Hats off to Jayden Cameron for this link to an interesting post that speaks for itself !
Jayden writes : The following is an alarming summary of recent 'crimes'
and negative actions perpetuated by the Roman Catholic Church. I hesitated
re-posting it from Alt.
Net.Org, because it is harrowing and depressing, and clearly the view of an
outsider - yet this is how most non Catholics view the Church, and it makes for
a salutary and very necessary shock to the system. The time for complacency is
long past.
50 Reasons to Boycott the Catholic Church
November 26,
2012 |
Photo Credit:
AFP
Last month in Ireland, Savita Halappanavar
died, and she shouldn't have. Savita was a 31-year-old married woman, four
months pregnant, who went to the hospital with a miscarriage in progress that
developed into a blood infection. She could easily have been saved if the
already doomed fetus was aborted. Instead, her doctors did nothing, explaining
that "this is a Catholic country," and left her to suffer in agony for days,
only intervening once it was too late.
Savita's death is just the latest in a long
line of tragedies directly attributable to the doctrines and beliefs of the
Roman Catholic church. I acknowledge that there are many good, progressive
Catholics, but the problem is that the church isn't a democracy, and those
progressives have no voice or vote in its governance. The church is a petrified
oligarchy, a dictatorship like the medieval monarchies it once existed
alongside, and it's run by a small circle of conservative, rigidly ideological
old men who make all the decisions and choose their own successors.
This means that, whatever individual Catholics
may do, the resources of the church as an institution are bent toward opposing
social progress and positive change all over the world. Every dollar you put
into the church collection plate, every Sunday service you attend, every hour of
time and effort you put into volunteering or working for church organizations,
is inevitably a show of support for the institutional church and its abhorrent
mission. When you have no voice, there's only one thing left to do: boycott.
Stop supporting the church with your money and your time. For lifelong
Catholics, it's a drastic step, but it's more than justified by the wealth of
reasons showing that the church as an institution is beyond reform, and the only
meaningful response is to part ways with it. Here are just a few of those
reasons:
1. Throughout the world, Catholic bishops have
engaged in a systematic, organized effort going back decades to cover up for
priests who molest children, pressuring the victims to sign confidentiality
agreements and quietly assigning the predators to new parishes where they could
go on molesting. Tens of thousands of children have been raped and tortured as a
result of this conspiracy of silence.
2. Strike one: "What
did the pope know and when did he know it?" The current pope, when he was
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was personally implicated in a case from the 1970s in
which at least three sets of parents reported that a priest in his diocese had
sexually abused their children. In response, Ratzinger assigned the priest to
therapy, without notifying law enforcement, and washed his hands of the matter.
That priest was back on duty in just a few short days and went on to molest more
children.
3. Strike two: In 1981, again when the current
pope was Cardinal Ratzinger, he got a letter from the diocese of Oakland asking
him to defrock a priest who had acknowledged molesting two children. Ratzinger
ignored this letter, and several followup letters, for four years. Finally, in
1985, he wrote back saying that more time was needed, and that they had to
proceed very slowly to safeguard "the
good of the Universal Church" in light of "the young age of the petitioner"
-- by which he meant not the victimized children, but the pedophile priest. (By
contrast, when a rogue archbishop ordained married men as priests, he
was laicized six days later.)
4. Strike three: In 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger
wrote a letter, De Delictis Gravioribus, to all Catholic bishops
advising them how to handle accusations of sex crimes by priests. There was no
recommendation to contact the police, but rather an instruction for them to
report such cases only to the Vatican and tell no one else: "Cases
of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret."
5. Some church officials, like the American
friar Benedict Groeschel, have
blamed the epidemic of child molestation on sexually wanton boys who tempt
priests into assaulting them.
6. They
threaten to cut off funding for immigrants' rights advocates because they
sometimes work with gay-rights advocates. Preventing immigrants from getting
legal and medical aid is less important than ensuring the church isn't
contaminated by even indirect contact with anyone who helps gay people.
7. In a sign of how ridiculously
disproportionate and unhinged the church's martyrdom complex is, the
current pope has compared expanding the rights of women and gay people to the
murderous anticlerical violence of the 1930s Spanish civil war.
8. They've used
their official UN observer status to team up with Islamic theocracies like Iran
and Libya to oppose calls for family-planning services to be made available
in the world's poorest nations.
9. They've gone to desperately poor,
AIDS-ravaged regions of Africa to spread the
life-destroying lie that condoms don't prevent transmission of HIV.
10. In the mid-20th century, they appointed a
special papal commission to study whether Catholicism should permit the use of
birth control. When the commission almost unanimously recommended that they
should, they
ignored that recommendation and doubled down on their absolute ban on
contraception.
12. They did not excommunicate the
stepfather.
13. Savita Halappanavar wasn't the first: Catholic-run
hospitals are willing to let women die rather than get lifesaving abortions,
even when a miscarriage is already in progress and no possible procedure could
save the fetus.
14. They
refused to provide contraception or abortion to women who were abducted and
forced to work as prostitutes, and then filed
a lawsuit complaining it was violating their religious freedom when the
government took away their contract.
15. In Poland, they
ordered politicians to vote for a law banning IVF and threatened to
excommunicate any who didn't comply.
16. They were a
major source of the pressure on the Komen Foundation that led to its disastrous
decision to cut ties with Planned Parenthood.
17. They've announced an
inquisition into the Girl Scouts to get to the bottom of its association
with morally suspect groups like Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam.
18. They've been one of the major forces
attacking Obamacare, filing
lawsuits arguing that non-church Catholic employers should be able to decide
whether or not employee health insurance plans will cover contraception.
This is effectively an argument that a woman's employer should be allowed to
force her to pay more for medical coverage, or even place it out of her reach
altogether, based on his religious beliefs.
19. In Australia, they
allegedly derailed a police investigation of an accused pedophile, putting
pressure on higher-ups to get an investigating officer removed from the
case.
20. They demanded
that Sunday school teachers sign a loyalty oath agreeing to submit "will and
intellect" to the proclamations of church leaders.
21. Some top church officials, including the
current pope, have advocateddenying
communion to politicians who support progressive and pro-choice political
ideas. Notably, although the church also opposes preemptive war and the
death penalty, no conservative politician has ever been denied communion on this
basis.
22. They've cracked
down on American nuns for doing too much to help the poor and not enough to
oppose gay marriage, condemning them for displaying a seditious "feminist
spirit."
23. In Germany, where parishioners pay an
officially assessed tax rate to the church, they've tried
to blackmail people who don't want to pay the church tax, threatening to
fire them from jobs in church institutions. In some cases, if the person opts
out but later loses the paperwork, they demand
on-the-spot repayment of decades of back taxes.
24. In America, bishops have compared
Democratic officeholders, including President Obama, to Hitler and
Stalin and have said that it jeopardizes a person's eternal salvation if
they don't vote as the bishops instruct them to.
25. They fight against equal marriage rights
for same-sex couples. It's not enough for the Catholic church hierarchy that
they refuse to perform church weddings for gay and lesbian couples; they want to
write that prohibition into the civil law and deny marriage equality to everyone
who doesn't fit their religious criteria, and have invested vast amounts of
money and effort into doing so. In the 2012 election cycle alone, the
church spent almost $2 million in an unsuccessful fight to defeat
marriage-equality initiatives in four states.
26. They've
compared gay sex to pedophilia and incest and called for it to be forbidden by
law, saying that "states can and must regulate behaviors, including various
sexual behaviors."
27. They've
shut down adoption clinics rather than consider gay people as prospective
parents. The church's official position, apparently, is that it's better for
children to remain orphans or in foster care than to be placed in a loving,
committed same-sex household.
28. They
barred an anti-LGBT bullying group, anti-teen-suicide foundation from a Catholic
school ceremony, explaining that the group's mission is "contrary to the
teachings of the Catholic church."
29. They told a teenager he wouldn't be
allowed to go through confirmationbecause he
posted a pro-gay-rights status message on Facebook, and theyexpelled
a preschooler from a private Catholic school because his parents were
lesbians.
30. They have
a history of dumping known pedophile priests in isolated, poor, rural
communities, where they apparently assumed that local people wouldn't dare
to complain or that no one would listen if they did.
31. They've
given huge payouts -- as much as $20,000 in some cases -- to pedophile
priests, to buy their silence and quietly ease them out of the priesthood,
after specifically denying in public that they were doing this.
32. When the Connecticut legislature proposed
extending statute-of-limitations laws to allow older child-abuse cases to be
tried, the bishops ordered
a letter to be read during Mass instructing parishioners to contact their
representatives and lobby against it.
33. To fight back against and intimidate
abuse-survivor groups like SNAP, the church's lawyers have filed
absurdly broad subpoenas demanding the disclosure of decades' worth of
documents.
34. In the Netherlands, some
boys were apparently castrated in church-run hospitals after complaining to the
police about sexual abuse by priests.
35. When a Catholic official from
Philadelphia, William Lynn, was charged with knowingly returning predator
priests to duty, his
defense was to blame those decisions on his superior, Cardinal Anthony
Bevilacqua, thus acknowledging that the corruption reaches to the highest levels
of the church.
36. When confronted with hundreds of
complaints about child-raping priests spanning decades, a
Dutch cardinal used the same "we knew nothing" excuse once given by Nazi
soldiers. Several months later, it was reported that this same cardinal had
personally arranged to move a pedophile priest to a different parish to shield
him from accusations.
37. In one case, Mother
Teresa successfully persuaded the church to return a suspected pedophile priest
to duty because he was a friend of hers. Eight additional complaints of
child abuse were later lodged against him.
38. In yet another case, they
appointed a priest with a history of child molestation to a board that advises
the church on what to do when they get reports of priests molesting
children.
39. And after all this, they've
had the audacity to plead for money and ask parishioners to pick up the tab for
legal costs and settlements.
40. They
abducted tens of thousands of babies from unwed mothers who gave birth in
Catholic-run hospitals all over the world throughout the 20th century,
forcing drugged or helpless women to give their newborn children up for adoption
against their will.
41. They
tried to have the Indian skeptic Sanal Edamuruku charged with blasphemy and
imprisoned for debunking a claim of a miraculous weeping statue.
43. Their finances are a disorganized
mess, lacking strong accounting controls and clear internal separations,
which means parishioners who give to the church can have no assurance of what
the money will be used for. According to an investigation by
the Economist, funds meant for hospitals, cemeteries and priests'
pensions have been raided to pay legal fees and settlements in several diocesan
bankruptcies.
44. They've
said in public that the sexist prohibition on women priests is an infallible
part of Catholic dogma, and hence can never be changed.
45. They've
silenced priests who call for the ordination of women and other desperately
needed reforms, exhorting them to instead show "the radicalism of
obedience."
47. They
lifted the excommunication of an anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying bishop who
also thinks women shouldn't attend college or wear pants.
48. When it comes to the question of who's
financially responsible for compensating the victims of sex abuse, they
argue that priests aren't employees and therefore the church bears no
responsibility for anything they do.
49. They
canonized Mother Teresa for doing little more than offering a squalid place for
people to die. Outside observers who visited her "Home for the Dying"
reported that medical care was substandard and dangerous, limited to aspirin and
unsterilized needles rinsed in tap water, administered by untrained volunteers.
The millions of dollars collected by Mother Teresa and her order, enough to
build many advanced clinics and hospitals, remain unaccounted for.
1 comment:
"Mother" Teresa is not canonized yet. Otherwise, this list is excellent and should be posted liberally around every Roman Catholic church.
Post a Comment