The No Child's Behind Left Campaign
My Fellow Roman Catholics, twin dilemmas face Catholics the world over today and both have far-reaching implications. First, for years the Church has been rocked by explosive charges of sadistic child sexual abuse. This has led some Catholic parents to remove their children from Catholic schools and to prevent their children from serving as altar boys and girls. Second, for years the Church has faced a dire shortage of new priests. These two issues — the shortage of children indoctrinated in Catholic dogma and serving our parish priests, and the shortage of parish priests — are related, as we shall soon discuss.
We must stand firm in our faith. The Catholic Church has never, in its 1,600-year history, done anything the least bit immoral. Sure, we have burned witches, but they were witches, after all. And sure, there were those inquisitions and the crusades and the persecutions of people of other faiths, but what's wrong with torturing and killing heretics? And then there are the people we killed for expounding basic scientific principles we now know to be true. It should be enough that we say "oops" and move on.
In the face of the most recent charges of the torture and sexual abuse of deaf children — charges that the Holy Pontiff Himself may have ignored — there appears to be only one solution. The Pope is Jesus Christ's Holy Vicar on Earth and, as good Catholics, we all know that he is religiously and morally supreme. Therefore, we ask that you join the No Child's Behind Left campaign. There are not enough children serving our priests. The Church and all right-minded Catholics must embrace the infallibility of the Supreme Pontiff and therefore support the sexual union between your children and priests. This will not only serve to officially condone the activities of the church as a sacred, religious practice beyond the reach of the silly criminal and civil laws of man, but will also attract many new priests to take their vows.
Let's face it: a lot of us good Catholics were molested by our parish priests and we're no worse off for it. So, please, join the No Child's Behind Left campaign and send your children to church and to Catholic schools with the comfort of knowing they will be treated to a tender relationship with a priest who will mold them into good Catholic adults.
Child Sexual Abuse
For at least fifty years — and probably much, much longer — child sexual abuse has been a documented staple of the Roman Catholic Church, as much a rite of passage for Catholic children as First Holy Communion and Confirmation.
In 1962, the Vatican's Holy Office, or Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued the Crimen Sollicitationis (which is Latin for "The Crime of Solicitation"), a secret edict detailing the procedures to be followed when priests or bishops of the Roman Catholic Church were accused of soliciting or abusing parishioners. This document (you can download the original Latin by clicking here or an English translation by clicking here) prohibits anyone, including the accuser, from sharing allegations or evidence of sexual solicitation or abuse with anyone, including legal authorities and legal counsel. According to the Crimen Sollicitationis, allegations of sexual abuse were to be investigated "in the most secretive way." All parties who knew of the abuse were to be "restrained by a perpetual secrecy ... and ... to observe the strictest silence … under penalty of excommunication." Thus, while nobody in the history of the Catholic Church has been excommunicated for raping or torturing a child, a child could be excommunicated for telling of her or his abuse and therefore spend eternity in Hell. Isn't faith a magnificent and beautifully mysterious thing? Religion makes everything better.
The only way you could ever discuss your abuse was with "special permission or dispensation ... expressly granted ... by the Supreme Pontiff." That never happened, but we all know that a lot of religion is centered around things that never happened. That's what faith is for.
The Crimen Sollicitationis was most recently updated in 2001 by none other than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. This 2001 update specifically addressed child molestation and stated that the Church reserves for itself the authority to investigate and punish such offenses. (You can download the Latin version of this letter update, called De Delictis Gravioribus, by clicking here. If you haven't yet found the time to learn the mother tongue, you can download an unofficial translation in English here.)
Plainly, our beloved Church has a long history of sexual abuse.
The Holy Pontiff Implicated
Our very own Holy Father has been implicated in several sex abuse scandals.
Way back in 1980, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, approved transferring priest Peter Hullermann to Munich and sending him to therapy in 1980 to overcome pedophilia after he was accused of molesting several boys in his former parish in Essen, Germany. Ratzinger was later copied on a memo stating that Hullermann would be returned to pastoral work within days of beginning psychiatric treatment. The priest was later convicted of molesting boys in another parish but was given an eighteen-month suspended sentence. Even after this, Hullermann, a convicted child molester, was allowed to continue to work with altar boys and girls for decades. Since this case became public — only recently — hundreds of Germans have come forward in recent months with allegations of sexual abuse from decades past, including reports of sex abuse cases linked to the Regensburger Domspatzen choir, directed for 30 years by the pope’s brother, the Right Reverend Monsignor Georg Ratzinger.
According to Vatican documents from the mid-1990s, two bishops urged then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to allow them to pursue a Church trial against a priest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The priest, Reverend Lawrence Murphy, had been accused of abusing more than 200 deaf boys over twenty years at St. John’s School for the Deaf. Despite these allegations, Pope Benedict refused to sanction a trial. The only "punishment" this sadistic child molester faced was that he was ordered by the Church not to give Mass outside of his own diocese. And we all know what the Pontiff meant by "give Mass," now don't we? (You can download all the sordid documents by clicking here.)
In Italy, in a eerily similar case, 67 deaf men and women have accused two dozen priests of raping and molesting children for years at the Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf in Verona. Even after this Italian case became public, no action was taken by the Vatican for a full year until, after the Wisconsin case also made headlines, the Church directed the diocese to interview victims about the allegations.
His Holiness was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 to 2005. As such, he was in charge of the office that conducted all Church investigations of worldwide allegations of sexual misconduct. His tenure there is marked by secrecy and indifference to child rape. As Catholic theologian, Hans Kueng points out, "There was not a single man in the whole Catholic Church who knew more about the sex-abuse cases than him...." Yet, consider Ireland alone. According to the Murphy Report, a 2009 government investigation of child sex abuse by the Catholic church in Dublin only, between 1975 and 2004 320 people complained of child sexual abuse. Since May 2004, an addition 130 people abused as children have come forward. The report details the cases of 46 priests guilty of abuse as a representative sample of 102 priests within its remit, with one priest abusing more than 100 children. Another priest abused a child every two weeks for more than 25 years. The period of the Murphy Report coincides almost exactly with the tenure of His Holiness as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the report finds that the "maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation of its assets" was more important to the Church than justice for the victims. And the Murphy Report only scratches the surface. Another report, the Ferns Report, found a pattern of abuse over forty years and identified over one hundred specific cases of abuse in the Diocese of Ferns in Ireland. Thank goodness we have the moral authority of the Church to tell us how to feel about this horrible information.
On March 4, 2010, the Pope's own household became part of a sex scandal. Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of His Holiness (a ceremonial usher of the papal household), was caught on a police wiretap negotiating with Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, a member of an elite choir in St. Peter's Basilica, over the physical details of men he wanted brought to him for sex. At least one of the men brought to Balducci was studying for the priesthood, linking a highly active gay prostitution ring with both the Holy See and an unnamed Rome seminary college. Other men described in wiretap transcripts include a former male model, a rugby player, and "two black Cuban lads." What a tangled but holy web we weave.
How can we reconcile our beliefs about His Holiness's inerrancy and primacy with our knowledge of these tragic crimes?
The only possible way is to accept the fact that the Pope was and is always right: even the grossest torture and sexual molestation within the Catholic Church is excusable behavior. As long a priest confines his abuse to his own diocese, we can ignore it. It's not like anyone is innocent: we all carry the terrible burden of Original Sin. And some of the traumatized children might even grow up to be priests themselves one day, thereby perpetuating God's holy cycle of sadistic abuse and redemption.
But Is It Legal?
As long as it is sanctioned by the church as a sacred religious act, it looks like molesting children would be a perfectly acceptable exercise of religious freedom.
We all know that we are allowed to brainwash our children about anything, no matter how unreasonable or preposterous, as long as we call it "faith." Consider Christian Scientists who deny basic medical care to their children, or the Amish who are allowed to deny their children a high school education, or Christian fundamentalists who home-school their children in demonstrably false scientific notions that will prevent them from ever attending an Ivy League college or from becoming geologists or biologists. All of these examples determine the fate of the children, who have no choice in the matter.
A more poignant example is called metzitzah b'peh. Imagine that you walk in on a grown man sucking the penis of a little boy. Well, you have hit upon a perfectly legal religious rite. Some Haredi and Hasidic Jewish fundamentalists right here in the United States practice this form of circumcision: a mohel, or appointed circumciser, takes a boy's penis, cuts around the prepuse, and then sucks off the foreskin. Is it legal? In 2005 in New York City, after a mohel performed this sacred rite and, in doing so, gave genital herpes to three boys — at least one of the boys died — no charges were filed in the name of the free exercise of religion. In fact, instead of banning the practice, in 2006 the New York State Department of Health issued an official protocol for the performance of metzitzah b'peh. There you go: pedophilia and death all wrapped up in one package, and condoned as the free exercise of religion. Isn't religion wonderful?
If pedophilia with death can be condoned as the free exercise of religion, there can't be any impediment to pedophilia alone being pardoned in the name of faith. Even bleeding hearts, in the name of religious tolerance and multiculturalism, often turn a blind eye to the most repulsive religious customs. Just look at the entire world's muted response to female genital mutilation. In the United States, it took twenty years to pass federal legislation banning female genital mutilation that has not resulted in even one federal prosecution in spite of the fact that female genital mutilation is regularly practiced throughout the US according to health officials. (Georgia, a state not afraid to show its disdain for kneejerk appeals to multiculturalism, stands alone in the nation for having prosecuted two cases of female genital mutilation under state child protection laws.)
See all the joyous freedom religion brings into our lives? Basing your life and moral code on cryptic, obsolete holy books that give conclusive authority to flesh-and-blood human beings sure has its advantages! And, best of all, that means that pederasty and pedophilia in the name of the Lord should be just fine.
How Will This Solve the Shortage of Priests?
Do we really need to spell it out?
We face a critical shortage of Catholic priests. We propose that this may be related to the critical shortage of children serving priests in the ways that children in the Catholic Church have traditionally served priests for at least the last fifty years, if you know what we mean. In other words, we face a crisis in which, soon, there will be No Child's Behind Left.
By solving the problem of the shortage of children, we may solve the problem of the shortage of priests. And we can solve the problem of the shortage of children simply by officially recognizing as a religious rite the decades-old tradition of Catholic priests having sex with your children.
At the same time, we will be supporting the Supreme Pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI. By recognizing child torture and sexual abuse as a Catholic rite, the Supreme Pontiff's glaring refusal to condemn pedophiles during his long tenure with the Church will simply be an exercise of his divine judgment and holy grace.