Today’s outrage comes courtesy of the Catholic Church, home of absolutist hypocrisy

In The Case of the Pope, a book which could be, but with wily lawyerly wisdom was not, called The Case Against the Pope, Geoffrey Robertson QC sets out in meticulous detail a potential prosecution case against Cardinal Ratzinger at The Hague. The charge? Crimes Against Humanity. A crucial component of Robertson’s argument is Ratzinger’s pre-Papal status as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. As is the wont of powerful religious men, the Congregation’s dominant feature is co-opted from the purported characteristic of their putative God: omnipotence.

Like the rest of the Vatican administration, the all-powerful Congregation is highly secretive and not even nominally accountable to those who provide the funds, including congregations of desperately impoverished families overburdened by the huge families demanded of submission to church teachings. Only the most senior of the celibate clerics entrusted with the vast wealth of the Catholic Church have any idea where the money goes or how the resource allocation decisions are made.

Nevertheless, it is acceptable in mainstream society to not question the criminal conduct of the church, and for mainstream media to describe the Congregation as “conservative” or “powerful” without questioning the terrible crimes in which it has played an active part. The assumption seems to be that the church does “good works”, and that no-one could possibly have known of the vast numbers of priests who are also child rapists, for if they had, they would have acted to stop it. This is an odd piece of equivalence at best, given the church itself stands against moral relativism and pushes an absolutist doctrine on sin, despite the sum total of its teachings being derived from fantastical mythology, genocidal allegory or, at best, anachronistic analogy.

That no-one could have known, on the basis that they would have acted had they known, is now demonstrably false as active cover-up after passive cheek-turning emerges on the evidence. It is dangerously retrospective and fallacious: we can not assume that people who have at no time been asked whether they knew something did not know it. Nor can we presume that a character test which at no time has been evidenced (the moral fortitude, or courage and strength, to defend abused children in the face of institutional and individual concealment) has been passed. As the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse has laid bare in Australia, none of these assumptions are, or ever were, grounded in fact. The Commission has just had millions of dollars of funding revoked as the new Catholic Prime Minister re-aligns budget priorities. Investigating and revealing child rape by catholic priests has never been a priority for the Catholic Church, and nor is it a priority for the Australian Prime Minister, who is not only a company man to his well- heeled shoes, but also notoriously wrote a personal, gushing reference for a convicted paedophile priest.

As Robertson documents, there is overwhelming evidence that the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith is a human trafficking racket which moves paedophile priests around the world for the specific purpose of covering up their crimes. These acts actively and predictably create opportunities for child rapist-priests to re-offend. Simultaneously, the Congregation pretends – and expends considerable resources collected from the Catholic faithful to this end – that ecclesiastical ‘punishment’ (Hail Marys and the like) for child rape is sufficient and justifiable, and somehow precludes any further action such as reporting complaints to the relevant civil authorities. Aiding or abetting the crime of child sexual assault by relevant institutions and their agents is not even on the table, although gag orders and minimal compensation payments have been, for some time.

In Australia, the legal framework at least nominally recognises the principle of separation of church and state, despite the dominance of Judeo-Christian traditions across all aspects of civil society. Spare a thought then for the good citizens of Ireland, a pseudo theocratic state where Catholicism is inescapable and competes with England as the single greatest source of human misery inflicted on the Irish, and Irish women and children in particular, over hundreds and hundreds of years. The church and its demand for sons and daughters to enter lives of celibacy, with its harsh and harmful teachings on contraception and abortion, sits in judgement on individuals, families, schools, neighbourhoods and whole communities. To an outsider, it is beyond ludicrous that any community would accept judgement on pre-marital sex and pregnancy from celibate childless adults who adhere to a bastion of victim blaming sadism which actively conceals child sexual assault.

And so, to the latest revelations of Catholic church works and how the Catholic church works. Almost 800 baby and child corpses re-discovered in a septic tank on site at an institution run by Bon Secour (good help/safe harbour) Catholic nuns. At least three mothers have been confirmed to have suffered the same fate. “Buried” is too inaccurate a term here, with the dignity and humanity it implies. Extraordinary courage must have been required of historian Catherine Corless for her tireless work in bringing the fate of these tragic lives to light.

Sister word presser Stephanie Lord writes in No Country for Young Women: Honour and Infanticide in Ireland, that thousands of young women

“had violated the honour of their communities, by bringing shame on their families through “illegitimate” pregnancy and therefore had to be hidden at all costs, and punished for their transgressions. The children died as they lived, discarded like the refuse of society that the Church considered them and the mothers that gave birth to them to be. Most of the children who survived were put to work in industrial schools under the supervision of perverts and sadists.” https://feministire.wordpress.com/author/stephanielordeire/

Lord takes no prisoners in her description of the Catholic Church as a central agency for attracting, rewarding and reproducing infanticide, sadists and perverts, and is equally frank on its power-hungry, child trafficking and wealth stripping activities:

“These children certainly did not die for lack of money or resources on the Church’s part (they had an income from the children they sold), and the fewer children of this kind there were, the less threat there was to the church’s control over society.”

Today’s outrage is brought to you by the Catholic Church.