They Still Just Don’t Get It.

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By Kay Ebeling
Reading the latest book on pedophile priests, I was with the author all the way up to this quote in Chapter One, “Furthermore, Church leaders have finally recognized the scandal and taken aggressive action. The sex abuse of minors by Catholic priests is much less widespread today than it was 10 or 20 years ago.” He then goes the direction so many have gone before, the way of tipping tea with the bishops to get Catholic reform. They just don’t get it.

The quote is from the new book The Faithful Departed by Philip Lawler and his next sentence is: “The second scandal is the prevalence of homosexuality among Catholic priests.” Huh? I’d much rather have a pastor who is gay than one who is lying to families to get to their children and rape them. How can anybody equate the two “crises” when the gay priest isn’t doing anything illegal and is doing it in private with a consenting adult?

It amazes me that a religion with a sacrament called Confession doesn't see that it can’t skirt around its own guilt. It is not enough to say we've changed our policy and we're never going to let this happen again. Raping thousands of children in sacramental venues is not a venial sin. (It also amazes me that a church would think giving money to some of the victims would solve a problem.)

Lawler sort of rescues himself by the end of the paragraph with the argument we've read in so many places before, that gay priests were afraid to report the pedophile priests and that's why the problem got so bad: “The existence of such a ‘lavender mafia’ could help to explain..."

Mm, maybe one reason pedophilia flourished in the Catholic Church is gay priests afraid to complain about pedophiles lest their own sins come out. To me it goes so much deeper than that

To the secrets

The mystery

Apologist Catholics argue, there are pedophiles in all religions, but an epidemic of pedophiles wouldn't take place in a church like say the Southern Baptists to the extent it has with Catholics.

Once people in a Baptist parish or just about any American evangelical church find out their pastor is having sex with anyone other than a spouse, let alone a child, the people bring that pastor up in front of the whole parish, question him unsparingly, and throw the guy out on his ear if he’s guilty.

No, it’s centuries of secrets that makes the Catholic Church pedophiles so special, so extremely sinful, so deeply deviant it takes most humans a few years to grasp what they've done.

It took Americans 50 years to accept that there was a second shooter when Oswald shot John F. Kennedy, it will be decades before we realize who really brought down the Twin Towers (and Building Nine).

It will also be decades before the depth and breadth of damage done by pedophile priests in the catholic church registers in the American conscience.

Lawler almost lost me as a reader with that worn out Blame it on the Homosexuals stuff, but he went on to write:

“While a small minority of American priests have been involved in sexual abuse, a clear majority of bishops were party to the cover-up.”

More good quotes from Chapter One which is available free online (linked in the column at left).

“Bishops who betrayed their own sacred trust by countenancing sexual abuse remain in office.”

“The third scandal, the scandal of episcopal misconduct, is today the most serious of all.”

THE THIRD SCANDAL?
I would call that “The Real Scandal”
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More quotes from Chapter One:
“Bishops who showed an icy insensitivity to the suffering of young victims, and lied repeatedly to conceal their own guilt, remain in power today.”
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CONFESSION.
Lawler wonders, still in the first chapter, why the bishops would even think that protecting pedophile priests rather than children was “for the good of the church.”

He writes: “The Catholic Church sees herself as the mystical Body of Christ; how could it be helpful to the body to ignore a cancerous growth within?”

That's where we need the Confessions.

Someone from inside the hierarchy can tell us what really happened.

Someone from the inside has to come out and talk.

Come to me, come to City of Angels Lady, talk to me. I’ll clear your conscience and put it out there for the world to see.

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Lawler writes: “The bishops made a fool's bargain. They were prepared to sacrifice the essential elements of the Catholic faith: the moral teaching, the clerical discipline, even the loving care for the faithful. In return, they hoped to prop up the prestige of the institutional Church.”

Lawler is an editor from Catholic World News and he’s writing for Catholics.

Here my eyes half close, I sigh, and throw the book aside never to be opened again. (Well close the website where I'm reading it for free.)

They still just don’t get it.

The problem is deep at the core, and as soon as a speaker starts repeating phrases like “the essential elements of the Catholic faith” and “the Catholic Church sees herself as the mystical Body of Christ,” I know that speaker is looking in the mirror talking to themselves, and they just don’t get it.

That institutional lie, that “We are the one and only church” lie,

As long as a person holds onto that, they'll never be able to see how guilty are their bishops, how much parishioners and families have been deceived as have their fathers and grandfathers who poured all their support into this criminal organization, the Roman Catholic Church.

Sorry. I have to say this.

Go back and reread the New Testament and read it again after that.

I’m continually amazed at how almost everything the Catholic Church does as an organization is the opposite of what Paul and others wrote to first century Christians about how to carry on Christ’s work.

It’s supposed to be about honesty, openness, and egalitarianism. That only lasted a few centuries.

Then they formed a hierarchy and started building the secrets and mysteries into the structure, bringing lies and the influence of evil right into the foundation of what ended up being today’s Catholic Church.

CONFESSION
I feel sorry for people like Philip Lawler, so stuck in the structure they'll probably never get out and see the light.

I remember at a visceral level the fear of God the priests put into us. They’d say, Don’t even walk into a church that is not Roman Catholic,

equating the sin of being non-Catholic right up there with

heck

Being Protestant is almost as bad as being Homosexual!

I was lucky. My dad saw the damage as his two daughters became teenagers. The two daughters who were diddled by Father Horne were now out of control, wearing see-through clothes, staying out all night, getting “reputations.” I used to see the guilt and loss in my father’s face, from the time I was 14 all the way up to the day he died in 1997

My dad realized the damage that was done to my sister and I and stopped making us go to church.

So by age 13 I stopped being indoctrinated as a Roman Catholic.

AND

Even though I went on to have sex with probably more than a thousand men and now most of the physical problems I have are because it’s not healthy to have sex with more than a thousand men, I can see that it would have been worse if we’d remained Catholics as a family.

Because then I might too think that all we need is a little reform.

Well maybe not a thousand but after the first 300 or so it gets blurred.
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(THIS PARAGRAPH WAS CUT FROM ABOVE:
“The priest came wrapped in the smoke of church incense, he wore a collar and flowing robes that in the child’s mind blended with pictures of saints and angels and even Jesus himself. His touch opened doors and feelings the child had never imagined and since it came from a priest, the sexual sensations came tied with desires to go to heaven, to contact god.

Oops, getting off topic

By the way

My church, Kairos, meets at 5PM Sundays in a room, set up like a coffee house, in the church at the corner of Fountain and Edgemont in Hollywood. No Catholic vibes at all. This Sunday another group is having a Super Bowl party in that room so we'll be upstairs, but other Sundays at 5 PM we're there, singing glorious music, hearing intelligent interpretation of Scripture. Hope someone joins me there soon.
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This is non-commercial Sunday, but it wouldn't hurt you to put five or so on my PayPal account now would it?
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Onward. . .