The Rock of St. Pederast

It was revealed last week that the Pope was one of untold dozens of priests who covered up untold thousands of child rapes. Seeing the way the issue is being talked about in our media, one might be forgiven for forgetting that the American Revolution ever happened.

One of the cornerstones of the United States was and is the separation of church and state. This is a very good thing, as we were the first modern nation to totally reject the idea of having political and military power vested in men who explicitly and exclusively claim to be able to talk to God.

But our separation is not as radical or as complete as one might think. The Catholic Church, even in this nation, is treated with kid gloves, treated with a nauseating degree of unearned deference, and allowed a law unto themselves. They pay no taxes to our government, despite being the largest landowner on earth. And, evidently, they get a pass when it comes to raping kids.

A quick semantic point: I call it "child rape" in the interest of being accurate, not of being provocative. To say "child abuse" is to talk of berating or slapping a child. But when a grown man has sex with a child, that's rape. Period.

This is especially disgusting on 2 levels: firstly, it's the most despicable crime in our culture and secondly, it's being carried out by an institution which claims to speak for God, to be "the conscience" of our culture, to be, in fact, infallible.

(The doctrine of infallibility is truly a crime against reason and morality. If a person convinces himself he can do no wrong, apparently he will occasionally do the wrongest thing imaginable, as if mocking the God he claims to speak for just to convince himself of his own perfection.)

First, for the crime. It's generally a myth that there's any such thing as honor amongst thieves. Except that is, when it comes to child rapists. These criminals are invariably held in total and utterly bottomless contempt by every member of society, up to and including murderers (and even rapists who target adults, for that matter, the operative theory there being "rape someone your own size").

A thought exercise: let's imagine you have a friend, someone you've known for years. Your friend calls you and says he needs to talk; he's in trouble with the law and needs some help, some advice, some support. You race to meet with your friend, wondering what's happened, worrying about your friend, hoping you can help.

If the friend says "I got caught with some weed" or "I didn't pay my income taxes" or "I was driving without insurance", your focus would be purely on how to help your friend. Surely, the revelation of any of these "crimes" would not alter your friendship or your opinion of your friend's moral bearings.

Even if your friend says "I killed someone", what would race through your mind? Shock at first, I would imagine, followed by hypothetical rationalizations: Was it an accident? Was it self-defense? After all, you know this person; surely there must be some explanation.

But if that very same friend said to you, "well, I was babysitting for my buddy Kevin last week, watching his 7 year old son and, you know, I hooked up with him, and now I guess he's blathering about it or whatever."

What is your reaction? Even if you don't instinctively physically attack this person, have you not instantly cut him out of the ranks of civilized human beings? Have you not instantly promised yourself that you will never talk to this person again, never mind let him anywhere near your family?

That's what child rape is. It's the worst thing someone can do. A man cannot rape a child and retain his humanity. There's no such thing as "child rape in the 2nd degree".

It is that crime which is plaguing the church. Not corruption. Not drug smuggling. Child rape.

Now, there are some who say "it's only a few people". Well, no, it's not. It dozens upon hundreds of rapists and thousands upon thousands of victims, and we can be very secure it assuming only a small fraction of the rapes were reported. And every time, EVERY time, the bosses got wind that they were employing child rapists, they moved that rapist down the road.

These were men who claimed to speak to God, who claimed to hold the keys to eternal salvation, who claimed to be above sin. They used that power to rape children or to protect those who did and enable further rapes by transferring these predators to new and unsuspecting communities.

For those who say it was only a few bad priests, let's say it was 1 in 10,000. Let's think of another profession where adults are in such proximity to children. Let's think about teachers.

What if it came out tomorrow that out of the 500,000 public school teachers in America, 50 of them were known by their bosses to be guilty of raping dozens of their students.

And each time a principal found out that one of these 50 teachers had raped dozens of children, that principal simply transferred the rapist to another school district. I mean, after all, it's either that or bringing "shame upon the schools".

What would happen? Would the Secretary of Education come out and say, "hey what's a few thousand raped kids when test scores are up 3%?" No.

What would happen would be that every single teacher who had raped a kid would get sent to prison and murdered there. And every single administrator who concealed evidence of child rape and transferred rapists to new districts would suffer the same fate.

Yet, when it comes to the church, it is basically treated as an internal matter. "Should the bishops have dealt more harshly with child rapists?" "Should the Pope apologize?".

Again, imagine this is someone else. Imagine a day care center knowingly employed serial child rapists. The question then wouldn't be "should they apologize?". The question then would be "should they be executed?"

So even though we have technically shunned the idea that the church is a law unto itself, that is how our law enforcement is behaving in this case. What the Church should do about this matter is irrelevant. When someone who works for Wal-Mart commits murder, nobody asks Wal-Mart when they think should be done.

Any person who protects child rapists has broken the law of the United States as well as, if you'll forgive me my arrogance, the law of God. Such a person is more guilty and more deserving of punishment than at least 95% of the people who we imprison.

Yet these men get away with it. Why? How? Because they wear funny hats and claim to speak for God. What year is this, again?