They picked a new Godfather

The Catholic Church, where the least controversial candidate for the top job is the guy accused of collaborating with a military dictatorship that murdered 30,000 people.


UPDATE: As Dawg points out, Bergoglio recently angrily denounced a plan by Agentina's current leftist government to legalize gay marriage as 'the work of the devil'.  He said NOTHING while a right wing government was murdering 30,000 people, operating torture chambers around the clock with the active participation of priests and kidnapping leftist women and giving their children to loyal right wing supporters of the regime.

In his defense that he helped smuggle people out of the country, interceded for kidnapped dissident priests and tried to recover kidnapped children during the dictatorship he has revealed that he was unambiguously lying when he said he didn't know about these crimes of the regime until years later.

So legalizing loving relationships between people of the same gender is a secular leftist government doing the work of the devil.  Torture, kidnapping and murder by a right wing government that publicly presented itself as the defender of the faith merited no such condemnation.

Jesus was pretty clear about conservatives...

“‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

Using God to justify being a vicious prick

Pastor Sean Harris of the Berean Baptist Church Fayetteville, North Carolina is the latest pro-Amendment One pastor to demonstrate just how virulently anti-gay the campaign is. In his sermon this past Sunday, he gave the parents in his congregation “special dispensation” to use violence against their children if they violate gender norms. For example, if you see your four-year-old son “dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist.” Pastor Harris says boys should have their girlish behavior “squashed like a cockroach” and similarly advises forcing girls to conform to female gender norms

For those who argue biblical justification for their bigotry against gays: If you saw your brother working on the Sabbath would you bash his head in with a rock? Do you believe in the death penalty for eating shell fish? If our country defeats another country in a war, do you believe that gives us a right to slaughter their children and take their women as sex slaves? No? Then you are already picking and choosing which parts of the bible you will follow and which you won't, the fact that you embrace the passages that justify bigotry against gays says more about you than it does about a rule book written for nomadic goatherders thousands of years ago.

"If you have a monopoly on God, you can get away with anything."

Rolling Stone's lacerating piece on the clergy abuse scandal should be the final nail in the 'few bad apples' defense as it lays out in detail the highly organized long standing policy of protecting and enabling abusers. 

The five co-defendants sit close enough to shake hands in the Philadelphia courtroom, but they never once acknowledge one another. Father James Brennan, a 47-year-old priest accused of raping a 14-year-old boy, looks sad and stooped in a navy sweater, unshaven and sniffling. Edward Avery, a defrocked priest in his sixties, wears an unsettlingly pleasant expression on his face, as though he's mentally very far away. He and two other defendants – the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, also in his sixties, and Bernard Shero, a former Catholic schoolteacher in his forties – are accused of passing around "Billy," a fifth-grade altar boy. According to the charges, the three men raped and sodomized the 10-year-old, sometimes making him perform stripteases or getting him drunk on sacramental wine after Mass.

Heinous as the accusations are, the most shocking – and significant – are those against the fifth defendant, Monsignor William Lynn. At 60, Lynn is portly and dignified, his thin lips pressed together and his double chin held high. In a dramatic fashion statement, he alone has chosen to wear his black clerical garb today, a startling reminder that this is a priest on trial, a revered representative of the Catholic Church, not to mention a high-ranking official in Philadelphia's archdiocese. Lynn, who reported directly to the cardinal, was the trusted custodian of a trove of documents known in the church as the "Secret Archives files." The files prove what many have long suspected: that officials in the upper echelons of the church not only tolerated the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests but conspired to hide the crimes and silence the victims. Lynn is accused of having been the archdiocese's sex-abuse fixer, the man who covered up for its priests. Incredibly, after a scandal that has rocked the church for a generation, he is the first Catholic official ever criminally charged for the cover-up.

Multiculturalism's success

PARIS — Canadians are the most tolerant people in the developed world, are terrific readers, enjoy more "positive experiences" than everyone but Icelanders, and don't produce many babies, according to a new report released Tuesday.
The conclusions were contained in the latest edition of Society at a Glance, a broad-brush analysis of social and economic indicators among the 34 member states of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
"At 84 per cent on average, Canadians report the highest community tolerance of minority groups — ethnic minorities, migrants, and gays and lesbians — in the OECD, where the average is 61 per cent," said a summary of Canada-specific findings.

Such widespread acceptance didn't happen automatically just because we are so much nicer - not completely anyway. It took deliberate and intentional public programs and initiatives.  Social engineering in other words.

It's an unpopular contention, bringing up connotations of bloated bureaucracy and the discredited legislation of political correctness.  But remember a lot of those connotations have been deliberately spawned and nourished by the same people trying to brand every progressive policy or program as 'Failed Big Government Run Amuck!'   There, I just boiled down every Financial Post editorial headline ever.

But while Canada was welcoming and integrating newcomers into our society and crucially, our economy with an inclusive respect for cultural differences, Germany was openly renouncing multiculturalism and France was standing on the principal of 'secularism'  another great, enlightened idea but used too often as a cudgel.  At least that's how they've used it.  They just outlawed veils that cover a woman's face and have started rounding up and arresting women who refuse to take them off.  Short sighted, mean-spirited and counter-productive, but portrayed as high minded defense of feminism and liberty.  This while the large French Muslim community remains disenfranchised, excluded, disproportionately underemployed and ghettoized.

We've had our own flare-ups, largely but by no means solely, in Quebec where a entrenched majority manages to transform isolated friction points into an argument that multiculturalism as a whole is a failed model and a sign that they are under siege from a small minority.

But in general I would argue that the huge success Canada has had integrating every Canadian into our society is the proof that multiculturalism is an unheralded success story.

Pro-Life means Pro-Murder now?

Pro-Lifers have always been a little caviler about any life that is more than a few inches long and not attached to a placental wall, dismissing the very real medical necessity of conditions like depression, toxemia and even ectopic pregnancy which can never result in anything but the death of mother and child and has to be terminated.  Don't tell Bill O'Reilly though.

But now that casual dismissal of the health of real living women - so much harder to get broody and weird about, than a scrap of flesh that could potentially become a BAAAAABBBBYYYYY - has been revealed as a truly murderous attitude towards doctors, nurses and anybody who helps a woman exercise her right to get a legal medical procedure done.

First, it was South Dakota. Then Nebraska and Iowa. The similarly worded bills, which have quietly cropped up recently in state legislatures, share a common purpose: To expand justifiable homicide statutes to cover killings committed in the defense of an unborn child. Critics of the bills, including law enforcement officials, warn that these measures could invite violence against abortion providers and possibly provide legal cover to the perpetrators of such crimes.

That these measures have emerged simultaneously in a handful of states is no coincidence. It's part of a campaign orchestrated by a Washington-based anti-abortion group, which has lobbied state lawmakers to introduce legislation that it calls the "Pregnant Woman's Protection Act" [PDF]. Over the past two years, the group, Americans United for Life, has succeeded in passing versions of this bill in Missouri and Oklahoma. But there's a big difference between those bills and the measures floated recently in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa.

While the Oklahoma and Missouri laws specifically cover pregnant women, the latest measures are far more sweeping and would apply to third parties. The bills are so loosely worded, abortion-rights advocates say, that a pregnant woman could seek out an abortion and a boyfriend, husband—or, in some cases, just about anyone—could be justified in using deadly force to stop it.

A Planned Parenthood official testified last week at a hearing on Nebraska's LB 232 that such legislation "authorizes and protects vigilantes." And it isn't just abortion-rights advocates who fear the implications of the AUL-inspired legislation. "This could be used to incite violence against abortion providers," said Omaha's deputy chief of police, David Baker. The office of South Dakota's Republican governor—no defender of abortion-rights—has called the version of the bill introduced in the state's legislature a "very bad idea." (Following a national outcry, the South Dakota bill was shelved.)

Of course expect the pro forma denials.  Shocked! Shocked they are, that anyone could interpret this legislation to imply legal protection for the murderous assassins these 'mainstream' totally not all extremist organizations keep producing.  Just because they use language about 'murdering babies', 'genocide', 'death factories' and the like, or publish the names and addresses of the clinic staff they use such rhetoric about should in no way be considered the proximate cause for the murderous rampages their followers keep engaging in.

You know the Science Fiction novel I would have preferred stay fictional?  The Handmaid's Tale.  Too bad groups like these seem intent on some kind of large scale re-enactment.

My Mommies help me with my homework

Arbitrary school rankings designed by the Fraser Institute to promote an anti public school privatization agenda?  Absolutely worthless.

Having a school for cultist polygamist kids get a perfect score?  Absolutely priceless.

A school for children in the polygamous commune of Bountiful, B.C. is among the highest ranking on the 2011 Fraser Institute Report Card. 

Bountiful Elementary-Secondary scored a perfect 10 mark. 

It tied with 12 other schools, mostly private schools in the Vancouver area, that also achieved perfect 10s. 

The Fraser Institute rates 875 public and private elementary schools throughout B.C. based on 10 key indicators using data from province-wide testing, known as the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) test. FSA tests are mandated by the B.C. Ministry of Education.
Fraser Institute spokesperson, Peter Cowley, said not much is known about what made Bountiful so successful on FSAs. 

“With regard to what techniques they may have used or how they taught in math, for instance, between kindergarten and grade 4, all those things may be interesting but we don’t have any long term record of success yet,” Cowley said. 

Jane Friesen, the director of Simon Fraser University's Centre for Education Research and Policy, said people should look at these rankings carefully. 

“It’s simply telling you how is a particular cohort of students in a school doing in a particular year. I think we have to be careful to not interpret those results as a measure of the effectiveness of the school and I think that’s where the real issue comes in,” she said

Escaping the Clutches

The Catholic church is upset with the waning of their influence in Spain, the country is going through the same kind of accelerated transition from a reactionary, church dominated society to a progressive, majority secularist society that Quebec did in the 60's with the Quiet Revolution.  The new government has removed mandatory religious instruction from public schools, legalized abortion, and liberalized divorce laws. 

Pope Benedict XVI has warned of an "aggressive anti-clericalism" in Spain which he said was akin to that experienced during the 1930s.

You mean when the Church was siding with Spain's fascists in the Spanish Civil War? 

Correspondents say many Spaniards turned away from the church following the rule of General Franco, as democracy and secularism became synonymous.

So become associated as an institution, with supporting dictatorship, brutal tyranny and elite control of politics, economy and culture and identified as the main cultural opponent of democracy and progress and then complain when it ultimately leads to large scale social rejection.

This is authoritarian and hierarchical cluelessness of an epic scale.

UPDATE: The Christian Science Monitor, predictably, digs a little deeper.  Spain is the only European country that officially does not have separation of church and state.  The state is officially neutral on religion but in practice the Catholic church has legal advantages over other faiths and state supported control over large chunks of the education system and other areas of social spending - to the tune of over nine billion dollars a year in taxpayer funds.  The current government has been proposing serious functional reforms that in practice would start bringing Spain's balance between church and state in line with the rest of the industrialized world. 

Short of Vatican City, Spain is the last refuge for Vatican control over state structures in a country that does have a large majority who identify as Catholic but where only about 20% of the population consider themselves practicing or observant. 

The fact that the Pope is fighting tooth and nail to keep that dominance is revealing.

Cartoon banned for not showing Muhammed

Yesterday's Non-Sequitur cartoon was replaced with a re-run by several papers, for making the point about how fearful that newspapers are by NOT including a picture of the prophet Muhammad (Peace be unto him).

In the comment section of his strip, when one reader complained that the Boston Globe has run a different cartoon, Wiley responded saying;

"Yours along with many other papers across the country were afraid to run this cartoon. In doing so, it is rife with irony, as it is obviously satirizing the paralyzing fear in media of anything regarding Islam. Cowards indeed.


For those of you whose paper ran the alternate edition, I strongly suggest you contact the editor and voice your opinion on the matter. They are the ones who need to hear it, as they are the ones who made the decision."

Barbara Kay clutches her Pearls

Memo to Barbara Kay:  Your distaste for the sex trade and your fretting that changing the laws detracts from treating those in it like the cheap little sluts that they are is insufficient reason to leave them to the tender mercies of the Picktons of the world - which is what the status quo amounts to.

Being a prostitute is a shameful, indecent activity, and any sex worker who demands respect as a matter of course is fooling herself. She is not respectable. Politically correct people will say she is, but she isn’t. The danger will continue, the pimps will still control the desperate girls and society as a whole will think less of itself. And all because nobody really takes a good look at the word “harm” and asks themselves what a healthy society looks like, and what kind of newly designated “normal” behaviours, stamped kosher by the courts, bring harm to that healthy body.

So Babs isn't planning on getting a happy ending massage any time soon, we get it.  Can I say that I'm very, very glad that its the Charter of Rights and Freedoms not Barbara Kay's idea of 'what a healthy society looks like' that is the law of the land?

UPDATE: Only fair to point out that while the National Post published the most bone stupid reactions to the court ruling, with a lot of ignoble competition from the Globe and Mail (New slogan: Pretty and dumb), they also printed one of the best pieces. Dan Gardner wonders how politicians and the media utterly refuse to even address that the laws struck down directly cause the brutalization and murder of women.

Today's Irony Moment

Atheists and Agnostics understand religion better than believers:

Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.

How much do you know about religion? Try answering a sampling of questions asked in a phone survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.

“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

Vatican: Attempting to treat women as equals as bad a crime as raping children

The Vatican today made the "attempted ordination" of women one of the gravest crimes under church law, putting it in the same category as clerical sex abuse of minors, heresy and schism.

The new rules, which have been sent to bishops around the world, apply equally to Catholic women who agree to a ceremony of ordination and to the bishop who conducts it. Both would be excommunicated. Since the Vatican does not accept that women can become priests, it does not recognise the outcome of any such ceremony.

Rise of the Theocrats

Alarmist? Shrill? An extreme interpretation of a cultural movement and its plans?

You could make any of those arguments about Chris Hedges impassioned treatise on the dangers of the religious right, The Christian Fascists Are Growing Stronger. What we shouldn't do is ignore him.

Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and shutting out all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to submit before an imperial America. It champions the eradication of social deviants, beginning with homosexuals, and moving on to immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims and those they dismiss as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace their perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Those who defy the mass movement are condemned as posing a threat to the health and hygiene of the country and the family. All will be purged.

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”

-Sinclair Lewis, 1935

Omertà

"One redeeming factor is that it would appear that the victims involved are of Polish descent and their respect for the priesthood and the Church has made them refrain from making these allegations public or laying a criminal charge against a priest. Had this happened elsewhere there would be every danger that charges would have been laid long ago with all the resultant scandal." - Bishop Joseph Windle of Pembroke, Ontario

The cynicism on display here is blunt and ugly; 'fortunately he picked children from a priest-ridden community and the parents know their place and understand the reputation of priests and church is more important then their children's pain and terror.'

There is no recognition that the abuser probably made the same calculation when he chose his victims that the hierarchy is making when they congratulate themselves on being able to keep his crimes hidden.

The Church's primary defense has been that this kind of abuse is widespread in this sinful modern world and focusing on that by priests is unfair, but of course the issue isn't the abuse, it's the institutional response to that abuse. Other organizations facing similar scandals have responded with alacrity, fired people, informed the police and expressed remorse quickly and without attempts at minimization or attacking the victim.

The Catholic Church's response has been marked by evasiveness, entitlement, resentment, arrogance and a disturbing tendency to view the rape of children as a minor moral peccadillo - certainly not important enough to risk their standing.

This is a church hierarchy that has piteously decried the modern world's increasing secularization and the creeping erosion of their power and influence - but it is those very changes that have finally allowed their drifting, dwindling followers to challenge an institutional culture that seems to view them as property. In the past the Church has manifestly depended on their unchallenged authority over their flock to keep horrific crimes hidden and unchallenged.

As their followers become less priest ridden and reflexively deferential, it becomes harder to sweep scandal under the rug.

UPDATE from Andrew Sullivan:

Celibacy is part of the problem, but deeper still is the authoritarianism.
It means no accountability for enormous power. That guarantees, in this fallen world, abuse of power. It is this abuse which is integral to the systematic nature of the sex abuse. Which is why Benedict's assertion of even more rigid Papal and centralized authority compounds rather than addresses the core problem.
So, no, K-Lo, greater fidelity to that authority and whatever it says and does is not the solution. It helped create this problem. And this problem means the rape and abuse of thousands of defenseless souls and bodies. The church can either grasp this nettle and restore the spirit and openness of the Second Vatican Council, or it can curl up in its authoritarian cocoon and die of a collapse in moral authority.

Vatican Abuse: Follow the Money

Andrew Sullivan, a pained and idiosyncratic but still religious Catholic, has been following the priest abuse scandal with the kind of serious reporting nobody else is doing. In his 'How long has this been going on?' series he demolishes the 'It's the iniquitous modern world's fault' argument the Vatican has been trying to push.

His readers have been writing in, new ones every day, detailing stories of abuse by priests over the decades and centuries. Rape and torture of children by priests has been gong on for centuries its only started getting reported in the last few years as the church loses its stranglehold of unquestioned authority over its flock.

Now he does a huge piece on the most unreported element of the story. The money, in the form of thick wads of unmarked bills in plain brown envelopes to cardinals, bishops and other Vatican authorities that blocked oversight and protected abusers.

Struggling to give context to the donations, this cleric continued: "You're saying these laypeople are good and fervent, it's good for them to meet the pope. The expression is opera carita -- 'We're making an offering for your works of charity.' That's the way it's done. In fact you don't know where the money's going." He paused. "It's an elegant way of giving a bribe." ...
When Martínez Somalo, a Spaniard, became head of the congregation overseeing religious in 1994, Maciel dispatched a priest to Martínez Somalo's home. The young priest carried an envelope thick with cash. "I didn't bat an eye," he recalled. "I went up to his apartment, handed him the envelope, said goodbye. ... It was a way of making friends, insuring certain help if it were needed, oiling the cogs."
Another critical figure who was the recipient of vast amounts of Legion money was Cardinal Sodano. Sodano was critical to fending off investigation of Maciel once formal charges were brought in 1998:
"Cardinal Sodano was the cheerleader for the Legion," said one of the ex-Legionaries. "He'd come give a talk at Christmas and they'd give him $10,000." Another priest recalled a $5,000 donation to Sodano.
Sodano was also the key Vatican figure who this Easter derided the latest stories of abuse as "petty gossip" and declared the church united in defending the Pope. He has refused to answer Berry's questions about the Legion's cash gifts to him over the years.
So this multiple rapist and bigamist essentially got away with his crimes because he bought silence from key Vatican officials, at the very least by ingratiating himself by donating huge amounts to the church and at the very most by directly bribing key officials with envelopes stuffed with cash.

Moderation in all things

VATICAN CITY—Calling the behavior shameful, sinful, and much more frequent than the Vatican was comfortable with, Pope Benedict XVI vowed this week to bring the widespread pedophilia within the Roman Catholic Church down to a more manageable level.
Addressing thousands gathered at St. Peter's Square on Easter Sunday, the pontiff offered his "most humble apologies" to abuse victims, and pledged to reduce the total number of molestations by 60 percent over the next five years.
"This is absolutely unacceptable," Pope Benedict said. "It seems a weakening of faith in God has prevented our priests from exercising moderation when sexually abusing helpless minors."
"And let me remind our clergy of the holy vows they all took when they entered the priesthood," he continued. "They should know that they're only allowed one small child every other month."

Yes it's the Onion.

Sinead on the Pope's apology

I brought up Sinead last year when the report on systematic child abuse in Ireland was released, now she responds to Pope's response to that report.

Irish Catholics are in a dysfunctional relationship with an abusive organization. The pope must take responsibility for the actions of his subordinates. If Catholic priests are abusing children, it is Rome, not Dublin, that must answer for it with a full confession and in a criminal investigation. Until it does, all good Catholics -- even little old ladies who go to church every Sunday, not just protest singers like me whom the Vatican can easily ignore -- should avoid Mass. In Ireland, it is time we separated our God from our religion, and our faith from its alleged leaders.

Almost 18 years ago, I tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on an episode of "Saturday Night Live." Many people did not understand the protest -- the next week, the show's guest host, actor Joe Pesci, commented that, had he been there, "I would have gave her such a smack." I knew my action would cause trouble, but I wanted to force a conversation where there was a need for one; that is part of being an artist. All I regretted was that people assumed I didn't believe in God. That's not the case at all. I'm Catholic by birth and culture and would be the first at the church door if the Vatican offered sincere reconciliation.

Quote of the Day

"The church wants wriggle room for the one crime no one can think about without vomiting...Don't let's call it child abuse. It's the rape and torture of children."

-Christopher Hitchens

Slap of the hand

South Park was right; the Vatican really does seem to believe that its everyone else's problem.

The children keep revealing what was done to them, the media is insufficiently deferential to their holiness and ask impertinent questions, their waning supply of believers want to know why child raping predators were protected and enabled and now that the cover-up scandal has come right to the Pope's door he's actually expected to take personal responsibility for his actions.

People keep asking if a culture of celibacy, of deliberately pushing those who reveal they are gay in confession to suppress their sexuality in the priesthood, of secrecy, authoritarianism, deference from the laity and unquestioned authority and access to vulnerable children are part of the problem.

Don't these disrespectful people understand that protecting the reputations of priests and bishops and the Holy Father himself is more important than a few dozen...hundred...thousand raped and beaten children?

If this was a new religion, IE a cult, the police tanks would have been knocking down church doors by now.

The church keeps trying to blame the evils of the modern world, claiming that permissiveness and waning adherence to faith are the cause of these problems - but it seems far more likely that these horrible acts have been happening throughout history and only now have people lost enough deference and awe of the church and priesthood to start holding it to account. The worldwide ebbing of faith is the only reason that the church is now getting seriously challenged on abuse and the protection of abusers.

Faith was the problem. Secularization was the solution.

Abuse scandal reaches the Vatican

Michael Wolff suggests that the latest upswing of the priest abuse scandal in Europe comes right to the Popes door and threatens his position directly.

This isn't getting much attention in the US, but it's a big one: The Pope's in trouble.

Trouble, trouble. Not-going-away trouble. Run-out-of-office trouble. It's a potentially transformative moment in matters of religion and of power, wherein even the infallible turns out to be vulnerable. Some of us live for such moments.

It's the priest sex story, the same one we've already done -- and done. But now it's popping up in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, all markets which make the American news media yawn. But come on. The priest sex story is one of the best we've had. It's one of the ones that the media of our time is going to be remembered for. It's the ultimate destruction of façade; the giving of voice to silence; the catching of deer and hypocrites in the headlights. It's our triumph.

It's also, on the other hand, our shame. Because who hasn't known for generations that that's what priests were doing? And yet the story went untold. It had to wait for 30 or 40 years for public sensibility to catch up with it before it was told.

He also makes the point we all know but almost never see in print: This isn't a story about aberrant behavior that is an exception to the norm; clearly a disturbingly large percentage of priests became priests precisely for the sexual access to children.