Priestly Virtues

Lately, there have been a lot of news stories about the Catholic Church and it’s abuses of underage children. First of all, I want to be clear that I am not defending Catholicism. The concepts of religion are dangerous to society. The Catholic Church has inflected enough damage to my personal psyche to warrant the most cruel of punishments.

I must admit, however, that these priests are a minority. They are just like the police – you only hear about the bad ones. When they do their jobs, you never notice them. So please understand that the abuse, which is completely unacceptable, is not as rampant as we are lead to believe.

What bothers me the most, is how the Church is handling the situation.  This is a religion that for thousands of years has prayed (pardon the pun) on the guilty. Where do you think their money comes from? It is the people plagued with guilt that are foolish enough to believe that religion can solve their problems and sooth their souls that line the coffers of the Vatican. How is it, then, that Church is unable to admit guilt? Are we expected to believe that the sins of you and I are real, but the sins of our spiritual leaders are not?

Father Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist for the Holy See, said in Rome that The Times’ coverage of Pope Benedict, which cast doubt on his rigor in dealing with pedophile priests, was “prompted by the Devil… because he is a marvelous pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the Devil wants to grab hold of him… and so we should not be surprised if priests too fall into temptation. They also live in the world and can fall like men of the world.”*

Really? That’s the excuse you are going to offer? When we shine light on your failures, we are doing so through the inspiration of Satan. Idiot. How about you not molest children. How about that? What’s odd to me, is that we have let these priests fuck with our heads, nay even lives, for so long, why are we drawing the line here? It’s ok for them to “request” 10% of our income. It’s ok for them to dictate who we can marry. It’s ok for them to tell us what we can read, what movies we can see, even how many children we can have (As many as possible, by the way. They need to get new soldiers somehow.), but we draw the line at molestation. Great job, Catholics. You sure nailed that one. Again, I apologize for the pun. Is anyone surprised that when we blindly follow people we inevitably find that faith manipulated? What did you think was going to happen?

The truth is that these priests have been victimizing you for so long, you haven’t even noticed the gradual increase. You should have stopped them when they were allowed to beat your children. Or when they encouraged war, many of which they started. Or any of a million other times  they used you for there own nefarious purposes. The members of the Church are nothing more than ATMs in the eyes of the Holy See.
Religion is poison. It removes free thought. It refuses to accept logic. Everyone has been asking, “what should happen to these priests”. Well, what would happen if they weren’t priests? Why does that matter? How would we as a society deal with any child molester? We castrate them. We remove the opportunity to abuse again. We humiliate them. We post their pictures on the news and internet so that everyone knows that they are CONVICTED FELONS.  That is all they are, people. Should we really have believed them special? I didn’t realize that the ordination ritual had an “I promise not to touch kids” vow. I mean they do have a celibacy vow, but they gave up on that centuries ago. I assume because the devil made them do it.

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