after I'd spent some time lurking around the dens of insanity that are hardcore Catholic blogs and message boards, that I realized just how messed up the Church's views on homosexuality really are. For a start, of course, there's its cruel teaching about how if you're gay, lifelong celibacy is your only option, and I noticed that even LGBT folk who tried to live by that rule didn't seem to get anything more than the most begrudging tolerance, if that, from their fellow Church members (it wasn't at all uncommon, for example, for a person who admitted they were gay yet trying to live a celibate life to be told by other people on the aforementioned blogs and message boards, "We’re sick of people like you trying to push your SIN down our throats! Shut the hell up about it!" (or words to that effect)).
I also started coming across accounts of the (no doubt drug- or mental-illness-induced) “visions” of Catholic saints who claimed that those guilty of “sodomy” received the worst punishments in hell, which certainly didn’t make the Church sound particularly gay-friendly. Then there was this other “vision” I heard about, in which the person who’d had it had said that the angels had told them that “sodomy” was so vile that it was the one sin that made them vomit. (“What?!” I remember thinking at the time. “THAT’S the “sin” heaven’s denizens find so objectionable, and not, say, rape or slavery or genocide?! Talk about fucked up priorities!”) I even found that the Church’s stated opposition to homophobia wasn’t as noble and uncompromising as I’d originally believed it to be. For example, I heard that one bigwig in the church hierarchy had said (and not too long ago either!) that discriminating against LGBT folk in the area of housing was perfectly fine since the only way a landlord would know that a potential tenant was gay was if the latter individual wasn’t living “chastely” (or somesuch rubbish).
So where am I going with all this? I think this is all just a roundabout way of saying that Bill Donohue’s recent comments don’t come as any surprise whatsoever to me; indeed, he’s by no means the only Catholic I’ve seen in recent weeks who’s tried to lay all the blame for the child abuse scandals squarely at the feet of the gays. I suppose they think it’s one way they can kill two birds with one stone – salvage the reputation of the Church while bashing the evil gays, again. Is there anything they won’t try and blame on the gays? They’re becoming just as bad as the Nazis were trying to blame everything wrong in the world on the Jews!
*For example, I was never taught that nonsense about masturbation being an "instrinsically grave sin", which is something I'm eternally grateful for. Puberty probably would've been a nightmare for me if that hadn't been the case!
Oh, and Bill Donohue also isn't the first person I've heard of who's tried to argue that sex with post-pubescent teenagers isn't as bad as paedophilia. During my time exploring some of the more fucked-up corners of the Internet, I've found no shortage of libertarians, men's rights activists, and other creepy weirdos who think that having sex with teenagers (particularly teenage girls) is perfectly fine. "It's not paedophilia - it's epheeeeebophilia!" seems to be their constant refrain.
ReplyDeleteIt's just amazing the Donohue should be tacitly endorsing sex with under-age children because it's 'better' than paedophilia. Robbing one bank or murdering one person is better than robbing two banks or murdering two people. And this from a church which claims to be guardian of the nations' morals!
DeleteIt's tempting to go out and find God. Once you have opened your heart and your checkbook for him, he exonerates you from bearing responsibility for almost anything.
DeleteI always thought that the Creator gave Man a free will because He didn't want apathetic robots walking around on his lively Earth, but there must be another reason. For this will to be animated and free with young boys and girls.
It may stem from the antediluvian days. They betrothed a child the moment she had her first period, and demanded non-stop babies from her until she shriveled up. The modern Church seems not able to let it go. I mean, we have 1 billion female Christians on this planet, so procreation is not really a #1 agenda item anymore. Or is it?
Perhaps the Vatican should sponsor Mars projects heavily. All these ravines and Mares there, room enough to stack many more billions of catholics.
Um, I hope no muslim reads this and gets ideas...because eventually we'll have a real War of the Worlds on our hands, when the marslims realize how much smaller than Earth their new planet is.
The liberated pope Francis seemed a man who was determined to sweep the Temple clean. So far he has slapped the wrists of some cardinals and bishops, but a corrupt leader in the American Catholic League is kennelijk off-limits. He may be assertive and articulate, but in the end he's a hypocrite, just like his predecessors.
ReplyDelete