Responding to the horror-show revelations in Pennsylvania about the systematic mass-sexual abuse of children by the Catholic Church, Pope Francis laments that “We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.” Which is entirely true. So now what?
Looking ahead to the future, no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such [abuses] from happening, but also to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated. . . .
. . . The heart-wrenching pain of these victims, which cries out to heaven, was long ignored, kept quiet or silenced. But their outcry was more powerful than all the measures meant to silence it, or sought even to resolve it by decisions that increased its gravity by falling into complicity.
Okay, soooooo now what? Well, the Post reports, “Francis did not lay out any concrete steps the Vatican would take.” M’kay.
Meanwhile, the Vicar of Showing No Care for Little Ones is in Ireland trying to staunch the bleeding as Catholicism sharply declines there. Can’t imagine why.
An adviser for the international headquarters for the global child-sex ring Vatican, Rev. Thomas Rosica, says, “This has been the summer from hell for the Catholic Church, and our sins are blatantly exposed for the world to see.” Aw, has this summer been tough for you guys?? That’s awful. I’m so…SO sorry.
The Archbishop of Washington, DC, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, is implicated in the Pennsylvania report for helping to protect molester-priests when he was bishop of Pittsburgh. He also did nothing and claims ignorance about his predecessor, former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who is implicated in cases of sexual abuse.
And now to class up the joint, here’s the chronically-aggrieved Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, the man who sees anti-Catholic bigotry under every rock he slithers beneath, and who wants you to believe that what those priests did was not rape. Not technically, anyway, by I assume Bill Donohue’s personal standards:
Most of the alleged victims were not raped: they were groped or otherwise abused, but not penetrated, which is what the word “rape” means.
Donohue also says it doesn’t count as pedophilia since many of the victims were “post-pubescent,” and it’s all “gay-driven” anyway.
Moving on, for now.
Congratulations to Bob Smietana, the next editor-in-chief of Religion News Service. Bob’s a good one, folks.
Following in the massive rebranding (or de-branding?) successes of tronc and Oath, the head of the Mormon church says not to call them Mormons anymore. LDS president Russell M. Nelson says to stop using that word altogether, along with the abbreviation “LDS” (oops). Instead, you may call Mormons (oops again) “Latter-day Saints” or “members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” If you screw this up, no afterlife-planet for you.
Last week, we characterized the Department of Labor’s new “religious liberty” directive as a “directive to discriminate,” and Mic quoted our master-of-all-things-legal Nick Little:
“In practice, this means religious groups must be allowed to discriminate,” Nick Little, vice president and general counsel at the Center for Inquiry, said in a statement. “They can take federal money and federal contracts and refuse to follow the federal anti-discrimination laws which exist for the protection of all Americans. And it is clear who are going to be harmed by this policy move — the LGBTQ community, women and religious minorities including atheists.”
The Daily Tribune News of Cartersville, Georgia profiles Brandon Lee. No, not the late son of Bruce Lee and star of The Crow (as far as we know…), but a local “atheist officiant” offering nonreligious wedding services. Gosh, we do a heck of a lot of that ourselves, you might know. Anyway, this passage was weird (a lot of this article was weird, to be honest):
At about $300 a gig, Lee admits his side business isn’t that lucrative. But with apologies to the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, he said he never really expected such a venture to lure in the almighty dollar.
“There is not a lot of money in atheism,” Lee said. “I have earned thousands, and as far as I know I’m one of the higher earning atheists in the world.”
Huh? Apologies to Dawkins and Dennett wha-huh? Highest-earning who-wha???
Physician to Her Majesty the Queen, Peter Fisher, was killed when a truck hit him while cycling. I mention this because he was apparently a “world-leading expert” in homeopathy and director of research at the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine.
Joe Nickell recounts his investigation of the Ancestors Inn in Syracuse, which was said to be haunted. Supporting evidence for this is as rock solid as, for example, “[guests] would later find their cameras in different places than where they thought they left them.” Wow, I mean, who you gonna call? (You call Joe, of course.)
The body of a three-year-old boy is discovered at a compound in New Mexico, and authorities find out the boy was very sick and was subjected to faith-healing rituals.
The devil went down to Arkansas. Okay, not “the devil,” but Baphomet, in the form of a bronze statue from the Satanic Temple as they protested their right to have the goat-fellow placed next to the Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the state capitol.
Rachel Becker at The Verge brings some sanity to the scaremongering about what screens are doing to our eyes after a recent study was reported to show that blue light will make us go blind:
I asked the paper’s senior author, chemist Ajith Karunarathne at the University of Toledo in Ohio, whether his results mean that staring at my tablet or iPhone will make me go blind. His answer was simple: “Absolutely not.” … “We haven’t done any experiments with the light coming out of digital devices, or any other digital screens.”
Hey, whatever you think of Alex Jones and his incitements to violence, at least his claims about his health supplements are totally dishonest. Wait. Steven Salzberg writes:
There’s no actual scientific evidence (and Jones’s Infowars pages don’t attempt to cite any) that these products do what the text on the very same page says they do. You just have to take Jones’ word for it.
This is pure snake oil. That shouldn’t be surprising, not coming from a man who has accused grieving parents of faking their children’s deaths, and who claims the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks. It’s hard to understand why anyone believes any of the outrageous claims this guy makes, and especially bewildering that people who trust him to advise them on health and diet.
Speaking of snake oil, it doesn’t just come in the form of medicine. YouTube personality DMS (who I assume is well-known, but lord, how would I know?) revels in the absurdity of audiophile magical thinking. Audio pebbles! Audio stickers! Etcetera! Oh, and again speaking of snake oil…
Poisoned by a snakebite-for-Jesus once, shame on you. Poisoned by a snakebite-for-Jesus twice, well, seriously, shame on you again. Like, double-shame. Come on, guy.
Quote of the Day
Georgetown University lecturer Paul Elie on the Church crisis:
A lot of Catholics, we have to ask whether we have wasted our lives following this model of leadership. At this point, the leadership in this country is not credible. The repeated scandals make it difficult or even impossible to pass the faith on to our kids . . . I think about it every hour.
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Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.