Benedict XVI Is "Deeply Ashamed" Of The Serial-Rapist Priests He Shielded From Justice

Hey, leave this subject to Catholic blogs.

Jews have no reason  to attack the Catholic Church on issues that don't concern them. If you want to criticize the Church become a member first.

I think that when it comes to systematic, ongoing cover-up of child molestation, it's hardly necessary to be Catholic in order to have the moral right to criticize.

You smear Rev Hagee for trashing Catholics, and less than a few weeks later you join him? This is not really even close to a Jewish issue, but yet I wonder why you will defend Obama's anti-Jewish minister by tarring McCain's supporter as anti-Catholic - listing that belief as a reason to disrespect him and then take to the very same journal and attack Catholics yourself. What is it kosher when you do it, but wrong for everyone else. And since you have the same position in Obama's campaign as Hagee does in McCain's do you know believe that Obama is not worthy of your support?

I don't blame myself for what happened so many years ago. I don't carry it with me anymore. It was'nt my fault, I was a 5 yr old then. I'm not a victim now, nor was I then, But I make damn sure that anyone whoever acts that way around me, my family or out in public is exposed for the vermin that they are. They usually slink off to the hole that they crawled out of very quickly. Because in this life, I'm charged with protecting my family, especially the children. I've see the wolves for who they are, and they can't hide from me. Every culture has them! these crimes have been here since the beginning of time. And, to deny this fact is to lie to yourself and others. We're all sinners! I know first hand of the horrible things humans do to one another. Truly we are a vile and unclean species, but, we are also, in Gods eyes just a step above the angels.

Stop Being Victims!

Perhaps the most ignorant, ill-informed, bigoted, malicious, anti-Catholic article I've read about the sex-scandal. The idea pushed by Hitchens and you that "child-rape was institutionalised" and actively promoted is not only wrong on the facts, it is simply slander and anti-Catholic bigotry of the lowest sort. Your attempts at humor don't even rise to the level of chuckle-worthy.

Not surprising, considering the source, I guess - when I first discovered Jewcy, I thought it contained some interesting, provocative, and well-written articles. Now it's clear to me that your writers' stock-in-trade is snide, crass, college-sophomore-level humor coupled with a fundamental ignorance of most of the subjects on which they write, and an abvious Jewish self-loathing and anti-Zionist extremism that would make the average Anti-Semite blush. Writers and blogs of your kind almost make anti-Semitism seem respectable and rational. 

anyone ever notice that Pope Benedict resembles Senator Palpatine from Star Wars?

Okay gang, let's take things slow. Here are three things that are different (i.e. non-identical): (1) the set of beliefs that compose normative Catholic religion; (2) the membership of the church's official clerical staff; (3) ordinary lay Catholics.

Quick review of Leibniz's Law:

∀x∀y x=y ⇒ ∀F F(x) ⇔ F(y)

which is equivalent to

∃F∃x∃y [(F(x) ∧ ~ F(y)) ∨ (~F(x) ∧ F(y))] ⇒ x ≠ y

In English, if "two" things are identical, every property "one" has is a property "the other" has (symbols get around those awkward locutions). Equivalently, if there is a property such that one thing has it and another doesn't, those things aren't the same.

What can we learn from this? We take as given that (1) ≠ (2) ≠ (3) (I'd be happy to explain why, though I'd hope it's obvious). Let's rename (1), (2), and (3) 'Karol', 'Joseph', and 'Bernard', respectively. If P is the property of being criticized by me, P(Karol) ⊅ P(Joseph), P(Karol)⊅ P(Bernard), P(Joseph)⊅P(Karol), P(Joseph)⊅P(Bernard), P(Bernard)⊅P(Karol), and P(Bernard)⊅P(Joseph). That's because they're not the same thing. (The horseshoe with the line through it is a sign for "does not imply.")

So our little jaunt through logic shows that criticizing Karol (Catholic beliefs) doesn't imply criticizing Joseph (Catholic officials) or Bernard (lay Catholic people), mutatis mutandis for each combination.

Now you'll notice in the piece above I criticized both Karol and Joseph, but left Bernard alone. Because I have nothing against him. In fact, I happen to think that Catholics and Jews have certain strong cultural similarities that ought to be explored more, and I'm not the first person to say so. (Buck Mulligan calls Stephen Dedalus a "jesting jew jesuit" in Ulysses, for example.) However, I find Karol generally pretty silly, as I find most bodies of religious dogma, except in cases where they're used to do harm to people, and then indignation becomes a more dominant reaction than amusement. As in the case, for example, of Joseph, a set whose members include some unknown (but known to be quite large) number of rapists who wear or have worn priestly robes, as well as a smaller but still significant number of non-rapists who found out about all the rapes and snapped into action protecting the rapists from the law, in many cases shuffling them into new hunting grounds with at least the general sense, if not a firm quantitative belief, that the recidivism rate for rape is quite high. Once you pop, you can't stop, as they say.

Among Joseph's members, also, is the inner circle of John Paul II's Curia in the last years of his reign. While there is some evidentiary support to the idea that JPII was not in a sufficiently salubrious state to continue managing the affairs of the church, and so he might in fact not be culpable, his cabinet, if you will, led by Cardinal Ratzinger, designed, promulgated and vigorously and with great organization and discipline upheld the policy of protecting rapists from the law and, to guard against the embarrassment a defrocking or removal at least from active responsibility for the well-being of irresistably sexy teenagers and pre-teens (cuz who knows what questions might be asked then) could cause, these soi-disant pastors and spiritual fathers to their congregations made proffering known rapists with a regular tithe of virgin boyflesh the default option for "dealing" with the "problem." Only after the sheer volume of rapes overwhelmed Joseph's leaders capacity to control information and brought the whole machine crashing down, did Joseph shift policy, to one of (still sort-of grudgingly) cooperating with the law (and demanding gratitude for doing so), all the while blaming their unforgivable crimes on gay people for having the unmitigated gall to live without being miserable, tormented, ashamed of themselves, and as close as one can get to the brink of suicide without jumping over (because God disapproves of that).

Those, Jeffrey and anonymous dreamer of antisemitic dreams, are the facts. The facts can't be anti-Catholic; they're just facts. If you believe as I do, that ethical judgments have content and function in our systems of belief as other judgments do, adding a category of moral entailments to less controversial rules of logical and causal entailment, then we have an obligation to believe the totality of facts as we understand it and also hold whatever beliefs might be entailed in one of these three ways by our other beliefs. So, if you believe, as I do, that raping children is wrong, that someone who becomes aware of a case of child-rape is obligated to report it to the appropriate authorities, that failing that she is obligated not to prevent the authorities from becoming aware, or if they are, from serving justice, and that even failing that obligation, she is still obligated categorically not to go out of her way to prepare the rapist with a several-course sampler of young boys to rape; and if you believe, as you must if you're honest and not hallucinating, that Catholic officials from Ratzinger on down violated all those obligations hundreds if not thousands of times over, then the conclusion you're obligated to draw is _____________________ (I invite either of you to print this page and fill in the blank).

"But doesn't your holding of beliefs consistent with reality and the basic moral intuitions of normal decent human beings make you no better than John Hagee, who calls the RCC 'the Anti-Christ' and 'the Whore of Babylon'?" I believe I hear you asking. Nope, not really. References to the RCC as "the Anti-Christ" or (what I like better) "the Whore of Babylon" are very, very old, very, very traditional tropes of a system of bigotry that was once, and not all that long ago unfortunately, pervasive among religiously observant American and (some, but fewer) English Protestants, according to whom the RCC was a Satanic conspiracy to poison the religion of Jesus Christ, place the Devil in people's hearts, minds, and souls where God ought to be, and just generally do really awful things. By this same line of thought, individual members of the church were thought to be mindless zombie slaves of the Pope, whose claims to being humans entitled to dignity were dangerous tricks to subvert decent Christian faith (though on occasion, their humanity could be restored by conversion), and who engaged in unspeakable atrocities. (Much like the conspiratorial atrocities Jews are so well known to have engaged in; I said Jews and Catholics were a lot alike, didn't I?) Because Catholic faith was seen not simply as one fact among many about a person's identity, but a singular fact that rendered all others moot, and that entailed an innate nature inferior to that of real Christians, anti-Catholic bigotry, like comparable antisemitic bigotry of past generations, and like anti-Muslim bigotry today, was a quasi-racist form of hate. For example, the Catholicism of the Irish, who might be the lilliest people on earth, prevented them from being counted as "White" along with the Anglo-Saxons, Scottish, Welsh, Ulster Irish and Scots, Germans, and Dutch who composed the original population of our republic.

That's the system of beliefs Hagee participates in when he talks about the church as the anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon. Are things becoming clear now? There is a particular language of antipathy towards Catholicism (the beliefs), the Roman Catholic Church, and the membership of the Roman Catholic Church --- all three of Karol, Joseph, and Bernard --- with a meaning and purpose clearly and precisely rooted in centuries-old traditions, that is every bit as unforgivable as antisemitism, racism, and bigotry towards gay people. But it is a horrific fallacy to conclude, in light of that, that any criticism of Karol and Joseph, in language utterly distinct from that wretched tradition, constitutes anti-Catholic bigotry; and indeed, in practice, that position is not one that can be arrived at both a) honestly and b) in full possession of the facts, so someone who takes that position is either c) dishonest or d) uninformed. My sense, although I have not done the survey research to prove it, is that c) and d) are easily combinable in practice (they're obviously not logically incompatible), so that the claim that criticism of Catholic beliefs and Catholic officials on factual grounds utterly unrelated to the horrible canon (if you will) of bigoted tropes, nonetheless constitutes bigotry, let alone constitutes bigotry on a par with the bigotry of John Hagee tends to be a product both of lack of education, and a dishonest effort at pious bullying.

One last point: since my preferences in the presidential campaign have left me subject to a fair amount of what I consider moral extortion about which people who are not my candidate I will reject, denounce, or reject and denounce, permit me a tu quoque. The view expressed several times in this thread, to the effect that Jews shouldn't care about children being raped by Catholic priests, because (yes?) Catholic priests aren't Jews, is a despicable affront to morality, and anyone who holds to that view has a moral faculty so badly warped that discussion with her, at least in the absence of significant treatment with a therapist and perhaps a psychiatrist, is a pointless waste of time. All that one can do is exclude such people (by democratic and liberal means, of course) from occupying positions in which the decisions they make can affect anyone but themselves.

In closing, anonymous, if you believe I've "almost" given you license to be an antisemite, why don't you try, as a sort of reverse zen koan, just reading this post (and maybe this comment, too) over and over and over? I suspect either you'll move just that extra bit of conceptual distance you need to in order to become a full-fledged antisemite, in which case, do enjoy yourself, or else you'll realize I'm right about all this, you're being fatuous, antisemitism is a bad thing and you should knock it off.

Was there something written that was not factually true? Out of all the articles here at Jewcy, this is the one that sent your opinion counter to your previous thoughts "... interesting, provocative, and well-written articles."?

I may not know much, but I have noticed this author's tendency to focus on what we (all people) have in common rather than the 2(?)% that makes us different. That in and of itself is refreshing especially in an election year.

An extraordinary jump indeed from being critical of inexcusable extremist political seizure of power to  "... abvious Jewish self-loathing and anti-Zionist extremism that would make the average Anti-Semite blush."

Although the recommended  review of his comments and hopefully subsequent introspection was meant for you, I see the value of such an action (if your not part of the solution, your the problem.)   

I don't see anything at all in this article that could be considered anti Catholic. These issues can be extremely depressing for Catholics (at least I have found them to be so), but "shooting the messenger", does not strike me as a particularly productive approach. As to the author not being Catholic, what does that have to do with the criminal acts that were committed?

And just as an aside, the author seems to know more about Catholic history than the vast majority of Catholics I have met in my entire life (I am 58).

So knowledgeable of that history, I would ask, is there such a category as 'Jewish friend of Catholicism"? With people like Hagee running around, we could use a few more friends. Speaking of which, I would very much like to see the author more fully address this issue...

"In fact, I happen to think that Catholics and Jews have certain strong cultural similarities that ought to be explored more".

I have felt much the same for many years. Very good article, Daniel.