by Pa Rock
Heretic
It's been a while, too long in fact, since I blasphemed Pope Benedict XVI. The last time I went on a tirade about the sins of the Church of Rome in general and His Holiness in particular, I was skewered by a reader who felt that I might have been a tad on the negative side. And I was - and I will be again with what follows. But as a fallen Catholic who has been greatly disappointed with the inflexibility and dangerous positions of the Church, I feel that I have a right, if not a duty, to express some dissent.
I will admit to having slipped in my level of faith over the years, but it was Bernard Cardinal Law, a man whom I met on a couple of occasions when he was the lowly Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Missouri, who finally succeeded in driving me from the Church. Cardinal Law had a vision - a vision of himself as the first American Pope. In trying to protect the image of his turf, he spent years in the Archdiocese of Boston shuffling pedophile priests around every time one of them came to his attention. By not removing these sick individuals from the active priesthood and arranging for some serious treatment for their pedophilia, Cardinal Law sentenced thousands of innocent children to suffer needless and cruel abuse that has scarred them for life - just to protect his good image.
Cardinal Law's incompetence and/or complicit criminal behavior short-circuited his run for Pope. That, of course, was a plus for Catholicism. But Law's removal from contention had a negative impact as well - it left the field open to the evil Cardinal Ratzinger who was ultimately elected by the College of Cardinals as Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger, a German reprobate and former member of the Hitler Youth Corps, was Pope Paul's doctrinal enforcer, a man who had a personal mission to bring back the good old days of Catholicism as it was practiced in the fourteenth century.
Benedict hadn't been Pope too long when he stirred up the entire Muslim world with comments indicating that Islam was a religion built on violence. Way to incite, Man of Peace! Then, more recently, he stirred up the world's Jewish population by bringing an excommunicated Priest back into the comfort of the Church - a priest who believed and preached that the Holocaust was a fiction.
Those two acts were thunderously stupid, but chances are no one died from the addle-brained pronouncements of this old man teetering on senility. Last week, however, the Pope uttered remarks that could easily turn very deadly. While on a tour of AIDS-ravaged Africa, His Eminence pontificated against the use of condoms. Really! The Pope said that using condoms was not the answer, and then he prattled on about the virtues of abstinence.
Yes, sir, Your Popeship, abstinence is the answer - for you. (And it would be nice if you could get your "celibate" priests to practice abstinence also.) But human beings have human needs. Don't tell people living in poverty to give up the one small pleasure that they have in life - because they aren't going to listen to you any more seriously than American Catholics do. Telling people in Africa not to use condoms is tantamount to genocide. It's time to get real and use your big-assed church for health education and the prevention of disease. That, old man, is what Jesus would have done.
1 comment:
I agree with you. Shock! LOL But I will go even further. I think any religion that looks upon it's leader as nearly a God, and that is based on the idea that in order reach the creator you need a network of holy men and women, saints, etc. to contact him for you, is doomed to fail sooner or later. I actually love some of the ritual; it reminds me of the Methodist rituals I grew up with. But the Catholic church is about blind obedience to rules, and mostly it is about being in control. Of course they are going to talk down condoms, because of the pronouncement against birth control. The church does not believe in flexibility! Once they make a rule, by God, they are sticking to it! And the other things, such as the Holocaust denier and the protection of pediphiles? I imagine these were done out of compassion. Compassion for the lying, piece-of-crap man who had been thrust from the priesthood. As for the pedo-priests, rarely are priests banned from the church entirely. Unless it is their wish to go back to laity, they are "retired." If a number of fairly young priests are retired, and word got out that some of them were pedophiles, that would do great harm to the priesthood and to the church. He was being compassionate towards the church. That is what his defense is.
My daughter, bless her, is a Catholic who converted to the faith when she fell in love with her husband. She is a good Catholic, but not good enough, because i want another grandchild and she is holding out.For her sake, I hope it is abstinence; for if the priest found out she was on birth control, the fur would fly! LOL.
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