Category Archives: roman catholic church

WHO DO YOU TRUST, JESUS OR THE CATHOLIC CHURCH?

The Catholic Church, ratcheting up its attack on President Obama, under the guise of fighting for “Religious Liberty”, has virtually leaped into the fray with an alacrity that would have seemed appropriate for protecting the safety of its children, but has been reserved all these years for just such a time as this, when government regulations to protect the welfare of women and reduce unwanted pregnancies are threatening the church’s essential core freedoms.

Which freedoms are those? The freedom to prevent church or diocese employees from enjoying the same access to contraceptives and family planning that the rest of society takes for granted. The freedom to ensure that families trapped in crushing poverty by unwanted and unsupportable births will never escape their destitution. The freedom to thwart birth control for many women and thus encourage their desperate recourse to abortions. The freedom for the bishops to take federal and state funds for their social programs without ever having to answer to anybody or any governmental institution about anything.

And what exactly are these bishops protecting? Who decided that a drop of semen or an unfertilized egg is so precious to the Divinity that no action must be allowed or countenanced—under threat of political damnation—to keep these two from conjugating?

Who asked these beacons of moral authority to take time out from cleaning up the mess brought about by the church’s wholesale sacrifice of hundreds—in some cases thousands—of childhoods to the sexual appetites of its
priests, so they can lecture the President on their rights and religious liberties? Where was their vigilance when the innocence of children was at stake? Where was their outrage when children’s welfare and safety was put at risk repeatedly under the liberty they took to protect the church’s reputation as a defender of the poor and the weak?

As we listen to the shrill complaints of the bishops, we should ask ourselves which would concern Jesus more, the plight of the poor or the preservation of doctrines that cement their poverty and suffering?

Church Declares Life Begins With ‘First Tingle’

Vatican City—The Catholic Church, ratcheting up its attack on President Obama, under the guise of fighting for “Religious Liberty”, today announced its newest doctrine on the sanctity of human life. Declaring that human life no long begins at the moment of conception, as has been promulgated for decades, but rather at the moment of ‘inspiration’ or ‘the first tingle’, the church declared war on a long litany of activities, books, cocktails and popular entertainers it considered unduly stimulating to humankind’s baser instincts. In essence, the church was reasserting its god-given authority over the Obama administration and anyone else who would curtail the church’s right to define morality and appropriate sexual behavior for Americans

“We’ve taken the act of creation—truly an act of God—to its primal stage, the exact moment the idea of fornication first rises in the mind of a man or a woman,” said, Bernard Cardinal Law, the church’s newly appointed Cardinal of Rectitude and Moral Sincerity, as the Vatican released a three-mile-long list of films, books and popular songs it considered “life-creating trash”. Under threat of excommunication, those prurient materials have been decreed officially off bounds for millions of Roman Catholic devotees around the globe because, as Cardinal Law explained, “they invariably lead to genital stimulation, which is a clear sign that an individual has been divinely inspired to create life.”

Some of the more surprising entries on the church’s list include Anne of Green Gables, Lassie Come Home, I Love Lucy and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. When asked specifically why Anne of Green Gables was banned and Portnoy’s Complaint wasn’t, Cardinal Law reminded his interviewer that redheaded women were often regarded as objects of desire for their hair color alone, while masturbation or self-abuse was considered by the fathers of the church to be the last acceptable “spilling of the Lord’s seed.”

When asked how the church could possibly enforce such a wide-ranging ban on what were previously thought to be acceptable forms of interaction and mental stimulation, Cardinal Law promised there would be a priest in every bar, every rave, every singles dance, every whorehouse and every bedroom in the Christian world.

Within minutes of the church’s announcement, three of the four politicians vying for the Republican presidential nomination hailed the church’s newest doctrine for its potential to create thousands of new jobs for priests and censors.

Mitt Romney, avowed-but-shaky Republican front runner, questioned, “Why can’t President Obama come up with a jobs bill even half as creative as this.” Adding with an impish smile, “Or should I say pro-creative!”

The Church of Sacred Vampires Wants Your Vote

Heaven protect us!

It wasn’t enough that they abandoned thousands (literally thousands!) of young children to the sexual appetites of predatory priests, but now America’s Catholic Bishops feel they have the moral and spiritual obligation to tell the rest of us how we should behave—and vote!—to validate their right to dictate public morality and individual behavior.

Defending what they describe as their “Religious Liberty” they are campaigning and essentially joining forces with the largely Protestant right, aligning themselves with Republican presidential candidates, in order to combat federal regulations that support the equality of homosexuals, the distribution of contraceptives and the right of women to have abortions.

You don’t have to read between the lines to see the Bishops care more about the welfare of unborn children than the protection of real children in their care. Their protection was reserved for pedophile priests who feasted off the young and innocent like hungry vampires.

It’s a sorry state of affairs that the Bishops today are more interested in defending a discriminatory definition of marriage than the quickly crumbling social safety net that was once so critical to their mission of service. Where is the voice of moral indignation that once clamored for the rights of workers and justice for the poor? Why are these very same Bishops not standing alongside the victimized, non-violent warriors of the Occupy Movement? That’s where Jesus would be. Certainly, he would not be standing with those attempting to shut out “undesirable” segments of society from their rights and privileges. Nor would he have allowed deviant priests to move among children with impunity, quenching their sexual thirsts while destroying lives.

How strange that this enabler of pedophile priests, this destroyer of childhoods, this institution too-tightly-controlled by the corrupters themselves to ever really change, should tell others how to live their lives, how to vote, or what to think. What hypocrisy, what sham morality!

If the Bishops ever learn to see beyond the walls of their enclosed insular world, they would see humanity thirsting for an honest, moral voice to lead us out of the wilderness. And they would silence their cruelly divisive attacks for fear of drowning it out.

The Church of Sacred Vampires

“Father Porter is coming!” a terrorized child would shout. Within seconds the hallways of St. Mary’s Grammar School would empty, its children fleeing in abject terror, knowing there was no one to protect them, no one to stand between them and a serial rapist and pedophile priest. A pedophile priest who loved to feast off their youth and innocence like a hungry vampire. A vampire who had been placed in their midst by a church seemingly, amazingly, shockingly unconcerned with their welfare.

A church that would move Father Porter from one parish to the next, from one hunting preserve to the next, for the next 14 years, putting hundreds of unsuspecting children within his sights and suddenly at risk.

Father Porter’s sexual crimes against children began before his ordination in 1959, but stepped up to epidemic levels in April 1960 when he was assigned to St. Mary’s Church and its parochial grammar school in North Attleboro, Massachusetts. By March 1964 he had been removed from his pastoral duties after molesting anywhere from 30 to 100 children—depending on whose estimates you believe—many of them repeatedly, some on a weekly basis.

After a year of treatment that included electro-shock therapy, Father Porter’s cure was accepted as a matter of faith, his transgressions were forgiven, and he was reassigned to Sacred Heart Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts where he would molest another 28 children before being removed to a different parish in just a year’s time.

And on and on it sadly went…

These days, stories of the Catholic Church shielding and enabling pedophile priests are so common it is easy for the mind to focus on statistics—the tally of children violated, names of parishes afflicted, millions of dollars paid to victims—that we often lose sight of the nightmare the victims endured or the young lives that were destroyed one after another by one rapacious priest after another.

Imagine what it must have been like for 11-year-old Paul Merry to be fondled by Father Porter on a weekly basis for three years. Or to be viciously sodomized, as happened to an 11-year-old girl who tried to intervene in Father Porter’s rape of a six-year-old child. And think what a living hell life was for two hundred boys who were repeatedly molested in a Wisconsin school for the deaf. The priest this time was Father Lawrence Murphy, and he regularly violated defenseless deaf boys in his office, his car, on class excursions, at his mother’s country house, in the confessional and in their dormitory beds at night. There was no safe haven from Father Murphy, no “Get Out Of Hell Free” card for these deaf and vulnerable children of God.

Father Murphy, who was never charged with a crime or defrocked for his sins, had been promoted to run the school in 1963 even though students had complained about his predatory behavior back in the late 1950s. Documents show that three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told of Father Murphy’s crimes against children but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities. Instead, the not-so-good Father was eventually transferred to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin where he spent his last 24 years working unhindered with children in parishes, schools and even a juvenile detention center.

Anyone who reads a newspaper knows these events aren’t isolated, nor are they anomalies. Given the large number of children molested, the many years those crimes were kept hidden, the long list of bishops and cardinals involved in the cover-ups, the number of dioceses and countries affected, it’s shockingly clear the leadership culture of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church is corrupt. So corrupt it could foster the commission and concealment of unspeakable acts against two generations of children. So completely corrupt it would take outsiders and lawsuits and a rising sea of outrage to force the church to finally start valuing the safety of children over the privileges of priests.

When you read how blithely and indifferently the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church responded to the savaging of children by priests, when you watch with disbelief as archdiocese after archdiocese, country after country, joins the list of the vampire priests’ feeding grounds, you realize those who stand guard over the Vatican long ago abandoned Jesus’ precepts in order to protect and perpetuate their own power and privilege. Even when local church officials took action, as did Archbishop Weakland of Milwaukee who asked his superiors to defrock Father Murphy, requests were almost uniformly met with an indifference that resonated all the way from the inner walls of the Vatican.

How strange then that this enabler of pedophile priests, this destroyer of childhoods and lifetimes, this institution too-tightly-held by the corrupters themselves to ever really change, should tell others how to live their lives, how to vote, who to like, what to think.

That these men who kept sacred the freedom and hunting privileges of priests who feasted on children could lecture the world on the inviolate rights of the unborn! What hypocrisy, what sham morality!

When will someone tell them they have lost their moral authority?

When will someone tell them they gave it up long ago on an altar of sacred vampires and broken childhoods?

And when will they ever change?

My apologies to any Roman Catholics who take offense at what I’ve said. My anger and disgust is not with them, nor with their religion, but with an institution that could so grievously abandon its responsibility to its flock. Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” I can’t imagine what he would have said about predator priests who cruelly suck the lifeblood and innocence from little children.