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How many times is she going to ask him “What for”??
How can anyone say Ratzinger or any other cardinal or bishop that has helped relocate or hide child abusers and cover up the abuses is a good guy? Then they have the audacity to claim they are the victims. John Steward did a remarkably succinct piece on this.
I think Dawkins is right. The world needs to question itself about how a word religion as an organisation par excellence can grow to become so powerful… Few people understand how powerful the RC Church actually is or how hard and how ruthlessly the Papacy has worked to bring the world into such a subservient focus to its wants and needs.
The pedophile scandal merely alerts us to the daring of the Church in trying to supress wrong-doing and to be a judge in its own cause. One must remember how vehemently the Church and its remarkable tentacles denied any wrong-doing whatsoever, how they managed (in the Irish case) to manipulate the entire Criminal Justice System and set up its own ‘quiet Inquision’ in the hope that things would be dealt with according to their desires. When the Irish judges, one after another, denied them that possibility, they prevailed at governmental and political level, to get the tax-payer to discharge the ensuing damages accruing to the pedophiles.
Thereafter, the entire process was one of denial and coverup by the bishops, the archbishops, the cardinals and , of course, by the Pope. However praiseworthy it is to make a powerful man toe the line with respect to the law, it is also true that in most catholic dominated countries, there is no real ‘separation of powers’; between the judiciary, the political parties and the civil service, the RC Church has managed to subvert them all into one very biddable body; the larger point being that the RC Church , the ‘universal’ church, operates everywhere to subvert the secular state and its equitable standards, and introduces where it can (which is in most places) its own civil service.
Whether we look at India, America, Ireland or East Timor, the universities-cum-civil service is controlled by the RC Church. Jesuit Universities alone in India and America run over the twenties and they all interface with government. In the Irish Republic the RC Church owns over 90% of the Primary Schools and all the others as well.
Further, the international dimensions of the Church, as we have all to frequently seen throughout history, is used to create and control international policy,and is most effective and most malignant when it proffers its ‘ethical views’ as crusading catch cries: and this extends to the use of contraceptives, issues of fertility and aboriton, as well as who should be allowed to enter the EU (such as Turkey) and where pre-war agitations should be initiated (Tibet, Poland, Georgia).
And this is not to mention the momentous influence of the Curch is conducting wars, whether in Mexico, Spain, Italy, Germany, Korea, Suez, Vietnam, Iraq, China, etc.. Is the Pope, for example, stirring it up in China at the moment?
The next time one passes a church, try to think how many widows’ mites and childrens’s prayers find their way back to the Vatican, the richest and most powerful statelet in the world! If by attempting to arrest the Pope Dawkins and Hitchens makes us reflect on the enormous power of those who would subvert all secular institutions across the world, then it was a brave effort by at least two atheists who decided to fight back. . .
Seamus Breathnach
http://www.irish-criminology.com
Seamus, your comment really does underscore how (unintentionally) nefarious those who consider going after the pope to be a non-skeptical activity are actually being. As Rebecca Watson has pointed out, the nature of the crime is linked to the nature of the church. As you have poined out, the nature of the seeming invulnerability of all the bishops, cardinals, and the pope (involved in this cover up) is linked to the nature of the church. (Many) skeptics routinely question the nature of the church. When this particular issue comes along, why turn away all of the sudden?
Just a reflective word or two on your comment, Greg:
1. As we are now about to move into 2011, we realize your comment all the more. You say that ‘Skeptics routinely question the nature of the church’, but remain shtum on the pedophile question. One has to be circumspect about the ‘routine questioning of the Church’. In secular and successfully productive countries that have necessarily reformed their religious attachment to Rome, perhaps there is a routine look back at the middle ages those countries are pleased to leave. But in countries that are still ‘pre-reformation’ (Ireland, Poland, the Phillipines, Mexico, etc.) there is no such questioning, whether routine or random. In Ireland’s case, no serious literateur has questioned the church since James Joyce. And I notice that in the new TV Ad on the extension of Dublin Airport, there is mention of Yeats and Friel, but none of Joyce,in whose home city the airport operates. Such are the continuous tensions between any effort the Irish may make to become or remain secular in the light of such unquestioned totalitarianism.
2. Wikileaks have revealed how the Irish Government, having set up the Murphy Inquiry, has operated to exclude the clerics from giving evidence. Could anything be more short-sighted or corrupt. It is despite the awful Irish Church-State ensemble that Judge Yvonne Murphy completed her hard-hitting enquiry contra an entirely male-dominated and Romanly-biased culture.
3. So far from questioning the RC Church, we now see how the Pope penetrated the UK; but few have dared to ask how he came to assist the Brits with Iran. And how can the Pope, no doubt through the Indian and Hindu sources, could remain pro-American in spreading the Christian faith, and join forces with Iran on the other.We have heen told that both Iran and the Vatican are united against the ‘secularism’ of the West. By ‘secularism’ is meant, of course, the capacity and ability of you and I to think for ourselves without the monastic permission of a Roman cleric. The Ayatollah and the Pope can join against the common enemy, the common people; but those who would work to rid their country of extreme religious/political leaders, like Turkey or China, are to be opposed! The point, again, is where have these world arrangements been critically enquired into. What business has the Vatican in interfering with political affairs, even to marshal the population of the Poles and Brazilians merely to maximize the Catholic interest. . .
4. Routine critical enquiry into the universal and local strokes pulled off by the universal church are now a matter of political necessity… For my part, all I can see is a further manipulation of the people by the Church: and this extends in particular to the use of Opus Dei personnel in government to protect Bondholders, an unknown number of whom are cleric, at the enormous expense of the common people. To talk of the decisions make by the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, and the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihen — the two people who govern the entire box of democratic wax — being ‘democratic’ is a caricature — and yet what they have decided is perfectly OK with the clergy, who no doubt have benefitted enormously by the common enslavement of the people and the generations to come. Bankers, Barons and Bishops, as of old, still govern the Betaghs without as a fist being raised or any one of the marauders being beheaded or imprisoned. The most laughable side of this entire Jesus Joke is the ability of the clerics, who pay no taxes whatsoever but enjoy indescribable privileges on every front, to mildly crticiize the financial arrangements that so favour them, without any REPORTER ever asking them why they do not pay taxes themselves if they feel so much for the peoples’ plight.
Ireland, as you can see, is not only still superstitious but is ever ‘semper fidelis’ to that superstition.
Seamus Breathnach