News From Spain: Exorcism

I think yer man and I are equally unimpressed with the Catholic Church's mumbo jumbo, but unlike myself, he takes the piss far more subtly than I ever would.

This is not the first time that exorcism, and Father Gabriele Amorth, has received my attention. Links below.

Exorcist squad hired to fight Satan in Madrid
Steve Tallantyre
24 May 2013

The church has selected eight recruits who will undergo special training to combat what has been described as an "unprecedented rise" in cases of "demonic possession".

The Cardinal Archbishop of Madrid, Antonio María Rouco Varela, has taken the unprecedented step of selecting eight priests to lock horns with Satan as expert exorcists.

Press agency EFE reports that the exorcists' specialist ghostbuster training will be led by Cesar Franco, one of the Spanish capital's three auxiliary bishops.

According to online website 'Religious Freedom', the decision was taken personally by Archbishop Rouco Valera to meet an avalanche of requests for help from the faithful to fight their otherworldly foe.

Many alleged victims of demonic possession and evil influence claim to have opened the gateway to hell with occult practices such as black magic, palmistry, Ouija boards and fortune telling.

Sources close to the Archbishop would confirm only that the issue is "being studied".

No priests are currently licensed to perform exorcisms in the Madrid area, and all would-be banishers of evil must be personally approved by the Archbishop himself.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that : "When the Church asks publicly and authoritatively in the name of Jesus Christ that a person or object be protected against the power of the Evil One and withdrawn from his dominion, it is called exorcism."

Church rules say that a "Major Exorcism" can only be performed by a priest authorized by the bishop.

Seasoned exorcists are said to begin with the textbook Rituale Romanum but improvise somewhat once the tête-à-tête with Satan is underway.

Author José María Zavala, whose book, 'This is how you beat the Devil', will be used to train the rookie damned-busters, said that only 18 active exorcists are currently registered in Spain.

Zavala named Father Salvador Hernández Ramón of Cartagena in Murcia, as the Spanish priest generally considered most fit to battle Beelzebub after years of doing regular exorcise routines around the country .

He noted: "Father Salvador spent a year in Rome exorcising with Father Gabriele Amorth. Father Salvador is the top exorcist in Spain, very famous within the church but barely known outside it." The Local Spain's news in English

The Devil Made Me Do It. But Isn't it the 21st Century? Catholic sex abuse scandals are 'evidence the Devil is in the Vatican', says Pope's chief exorcist (How convenient the "Evil One" not pervy priests) Link

Buggery Club To Start Witch Hunt Pope's exorcist squads will wage war on Satan Link

The Intelligence Squared Debate: "The Catholic Church is a force for good"

I have upped two segments, those featuring Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens, plus the complete 2009 debate.

If you watch nothing else, do watch Stephen Fry, I thought he came across particularly well.

This post debate report from the Telegraph.

Intelligence Squared debate: Catholics humiliated by Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry 

By Andrew M Brown
October 19th, 2009 

I have just witnessed a rout – tonight’s Intelligence Squared debate. It considered the motion “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”. Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, opposing the motion, comprehensively trounced Archbishop Onaiyekan (of Abuja, Nigeria) and Ann Widdecombe, who spoke for it. The archbishop in particular was hopeless. 

The voting gives a good idea of how it went. Before the debate, for the motion: 678. Against: 1102. Don’t know: 346. This is how it changed after the debate. For: 268. Against: 1876. Don’t know: 34. In other words, after hearing the speakers, the number of people in the audience who opposed the motion increased by 774. My friend Simon, who's a season ticket holder, said it was the most decisive swing against a motion that he could remember. 

The problem (from the Catholic point of view) was that the speakers arguing for the Church as a force for good were hopelessly outclassed by two hugely popular, professional performers. The archbishop had obviously decided that it would work best if he stuck to facts and figures and presented the Church as a sort of vast charitable or “social welfare” organisation. He emphasised how many Catholics there were in the world, and that even included “heads of state”, he said, as if that was a clincher. But he said virtually nothing of a religious or spiritual nature as far as I could tell, and non-Catholics would have been none the wiser about what you might call the transcendent aspects of the Church. Then later when challenged he became painfully hesitant. In the end he mumbled and spluttered and retreated into embarrassing excuses and evasions. He repeatedly got Ann Widdecombe’s name wrong. The hostility of both the audience and his opponents seemed to have discomfited him. 

So it was left to Ann Widdecombe to defend the Church single-handedly. She did well, showed a light touch and took Hitchens to task for exaggerations and so on. But in the end Hitchens and Fry were able to persuade decisively by simply listing one after another the wicked things that have been done in the Church’s name over the centuries. More than anything they focused on the “institutionalisation of the rape and torture and maltreatment of children”. That’s what Hitchens called it – that's pretty much what it was – and Fry returned to it. I don't blame them for harping on about these unspeakable crimes, because there is no answer to them. Then they talked about the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. When Zeinab Badawi in the chair asked the archbishop whether Christ himself ever actually said anything about homosexuality, he replied by saying "that's not the point" or words to that effect, and sounded slippery. Blah blah

Stephen Fry dismantles the Roman Catholic Church, from the Intelligence Squared debate.

Christopher Hitchens about the Catholic Church from the Intelligence debate.

Filmed 19 Oct 2009, this is a segment of the intelligence² debate. Title of the debate: "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world".

Eugenics or Murder in the Dutch Catholic Church? Castration Certainly

Eugenics or murder? The article hints at a third motive, mercy killing. But having reported recently on the horrors that have been perpetrated on children by the Dutch Catholic Church, I'm having none of it. Continued after the fold.

Catholic monk responsible for dozens of deaths
25 June 2012

One man is responsible for the deaths of dozens of boys at the Saint Joseph mental institution in the province of Limburg, according to an investigation conducted by the local newspaper De Limburger.

Between 1952 and 1954, the mortality rate at Saint Joseph’s was alarmingly high. According to De Limburger, prosecutors will soon release the findings of their investigation into one of the most serious cases of abuse within a Catholic institution. The newspaper writes that a man called Brother Andreas, who is already deceased, was responsible for the deaths of the severely handicapped boys.

It is apparently unclear if Brother Andreas, also known as Brother Death, killed the boys or if they died because of neglect. It is also unclear whether Brother Andreas was motivated to spare the boys their suffering. RNW

Below is an introduction and link to a fifteen minute report on 'all things Dutch' for want of a better expression. The program begins with a report of forcible castrations committed on boys by the Dutch Catholic Church in the Fifties.

eta These were healthy boys that were subject to these atrocities, and for reasons most foul. I didn't want to give the impression that it was the mentally subnormal that had undergone these operations.

If these horrific goings on are new to you, you may first wish to read about these, and other abuses, that I cover in three previous posts under the tag, Catholic church Netherlands.

The horror of the abuse described in the report, is but nearly matched by the horror of the excuses given by the then, Dutch authorities of the day.

Church castrations
Over the past year, the Dutch have been shocked by evidence of child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. It appears that the abuse was widespread and that church officials conspired to cover it up. New evidence has now emerged that a number of young men were forcibly castrated after they complained about being abused.

Paying for testimony?
Peter la Serpe, the key witness in the Amsterdam liquidation case, will allegedly be paid 1.4 million euros as part of his witness protection agreement with the Ministry of Justice. The Dutch news organisation NOS says it has documents that lay out the details of that agreement. It's the latest twist in the prosecution of the suspects in a series of mob-style executions in Amsterdam between 1991 and 2005. La Serpe was allegedly a hitman who had a hand in at least one of the murders. Peter la Serpe's attorney has filed a complaint against the prosecution for the leak of the information to NOS. The Justice Ministry, meanwhile, has denied that La Serpe is being paid for his testimony.

The Dutch 30-hour work week
Dutch employees work the least number of hours in Europe. The European average is 37.5 hours a week; the Dutch only work 30.6 hours. Even though worker productivity in the Netherlands is very high, the European Union says it would be good for the Dutch economy if people worked longer hours. So why do the Dutch work so little?

President Obama's transsexual former nanny
A Dutch reporter has visited the nanny who took care of a young Barack Obama and his family when they lived in Indonesia in the 1960s. After the Obama family left the country, Mr Turdi became "Miss Evie", wearing dresses and make-up and working in the sex industry. (Don't tell the Republicans) Link

Joseph Ratzinger Paedophile Protector J'accuse The Shocking Story of Dutch Clerical Abuse

I ran one of the stories featured here a little earlier today, so of the words I wrote previously, I shall avail myself now. See: Time for the truth about Catholic sex abuse in the Netherlands.

Firstly though, a third party description regarding the work carried out by Dutch journalists, Joep Dohmen and Robert Chesal in exposing the horrific goings on in the Dutch Catholic Church.

A short report then follows; both men receiving Journalists of the year awards, and after that, the horror stories.

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Church of child abuse
by Marcel Van Silfhout
March 20, 2012

The stories that reached the newspapers are painful and tragic

The scandal was first revealed in Ireland. Then more scams surfaced in the United States and Australia, followed by Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and The Netherlands. The Vatican might hope for an end to the sweeping devastating scandals about child sex abuse at countless Catholic institutions. But realists will say: “its just the beginning”. All eyes were on Pope Benedict XVI what would he say in his Easter message. Would he say sorry at least? He didn’t.

As said, Holland wasn’t the first and only country to disclose the existence of a wide range of paedophile priests, monks, fathers and teachers in the past decades. But the number of scandals in this little country is still impressive.

It all started with the excellent investigative reporting done by Joep Dohmen (NRC-Handelsblad) and Robert Chesal (RNW-Radio Netherlands Wordwide) late February. Since their publications of child sex abuse in a monastery and a boarding school of the so-called ´Salesianer Order´ there hasn’t been a day without new revelations. Meanwhile, Dohmen and Chesal received hundreds of new complaints about various cases of abuse in Catholic schools and seminaries. They counted at least 137 Catholic fathers and monks involved in the offences. As a result, the Dutch Catholic Church has started an investigation.

The stories that reached the papers are confronting, painful and tragic. Many men, aged between 45 and 80, for the first time in their lives, cried out loud, disclosing the traumatic incidents when they were young, innocent, vulnerable and defenceless. As boys they were sent to these schools by their parents who had full trust in the holy Catholic Church, its institutions and its devoted priests.

The boys, sometimes girls, didn’t dare to complain. And if they did, nobody believed them. Parents even became angry with them when they tried to speak out. The detailed descriptions of sex abuse in these stories could only be summarised by the adequate word that former Archbishop and cardinal Ratzinger used just one week before his election to the papacy in 2005. He referred to priests who abused their position as ´filth´.

More important, most of the cases of child abuse are criminal, a clear matter of violating the law. But due to the fact that it happened mainly in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s makes it impossible to bring them to justice. In Holland, punishments of 8 to 12 year are given, but crimes such as these can only be prosecuted within 12 to 20 years.

As a result, the Dutch government has decided to extend the time period to take up child abuse cases to an unlimited period. There is reason to do so: Child abuse belongs to the highest ranks of criminal offences. One has to read some of the many detailed stories. All the victims have suffered psychological damage of highest degree throughout their lives. Though some of them have reached the age of 80 years, they still suffer from nightmares, shame, depression and total distrust. The scale of the scandals might be astonishing and the list of dramatic consequences is beyond imagination.

Nevertheless, the Dutch Archbishop Johannes Simonis has managed to get Holland into stupefaction once more. In the famous late-night talk show Pauw And Witteman, Simonis said: ´Wir habben es nicht Gewusst,´´ (we didn’t know) a phrase that is used in Holland as the famous understatement made by Germans when they tried to explain their failure to prevent atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. Simonis excused himself the other day for using this notorious phrase, but of course these same words apply to his boss, the German Pope Benedictus XVI. He did know.

According to the authoritative Süddeutsche Zeitung, former Cardinal Ratzinger was fully aware of a paedophile priest ´Brother H´ who should have got therapy, but later on continued his activities of child sex abuse. The New York Times also accused Benedictus of failing to act over an American priest who molested up to 200 deaf children between 1950 and 1974.

In an editorial, the Dutch quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad is clear about the almost impossible position of the pope. “The net is closing around Pope Benedict XVI´ and ´he has become part of the problem.” A few weeks ago the Dutch emeritus professor Hans Küng wrote in the same paper that it was Cardinal Ratzinger´s office at the Vatican that demanded the exclusive authorisation of all cases concerning rampant child sex abuse in order to keep those events discreet. In other words, it was the Vatican policy executed by Ratzinger personally to keep it all secret.

The Vatican is still defending its vision that most of the cases are old, known and cleared. Catholic spokesman speaks about ´incidents.´ But it is clear in Holland, Germany, the United States, Australia, Austria and Switzerland that the scandals aren’t incidents. They are structural phenomena.

On Palm Sunday, Pope Benedictus XVI didn’t mention the child sex abuse scandals, but he did say: “God gives the one who believes the courage to withstand intimidation by rumours made in common opinion.” If this is all that he had to say at Easter, it is clear that the Vatican once more brings us callousness and arrogance, instead of the necessary apologies, transparency and investigations. Just another ´wir habben es nicht gewust´ (we didn´t know) won´t work.

(Marcel van Silfhout is an investigative reporter working for public Dutch Television). Oman Tribune

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Robert Chesal and Joep Dohmen honoured as Journalist of the Year
27 January 2011

Recognition for the work of journalists, and recognition for the thousands of victims of church sex abuse. This is how Radio Netherlands Worldwide reporter Robert Chesal characterised the 2010 Journalist of the Year Award. Robert Chesal and his colleague Joep Dohmen from the newspaper NRC Handelsblad received the award from the hands of Culture Minister Marja van Bijsterveldt.

Joep Dohmen, Minister Marja van Bijsterveldt, Robert Chesal

The annual prize is awarded by the editorial staff of the Journalists’ magazine Villamedia Magazine. Robert Chesal and Joep Dohmen were honoured for their series of publications on sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church; publications preceded by months of investigative journalism.

One revelation after another

Reports about church sex abuse had surfaced years earlier in Ireland, the United States and Germany, but everything remained quiet in the Netherlands, until Robert Chesal called up Joep Dohmen following an interview about abuse at a boarding school. Robert put the right journalistic question: “Was this man’s report an incident or symptomatic of a much wider problem?” Their collaboration led to a stream of publications featuring one revelation after another and eventually gave rise to the creation of the Deetman Commission which was charged with investigation the reports. Radio Netherlands Worldwide

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This is the text I previously employed to introduce the post below under the header:

Peadophile Priests Prime Ministers Politicians and Police

Not a story about the UK, if from reading the header, that is what you were expecting, but more details surrounding the previous shocking expose, Forced Child Castrations Reportedly Found in Roman Catholic Care.

Evil is a word I seldom use, the main reason being, the way the word has been hi-jacked by the religious, giving a single word the status of an entity in its own right; evil, like the Devil, lurking in some dark corner as it were.

But there is evil here, not in the form of some supernatural demon, but like evil the world over, evil in the only form it takes, the only form it has, man alone. And nothing so evil as man cloaked in the garb of all evils, the apparel of religion. And in this particular case, worn by those of the Catholic Church.

And let not one of you, for the love of what ever fictional entity you may pray to, have the affront to tell me, ''but this isn't true Catholicism'' because it is. This cult of perversion and pederasty is every bit true of Catholicism as intolerance, misogyny, and the cult of death, is Islam.

The paedophile will never stop abusing children, if only in his fantasies. The wife beater, for all his contrition and promises after the act, will never stop beating his wife, and the priesthood will never stop physically and sexually abusing children. It is what they are, it is their being, their fundamental make up, it is as unalterable as their DNA.

And unimaginable as it might seem, there are those that carry even more guilt than those that perpetrated these horrific acts on children, those that let it happen decade after decade, the Joseph Ratzinger's of this world.

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Time for the truth about Catholic sex abuse in the Netherlands
19 March 2012

The revelation that a number of minors who were abused in Dutch Roman Catholic institutions were also forcibly castrated has shocked the Netherlands. It casts grave doubt upon the recent findings of a commission set up to look into abuse in the church. RNW's Robert Chesal, who first brought the sex abuse scandal to light, argues that only parliament can be trusted to investigate further.

We now know that former Dutch cabinet minister Wim Deetman did not meet the expectations he raised when he chaired the commission of inquiry into sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church. He did not get to the bottom of the abuse scandal or reveal all of the horrors that took place behind church doors in the Netherlands. More

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Forced castrations reportedly found in Roman Catholic care
17 March 2012

Underage sexual abuse victims were castrated in Dutch Roman Catholic psychiatric wards in the 1950s, according to the Rotterdam-based newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

Castration was performed on young men who were thought to be homosexual, but also as a means of punishing those who blew the whistle on abusers, the paper quotes sources as saying.

NRC discovered proof of the forced castration of one young man and strong evidence that at least ten other abuse victims were subjected to the removal of their testicles. The proof includes court documents, medical records, letters from lawyers and private correspondence.

According to the paper, the practice was reported in 2010 to the Deetman Commission which completed its investigation of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church last December. The commission, led by former cabinet minister Wim Deetman of the Christian Democrat party (CDA), made no mention of the castration of abuse victims in its final report. More

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Covering the Catholic sex abuse cover-up
16 December 2011

Roman Catholic bishops in the Netherlands protected sexual abusers and covered up their crimes, according to a major new report released today. The church-installed Deetman Commission says there were up to 20,000 victims of abuse between the end of World War II and 1981.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide journalist Robert Chesal - together with NRC Handelsblad's Joep Dohmen - brought to light the abuse that led to a national scandal. Robert Chesal looks back at how the story unfolded.

You could say that 2010 was the year when the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal went viral. Until February of that year, abuse of youngsters by Catholic clergy was primarily seen as a problem in Ireland and the United States.

German scandal
But that month, as northern Europe lay buried in snow, a simmering problem began to reach boiling point. Reports from a Catholic boarding school run by Jesuits in the German capital Berlin spoke first of a few, then of a dozen, and then of over a hundred victims of abuse by priests.

One of those reports reached me at the RNW newsroom in mid-February. That same day I read that Pope Benedict XVI had ordered the entire Irish bishops' conference to appear at the Vatican, where they would receive a dressing down for failing to tackle abuse in their dioceses. I decided to investigate what, if anything, had happened in the Netherlands. More and the bigger picture.

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"Catholic church knew about sexual abuse in 1958"
30 November 2011

A Dutch current affairs programme has uncovered evidence that in 1958 the Netherlands’ Catholic Church hierarchy was told that children were being physically and sexually abused in its institutions. The evidence is contained in a letter found in the archives of the Catholic child protection services. The letter was written by a judge who warned the board of the child protection services that clerics were sexually abusing children.

The board took action and sent various letters to the boards of institutions to warn them. The confidential letters mentioned a black list of abusers. But the church hierarchy failed to take steps to stop the abuse. End

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Dutch bishop faces new abuse allegations
15 November 2011

The Dutch police have been asked via Interpol to investigate new sex abuse allegations against retired Dutch bishop 'Cor S.' Radio Netherlands Worldwide has learned this from conversations with the sex crimes division of the Irish national police. In the Netherlands, both the police and prosecution service deny having received the request.

Cor S. (full name withheld) is one of six Roman Catholic priests who face allegations from Emmanuel Shikuku, a former seminary student from Kenya. All six are members of the Mill Hill Missionaries, a society based in Maidenhead, England which has told Radio Netherlands that all the allegations are untrue.

Altar boy
Mr Shikuku, now 42, has told the Irish sex crimes police he was the victim of a long series of rapes, coercive sexual contact and other forms of abuse by Mill Hill priests starting in the late 1970s. Four of the alleged perpetrators are Dutch and two are believed to be British. More

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Abuse in Dutch Catholic care: more evidence
24 September 2011

Serious abuses went on unreported for years in Dutch Roman Catholic homes for the mentally disabled. They included sex offences, castration, secret medical experiments and possibly murder. One Catholic brother was banished to Africa for doing unethical brain research. Radio Netherlands Worldwide tracked him down.

Until recent years, most abuses in Dutch institutional care were kept out of the public eye. One exception was a scandal in 1978 involving medical experiments at 'Huize Assisië’, a Roman Catholic boarding school for mentally handicapped boys in the southern town of Udenhout.

Brain x-rays
The home's medical doctor and a Catholic nurse known as Brother Dionysius performed spinal taps on approximately 180 patients, including minors. They injected fluid and air into the patients' brains in order to take x-rays of the cerebral cortex. These were used for brain research which was quietly being carried out. After the injections, the patients suffered nausea and headaches for days. Their parents were neither asked for permission nor notified of the procedures. More and quite shocking.

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Abuse victims urge ICC to prosecute the pope
13 September 2011

Victims of sexual abuse by the clergy have asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to prosecute Pope Benedict XVI and other leading Vatican officials for crimes against humanity. A worldwide network of victims accuses the pontiff and three cardinals of aiding and abetting wide-scale rape and sexual violence against children by priests. Fat chance! more

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High child death rate in 1950s mental institution investigated
17 August 2011

The Dutch Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the cases of 34 mentally disabled youngsters who died whilst in the care of Roman Catholic clergy at the St Joseph care home in the southern province of Limburg at the beginning of the 1950s.

However, it has now also come to light that 40 girls at another Catholic home in the same town, Heel, also died in the period 1952 - 1954. In the case of these deaths, at the St Anna home for mentally disabled women, the girls were all aged 12 or younger, whilst the boys who died at St Joseph's were between 11 and 18. More

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There are in fact, five pages of this stuff, page two can be found here, Radio Netherlands Worldwide, personally, I've had enough.

A choice of two videos below, both highlighting the Vatican's complicity in protecting priests at all costs and the total disregard in which it held the child victims of clerical sexual abuse.

And one last word, dripping with irony as it does, Rick Santorum's recent cheap politicking regarding euthanasia in the Netherlands. (See Rick Santorum tag)

It would appear that euthanasia has been practiced in the Netherlands, eugenics certainly have, and we know by whose hand, that of the Catholic Church.

Rick Santorum is a Catholic. And like every other subject that Ricky has an opinion on, he also has an opinion on paedophilia in the Catholic Church: Santorum Hypocrisy Writ Large: Church Paedophilia a 'Basic Homosexual Relationship'

Perhaps one or two of you might like to give Ricky a tweet regarding this post.

Mick Peelo looks at some internal Vatican letters that appear to paint a picture of Vatican obstructionism towards investigations into clerical sexual abuse.

Sex Crimes and the Vatican is a documentary film by Colm O'Gorman, who was raped by a Catholic priest in the diocese of Ferns in County Wexford in Ireland when he was 14 years old. Father Sean Fortune was charged with 66 counts of sexual, indecent assault and another serious sexual offence relating to eight boys but he committed suicide on the eve of his trial. Colm started an investigation with the BBC in March 2002 which led to the resignation of Dr Brendan Comiskey, the bishop leading the Ferns Diocese. Colm then pushed for a government inquiry which led to the Ferns Report.

Big tip of the hat, Dutch reader, Maren.

Peadophile Priests Prime Ministers Politicians and Police

Not a story about the UK, if from reading the header, that is what you were expecting, but more details surrounding the previous shocking expose, Forced Child Castrations Reportedly Found in Roman Catholic Care.

Evil is a word I seldom use, the main reason being, the way the word has been hi-jacked by the religious, giving a single word the status of an entity in its own right; evil, like the Devil, lurking in some dark corner as it were.

But there is evil here, not in the form of some supernatural demon, but like evil the world over, evil in the only form it takes, the only form it has, man alone. And nothing so evil as man cloaked in the garb of all evils, the apparel of religion. And in this particular case, worn by those of the Catholic Church.

And let not one of you, for the love of what ever fictional entity you may pray to, have the affront to tell me, ''but this isn't true Catholicism'' because it is. This cult of perversion and pederasty is every bit true of Catholicism as intolerance, misogyny, and the cult of death is Islam.

The paedophile will never stop abusing children, if only in his fantasies. The wife beater, for all his contrition and promises after the act, will never stop beating his wife, and the priesthood will never stop physically and sexually abusing children. It is what they are, it is their being, their fundamental make up, it is as unalterable as their DNA.

And unimaginable as it might seem, there are those that carry even more guilt than those that perpetrated these horrific acts on children, those that let it happen decade after decade, the Ratzinger's of this world.

Time for the truth about Catholic sex abuse in the Netherlands
By Robert Chesal
19 March 2012

The revelation that a number of minors who were abused in Dutch Roman Catholic institutions were also forcibly castrated has shocked the Netherlands. It casts grave doubt upon the recent findings of a commission set up to look into abuse in the church. RNW's Robert Chesal, who first brought the sex abuse scandal to light, argues that only parliament can be trusted to investigate further.

We now know that former Dutch cabinet minister Wim Deetman did not meet the expectations he raised when he chaired the commission of inquiry into sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church. He did not get to the bottom of the abuse scandal or reveal all of the horrors that took place behind church doors in the Netherlands.

Whistle blowers punished

We know this thanks to investigative journalist Joep Dohmen of the newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Dohmen wrote about a boarding school student who had been sexually abused by a Dutch monk. When the former student reported the abuse to the police in 1956, he was brought to a Roman Catholic psychiatric ward, declared a homosexual and then castrated. The same surgery was probably performed on at least ten other schoolmates of his who tried to blow the whistle on abuse.

The main abuser in this case was ‘Gregorius,’ the brother superior of the Roman Catholic Harreveld boarding school in the east of the Netherlands.

We cannot yet say for sure why the Deetman Commission left all this information out of its voluminous report on sexual abuse in the church that was published just three months ago. The commission received a clear complaint detailing the castrations in 2010, which it now says it did not investigate "for lack of sufficient leads".

This explanation looks shaky at best, seeing as Joep Dohmen was able, in just a few months’ time, to find irrefutable evidence of one such illegal castration and strong indications of ten more.

Senior politician involved

But Dohmen found something even more important. He discovered that the Deetman Report failed to mention a certain political figure who tried to secure a royal pardon for Gregorius and other convicted Catholic brothers from Harreveld. That was Victor Marijnen, a former Dutch prime minister and leading member of the Catholic People's Party (KVP). The KVP later merged with Protestant parties to form the Christian Democrats (CDA) - the political party of inquiry commission chairman Wim Deetman.

Victor Marijnen was in an extraordinary position in the 1950s. Not only was he a rising star in his political party, he was also vice-chairman of the Dutch Catholic child protection agency, and –most pertinently– director of Harreveld boarding school. The Deetman Commission was aware of these connections and the potential conflicts of interest they represent. The commission was aware of Marijnen’s letter to the Queen on behalf of sexual abusers, too, but omitted these facts in its report.

Reacting to Dohmen's revelations, the Deetman Commission explains that it did not mention Marijnen because it did not detail any cases that could be traced back to an individual, for the sake of protecting privacy. However, elsewhere in the same report we see numerous mentions of cases that can be traced back to individuals, even highly-placed figures such as bishops Ad Simonis and Philippe Bär. The commission did not shy away from slapping these men on the wrist.

It's not unreasonable to conclude that the Deetman Commission refrained from investigating the castration because it knew this would inevitably lead to closer scrutiny of the Harreveld situation, exposing the role of Victor Marijnen and showing Mr Deetman’s own political party in a very negative light indeed.




The big picture

But this may be too narrow a view. The bigger picture is this: Victor Marijnen was just one member of a wider elite of Catholic notables who weilded vast power in the 1950s. They were captains of industry, chairmen of commissions, judges, high-ranking civil servants and politicians. And it was through this old boys network that abuse at Harreveld and other Roman Catholic institutions was covered up.

In short, the Harreveld castration story reveals collusion between institutions, bishops, politicians, the police and the justice system that enabled sexual abuse in the church to continue unpunished for decades on end.

Questions to answer

It's now clear that the critics were right when they complained that a church-installed commission of inquiry could not, or would not, get to the bottom of the abuse scandal. There must now be an impartial inquiry whose integrity is beyond doubt. Only parliament can fulfil this role. And perhaps the first witness called to testify under oath should be Wim Deetman himself. Radio Netherlands

Journalists of the Year 2010
RNW's Robert Chesal and Joep Dohmen of NRC Handelsblad were named journalists of the year in 2010 for their work in exposing sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church in the Netherlands.

Dohmen also published the book "Vrome Zondaars" (Pious Sinners) on the same subject.

Forced Child Castrations Reportedly Found in Roman Catholic Care

Jesus Christ! is there no end to the horror stories that keep coming out of the Dutch Catholic Church?

Forced castrations reportedly found in Roman Catholic care
17 March 2012

Underage sexual abuse victims were castrated in Dutch Roman Catholic psychiatric wards in the 1950s, according to the Rotterdam-based newspaper NRC Handelsblad.




Castration was performed on young men who were thought to be homosexual, but also as a means of punishing those who blew the whistle on abusers, the paper quotes sources as saying.

NRC discovered proof of the forced castration of one young man and strong evidence that at least ten other abuse victims were subjected to the removal of their testicles. The proof includes court documents, medical records, letters from lawyers and private correspondence.

According to the paper, the practice was reported in 2010 to the Deetman Commission which completed its investigation of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church last December. The commission, led by former cabinet minister Wim Deetman of the Christian Democrat party (CDA), made no mention of the castration of abuse victims in its final report.

NRC also writes that a prominent Dutch politician tried to secure a royal pardon for Catholic brothers convicted of sexual abuse at Harreveld, a former boarding school in the Netherlands. The politician was Vic Marijnen, who later became Dutch prime minister.

Marijnen was chairman of the Harreveld board of governors at the time when the abuses took place. He was also vice-chairman of the Netherlands' main Catholic child protection agency and leader of the Catholic People's Party (KVP), which later merged with Protestant groups to create the Christian Democrats.

In a reaction, the church-installed Deetman Commission says it did not publish any findings on the castration of abused minors in its final report because it had "too few leads for further investigation." The commission did not report on the actions of Vic Marijnen because "the case was unmistakeably tied to circumstances which could be traced back to an individual person." In its final report, the commission left most identities anonymous as a means of protecting individuals' privacy. Radio Netherlands and more Catholic Church abuse stories.

H/T Maren.

Wikileaks The Vatican's Meddling in Venezuelan Politics

''Manning in Shackles''

I haven't bothered with the story, it's nothing you haven't heard before or will again, and let's face it, it's only rhetoric. All the words and all the column inches in all the world, or calling Bradley Manning hero, Nobel nominee, or whatever, ain't going to make this slightest bit of difference to any of it.

Bradley Manning is already convicted and his fate predetermined. The US government will go through the motions and then they will throw him in a hole for the rest of his natural. Which I have a feeling, won't be all that long. By design or accident, the system will eat him alive.

More interesting than the story by far, which can be found at the bottom of the page, is the sin list, or a tiny part thereof, that the leaked emails have exposed.

And what a list it is. The first thing that hits you, and square in the face at that, is, well you only have to look at today's graphic to get a hint of that, but for me, and although there are far worse, was this:

The Vatican told the United States it wanted to undermine the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Latin America because of concerns about the deterioration of Catholic power there. It feared that Chávez was seriously damaging relations between the Catholic church and the state by identifying the church hierarchy in Venezuela as part of the privileged class.

Isn't that nice, the Buggery Club asking the US to undermine a democratically elected president, who has done more to better the lot of his people, than probably any other head of state, that is, or has ever been.

We have already seen the effects of the influence of the Catholic Church in that neck of the woods, it's not good, and of course it's not good for those possessed of the Devil's gateway, women.

The Saga of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks, to be put to ballad and film
by William Blum
March 06, 2012

...... Here is a sample of some of the other Wikileaks revelations that make the people of the world wiser:

: In 2009 Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano became the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which plays the leading role in the investigation of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or is working only on peaceful civilian nuclear energy projects. A US embassy cable of October 2009 said Amano "took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded the [American] ambassador on several occasions that ... he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program."

: Russia refuted US claims that Iran has missiles that could target Europe.

: The British government's official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government's pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of the inquiry.

: A discussion between Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and American Gen. David H. Petraeus in which Saleh indicated he would cover up the US role in missile strikes against al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen. "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," Saleh told Petraeus.

: The US embassy in Madrid has had serious points of friction with the Spanish government and civil society: a) trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of killing a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad during a 2003 unprovoked US tank shelling of the hotel where he and other journalists were staying; b )torture cases brought by a Spanish NGO against six senior Bush administration officials, including former attorney general Alberto Gonzales; c) a Spanish government investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; d) a probe by a Spanish court into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for American extraordinary rendition (= torture) flights; e )continual criticism of the Iraq war by Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, who eventually withdrew Spanish troops.

: State Department officials at the United Nations, as well as US diplomats in various embassies, were assigned to gather as much of the following information as possible about UN officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, permanent security council representatives, senior UN staff, and foreign diplomats: e-mail and website addresses, internet user names and passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, work schedules, and biometric data. US diplomats at the embassy in Asunción, Paraguay were asked to obtain dates, times and telephone numbers of calls received and placed by foreign diplomats from China, Iran and the Latin American leftist states of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. US diplomats in Romania, Hungary and Slovenia were instructed to provide biometric information on "current and emerging leaders and advisers" as well as information about "corruption" and information about leaders' health and "vulnerability". The UN directive also specifically asked for "biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats". A similar cable to embassies in the Great Lakes region of Africa said biometric data included DNA, as well as iris scans and fingerprints.

: A special "Iran observer" in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku reported on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff, Mohammed Ali Jafari, allegedly got into a heated argument with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.

: The State Department, virtually alone in the Western Hemisphere, did not unequivocally condemn a June 28, 2009 military coup in Honduras, even though an embassy cable declared: "there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch". US support of the coup government has been unwavering ever since.

: The leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party — neutral, pacifist, and liberal Sweden, so the long-standing myth goes — visited the US embassy in Stockholm and asked for advice on how best to sell the war in Afghanistan to a skeptical Swedish public, asking if the US could arrange for a member of the Afghan government to come visit Sweden and talk up NATO's humanitarian efforts on behalf of Afghan children, and so forth. [For some years now Sweden has been, in all but name, a member of NATO and the persecutor of Julian Assange, the latter to please a certain Western power.]

: The US pushed to influence Swedish wiretapping laws so communication passing through the Scandinavian country could be intercepted. The American interest was clear: Eighty per cent of all the internet traffic from Russia travels through Sweden.

: President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy told US embassy officials in Brussels in January 2010 that no one in Europe believed in Afghanistan anymore. He said Europe was going along in deference to the United States and that there must be results in 2010, or "Afghanistan is over for Europe."

: Iraqi officials saw Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state. The Iraqi leaders were keen to assure their American patrons that they could easily "manage" the Iranians, who wanted stability; but that the Saudis wanted a "weak and fractured" Iraq, and were even "fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government". The Saudi King, moreover, wanted a US military strike on Iran.

: Saudi Arabia in 2007 threatened to pull out of a Texas oil refinery investment unless the US government intervened to stop Saudi Aramco from being sued in US courts for alleged oil price fixing. The deputy Saudi oil minister said that he wanted the US to grant Saudi Arabia sovereign immunity from lawsuits

: Saudi donors were the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

: Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial 1996 drug trial involving children with meningitis.

: Oil giant Shell claimed to have "inserted staff" and fully infiltrated Nigeria's government.

: The Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats about the Indonesian military's activities in the province of West Papua, expressing fears that the Indonesian government's neglect, rampant corruption and human rights abuses were stoking unrest in the region.

: US officials collaborated with Lebanon's defense minister to spy on, and allow Israel to potentially attack, Hezbollah in the weeks that preceded a violent May 2008 military confrontation in Beirut.

: Gabon president Omar Bongo allegedly pocketed millions in embezzled funds from central African states, channeling some of it to French political parties in support of Nicolas Sarkozy.

: Cables from the US embassy in Caracas in 2006 asked the US Secretary of State to warn President Hugo Chávez against a Venezuelan military intervention to defend the Cuban revolution in the eventuality of an American invasion after Castro's death.

: The United States was concerned that the leftist Latin American television network, Telesur, headquartered in Venezuela, would collaborate with al Jazeera of Qatar, whose coverage of the Iraq War had gotten under the skin of the Bush administration.

: The Vatican told the United States it wanted to undermine the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Latin America because of concerns about the deterioration of Catholic power there. It feared that Chávez was seriously damaging relations between the Catholic church and the state by identifying the church hierarchy in Venezuela as part of the privileged class.

: The Holy See welcomed President Obama's new outreach to Cuba and hoped for further steps soon, perhaps to include prison visits for the wives of the Cuban Five. Better US-Cuba ties would deprive Hugo Chávez of one of his favorite screeds and could help restrain him in the region.

: The wonderful world of diplomats: In 2010, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the question of visas for two wives of members of the "Cuban Five". "Brown requested that the wives (who have previously been refused visas to visit the U.S.) be granted visas so that they could visit their husbands in prison. ... Our subsequent queries to Number 10 indicate that Brown made this request as a result of a commitment that he had made to UK trade unionists, who form part of the Labour Party's core constituency. Now that the request has been made, Brown does not intend to pursue this matter further. There is no USG action required."

: UK Officials concealed from Parliament how the US was allowed to bring cluster bombs onto British soil in defiance of a treaty banning the housing of such weapons.

: A cable was sent by an official at the US Interests Section in Havana in July 2006, during the runup to the Non-Aligned Movement conference. He noted that he was actively looking for "human interest stories and other news that shatters the myth of Cuban medical prowess". [Presumably to be used to weaken support for Cuba amongst the member nations at the conference.]

: Most of the men sent to Guantánamo prison were innocent people or low-level operatives; many of the innocent individuals were sold to the US for bounty.

: DynCorp, a powerful American defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from US tax dollars, threw a "boy-play" party for Afghan police recruits. (Yes, it's what you think.)

: Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations repeatedly maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was untrue.

: Known Egyptian torturers received training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.

: The United States put great pressure on the Haitian government to not go ahead with various projects, with no regard for the welfare of the Haitian people. A 2005 cable stressed continued US insistence that all efforts must be made to keep former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the United States had overthrown the previous year, from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process. In 2006, Washington's target was President René Préval for his agreeing to a deal with Venezuela to join Caracas's Caribbean oil alliance, PetroCaribe, under which Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest. And in 2009, the State Department backed American corporate opposition to an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian workers, the poorest paid in the Western Hemisphere.

: The United States used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at the crucial 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen.

: Mahmoud Abbas, president of The Palestinian National Authority, and head of the Fatah movement, turned to Israel for help in attacking Hamas in Gaza in 2007.

: The British government trained a Bangladeshi paramilitary force condemned by human rights organisations as a "government death squad".

: A US military order directed American forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis.

: The US was involved in the Australian government's 2006 campaign to oust Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.

: A 2009 US cable said that police brutality in Egypt against common criminals was routine and pervasive, the police using force to extract confessions from criminals on a daily basis.

: US diplomats pressured the German government to stifle the prosecution of CIA operatives who abducted and tortured Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. [El-Masri was kidnaped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He was flown to a torture center in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, starved, and sodomized. The US government released him on a hilltop in Albania five months later without money or the means to go home.]

: 2005 cable re "widespread severe torture" by India, the widely-renowned "world's largest democracy": The International Committee of the Red Cross reported: "The continued ill-treatment of detainees, despite longstanding ICRC-GOI [Government of India] dialogue, have led the ICRC to conclude that New Delhi condones torture." Washington was briefed on this matter by the ICRC years ago. What did the United States, one of the world's leading practitioners and teachers of torture in the past century, do about it? American leaders, including the present ones, continued to speak warmly of "the world's largest democracy"; as if torture and one of the worst rates of poverty and child malnutrition in the world do not contradict the very idea of democracy.

: The United States overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces — despite the Kopassus's long history of arbitrary detention, torture and murder — after the Indonesian President threatened to derail President Obama's trip to the country in November 2010.

: Since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country. Full story

Gang Membership Cards For Catholics?

Card-carrying Catholics

Catholics are being encouraged to carry a 'faith card'. Could it catch on?
by Nelson Jones
02 February 2012



I'm intrigued by the proposal, revealed yesterday by the Telegraph's Martin Beckford, to issue all one million regularly practising Catholics in England and Wales with credit-card-sized "faith cards". One side carries a quote from the recently beatified John Henry Newman, while the other lists six things that good Catholics ought to do (number one is to share the faith, incidentally) and carries the injunction, "in the event of an emergency please contact a Catholic priest."

I assume that this refers to a medical emergency, rather than to a sudden crisis of faith or to a difficulty encountered while trying to explain the finer points of the doctrine of transubstantiation to an incredulous atheist.

Launching the scheme, Bishop Kieran Conry put the card in the context of modern society, in which it is common to carry cards "which reflect something of our identity and the things that are important to us." But it would surely have appealed to the fifteenth century Franciscan preacher St Bernardino of Siena, who used to carry around a plaque inscribed with an IHS logo, the better to impress congregations with reverence for the name of Jesus. He's now the patron saint of advertising.



According to the bishop, the card will remind Catholics of their faith and encourage them to share it. It isn't, though, a membership card. There's no suggestion that it would be necessary to show it before receiving communion in an unfamiliar church, for example. Perhaps they're missing a trick, there. Given the complexity and specificity of the rules surrounding who is and isn't permitted to receive the sacrament, it might be considered surprising that the system continues to function largely on trust. A smart card would provide an excellent way of keeping track of which Catholics were in good standing with the Church, as well as preventing Anglicans from surreptitiously availing themselves of communion, as Tony Blair used to do while he was prime minister.

Nor is it, yet, a loyalty card, although I can imagine enterprising Catholic-friendly businesses offering discounts to its bearers. It's not uncommon, after all, for some clubs and societies to negotiate discounts on behalf of their members, or universities on behalf of their alumni, while many businesses spontaneously offer discounts to students, pensioners or local residents. At a time when the Catholic Church is seriously worried about falling congregations (the pope himself warning the other day that "in large parts of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame that has no more sustenance") some such incentive scheme might prove useful.

More seriously,...... more

See full text for significance.

Christmas Message From His Popiness

Wearing cream and gold vestments by Armani, red patent pumps by Prada, hat by Funny and carrying a Fabergé gold cross, the Pope, speaking from the Basilica in Saint Peters, had this to say about Christmas.

"Let us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this season, and to discover behind it the child in the stable in Bethlehem, so as to find true joy and true light."

Blessed are the religious.

Prison Nation regrets.

"Jiizas - di buk we Luuk rait bout im".

Child Rape Penn State Catholic Church ''Everyone's doing it''

They may well be, but that hardly makes it right.

In one with which I am in total agreement, the writer argues throughout the article that reality and the behavioural safeguards that it keeps in place, all but disappear when the incredible, in the form of religion, takes precedent to become the guiding light and the moral compass of its adherents.

What was it that Orwell said, ''As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents''

Yes quite, he also said, ''One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up'' although I feel he did a disservice to the truth by singling out Catholicism, rather he might have said, one cannot really be religious and grown up.

The free pass we atheists, we realists, are expected to afford those that embrace the most preposterous beliefs, is quite frankly far beyond the pale. I'm not going list even a few of the thousands of bizarre beliefs that we are asked to respect the believer for, suffice to say, were the ''religious'' tag not attached to ridiculous articles of faith, then half the world would be in the asylum.

Perhaps a better quote might have been, one cannot be a realist and religious. The two are totally incompatible. And it this point that the writer repeatably makes throughout her essay. If religion becomes your reality and the ''law'' of a deity takes precedent of the laws of man, then all things become possible in the unreal world that these people have chosen to create.



Child Rape, Penn State and the Catholic Church: Is Religion Especially Bad?

The child rape scandal at Penn State raises inevitable comparisons with the Catholic Church. Does religion make these kinds of abuses worse?
By Greta Christina
November 22, 2011

I can't be the only person who heard about the Penn State child rape scandal and thought, "Holy crap -- it's just like the Catholic Church." The abuse of power by a trusted authority figure; the coverup by people in authority; the unwillingness of witnesses to speak out; the grotesque, morally bankrupt defenses of a beloved institution by its followers... all of it is depressingly familiar.

And I can't be the only critic of religion who's been wondering, "Hmm. If Penn State has been acting like the Catholic Church... then did the Catholic Church child rape scandal actually have anything to do with religion?"

I still think it does. But it's a complicated question. Let's take a closer look.

Apologists for the Catholic Church and its role in the extensive child rape scandal often use the "But everyone else does it!" defense. "Priests aren't the only people in positions of trust and power over children who abuse that power," they say. "Parents, relatives, teachers, babysitters, coaches -- they rape children as well. It's all terrible... but it's unfair to single out the Catholic Church as if it were special."

Atheists and other critics of the Church typically respond to this defense -- after tearing their hair out and screaming -- by pointing out: The rapes aren't the scandal. The coverup is the scandal. The rapes of children are a horrible tragedy. The scandal is the fact that the Catholic Church hid the rapes, and protected the child-raping priests from discovery and prosecution: lying to law enforcement, concealing evidence, paying off witnesses, moving child-raping priests from diocese to diocese so they could rape a whole new batch of children in a place where they wouldn't be suspected. The scandal is the fact that it wasn't just a few individuals in the ranks who protected and enabled the child-raping priests: it was large numbers of Church officials, including high-ranking officials, acting as a cold-blooded matter of Church policy. The scandal is the fact that the Church treated their own stability and reputation as a higher priority than, for fuck's sake, children not being raped.

And many critics of religion have concluded that the nature of religion itself is largely to blame for this scandal. They have argued that religion's lack of any sort of reality check, and its belief in a perfect supernatural moral authority that transcends mere human concerns, makes religious institutions like the Catholic Church far more vulnerable to abuses of this kind.

By some strange coincidence the original photo in the article is the exact same one as this from my archives. Well perhaps not exactly the same, as I'm sure the sharper eyed among might discern.

I've made this argument myself. And in my own writings on this subject, I've asked what I thought was a rhetorical question: "If these scandals had taken place in any organization other than a religious one -- would you still be part of it? If it were your political party, your softball league, your university, your children's school, your employer? Would you still be part of it? Would you still pay your league dues and show up for softball night? Would you still pay your tuition and send your kids off to the school every day? Or would you be walking out in moral outrage?"

But it seems that this question wasn't so rhetorical. It seems that, at least sometimes, the answer to that question is, "Yup -- we'd be defending our school."

At least sometimes, the answer is, "If we see our coach raping a child -- we won't alert the police. If we're in positions of authority in a school and we hear reports about our coach raping a child -- we won't alert the police, and we won't investigate. And if we hear that a coach at our school raped children, and that the authorities at the school knew about it and didn't alert the police or investigate, we will become outraged -- not at the fact that the rapes occurred, not at the fact that the witnesses and school authorities did nothing, but at what we see as unfair treatment of the perpetrators, and at the very fact that the media is covering it."

Clearly, defending the indefensible is not unique to religion.

Clearly, institutions centered on something other than a belief in the supernatural are perfectly capable of inspiring this grotesquely contorted form of loyalty. This unwillingness to believe that the people and institutions we admire could do anything that vile; this ability to rationalize actions we would normally find thoroughly despicable when we've made a commitment to the people who perpetrated them... this clearly isn't just about religion. This is about the more fucked-up directions that the human brain can go in.

So I want to take a step back. I want to be rigorous, and ask: Is there anything special about the child rape scandal in the Catholic Church? Does the fact that the Catholic Church is a religious organization have any effect on how the child rape scandal has been playing out for them? Is there any real difference between the child rape scandal in the Catholic Church, and the child rape scandal at Penn State?

I've been looking at this hard. And I'll acknowledge that I don't think the difference is as great as I'd originally thought. The degree to which many students and supporters of Penn State have behaved like blind religious zealots has, quite frankly, shocked me.

But I still think there is a difference. There are non-trivial differences between these two scandals: differences of degree, and differences of kind. I want to look carefully at those differences and at whether religion has any part in how the Catholic Church has behaved, and continues to behave, when it comes to the rape of children.

How Much Worse Was It?

1: Scope. At Penn State, one man, former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, has been charged with the rape of seven children. In the Catholic Church, over 4,000 priests raped over 10,000 children. According to conservative estimates. The actual numbers are likely to be much higher.

And at Penn State, about eight school officials and staff members are currently thought (according to grand jury records) to have turned a blind eye to the alleged rapes. In the Catholic Church, the Church officials who either ignored the rapes or deliberately acted to conceal them number in the hundreds -- going all the way up into the top echelons of the Church hierarchy.

That is a huge freaking difference. To be comparable in scope to the Catholic Church child rape scandal, the Penn State scandal would have to extend to multiple major universities across the country, with a deliberate campaign of concealment extending throughout the Association of American Universities and into the top levels of the Department of Education. And as appalling as the recent events at Penn State are, that's clearly not what we're looking at.

Have non-religious institutions sheltered and defended child rapists? Yes. But have any of them done so on anywhere near the scale that the Catholic Church has? Not to my knowledge.

And it's hard to see religion as irrelevant to that. Religion is uniquely unfalsifiable -- and it thus has a unique lack of any sort of reality check. And most religions have a belief in a perfect moral authority, and a belief that it understands the wishes of that moral authority and knows the right way to interpret them. So because of this lack of reality check, and because of this belief in a perfect supernatural moral authority that trumps human morality, religious institutions have a uniquely powerful armor against any sort of criticism or self-correction. And because of that armor, appalling situations -- like the widespread rape of children by priests -- have the capacity to spin wildly out of control, with a scope that's hard to imagine in secular institutions.

2: Duration. As far as we know, the alleged rapes of children by Sandusky at Penn State, and the conspiracy of silence about them, have been going on since about 1996. The rapes of children by Catholic priests had been going on for decades -- possibly centuries -- before people finally began talking about them. Go to page three.

Catholicism In The Twenty First Century

Or should that read, mumbo jumbo in the twenty first century?

There is something drastically wrong here. This self serving organisation has a direct influence on the welfare of millions of people, and this is what they are all about, pre-medieval superstition, dark age mumbo fucking jumbo, here in the twenty first century.

I despair, I really do, between this lot and the creationists, I wonder how we ever managed to achieve the enlightenment that we enjoy today. What was it Orwell said, you can't be a Catholic and grown up? Tell me about it!

Catholics: dead pope’s blood will stop Mexican crime

One of the more loony episodes (and there are many) in the annals of the Catholic Church is this report from The Freethinker, “Catholics pin hopes on dead Pope’s blood to stem gang crime in Mexico.” Yes, that’s right: a vial of the late Pope John Paul II’s blood is, with Vatican permission, going on a tour of Mexico in an attempt to stem unrest in that country:

An episcopal conference in Mexico has requested that the relic be sent over and, according to Vatican Radio, the “relic”will arrive in the country on August 17 before being taken to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

A week later the vial of blood from the “blessed” Pope John Paul, a title he acquired posthumously after his successor Benedict XVI beatified him in May, will be taken on a pilgrimage to other Catholic dioceses around the country.

The relic will be accompanied by a statue of the late Polish pope, born Karol Wojtyla, with the intended message one of reconciliation.

Killings in parts of Mexico have shot up in recent years amid a military crackdown on organized crime and drug cartels which has sent soldiers onto the streets.

Mexican bishops, in a statement broadcast on Vatican Radio, said:

The reminder of John Paul II and the love he had for our country should push us to reinforce the faith of the Mexican people, at a time when our nation is undergoing profound social change.

Here is the grisly relic that will make Mexicans put down their guns:

Looks like something out of one of those ghastly trophy shops, one hundred and eighty!

Equally sickening is this statement: “Several vials of blood were taken from Pope John Paul II during the last days of his life in 2005.” Amazing to think that they leached the old dude’s body for relics while he was still alive, though maybe that was just for medical use.

Grania Spingies of Atheist Ireland, who reported this bizarre Sanginary Tour to me, had this to say about it (she’s an ex-Catholic):

Oh man, how embarrassing.

On the whole I don’t bother to draw people’s attention to the stuff that Freethinker publishes every week, because it’s a never-ending stream of crazy. It gets a bit ho-hum after a while. But whenever Catholics try to claim that their religion is sophisticated and liberal and trying to move with the times, I find it useful to point to examples like this that prove that Holy Mother Church is still trying to stupefy the peasants with carnie tricks.

The classic response from Catholics to this is: “Well, we don’t have to believe in these bits”.

The response to that, is: “So why does the Vatican endorse this stuff then?”

The question comes down to this. Either these relics are dead flesh with supernatural powers or they are not. By endorsing and promoting such things to whomever is superstitious enough to be impressed by them, while at the same time holding them as optional parts of the faith to the more educated and “sophisticated” believers, the Vatican betrays a level of cynicism that one should not expect from an institution that holds itself up as a high example of morality. whyevolutionistrue