Just how much institutionalized malfeasance would you excuse, and why?

Vocal and persistent comments supportive of the Catholic Church from apologists posted to USA Today’s online religion news stories got me thinking: exactly how much illegal, illicit, and unconscionable behavior would I tolerate before I would withdraw my support from an organization to which I belong?

I’m not a big joiner.  I tend to do my own thing.  But, I do belong to a few organizations, mostly freethinker oriented.  I pay my annual dues, get their newsletters and communications, respond to certain appeals to action or for donations, and attend meetings from time to time.  My life doesn’t revolve around these groups, but they provide me with a connection to the atheist community, an information flow which I find helpful for my writings and activism.  They are also on the front line in keeping creeping theocracy and religious intrusion at bay.

But what if one of these national organizations were engaged in cover-up of ongoing illegal activities of its paid employees?  What if a meaningful number, or even just a few of  the employees of one of these groups were  engaging in slave trade, or running a child prostitution ring, or purveying child porn, or simply molesting children or the mentally infirm?  And what if the senior executives of that organization knew about these activities for a long time and let them go on with nary a slap on the wrist, or just turning a blind eye?

What if the organization decided to keep the authorities out of the picture; took matters into their own hands by moving the guilty staff to other branches of the organization;  paid off or threatened victims with some action by a “higher authority” whatever that might be?

What if those people who committed the crimes were kept on the payroll, given retirement benefits, while their activities were swept under the rug for decades by their bosses, and their bosses’ bosses?  What if that organization’s modus operandi of cover up was an unwritten operating standard in order to preserve the organization’s credibility, prestige, membership, and financial solvency?

When this all unraveled;  when it became exposed; when years of massive abuse, institutionalized cover-up, denial, lies, and ruined lives floated to the top like so much sewage in a cesspool and continued to bubble up to the surface ten years after the organization promised to clean house and end it  ...  could you continue to proudly proclaim your allegiance? 

Could you slough it off? Could you justify your membership by saying “It’s just an aberration, it could happen anywhere,” or “it was only a few people, and some of the hierarchy,” or “I don’t believe it - most of the victims are probably lying,” or  “My organization is no worse than that other organization.” ? 

Could you keep paying dues, contributing to support something which has at its root a sickness that is so engrained and so deep that it continues the deviant destructive behavior today in offices all over the country, known to management yet still kept under wraps, hushed, ignored?  Wouldn’t that make you an active participant in promulgating a great evil?

I for one could not ignore it.  I could not support it. I could not allow my name to be included among that group’s membership. I’m better than that.  My life is not dependent on any one group so that my instinct for justice, and my outrage against abuse of power in its most heinous form, could be ignored or justified.  I would protest loudly and resign in indignation.

“But,” some might say, “you’re taking a myopic view.  The organization is bigger than a few miscreants, and their supervisors, and their supervisors’ supervisors who perpetrated these wrongs and allowed them to go on.  Look at all the good the organization has done. Besides, it was launch by THE truly great freethinker of all time. You can’t just leave because of this.”

Yeah...I can. 

You see I wouldn’t be leaving an organization that was allowing its pumped up self importance to become its sole raison d'etre at the expense of its conscience and morality and those it promised to serve -  the organization will have left me long before I left it. 

Catholics cannot understand or absorb this.  Or worse, they justify it or down play it and continue to enable their secretive den of self serving shaman. They are so tied to this misogynistic fraternity of sickness, subterfuge and supernatural delusion that they fear their life (or soul) is in the balance and thus demands their continued support.   Damn the laity and paid apologists who make a career out of lying in defense of the church permitting the perpetuation of its ills.

The Vatican has had its way manipulating people for almost 1700 years. Fight it as they may, the end of their influence is just coming into view. The enablers’ transparency cannot hold back the tide of reality.   The sooner it gets here and washes away the filth that is the Catholic Church, the better off the planet will be.