Even though only a 25% minority of the U.S. population belong to the Roman Catholic Church, because many of its members are so well situated and/or have spouses who are well situated in high offices in the land, and throughout American society, they have now secured not only 5 out of 9 seats of the U.S. Supreme Court, but key positions in every other important sector of society. See Catholic celebrities throughout civil society.
When you are an organization with such clout, with a billion members, a world wide institution, with centuries of effort to put down roots deep into societies all over the world, and a treasury to match, you get to do all kinds of things, including making your own reality, i.e. you can persuade yourself and/or others of "reality" like the following:

that Jesus Christ personally selects one of your high priests to fill his shoes and speak for him on earth; and . . .

this high priest isn't even required to act as Jesus Christ clearly instructed his apostles to act, or to teach what Jesus taught; and . . .

this high priest can teach all kinds of things that Jesus never taught, and get away with calling that teaching the "Gospel of Jesus Christ"; and . . .

this high priest can live in opulent splendor, in a palace with over 10,000 rooms, and never have their sheep question how they can be "vicars of Christ", who said of himself, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." (Matt. 8:20) See VaticanPalace.html.

Such high priests can demand that their billion "sheep" treat them -- not like royalty, because that is not good enough, but like a fourth person of the Holy Trinity. They can require, for example that (in defiance of what Jesus taught regarding the use of titles of honor) they be addressed as "Your Holiness", "Holy Father", "Supreme Pontiff," and even more "the Vicar of Christ"?

These are the instructions which Jesus left for those who would take over the leadership of his new movement after his impending departure :

"For, they (the lawfully established clergy of his time) preach but do not practice. They pile up back-breaking burdens and lay them on other men's shoulders -- yet they themselves will not so much as raise a finger to move them. Their whole lives are planned with an eye to effect. They increase the size of their prayer books and lengthen the tassels of their robes; they love seats of honor at public functions and front places and to have men call them "rabbi" or "teacher".
As for yourselves (the clergy that would follow Jesus), don't you ever be called "rabbi" -- you only have one teacher, and all of you are brother of one another. And don't call any human being "father" -- for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. And you must not let people call you "leaders" -- for you have only one leader, the Anointed One (Christ). The only "superior" among you is the one who serves the others. For, every man who promotes himself will be humbled, and every man who learns to be humble will find promotion.
But alas for you, you scribes and Pharisees, play actors (hypocrites) that you are! You lock the doors of the kingdom of Heaven in men's faces. You will not go inside yourselves, and neither will you allow others to enter." (Matt. Ch. 23)
( See http://CatholicArrogance.Org/callnomanfather.html. )

How many people know that the famous saying
"All power tends to corrupt;
absolute power corrupts absolutely."was specifically addressed by one of the England's greatest liberal Catholic thinkers at the time, Lord Acton, to one of England's most important churchmen in a letter addressed to the Anglican historian Mandell Creighton, 1887? Creighton had just published the first two volumes of his chief historical work, the History of the Papacy,

When you are an organization with power like the Catholic Church's, you can even overrule the dictionary when it comes to the meaning of words. When the word "bigotry" is used in conjunction with the Catholic church, it doesn't mean believing or promoting lies about that institution. It means "knowing and publishing the truth about that institution". When it comes to the Catholic Church, the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply. Most Roman Catholics seem to believe that official representatives of their church have some kind of divine right to get away, not just with murder, but with mass-murder. And anyone who says otherwise they label "an anti-Catholic bigot".
As the author of this web site, I welcome any effort by any Catholic apologist to prove even the smallest detail of my work wrong. I do make mistakes on occasion. But they are honest mistakes, which I am happy to correct when solid evidence is presented to prove that something I have published was inaccurate. Every such correction makes this site that much more powerful. But more often than not, all that Catholic apologists have to say in response to charges of Catholic criminality or sinfulness is either "you're an anti-Catholic bigot" (because you don't believe what Catholics believe ), and / or "what you say is wrong" ( because I, or other Catholic apologists, say otherwise), without any evidence to prove their case.

When you have clout like the Roman Catholic Church's, you can even conduct a campaign for public sympathy on the grounds of being an oppressed minority. ( Don't laugh; when non-Catholics don't capitulate to every last demand of the R.C. church, many Catholic apologists complain about being powerless victims of oppression!)

When you have a billion people behind you, among other amazing things you can do is rewrite history. To give just one of many examples, the marauding bands of well-armed agents of "Holy Mother the Church" who murdered and enslaved the inhabitants of whole continents and stole all of their property and possessions weren't criminally immoral villains to be ashamed of. In the Catholic mind, they were heroic "explorers" who "discovered" a "New World" and brought "salvation" to "pagan savages". Even though his many victims would have had a hard time seeing much difference between his "Conquistadors" and the Nazis - who were lead by another Roman Catholic conqueror named Adolf Hitler - the slave-trading, rapist, nation-stealing, mass-murderer, Christopher Columbus, has been transformed into a saintly hero. This historical revisionism has been so successful that a million and a half Catholic men pride themselves in being dues-paying "Knights of Columbus".

A church with a billion people behind it can even hide from millions of Native Americans and Latinos the fact that they wouldn't be Roman Catholics now, were it not for the fact that their ancestors were "converted" to this "faith" at the end of a sword or they were raised as Catholics after all the adults in their families had been killed for refusing to accept "the one true faith". (All of this and much more we document fully at www.ColumbusNoHero.Org).

When you have a billion people behind you, you can turn the most disgusting and immoral of your churchmen into "vicars of Christ", men like the pope responsible for "the Sistine Chapel", the celebrated artistic masterpiece in which popes ever since then have been selected by the college of cardinals under the guidance - they imagine - of the Holy Spirit, namely Pope Sixtus IV.

"Sixtus IV was the first pope to license the brothels of Rome; they brought him in thirty thousand ducats a year (roughly the yearly income of 30 common laborers). He also gained considerably from a tax imposed on priests who kept a mistress. Another source of income was granting privileges to rich men 'to enable them to solace certain matrons in the absence of their husbands.'
It was in the area of indulgences that Sixtus showed a touch of genius. He was the first pontiff to decide that they could be applied to the dead. Even he was overwhelmed by their popularity. Here was an infinite source of revenue that even his greediest predecessors had not dreamed of. It was breathtaking in its implications: the pope, creature of flesh and blood, had power over the regions of the dead. Souls in torment for their misdemeanours could be released by his word, provided their pious relatives dipped into.their pockets. And which of them wouldn't if they had a spark of Christian decency? Widows and widowers, bereaved parents spent their all trying to get their loved ones out of Purgatory, painted in ever more lurid colours.
Praying for the dead was one thing, paying for them another. Simple folk were led to believe that the pope, or those who came to their village and sold the pope's pardon, guaranteed their dead would go to heaven on the wings of indulgences. The potential for abuse was considerable. The sale of relics from the tenth century had been bad enough. . . Martyr's bones, like oil, were not a renewable commodity, but indulgences were limitless and could be priced to suit every pocket. Nothing was required of the donor or recipient, not love or compassion or prayer or repentance - only money. No practice was ever more irreligious than this. The pope grew rich in the measure that the poor were duped.
Purgatory had no justification, whether in Scripture or in logic. Its real basis was papal avarice. An Englishman, Simon Fish, in A Supplicacyion for the Beggars, written in the year 1529, was to point that out irrefutably:
'There is not one word spoken of it in all holy Scripture, and also if the Pope with his pardons may for money deliver one soul hence, he may deliver him as well without money: if he may deliver one, he may deliver a thousand: if he may deliver a thousand, he may deliver them all; and so destroy purgatory: and then he is a cruel tyrant, without all charity, if he keep them there in prison and in pain, 'till men will give him money.'
In 1478, Sixtus IV published a Bull that did even more harm to the church. He sanctioned the Inquisition in Castile. It spread, literally, like fire. In 1482, two thousand heretics were burned in Andalusia alone.
Of Sixtus it was said that he . . . 'embodied the utmost possible concentration of human wickedness'. In Bishop Creighton's words, 'he lowered the moral tone of (all of) Europe.' " (This is just one of many instances of the Catholic Church telling its millions of followers that Christ chooses the vilest of human beings to be his "vicars" on earth. See much more at JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/ popesvschrist/ :)

Imagine yourself as the Catholic parent of an altar boy son being told that you can't know anything about the past record of a new priest being assigned to your parish? Although Catholic parents never even dreamed of asking such questions in the past, they take it for granted now. Yet, even now, most Catholics wouldn't dream of asking the church as a whole "how have you behaved in the past, in other times and in other places?" If only Catholics did ask such questions, they would find what I have found, namely a long record of scandals that would make them think twice before swallowing whole all of this church's claims.

The great Greek philosopher, Plato, once wrote:
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark.
The real tragedy of life is when adults are afraid of the light."

Most Catholics have heard the words of Jesus that "The truth will set you free", but they find it easier to be wrong with a billion others, than to embrace the truth on their own.

for claiming to be the one and only "Mystical Body of Christ", outside of which there is no salvation. when in fact it has proven itself over the centuries, not to be outstandingly faithful, but to be outstandingly unfaithful to the teaching and example of Jesus Christ. Many Catholics in the pews are decent, humble, and intelligent people, who respect people of other faith. They often don't even know and might even reject the official teaching of their church. But to the extent that they don't know and/or don't share the official position of their church, such people are less Roman Catholic than they might be. Those who are truly Catholic believe the whole of its teaching. And when it comes to the place of its church and its religions in the world, CatholicArrogance.Org/OneTrueChurch.html makes it clear that their official belief is that every church and religion other than Roman Catholicism is false and / or worthless.

Millions of Roman Catholics in America are still reeling from the discovery that, over the years they have had a 4% chance of being assigned a priest who might use their church's sacristy or rectory to sexually molest their children, and pretty close to a 100 % chance that when their celibate, childless bishop found out about such crimes, that he would do everything in his power to hide the crimes of their priests in order to defend the reputation of the "One, Holy, Catholic Church", rather than the safeguard the dignity of innocent Catholic children.
But what makes the dignity and emotional health of a relatively small number of children so much more worthy of moral outrage than the very lives of 6 million Jews, and 4 million Jehovah Witnesses, Gypsies, liberals, handicaps, homosexuals, Polish Catholics, and other victims of the Nazi holocaust? Is it simply that the molested children were contemporary Americans and the killed and tortured holocaust victims were only Europeans of a bygone era?
One lesson to be learned from the recent pedophilia scandals is that Catholics who instinctively jump to the defense of their church, whenever any charge is made against it, shouldn't be so hard on the many bishops who hid the sins of their priests all those many years, because they were only doing the same thing, i.e. protecting the illusions that they have had inculcated in them all their lives about "Holy Mother the Church", the "Bride of Christ", and / or "the Mystical Body of Christ".
And most American Catholics haven't even heard yet of the scandal that its priests have been dying of AIDS at a rate 4 times as high as the average American : see www.CatholicArrogance.Org/priestswithaids.html.

for constantly displaying the very kind of arrogance, pride, pomp and lordship that Jesus clearly and explicitly warned those whom he appointed to leadership positions to avoid. See JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/callnomanfather.htm .

for the pretense that a bunch of old men in the Vatican are endowed by God with the ability to make one of their own an infallible "Vicar of Christ". See JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/Papalinfallibility.htm .

for torturing and killing thousands of fellow Christians (on the grounds that they were "heretics" or "schismatics). See Catholic victims .

for exploiting Native Americans ( whom it considered "infidels"). See Native American victims .

for torturing and killing the Jews (on the grounds that they were "Christ-killers). See Jewish victims.

for torturing and killing thousands of Orthodox Christians and Muslims (a Catholic version of "ethnic cleansing"). See Orthodox Christian and Muslim victims.

for exploiting young Irish women . See Young Irish Catholic female victims ("Magdalene laundry girls").

for torturing and killing thousands of homosexuals over the centuries and for continuing its persecution of homosexuals in our time by defying civil society's efforts to grant homosexuals justice and equality. See JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/ChurchvsGays .

for imposing its celibate male views of sexuality on married people who know much more about male and female sexuality than they do, and for denying Catholic and non-Catholic mothers and fathers alike the rights to decide for themselves how to live out their sexuality and how many children they will bear and raise. See CatholicArrogance.Org/ChristianChoice.

for posing as authorities on moral questions when they have no proven record to justify such authority. See RC_blindleaders.html .

for aggravating the poverty of millions of women around the world by conspiring with fundamentalist Christians in America and Muslims around the world to deny poor and powerless women access not just to abortion but to family planning and other related services.

for tipping the balance between Conservative and Progressive political parties in favor of those who promote the welfare of the rich and the powerful at the expense of the poor and the oppressed.. See JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/ReligiousRight.htm.

and we haven't even mentioned the pedophilia scandals, because so many others have done so, such as

Bishop-Aaccountability.org
and
Snap Network.org
(Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests).

Early in Jesus' ministry, John the Baptist sent a couple of his followers to ask Jesus "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?". This was his response: Luke 7: 21-

"Jesus had just then cured many people of diseases, plagues, and evil spirits, and had given sight to many who were blind. And he answered them, 'Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.'
The Vicars of Christ would have you believe that "Blessed are those who take no offense at us. ," no matter how contrary to the teaching of Jesus that they behave.

Catholic Bishop of Sydney, Australia
(coordinator of 2008 Catholic World Youth Day )
says abuse victims are 'dwelling crankily on old wounds'

In a Catholic newspaper in 2003, a reporter wrote about this man: "Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney, Australia, had been described to me as one of the sharpest minds in English-speaking Catholicism, and this by Dominican confrères who don�t necessarily share his rather traditional views on some questions." Later in the same article he went on to write: "Finally, we discussed the media. Fisher agreed that often the Catholic church does a poor job of expressing itself � in part because sometimes the wrong people are speaking, in part because sometimes their language is inaccessible."
[ http://nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/word103103.htm ]

The Catholics in the pews haven't shared much of the blame in the past for what their Church did, because they knew so little about what went on in their church and would have been powerless to do anything about the behavior of their priests, bishops of popes anyway. But "the times they are a changin' ". To the extent that, in democratic countries, at least, Catholic lay people are recognizing that paying all the bills gives them at least some voice in their church, they are gaining in responsibility as well. "My church right of wrong" is just as unwise and immoral when practiced by lay people as it is when practiced by bishops. And a church with bishops willing to protect priests who mollest innocent children is capable of harboring other immorality as well.

if they refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence that their shepherds are not entitled to the respect and obedience they expect and/or demand from their "sheep", because they are not fulfilling the responsibilities they claim to have received from Jesus Christ.
to the extent that they don't demand -- in democratic countries at least --that the hierarchy be more accountable for their use and/or abuse of the authority.
to the extent that they don't demand -- in democratic countries at least --that leaders be selected by the whole community of the faithful, as they were in the early church, prior to the tremendous scandals and abuses that have resulted from absolute, unquestioned authority being placed in the hands of a very few, very vulnerable, male human beings over approximately 1 billion human beings on this planet.
if they choose to identify with the clergy perpetrators of the atrocities laid out above, rather than with the innocent young victims,
if they choose to respond to revelations about wrong-doing on the part of Catholics with anger at the messengers and accuse them of being "anti-Catholic bigots" or "Catholic bashers", instead of anger at the Catholics whose cruel and unChristian behavior has brought shame on their church.
if they choose to object-- not the sinful and/or criminal behavior of their fellow Catholics -- but instead object to the publicizing of that disgraceful behavior.
if they remain content with the only education most Catholic laity have gotten about the history of their church, namely the viewing of shmaltzy movies like "The Bells of St. Mary", "Boys Town", "The Sound of Music", and "Lillies of the Field".

Given the choice to identify with the humanity of the victims, or to identify with the victimizers who shared their own Catholic faith, how sad it is that for so many Catholics, their church affiliation trumps their humanity, and they feel compelled to defend the victimizers. I invite sincere Catholics to join me in speaking on behalf of the victims of their church. By understanding and appreciating how and why their church has mistreated so many in the distant as well as the recent past, they will better understand how and why their church is doing much the same thing today to different victims as it has done to so many so often in the past. We may pray, as Jesus did, "Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do." But we dare not forget Jesus' crucial prediction of the Final Judgment, where he warned that he would judge us all on the basis of what we did in our lives to our brothers and sisters.

by our love for the millions of devout Christians and Catholics who were persecuted over the centuries as "heretics", as opposed to their ecclesiastical persecutors ;
by our love for the millions of Jews who were tortured and killed over the centuries as "Christ-killers", as opposed to their ecclesiastical persecutors ;
by our love indeed for the millions of German Roman Catholics whose eternal salvation was certainly compromised by the failure of their hierarchy to condemn Hitler and warn its members not to have any part in his murderous scheme to wipe out the entire Jewish population of the world, as opposed to their ecclesiastical persecutors ;
by our love for the many millions of Natives of America and other parts of the world who were given the choice of conversion or death, as opposed to their ecclesiastical persecutors ;
by our love for the many millions of women who have little if any reproductive health care or control over their reproductive lives because of the interference of an all-male, supposedly celibate, know-it-all clergy, as opposed to their ecclesiastical persecutors ; and
by our love for the millions of our homosexual brothers and sisters whose opportunity to finally get fair and equal treatment by society is being hampered by a clerics whose own sex lives are messed up enough without their interfering in the lives of others, as opposed to their ecclesiastical persecutors.

This love should not cause us to hate the Catholic Church, but shouldn't anyone who loves that church, want it to do exactly what it teaches all of its members to do, namely

acknowledge and confess its sins,

ask God's forgiveness for them,

prove the genuineness of its repentance by doing what it can to repair any harm done and

avoid doing it again?

What's the appropriate response
to scandals in the Church?
For Thomas Aquinas, following the thinking of Aristotle, anger is a necessary element of the virtue of fortitude: "fortitude isn't a matter of just putting up with evil, or of enduring sorrow, but includes actively resisting evil, bravery in the struggle, and anger at the evil which has led to sorrow (over some evil occurence). Summa Theologica, IIa-IIae, Q. 123, Art. 10.
St. Thomas affirmed that �wrath is a necessary and positive part of human nature,� and �the lack of wrath against injustice is a deficiency.�

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall". The size of the R.C. church awes many, but the fact is that it is crumbling before our eyes.
"In 1965 there were 42,000 young men in American seminaries studying for the priesthood. Today ( actually in 1997) there are fewer than 6000, even though there are 50% more Catholics. One half of all American priests quit the priesthood before reaching retirement age due to this loss of credibility of the institution itself. There are now over 20,000 ex-priests. The Vatican now regards America as a missionary region. Younger priests from Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America are being brought in to protect Papal interests because American men are shunning the priesthood. The average age of nuns in the United States is 65 years. Only 3% are under age 40 while 35% are older than age 70. The number of Catholic general hospitals is down 22% since 1960. Only 28% of Catholics attend Mass on a typical Sunday while 30 years ago Mass attendance was more than 70%. Catholics contribute only 1.1% of their income to the church, while Protestants contribute 2.2%. Twenty years ago they gave about the same. "

See this excellent LA Times article by Robert Scheer on Blame Church Arrogance, Not Oversexed Society.

Contrast the above with the laughable article below:
"Pope Benedict warns Catholic theologians against arrogance"

In Sept., 2008, Pope Benedict XVI went to Paris and according to an A.P. report, "Paraphrasing from the New Testament, Benedict decried 'insatiable greed' and said 'the love of money is the root of all evil.' 'Have not money, the thirst for possessions, for power and even knowledge, diverted man from his true destiny?' the pope asked. In his homily, Benedict blasted modern society�s thirst for these new 'pagan' idols as a 'scandal, a real plague.'
Would you believe that the pope is so poor he csn't afford to buy a mirror?

It appears that a now retired Australian bishop is stepping forward to say at least some of what I say on this web site about the R. C. church. Bishop Geoffrey Robinson is under investigation by the Australian bishops conference, and multiple American bishops are trying to ban him from their dioceses after he published a book suggesting the Catholic Church examine the roles that power and sex played in the clergy abuse crisis.
Bishop Robinson's book is called "Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church," and there is a good article about his speaking tour in America at Boston Globe online.

Thanks to the behavior of the Roman Catholic Church (and others like it), rational people like the British internet sensation (and former comedian) Pat Condell, use their wit and humor to turn people against not just the Catholic Church, but against all churches, and against Jesus of Nazareth as well.

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