We have a bit of a question for anyone who identifies as Catholic (whether you identify as a "good" Catholic, or a "bad" Catholic who only goes to church on Easter and Christmas). The question has a bit of a lead-in, so bear with us.

We all know about the rampant sexual abuse perpetrated by the Catholic clergy in which scores of priests diddled altar boys (or at least engaged in some "brotherly" nude fondling). We all also know about the church's attempts to sweep that behavior under the Vatican rug.

We also all know that, instead of choosing a more progressive Pope when the last one kicked the bucket, the church went with the most conservative fuck they could find (hell, he was basically the Grand Inquisitor).

In addition, we wrote a while back about how the church was toying with the idea of changing the translations of their masses so that they matched more directly with the original Latin. Internal church opposition to this move noted that the new wording was "very awkward" with a "heavy, ponderous and often turgid style" that uses "irregular, passive and run-on sentences." At the time, we opined (in a Rant we called When "Rearranging Deck Chairs" Isn't Counterproductive Enough):

So go right ahead, Catholic Church — confuse an already pissed off segment of your followers. Some of us grew up Catholic, and in our experience, there are plenty of American Catholics who are about a half step away from tossing the whole religion thing out the window, staying the hell home on Sunday, and doing something actually productive and/or enjoyable with their time. Maybe if you throw a few of those deck chairs at them, they'll make the change. Hell, we can always use more atheists.

Apparently not happy with their as yet unsuccessful efforts to entirely disenfranchise their followers, the Catholic church has upped the ante. The other day, we read about this story on Pharyngula:

The case of the Brazilian child who was raped, impregnated, and then had an abortion has taken a predictable turn. Sensible, rational people saw this as a tragedy, but one with a simple partial solution: the abortion was necessary to save the life of a young girl who could not possibly bear the burden of an unwanted pregnancy. The Brazilian Catholic church saw it differently and excommunicated everyone associated with the decision. Then the president of Brazil took a public stand against the church's unjust decision. Now at last, we hear from the top of the Catholic hierarchy...and the Vatican sides with fetuses over children. No surprise there at all.

Fuck. Seriously? Let's clarify the situation here: nine years old, and raped by her stepfather (for years, probably since she was six), conceives twins which her tiny body isn't even remotely equipped to handle (safe delivery by C-section is possible, but risky as fuck), and because she gets an abortion, her mother and the doctors involved are kicked out of the Catholic church? And the only reason she wasn't kicked out was because she was too young to be responsible for that decision? And when this was kicked up the line from the local archbishop to Cardinal Re, the high muckety-muck for all of Latin America, he agreed with the ex-communication, and had this to say:

"Life must always be protected, the attack on the Brazilian Church is unjustified."

Life must always be protected? Yeah, we agree with that — the life of the fucking nine-year-old girl is what had to be protected, you sick, disgusting fuck, not a clump of fucking cells that threatened her life. How fucking sick in the head do you have to be to take the position that the church has taken here? How do you even get to the point where a statement like this one seems like a reasonable position to take? The attack on the church is not merely "justified" — we have to question the humanity and the compassion of anyone who doesn't think that advocates of the church's move deserve six inch steel spikes through the left testicle as a result of this shit.

So there's the background for you. And here's our question, to any Catholics who are left: After all this, do you really still want to align yourself with the Catholic church? Really? And if so, we have two follow-up questions:

1) Why?

2) What the fuck is wrong with you?

We were just wondering.

As with a lot of what has gone wrong with this country over the last few decades, I think the media bears a lot of the responsibility for these types of objective outrages going unchallanged.

I've said since we Dubya first invaded Iraq (I'll tell ya, it feels like that was six long years ago ... Wait! What?) that every question from the press that had anything to do with Iraq should end with the additional question "Why did we invade Iraq, which presented no security threat to the U.S. and had nothing to do with 9/11?"

I would extend that process to include every question to anyone speaking from a pro-Catholic (or, better yet, pro-any-religion) position should end with the additional question "Why do you accept fertility clinics disposing of unused, fertilized embryos (which you consider to be as human as as you or I) by throwing them in the incinerator?"

But, back to your question. I suspect the general response you will get will be something along the lines of:

Why? Because God works in mysterious ways and it is not for us to know his glorious plan.

What the fuck is wrong with me? Nothing, as you would see if you would only let our saviour Jesus Christ into your heart.

If one is capable of suspending ones reason to accommodate a sky daddy without supporting evidence, and an error filled - not to mention buckets of blood - book that is the word of a perfect being; well anything is possible.

Besides the devout often excuse it by blaming the problems on mortals, men within the edifice, not the edifice itself.

How fucking sick in the head do you have to be to take the position that the church has taken here?

Sick, yeah, not stupid.

The Church cannot give even a smidgin of concession to reasonableness or reality - were it to do so, it would be the thin end of the wedge. It's a highly successful business in an ever more challenging environment, when education and information is more available than ever before, but it rode out the Reformation and it rode out the Enlightenment, and so it continues with its time-tested strategy and tactics.

These are all valid points, guys, but what we asked really has nothing to do with god at all. If someone believes in god, that's not our problem (well, it may be, for various reasons, but let's set that aside for now).

We're talking about the Catholic Church here, and what we don't get is how anyone can possibly believe that the Catholic Church's stance on issues like this one could be at all in line with the interests of what they allegedly believe is a benevolent god. "Mysterious ways" and "unknown glorious plans" just don't cut it. There has been no commandment "handed down from on high" that says "this nine-year-old girl should have a terrible, terrible life, and anyone who interferes with that is no longer in my church." That is something that the people who run the church decided. If any commandment is being executed, the "on high" here is the Catholic Church itself.

So the question isn't why Catholics believe this horrible thing that god is telling them, but rather why they believe this horrible thing that the church is saying is what god is telling them.

We know the game the church is playing — that's not in question, and John Morales has pegged it nicely. To wit, if the church changes their fundamental (-ist?) views at all, that would risk starting a cascade that could knock down their whole house of cards, because then people could start to question everything. Which is, of course, something we'd like to see, but which we understand the church would like to avoid. But why are the people — not the church hierarchy, but the laity — buying into this shit, when it is so clearly not just batshit insane, but downright fucking cruel? How can the church pull this shit, and the Catholic laypersons still want to align themselves with them?

So really, the Catholics who keep on keepin' on with the church are sick, too, because they're apparently so addicted to their religion that they're happy to ignore all the bullshit, the batshit insanity, and the downright cruelty, just so long as they can continue to believe and belong. And that, we just don't get.

In other words, Catholics: believe in god, have a blast. But grow a brain and a fucking conscience, and ask yourself an important question — are these people, this organization, the ones you want representing you and your beliefs (and your god!) and telling you how the rules work? We don't understand why Catholics who vehemently disagree with the church on issues like this one don't simply stop relying on the sick fucks at the Vatican who are making an utter mockery of their belief in a loving god, or why they don't just go find another way to practice their spiritual beliefs that's more in line with what they think god is all about. There are plenty of ways to believe in the Judeo-Christian god without kissing the Pope's ring (read: his ass). So why call yourself a Catholic when doing so aligns you with fuckheaded proclamations like this one?

Most of the Catholics I know seem to pick and choose which parts of the church's bullshit to buy into. They use contraceptives. They believe in evolution, etc. and yet they consider themselves Catholic. They go to church on Easter and Christmas. They give up things for Lent and walk around with the creepy smear of ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday and all that shit. It baffles me. How can they claim to be part of that church while seemingly rejecting more than half of the bullshit they are supposed to believe. I wish this story would be a wake up call for them, but I doubt it will be. Most of them will probably never even hear about it and those that do will just shrug it off.

Well the other day after his mindless once again affirmed the RC's idiotic stance on contraception I heard various opinions from relations of mine. They unanimously reckoned he was an idiot for suggesting such crap and that being celibate, he does not know anything about what he speaks and should shut his yap.

They will have all attended mass today and continue to do so and observe any other doctrinal requirement as long as they are able and choose to recognise it. The pope on this matter to them is an idiot, but at no point does this raise questions, despite the fact that to them he is the infallible representative of the sky daddy on Terra. Their faith, however they have interpreted it is neatly parceled away in a box far from reason. When something comes along like this they will separate the man from the church and castigate him and his opinion as a separate entity, then reintegrate him into the body of the organisation and carry on regardless. It is also a often faith they have been brought up with and much like they vote in politics just as their parents did, so too do they maintain the faith their parents had, thought never enters into it.

Exactly — stories like TimmyAnn's and Darthcynic's are the kind of thing we're all used to seeing, and that's the kind of thing we're talking about. And it's insane, and weird, and completely fucked up!

We're all aware of the extraordinary ability of humans to compartmentalize. We punch up that awareness in (entirely false) presentations in epic fiction, where the "simpler" (and ostensibly "therefore" wiser) cultures don't even have a word for some complex moral or ethical concept, and must therefore be ever so much more enlightened than we civilized folks, who can mix grays in with our blacks and whites...or, more accurately, lay starkly contrasting concepts right next to each other and see no big dilemma.

This is all bullshit, of course, since not having a word for something doesn't render a culture incapable of expressing it in words (any more than having lots of words for it would necessarily indicate any particular significance), and — even if that were true — being unable to express something in words doesn't indicate that a culture can't grasp, or inherently be intensely aware of, a concept. Try actually describing the flavor of "sweet" to somebody some time, without resorting to defining it using its own examples (like sugar, honey, maple syrup...), and you'll see what we mean. We all know damn well what something "sweet" is like, even if we can't explain it fully in other words; and if we didn't have the single word itself, that wouldn't suddenly take away our understanding of the sensation.

That tangent aside, the point, of course, is that everybody compartmentalizes, to some degree or another (yes, even us, which is part of why we write this stuff together, to help compensate for any individual tendency to distort the facts with our fallible human memories and biases). We're just constantly amazed by that degree when it comes to religious people.

The picking and choosing, we're used to — that's par for the course with religion, when you have a holy book that says (depending on how you interpret it) both "God hates fags" and "God hates shrimp," while still claiming that he's a heck of an all-loving kind of guy. Hell, this peculiar protagonist alternately appears as a benevolent psychotic prankster and a viciously homicidal mass-murderer on a scale that would make Final Solution advocates cringe. But look at these three simple bullet points:

• There exists a single all-loving, all-powerful deity.
• The organization with which I associate delivers the edicts, messages, and preferences of this deity directly.
• This organization has advocated incredibly cruel and disgusting behavior according to the deity's will.

It just doesn't scan. If the third point is true, than either the first or the second must be false. However, we're not saying that they must throw out the first one (despite the fact that we personally think everybody should) — if they're so keen on that deity existing, then the answer, clearly, is to throw out the second one, because that is the only way to reconcile the third: to wit, the organization is lying. Especially if, as the Catholic Church does, they claim their pronouncements to be infallible.

Do we have hope? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, we do. Religion has been shooting itself in the foot for thousands of years, and within the last couple of centuries, with the advent of an alternative method of improving our lives — you know, science, which (unlike religion) has actually produced tangible results — people have been realizing less of a need for this archaic bullshit (hence the rise of non-religious numbers in recent polls).

But meanwhile, at the very least, we'd like to see those who believe in a supermagical sky hero start realizing that, even if one did exist, these sick fucks — who make pronouncements about aspects of the human experience that they, by their own rules (or "his"), are never even allowed to experience — certainly don't speak for him. Religiosity, if you must be so inclined, should be a private matter. Institutionalizing it was the big mistake in the first place.

It all comes down to the evilest religious concept of all: Original Sin. Once you buy into that crap, you can justify anything. See, the way this works is, that nine-year-old girl had it coming, on account of what Eve did with that apple.

Yeah, except presumably the fetus had it coming too, for the same reason. No, what it really comes down to is a great many people seem to be seriously deficient in the cognitive dissonance department. If you try to hold two mutually exclusive concepts as simultaneously true, it damn well should make your brain squirm. Clearly, this just isn't happening for people who believe Original Sin corrupts all souls, uh, except for the purely innocent souls in the womb, who, uh, turn into corrupted souls after they're born. I dunno, maybe Original Sin rubs off on babies on the way out thru the vagina. That is where the problem started, after all. Maybe C-section kids are still morally pure, like Macduff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macduff_(Macbeth).

I realize you have to compartmentalize just to get thru life. You wouldn't be able to function if you were constantly grief-stricken over the latest famine or war. But there is something severely unevolved about folks who don't get that the problem of evil totally dismantles the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent being. You don't even run out of fingers and toes before you hit a snag there.

Speaking of Brazil, Catholicism, and depressing stories, hunt down a copy of Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. I read it for a class not too long ago. Astoundingly, for pernicious influence over the lives and deaths of the poor, the Catholic lunacy comes in second to the sheer economic viciousness of the sugarcane industry. Still, it's apparently better to bury your starved infants than to avoid having kids. Even though the parents have to dig up the tiny cardboard coffins after a few months so they can reuse them.

Look at these three simple bullet points:

The U.S. government exists for the benefit of the citizens it serves.

Dubya, as President, delivers the edicts, messages, and preferences of this government through his administration's policy decisions.

This administration invaded Iraq, which presented no security threat to the U.S. and had nothing to do with 9/11.

It just doesn't scan. Yet, millions upon millions of Americans will tell you what a great President Dubya was.

The Catholics have nothing on the American body politic.

Yes, but, now imagine that Americans during the Bush years had an easy way to opt out of the Bush administration. Let's just conjecture that all those who didn't like the crap that Bush and company were spewing could have just opted out of his leadership and lived their lives without having to care or worry about what Bush did and said — he wouldn't hold any direct influence over their lives whatsoever. And now imagine that, despite how much that 60 to 70 percent disagreed with 99% of what he did, and with the easily available ability to opt out, they made a conscious decision to remain affiliated with him.

Because that's what the Catholics are doing here. We agree with your sentiment, PoolGuy, but not the entirety of your analogy.

There's simply no easy way to opt out of being an American (unless the Libertarian Party gains controls, secession in place isn't doable; and even if they did gain control, it isn't remotely practicable or rational). Even if you didn't want Bush to represent you during his two incompetent terms, he still did. And his words and actions still affected all Americans (and then some), even if they wanted to be unaffiliated with him.

The Catholics, on the other hand, need only decide that they aren't Catholic any more and it would actually be true — poof! Like magic! And yet they don't. That's a very different story altogether.

I understand your point, but I think what I was getting at was that even though Dubya implemented policy that was anathema to the large majority of Americans (vis-a-vis the Pope condemning the people who saved that little girl's life), including me, I still believe in the American government. I think that a lot of Catholics (especially cafeteria Catholics) believe in the institution of the church regardless of what heinous actions a particular Pope takes.

@Poolguy

"I think that a lot of Catholics (especially cafeteria Catholics) believe in the institution of the church regardless of what heinous actions a particular Pope takes."

But that is exactly the point. How can any Catholic, even the cafeteria variety reasonably maintain a belief in the institution regardless of what Il Papa says? He is supposed to be the infallible representative of Him to his earthly subjects, he cannot be wrong. Therefore no Catholic should be able to reconcile a belief in his holiness being wrong with that of the RC's being the true church of god, the institution cannot have validity apart from the pope in a theological manner. If you lose one then it follows that the other is lost with it. They do though, they hold completely opposing views and carry on regardless, it is stunning and I would love to know how they can maintain such an absurd position.

It's rather like stating that all crows are black and meaning it with all your heart while holding a white bird that you truly believe to be a crow.

Darthcynic,
The U.S. president takes an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend" the constitution. Dubya did none of these. Am I supposed to lose faith in the constitiution because he's an asshole?

I understand that constitution does not hold the president to be infallible (hence checks and balances), but I am able to hold the institution (i.e. - the constitiution) to be worthwhile, even though I think Dubya should be rotting in a prison somewhere.

I do concede your point that in the case of the Catholic church, the institution itself declares the infallibility of the pope. But just to indulge my pedantic side, I believe (IANAC) that the pope is only infallible when speaking ex cathedra in matters of faith and dogma.

BTW, I am a hard atheist. I am just trying to reason out why someone would still believe in an institution when its respresentative would take actions that seem to negate everything the institution purportedly stands for. Thus I keep coming back to the Pope/Catholicism vs. Dubya/Constitution argument.

"I believe (IANAC) that the pope is only infallible when speaking ex cathedra in matters of faith and dogma."

Ahh yes, tis been awhile since I left that place behind and plum forgot the limitations, good to know. Though I do think that regarding contraception he speaks on a matter of dogma and faith and hence my puzzlement.

Darthcynic,
I think I agree with your reasoning that the views on contraception are dogma. However, proving that once you go pedantic you never go back, I think (again, IANAC) that when the Pope speaks ex cathedra there are a bunch of bells and whistles that attend that status. I don't think he can just speak at a daily appearance, through his bishops, etc. an have it be considered to be ex cathedra.

Sorry to be a little late to the debate. At the risk of recycling plotlines, we'll admit that real life has moved in and crashed on our couches this month, and we're discussing techniques for dislodging it and getting on with the stuff we like to do.

While discussions of the pope's infallibility, and the circumstances under which it kicks in (or not, as reality would have it), are valuable in determining just how viably the Catholic Church and its associated belief system stand up to scrutiny, it's a bit of an aside in this context.

See, our point is not about the infallibility doctrine, nor even the specific policies of the church, or of the U.S. government, for that matter. It's as simple as this:

An American president is elected leader, by majority vote, by members of America (citizens), to determine the best course of U.S. policy for the next four years. The president makes decisions based on his or her own positions, ideally (though obviously not always) influenced by competent advisors and the will of the people. If, after four years, the majority of the members of the entity (America) are unsatisfied with the decisions made by that leader, that leader will no longer be the leader (and, of course, after another four, there's no choice — he or she is right out). There is therefore no practicable rationale for executing an "escape clause" from membership, as one's voice and influence can be used to help shape policy (the vast majority of American citizens are eligible to run for a variety of policy-shaping positions), which is a good thing, as the only actual escape clause would involve an international move and change of citizenship, both of which are quite beyond the average citizen in terms of practicality and expense. Meanwhile, as history has documented, a change from one president to the next can bring drastic differences in opinion and policy to the upper echelons of the entity (America), so while dissatisfaction may mark the present, it is not an inevitability in the future.

Now, the parallel, piece by piece:

A Catholic pope is appointed leader, by fiat, by an elite oligarchy (the Vatican gang), to deliver the edicts of established Catholic policy for life. The pope is bound by the intolerant tenets of the Catholic tradition to perpetuate those intolerant tenets themselves, with zero weight given to the opinions of those controlled and contained by these Catholic policies. If, at any time, any members of the entity (Catholicism) are unsatisfied with the decisions made by that leader, they're welcome to suck a big fat one — because he's in for life. Alternatively, the "escape clause" from Catholicism essentially consists of stating "I am not a Catholic" and ceasing to follow Catholic dogma and traditions, which can be done in situ and at no expense, making it remarkably simple to just get the heck out if one is so dissatisfied (we're speaking of the laity, rather than the clergy, for whom it would be slightly more complicated, though not impossibly so). Meanwhile, as history has documented, there will be no significant change in policy from one pope to the next, other than reluctant and slight concessions to modern times (a millimeter per millennium, it seems) brought on by the pressures of modern society outside of the entity (Catholicism), so any dissatisfaction marking the present is in all probability going to persist into the foreseeable future.

These are two entirely separate situations, with largely disparate circumstances, and, in our opinion, hardly the same context. Again, PoolGuy, we completely agree that a great number of Americans have compartmentalized their actual positions and well-being in this country from their staunch admiration of Bush and other Far Right Republicans, and that point alone is worth your making it (thanks, by the way). But we feel that comparing the two different scenarios is less "apples and oranges" than it is "ducklings and thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles." They're not just different ballparks, not just different games, they're entirely different fields of human endeavor (i.e., one's baseball, and one's motorcycle repair).

For us, the comparison just doesn't hold up. Catholics have no choice when it comes to their leadership or (directly or indirectly) their policy, but have a ready-made escape clause. Americans can have a powerful influence over their leadership and, by extension (and sometimes directly), their policy, and have no particularly viable escape clause. All rational Catholics should question their membership if they disagree with policy (rather than attempting to change policy, which they can't do); all rational Americans should take advantage of their suffrage, free speech, and candidacy rights if they disagree with policy (rather than opting out, which is absurdly impractical). Evidence of compartmentalization aside, these are vastly different animals.

[Thanks to his off-topic and insipid bullshit, failing to make a point so that he could instead whine about our use of profanity, GeorgeRic has been shoved over to the Putting the "Fan" in "Profanity" Rant, where we promised to send any idiots who pulled that tired old canard. — the Management.]

I do believe that the Catholic Church is extreme on this issue. I was raised Catholic, but I have since let go of any religion that requires me to go to any place of service or worship.

That being said, how dare you attack and vilify the Church in this way. It is not your business to destroy people's faith. They will believe what they want to believe, and you cannot force them to believe otherwise. You're just as bad as those so-called "bible thumpers."

I'm new to this site, but from what I've read today (I've only read two of your rants), I won't be coming back for more.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" I mean seriously, guys, show some respect. It's what any decent fellow, religious or otherwise, would do.

Yeah, how dare you attack and vilify an institution that protects and enables child molesters, fighting law enforcement and belittling victims at every turn? How dare you show such disrespect to an organization where one can be a child protection official and still amass thousands of images of child pornography?

Anonymous, if you can be "forced" to believe something based on reading a blog post, if reading about the actual true facts of the Catholic Church's heinous crimes against humanity is enough to destroy your faith, then the faith must not have been very strong in the first place, must it? Yes, people will believe what they want to believe, but why would anyone want to believe in a god whose representatives here on Earth were a criminal cabal of child rapists?

I daresay that the 2%Co. are not as bad as those "bible thumpers," because the 2%Co., to my knowledge, have never shielded rapists from prosecution. QED.

No, Anonny, a decent person would not "show some respect" for the rapist Papists who make up the Vatican's vast criminal organization. A decent person would fight against the deeply-rooted corruption and do everything they could to expose it to the light and ensure that terrible people are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for abusing their ill-gotten authority in order to abuse the innocent. A decent person would recognize that any system which not only allows but protects such corruption and crime is worthy of no respect.

So I put the question to you, Anony: if these crimes and cover-ups were committed by an organization that wasn't soaked in faith and god--say, one of the teacher's unions or Kindercare or fucking Chuck E. Cheese's--would you be rushing to defend them? Would you be telling us that a "decent person" would show respect to the pimply college kid who pulled down his plush mouse-pants to molest little Timmy in the pizza kitchen? If not, what makes the Catholic Church different?

Or, more succinctly, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Tom Foss, I can pretty confidently confirm that none of us have ever shielded child rapists from prosecution. Though somebody withheld Keebler Fudge Sticks from his daughter recently, which is a pretty awful thing for an adult to do to a child.

Oh, wait. He ended up giving her some. And that's actually not quite as bad as committing a rape or assisting in a cover-up of one.

Right.

Well.

Fun fact (easily confirmed by our visitor stats): our anonymous moron went from this pitiful attempt at reasoned critique in defense of the indefensible to an incoherent dribble of rage in under twenty minutes. (The change of name and e-mail address was so close to fooling us, though. Really, it took numerous seconds to connect the dots.) This person also lied — he or she spent quite some time skimming more than two Rants (coming in off a Google search for Allison Dubois) before looking for something else to write angry replies on and striking gold...twice.

O, Internet! With your half-literate, 140-character diatribes and videos of sneezing cats, you are endlessly amusing.