Yes, they really must learn to avoid the 'taint of scandal.'

(Also, one wonders how much of the Church's historical opposition to out-in-the-open homosexuality has to do with their reliance on a large population of closeted homosexuals to fill the ranks of their "celibate" clergy.)

@2: Ding, ding, ding. And I say that—ding that—as a former seminarian.

Who's sucking cucks?

Their bad behavior proves the old adage of power corrupting. But this is just the last in centuries of the most horrible cruelty they have perpetrated on the weakest and most innocent. It is a relic of a past that believed the most fantastical myths and superstitions around which they built their power. And even in Africa and South America, it's intrinsic disorder will expose it for a fraud.

i think dan meant 'clucksucking', something to do with chickens. is there no end to their depravity?

They make it too fucking easy. Really Dan, you don't say, a Catholic priest sucking dick? No way! You can't be religious without being a hypocrite. All of that religious teaching shit doesn't apply to humans, we are human after all.

@2, 3: Ding ding ding. And I say that as someone who stayed in the dorms at Catholic University of America in D.C. for a week while participating in a cloning/sequencing workshop on campus.

Its a bad sign that my first thought was, "at least it wasn't little kids." My next thought was, "wait to see how they use this to deflect responsibility for pedophilia."

With people leaving the RC church in droves, will they need to start selling some of their billions in stolen & extorted art?

Fuck the motherfucking cocksucking Cardinal and fuck the motherfucking Pope.

The fact that God hasn't gone all Sodom and Gemorrah (no, I don't give a shit how it's spelled, thank you very much) is proof that the Catholic Church hasn't got a damn thing to do with God.

@10: Both derive from setting up a frame in which young teenage boys who fail to develop a normal and boring interest in teenage girls conclude, "Huh. I guess that means I have a religious calling to be a priest."

@1: Europeans are benign, Central and South Americans are progressive, but Africans launch pogroms? The fuck?

@13: I'm pretty sure they would be spelled Sdm and Gmr in contemporary texts, so no worries.

I honestly thought 'cucksucking' was some neologistic amalgamation of cocksucking + cuckold or something else.

@16- The bishop liked to blow guys as they watched their wives get fucked. Pretty complicated to set up, but thanks to craigslist it can happen.

cocksuckers

I suppose it is possible that American Catholics choose not to see scandal or assume that it is "somewhere else" or a few cases are getting more attention and implying a wider reach. Aside from the scandal of adult lack of practice of celibacy, the Church never did a good job with clergy that was humane toward people they thought lesser of. That's a scandal too.

I for one am always surprised that there are still Native people who are Catholics (like my mom and sister) given the brutality of the church and its clergy towards Native kids.This wasn't a long time ago in the historical past. This is my mom's generation. And in places like Eastern Washington this is my sister and my generation.

A variety of religions ran the forced conscription boarding schools that Native children had to attend, Catholic and Presbyterian the most common that I know of. And the Catholics were always pretty certain that Native people were one step removed from the devil.

Maybe we could judge the new pope on what he actually does, rather than say "White guy! Those dudes NEVER have pogroms!"

But secular government doesn't need the moral authority to legalize things. It only needs legal authority. That's why it's secular. If the Cardinal said that the secular government didn't have the moral authority to declare that gay marriage was not a sin, then he might have something. Sin a religious concept.

Amen to the Church needing to clean up its act before anyone will listen. I can get being so selfish and deceitful; I can't get being so stupid. Why was there anything new to reveal in 2010 after the first revelations in the U.S. in 2002 and the second round in 2006?! Why didn't the Church fathers say "We got caught, and people are really mad. I guess we should stop tolerating sex abuse. Hey, if we don't want to publicly denounce child molesters among the clergy, we could pack them off to prisons-I-mean-monasteries with no access to kids and so protect both our flock and our reputation." There were many ways of handling this!!

@1 The pogroms are political. The new pope will be elite Catholic clergy, thus neither benign nor progressive whatever his nationality. And Ratzy aint gone, maybe giving sermons was cutting into his spreading the hate time.

@ 1 by way of 23 - All the advances on the gay/social front in Europe and Latin America are being accomplished by fighting against the catholic church.

You can read up on one of J.P.II's protégés if you wish, Marcial Maciel, or on Norberto Rivera, the current Archbishop of Mexico. Two very evil characters (the former more than the latter, I'll grant Rivera that much, but still).

Gay rights are being acquired thanks to the legal system in Mexico (and Fox's antidiscrimination law), with absolutely no help from the catholic clergy, who's doing its best to stop any evolution and to keep women making more babies so that they can remain ignorant and living in abject poverty - and thus easy to control.

So it doesn't matter where the next pope comes from, really, he'll be as shitty as all the other ones before.

So all the guys O'Brien was blowing were of legal age, right? Just think, if he'd done a choirboy or two we'd have found the next pope.

Stinking hypocrisy. Their stench rises to the heavens, yet they show no remorse, nor do they repent for their evil. Amen to Ricardo @24- the next Pope will be as shitty as all the ones before.

Wouldn't it be fun to overhear the next conversation between David Cameron and O'Brien?

@2, 3, 9: Ding ding ding. And I say that as someone who dated and was friends with many, many seminarians while going to Notre Dame!

If the Catholic Church ever had any claim to moral authority, they lost it with the "indulgences" scandal. Then they completely flushed it forever with the Inquisition. They've since compounded their corruption with the support of the Nazis, and compounded that with the organized protection of child rapists within their organization. They most certainly hold no oral high ground now, and never will again.

Who holds "oral high ground", the top?

@22

"Hey, if we don't want to publicly denounce child molesters among the clergy, we could pack them off to prisons-I-mean-monasteries with no access to kids and so protect both our flock and our reputation."

Good God. That is so very not okay.

@15: HAH! I get it!
Gentiles probably don't.

@ 22 - They usually give them a job at the Vatican, where no other government can get to them, until they die.

@21, Actually the candidate from Ghana has said that blacks are never gay pedophiles. He equates gay and pedophile, you see and thinks only whites are that way. He's already come out strongly in favor of Uganda's anti-gay legislation.

And the worst part of him being pope would be how many bigots would then be able to say they were gay-bashing because the pope said to do it and they didn't want to be racist.

@ 34 Bigots are already gay-bashing in the name of the pope, and have been doing so forever. And I don't think homophobic Africans need the pope to keep coming up with such legislation - the muslim nations of Africa aren't exactly pro-gay, are they?

I really wish our side would stop calling this evidence of hypocrisy.

It isn't hypocrisy; it's natural selection.

Catholicism's tenets selects for the sexually obsessed, the sexually damaged, the closeted, and pedophiles. Its rigid hierarchy and absolute need for male authority provides the perfect venue for men seeking both power and legal cover. It also provides ideological cover (never underestimate the psychological pull of redemptive narratives in which you are cleansed of sins through confession) and, in the case of pedophiles, rewards their climb up the latter with guaranteed authority and easy access to children.

@32, hey some of us goyim know a consonantal root when we see one.

The day the bishops and cardinals who covered for the child rapists, and shuffled them around to violate innocents over and over again, start offering some sincere public confessions and apologies and do some honest-to-God penitence in full view of the public is the day I'll believe that the Church can be saved. But I doubt that will happen. All we've seen so far are denials, excuses, arrogance and cowardice. A Second Reformation is rolling across the West and they don't have what it takes to give anyone with half a brain any reason to stay with them.

@ 38 - They don't actually care about anyone with half a brain. That much brain-power is a threat to them. They've always aimed to keep people in ignorance so that they'd be more obedient.

Oh, and we haven't only seen denials, excuses, arrogance and cowardice; we've also seen a lot of victim-shaming-and-blaming.