I read the news

Friday, April 30, 2010 :: Tagged under: pablolife. ⏰ 3 minutes.


Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄


If you aren't head-explodingly outraged with the Catholic church, you aren't paying enough attention (or, alternatively, you're incapable of independent thought).

With that in mind, this video tickled me (language NSFW).

Unsurprisingly, I agree with the Hitchens/Dawkins initiative to have the Pope brought to court.

Edit: I realize this was an inflammatory post, especially since I don't provide any links to what's going on, or the conversation in place. Here are a few articles that guided my understanding:

The Vatican, like Phil Donahue and most other shills, have demonstrated themselves to be incapable of owning up to this, and have only shown their incompetence by blaming others. The best defense of the Catholic Church came just this morning, by Nick Kristof of the New York Times.

He basically says "don't mock so hard or cruelly, because these idiots in the Vatican aren't the entire Catholic church; many priests and nuns on the ground give their lives selflessly in the true spirit of the organization, and the mockery/criticism belittles their unmatched generosity."

Dan Savage addresses this, and I more or less agree. Standard accountability models are necessary, but mockery (especially honest and well- produced mockery, as in the video at the top of the post) will accelerate the response from the Church while they continue to earn it. Until that response comes, the good, "real" representatives of the Catholic faith will not be represented by the organization they deserve to be, and the churchgoers will suffer as they always have.

Until then, regarding Ratzinger, fuck the motherfucker.

Edit 2 (5/3/2010): More from Andrew Sullivan, reflecting on the NYT summary published yesterday. I also left out the reporting on Marcial Maciel, the Legion of Christ, and other establishment blights that further illustrate how horrible the whole situation is (Sullivan, National Catholic Reporter).

Edit 3 (5/11/2010): Ratzinger finally says something more substantive. This doesn't put him off the hook for the scandals he's been a part of, and I'm still waiting for him to do something. Took long enough, but it's better than blaming outsiders or the victims.

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