With sickening regularity, another child sexual abuse case in the Catholic Church hits the headlines. This time it is the top of the tree that has had the spotlight shine on him, a Cardinal no less. When will people realise that the Catholic Church has been riddled with this sort of thing for centuries, it is not a modern phenomena, it is part and parcel of its history. I have always maintained that it is not just the humble priests that are guilty of this. Priests get promoted and no doubt some of those will continue secret perversion as they move up the ladder. How many guilty higher ranking clergy are now sitting in the judgement seat of of known colleagues with the same perversion.
The whole institution stinks from top to bottom for a multitude of reasons, child sexual abuse is just one of that multitude. Others include stifling freedom of expression, control over people's rights to choose, brainwashing children into believing in a man in the sky, who will send them to hell for all eternity if they don't obey their perverted and irrational rules. In all its history it has been an instrument of control with bizarre, cruel and barbaric punishments on those who would dare to disbelieve their hogs-wash.
As I have said, it is a scar on the face of humanity, an impediment to freedom of speech and choice, its brutal and violent past has not been abandoned willingly, it has been contained by public outrage and disgust.
From Wikipedia:Debates in international forums and in mainstream media on the role, responsibility, liability, and response of ecclesiastical authorities of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) toward clerical child sexual abuse (cCSA) fail to take into account the historical roots and awareness of the problem. Reports also fail to mention the historic organizational laws RCC developed over centuries. In contrast, RCC documents evidence that the Catholic Church not only carried century's old history of cCSA, but also repeatedly condemned cCSA by successive papal authorities, organizational laws, and institutional management mechanisms. During the first millennium, however, church laws remained confined to the bookshelves and were not converted into appropriate management policies and infrastructural models. This was largely due to the absence of a central administrative organizational structure, which developed later in the 12th century, following the Second Council of Lateran (1139) when the Papacy asserted its authority to establish administrative control over the organizational church. It was only then that management policies started to be framed and institutional structures enacted to deal more appropriately with cCSA from the 14th to 20th centuries. Despite this, RCC developed a culture of secrecy using clandestine organizational management models and institutional laws prescribed in 1568, 1622, 1741, 1866, 1922, and 1962 which aimed to manage cCSA. The current study traces reported cCSA as far back as the first century and critically examines the organizational laws, and institutional policies developed by RCC to address clerical sexual misconduct up to the end of the 19th century.(
Sexual abuse has existed in the Catholic Church since at least as far back as the 11th century, when Peter Damian wrote a scathing treatise, Liber Gomorrhianus, against such abuses and others. In 1531, Martin Luther claimed that Pope Leo X had vetoed a measure that cardinals should restrict the number of boys they kept for their pleasure, "otherwise it would have been spread throughout the world how openly and shamelessly the pope and the cardinals in Rome practice sodomy."[23]
I don't write these things an an enemy of the Catholic Church, but as a lifelong enemy of all religions. They are all power structures, that aim to control the population within their irrational dogma under the threat of punishment. They all preach peace and love, but will have no hesitation in slaughtering non-believers and those of other religions. All religions have a gory blood stained past, which from time to time bursts forth to the surface even today. How many bloody conflicts across the globe can be laid at the feet of opposing religions and religious factions? Too many to count and too many to allow us to let religions maintain their vicious grasp of people's minds.
