A suggestion for the Pope

Ol' Ratzi is quite upset at the Belgian raids on Catholic church offices — he's calling them "deplorable", a "moment of sadness", and is calling in the Belgian ambassador to the Vatican for an angry dressing-down.

He's doing everything all wrong. Here's what he should be doing: he should be calling the actions of priestly sex abusers deplorable and wrong, and insisting that the church will do everything in its power to correct the deep problems that have led to these awful acts. Then he should announce that the church will cooperate fully with all legal secular actions — and the Belgian raids were fully authorized by the Belgian state — in getting down to the heart of the matter, and go even further, offering to open up all relevant records to inspection. Then I might be convinced that the church is sincere in its pursuit of justice for all, not just its priests, but also its parishioners.

But then, I'm an atheist. Ignore me. I'm kind of enjoying the spectacle of the Catholic church putting on the indignant act of a guilty criminal caught red-handed and insisting that the police shouldn't be working so hard to catch them.

Tags

More like this

Eric Dejaeger is a Catholic priest and pedophile who benefited greatly from church policy: when it was learned that he was a child-raping monster, the Catholic Church did the upright, moral thing and kept him on as a priest, but simply shipped him off to the Canadian north where he'd only be raping…
The Catholic Church still doesn't get it By Adrian Liston No matter how many revelations of child sex abuse by Catholic Priests come out, the Catholic Church still doesn’t get it. Take, for example, this story told by the Archbishop of New York, in which he recounts a (probably apocryphal)…
One of the Vatican's "solutions" for their perennial sex scandals is to start testing and screening candidates for the priesthood. Australia is even considering doing it: unfortunately, the targets are all wrong. Melbourne's Catholic Church has embraced a Vatican suggestion to test potential…
I'm not going to say anything about the methods the Belgian authorities have used, because I don't know anything about due process in that country. (Though I did notice that that Belgian police carry big machine guns, at least when I've been there.) Anyway, the Vatican has it's shorts in a twist…