MSNBC headline from Britain: "Britain's top Catholic cleric resigns amid allegations of inappropriate behavior."
Here or following is the link: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/25/17086012-britains-top-catholic-cleric-resigns-amid-allegations-of-inappropriate-behavior?lite
My intent is NOT to be critical of one religion over another but to be critical of ALL orthodoxy within the major organized religions. The singularly male controlled hierarchical nature of orthodox religion is obvious. Where one blots women out of positions of power and relegates that institution to solely male control one often gets monumentally sick often violent sexual and anomic social behavior. In the face of SO much loathsome news about the Vatican's corrupt opaque essence it cried out to me for a response about it and I wrote:
Pope Benedict XVI is too tired and old so he must resign, he says. It is the first resignation of a pope in 700 years. I suspect there is more to this resignation than that. Why does this even matter to me? Mostly, it does not as it surely has no influence in my life but in a way it does because this institution directs its clergy in hypocritical fashion from the pulpit in our country and around the world to advocate for political issues that suppress and most importantly oppress human beings by spending money in elections against policy it does not like. It has influence on voters.
Charles Dickens could not have given the Austrian born Pope Benedict XVI a better name – the former Cardinal Ratzinger. There is, it seems to me, a poetic malevolence to this name. He had a childhood in the Nazi Youth and I believe continued to hold some of the ideological and anti-Semitic views with which he was infused at a young age. It was evidenced by certain tolerances by him of priests who would be a part of a right wing extremist Catholic sect called Opus Dei and conduct in Latin the inclusion of centuries old anti-Semitic passages in the mass which had been long erased from its liturgy. He was forced to apologize to the Jewish people more than once.
As an adult in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, he was in control of the hidden sex scandals and other corruptions which saturated the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, aka the Inquisition, a morphed Middle Ages papal institution he once led. The church has tortured and slaughtered in its history many Jews and others it considered heretics. Now while it does not physically slaughter it emotionally still does. It stands silent in the face of a great sin and crimes against humanity by the cover-up of the massive sexual abuse of children by hundreds of its priests around the world. The Pope himself was named in a lawsuit suing the church for its alleged decades-long and ugly cover-up of priest pedophiles.
Many popes, including this present one, ignored these crimes. The church tried to keep this evidence behind its walls through its silence while it moved those accused priests around the world like pawns on a checkerboard and did nothing except when forced to do a little for its victims of this dastardly abuse. This corrupt and disordered celibate institution will probably conduct business as usual, select a new pope and its great perversion of justice will go on. Since we are not living in the Middle Ages resignation of this pope will make no difference to most but the church in its infinite odious wisdom will continue to advocate for policies against women and advocate against, in mind numbing hypocrisy, all forms of gay rights even though the institution of the church contains many adult homosexual priests who are NOT pedophiles. It did nothing about the true crimes it perpetrated and would still be doing nothing, hiding in the dark to this day if not for the press blowing the scandal sky high to see the light of day.
I suspect there is more behind this pope's resignation as the Vatileaks whistle blower, the Pope's butler, revealed in documents he released. The documents showed a church saturated with scandal from pedophile sins to the theft of millions by some of the Vatican hierarchy. We may never know the true extent of all of this perversion of justice and illegality even though the church could finally, now, have an opportunity to remake itself, ultimately reopen churches to their faithful and in so doing fill its coffers with the gold it lost. I am sure, however, it will not remake much.
I submit Pope Benedict and the Church he led will surely take advantage of his age in its explanation of his resignation but I suspect he is resigning because of something much more heinous. The pope has soaked his hands in blood by his own acquiescence to his Church’s abuse of children. Where this will lead I have no idea but this damn spot, like Lady Macbeth's, cannot be washed out.
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