The Pope

Your common garden variety paedophile lives in secret, slave to their appetites, knowing that even suspicion can ruin their lives, forced to do business with criminals in order to seek gratification, and each image, each child is a victim left broken, whether they are alive or dead after. Whether you come from a place of compassion that it is an illness or otherwise, the testimony of victims speaks to the horror of it all. Unless you are a Catholic Priest.

Then, sure you have to confess but ultimately you are accepted, in no way denied the grace of your God and you are moved to another parish, leaving behind your victims. Out of 22 priests, 14 are still ordained, which makes me aghast and wonder whether the Church has some kind of points system in place. That the current Pope has overseen a great deal of the abuses and managed the response and as yet no one has put a fucking bullet through his head is tribute to the power of religious faith. Or to the denial of the same faithful.

Essentially you worship in a church that puts those who murder the spirits of children over common law and the concept of justice. Fuck you for not doing all you can as a member to right this wrong, and that comes from all of us who have ever experienced abuse, or known those who have, or those who see it for the travesty it is.

That you have a Cardinal who then comes out as a racist and begs off visiting our country because of our aggressive secularism and I say fuck him too. There is an argument for moderate religious belief, the Axis of Jam Making as it were but I wish that they were a little bit less tolerant where it counted, Even a Buddhist priest entertains thoughts of swatting a hornet once in a while, and these crimes and attitudes are the very cause of aggressive secularism. When you see that Mother Church is playing the same game as the financial industry and the government, similarly their promises sound hollow. Faith is irrational, and dogma is dangerous - as much as Marx said that capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction, does the Catholic Church bear similar fruit.