Showing posts with label Roman Catholic Church. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roman Catholic Church. Show all posts

Thursday, 21 July 2011

Revolution!

And a smoking gun!
The Irish are broadly lauding this week's thunderbolt from Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who denounced the Vatican's role in the past 17 years of abuse scandals. He accused the Holy See of downplaying "the rape and torture of children" and hiding behind its status as a sovereign state with its own secrecy-obsessed canon laws.

Astonished cabbies pulled off the road to watch the unprecedented speech on their smartphones. Victims of clerical sexual abuse, who have spent two decades trying to be heard and believed, cheered a day they thought would never come.

Watch and cheer with them.



The latest investigation, into the County Cork diocese of Cloyne, was published last week. It found that officials there were still shielding suspected pedophiles from the law until 2008.

That's 12 years after the Irish church unveiled a new policy requiring the mandatory reporting of all suspected crimes to police. And seven years after Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and head of the Vatican's powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ordered bishops worldwide to report all abuse cases to him, too.

However, the Cloyne report highlighted a 1997 letter from the Vatican to Irish bishops warning them that their new crime-reporting policy undermined canon law and had not won the Holy See's approval. For the first time, an Irish fact-finding inquiry found the Vatican culpable in promoting the culture of cover-up.

Shocking, innit?

Cue Tim Minchin! (EXTREMELY NSFW)

Monday, 17 May 2010

Truthiness and outright lies (with updates)

Ayatollah Ouellet was a speaker at this event, and while in the presence of flaming homophobes, he drew quite a bit of attention for his screed against women who have abortions. From here:

He called abortion a "moral crime" as serious as murder. Ouellet said he understands how a sexually assaulted woman has been traumatized and must be helped and that her attacker must be held accountable. "But there is already a victim," he said. "Must there be another one?"
Former MP and Catholic priest Raymond Gravel observed that this was the same-old same-old discourse of blaming and shaming women. He opposes the criminalization of abortion.

The Fetus©™ fetishist deputy Paul Szabo, à propos of the auditor general reviewing the books of the Board of Internal Economy which is the secretive House of Commons’ committee that administers MPs' allocated budgets, said: "... all of a sudden people would jump to conclusions without having all the facts".

That encapsulates the MASSIVE abortion-criminalizing and propaganda war being waged by the Zygote Zealots. Marie-Claude Lortie simply and eloquently demonstrates how pro-choice advocates are the sane, reasonable and humane thinkers in this confrontation. She would like a public discussion that would allow an authentic expression of concerns about abortion, without all the shrieeeking, the gynophobia, the hypocrisy and the tactical lies exploited by anti-abortionists.

At DJ!, we call them the Vulture Culture, since The Fetus©™ fetishists are willing to sacrifice women's lives in order to establish their theocratic dominion.

Why aren't Catholics like this one receiving the media attention they deserve, instead of gynophobes like Ayatollah Ouellet?

Consecrated women cannot remain silent in light of the sex scandals destroying the moral credibility of the Church, says Ursuline Sister Teresita Kambeitz.

"Who is going to speak out if we as consecrated women don't speak out?" Kambeitz asked. "Who is going to speak on behalf of the children? Who is going to encourage the good and faithful priests? Who is going to call the bishops to account?"

Kambeitz, a professor at St. Thomas More College in Saskatoon and a former professor at Newman Theological College, gave a series of talks on Hope-Filled Discipleship at the annual assembly of the Council of Consecrated Women (CCW) April 23-24.

Interestingly enough, she doesn't believe women should STFU. But of course, fundamentalist zealots like SUZANNE and Paycheck would likely call Sister Kambeitz a deluded and 'useful idiot'.

The Catholic Magisterium has established an ideological religious scheme founded on the premise that women are inherently evil, and that men are absolved from responsibility - because they only ever rape or engage in pedophilia when it's a woman's fault - that's the belief The Fetus©™ fetishists MASSIVELY support.

Update: From Slap Upside The Head: Pope: Gay Marriage “Insidious And Dangerous”

And also: Pure Hypocrisy - France Bédard, who was raped and repeatedly sexually abused by a priest when she was 17 and forced to work for the parish, was told by the vicar Armand Therrien to get an abortion and leave him the hell in peace, when she told him of her pregnancy. Criminal charges fell when Therrien died 2 weeks before the start of his trial for the years of abuse to which he had subjected her. After speaking to Ayatollah Ouellet about these events, Bédard was told that the Church could not help her, since the priest would not take responsibility for his actions. BTW, Bédard chose to carry the pregnancy to term, gave her son up for adoption and, decades later, was able to re-connect with him.

Sweet tap-dancing Baby Jay-Zeus: On Radio-Canada, Isabelle Bégin-O'Connor has just declared, presumably as some form of religious truthiness, that women who are raped almost never become pregnant because of the high stress level they endure. That must be so comforting to the hundreds of thousands of devout Catholic women who endured coercive marital sex for decades and yet became pregnant, to know that they are exceptional.

Friday, 12 March 2010

Hope in the Philippines

The Philippines has a population problem.
With an estimated population of about 92 million people, the Philippines is the world's 12th most populous country. It is estimated that there are an additional 11 million overseas Filipinos worldwide.

It is also 80-85% Roman Catholic.

Legislators there have been trying to formulate a family planning policy for eight years, but the Catlick Church keeps stamping its tiny feet and thwarting all efforts.

The Philippines’ population growth rate of 1.90 percent from 2005 to 2010 is still among the highest in East Asia, although this has gone down from 2.3 percent in the nineties. In a country that has no clear policy on family planning and population, more than 4,000 babies are added to its population every day.

In poorer areas, women have as many as six to seven children due to the lack of access and information to modern methods of family planning in the last decade. Depending on which government was in power, local clinics were giving out information about contraception that included condoms or were instructed to avoid doing so.

Incumbent President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who came to power with the backing of the Church, has consistently emphasised natural family planning – including abstinence –and "responsible parenthood" over modern methods.

(She herself has just two children.)

In May they're having a presidential election. There are nine candidates, only three of whom 'seem' to be in favour of a reproductive health policy, according to that article, 'based on their track records and public pronouncements'. (The article is silent on whether the others are opposed or just too intimidated to say.)
In late 2009, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) warned the electorate not to vote for candidates who favour the reproductive health bill. "It would not be morally permissible to vote for candidates who support anti-family policies, including reproductive health," said the CBCP's Catechism on Family and Life for the 2010 Elections.

So, that seems to be it. The Catlick Church will continue to oppose rational measures to control population growth and the Philippines will continue to export its people overseas to work and send dough home.

Oh. Wait. Looky here.
Seven in 10 Filipinos would defy the powerful Roman Catholic church and elect a president who supported the use of condoms and pills for birth control, according to survey released Friday.

Heavily Catlick countries around the world -- Spain, Portugal, Mexico, to mention a few -- are crawling out from centuries of the church's vicious misogyny, homophobia, and general opposition to sex and freedom. We hope the politicians of the Philippines are listening to their people.

Wednesday, 8 July 2009

Wha? It's only a cracker, isn't it?

Ooops scratch that, Dimitri. Such response would get you and Stevie in bee-eeg trouble.

And we wouldn't want that to happen to your boss, would we? Especially as he flies off to über-Catholic Italy for the G8.

Monday, 2 March 2009

Doing the fetus fetishists' back-pedal

It's not a new dance craze. It's what the zygote zealots do when they attempt to gloss over their MASSIVE tactical error, by blindly supporting octuplet mom Nadya Suleman.

Quick to pass judgment is Karoline Byler, a Roman Catholic who received hormone shots to stimulate ovulation. The Vatican has taken an official position against abortion and in-vitro fertilization but Byler was able to get pregnant yet obey the doctrine of her Church because she carried all six fetus to term. It wasn’t easy, though the Bylers’ pediatrician authorized nursing assistance since one of the babies still required oxygen three months after their birth by C-section.

Nadya Suleman recently turned down support from the Christian group Angels in Waiting which had offered to raise money to provide her and the babies with a house and 24-hour care. Sniffed Karoline Byler: “To be frank, I think that she’s an attention whore.”


Could that be the sound of sour grapes talking? The Bylers once had an exclusive contract with Inside Edition. Wonder how that’s going for them, now that sextuplets have become ho-hum.

Sunday, 11 January 2009

doubts about Doubt

Yesterday evening I saw the movie Doubt with friends, some who are recovering Catholics and one who was once a nun.
As the end credits rolled up on the screen I turned to a friend and whispered, "Well, that movie won't be sending anyone rushing back into the arms of the Church!"
Doubt was directed and written by John Patrick Shanley who adapted it from his own stage play. Shanley has mined his New York Bronx Irish Catholic background brilliantly in the past and produced many theatrical and cinematic gems. I was seduced and transported by Moonstruck, which was directed by our own Norman Jewison.
But Doubt left me cold. It is a parable, there is no doubt about that, but its adaptation into a movie did not feel entirely successful. As drama, it must have been riveting to the audience who witnessed the verbal confrontations between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn.

"Doubt has gotten a bad reputation. People who are utterly certain are vulnerable to a brand of foolishness that people who maintain a level of doubt are not." - John Patrick Shanley, explaining why audiences are left to decide for themselves whether Sister Aloysius is wise or overly zealous in her determination to expose the charismatic Father Flynn as a pedophile. (11/20/04 New York Times, interview with David Cote).
In the sixties, nuns never challenged the actions of priests, to do so was to transgress the hierarchal authority of the clergy. The dialogue is minimalist and powerful. But the direction and cinematography of critical scenes did not do justice to the words and to the rigour of the actors' performance, in my opinion.
Doubt was a good movie, it simply didn't have the power and the cinematic excellence of another film that it brings to mind, Agnes of God.

Sunday, 28 December 2008

I wanted to entitle this blog post “Catholic priests molest little girls” ...

... when unrepentant old hippie did her blogpost about the batshit craziness of Blob Blogging Wingnut. I felt that I should blog about priests who sexually abuse female children.

Pope Benny Ratzo recently pontificated upon the harm done to children. It was not an apology for the centuries of tacit complicity between the clerics who abuse children and those who don't. It was not an admission the Catholic Church and its refusal to be accountable for the actions of abusive priests, its hypocrisy that denies and evades responsibility, and its arrogance are morally bankrupt.
While the focus remains fixed on priests (men) who abuse boys, it is likely that more girls than boys have been subjected to sexual exploitation by members of the RCC clergy.
Why would a church committed to purging from its ranks potentially predatory clerics focus its scrutiny on prospective priests with homosexual tendencies? That would imply two things we know not to be true: that the crisis in the church was triggered by sexual orientation, not by sexual misconduct and its coverup, and that the victims of rapists in Roman collars were all male.

Why would a church that claims to be intent on healing and reconciliation effectively erase the traumatic experiences of so many women and girls? Kathleen M. Dwyer thinks she knows why. ''In order to be successful in blaming gays, the hierarchy knows that the sexual abuse of girls must be swept into invisibility and be internalized in the culture as a rare exception," said Dwyer, herself victimized by a priest.

''I can only assume that women victims simply aren't newsworthy, regardless of what we have to say," concluded a dispirited Ann Hagan Webb, a psychologist who heads the New England chapter of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. Fifty percent of the organization's members are women. ''The Vatican's decision to ban gay men from the priesthood is an insult to survivors of either gender. The vast number of girls and women abused by priests underscores the obvious, that banning gay priests will not solve the problem of sexual abuse in the church."
Thousands of women who have been sexually abused by priests in their childhood have remained invisible and silent, some by choice, some shamed by RCC doctrine that implies that as little girls, their 'female allure' made priests commit these sins and thus, are the cause of their own abuse.

That's quite the racket you have there, Benny Ratzo.