Sex and Scandal: “Don’t ask don’t tell” and the Catholic hierarchy

Seems the good Pope Benedict is implicated in a cover up of a child molesting German priest back in the 80’s. Instead of turning him into the authorities, the Pope directed him to get psychiatric counseling … all the while the priest continued on with his sexual predilections, being reassigned to another parish where his perversity continued.

Meanwhile Bishops are under fire over their exposed cover ups; and all over the planet -- Latin America, Ireland, UK, Germany, Austria, France, Poland, Australia, Canada – victims are coming forward attesting to decades of sexual abuse at the hands of priests. The cover-ups and denials of the Church hierarchy in those countries indicate they don’t have a much better track record than the pope, or US Church officials. So much for the hackneyed whine of the defensive devout that molesting priests are just a tiny, insignificant minority. That duck doesn’t quack anymore.

Oh, sure…the Church pays the necessary lip service. The pope condemns sexual misconduct, and I’m sure he’d wish it would all just go away. Some church officials are admitting they just weren’t aggressive enough; they didn’t realize the breadth of the problem or its life long implications to the victims.

And why should they? These aren’t psychologists. They aren’t typically trained psychotherapists, sex therapists, social workers, Special Victims Unit detectives. They are largely sexually repressed shaman who have been trained to read Latin, promote the Church to find new recruits, accept the impossible as real and reject the real as impossible. They are wannabe apostles to a myth, dressed in gender neutral opulent costumes, conducting foolish rituals, embracing magical liturgy, promising nonsensical rewards for belief, forgiving people for sins so they can clean their slates and repeat the sin, and mumbling the same old prayers that fall only on the ears of their awed and cowed parishioners.

It is to these self imposed eunuchs, these socially impotent pretenders, that responsibility rests for ferreting out perverts among their ranks; all while a goodly number of their own highly placed brethren are themselves doing exactly the same unholy acts. It’s the quintessential example of the inmates policing the inmates.

If the Church really understood the depth of the problem; if it cared as much about the victims’ well being as they do about their own financial stability; if it were genuinely invested in rooting out and resolving the problem and ending it once and for all; they would have taken draconian steps to fix it years ago. The pope could have appointed his own VBSMI (Vatican Bureau of Sexual Misconduct Investigation), with all the power and independence that the Church gave to Tomas de Torquemada, the 15th Century leader of the Spanish Inquisition.

When it came to rooting out and punishing imagined enemies of the Church, heretics and back-sliding converted Jews, Torquemada was all powerful and remarkably effective. But then, those were the good old days when the Church felt threatened by those innocents they considered ungodly. Now that it’s the “godly” themselves that threaten the innocents the motivation isn’t quite as strong. They don't want to hear the ugly truth, much less uncover anymore of it than absolutely necessary

It took 350 years for the Catholic Church to apologize for the persecution of Galileo; 750 years to apologize for the Inquisition. I’m going to guess that the thousands and thousands of victims of wholesale sexual abuse and cover-up by the Catholic clergy should get their apology in, oh … 2500 CE. This assumes the Church doesn’t fuck itself into oblivion between now and then.