(Roe’s note: this post went up about ten minutes before this version appeared under the username Joseph Fosco. It was, of course, not Joe – it was me. I was logged in under admin privileges on the site and when I posted it for some reason it indicated the wrong author. Not sure why that happened, but I wanted to straighten that out in case anyone noticed.)
 
Dear Mr. Hungryhound,

I am saddened by the strangeness of your responses, to the point where I did not wish to respond to them because such a response would largely revolve around pointing out the myriad of logical flaws they contained.  This sort of response will most likely leader to even more nonsensical responses, perhaps by you yourself, or possibly by others on your behalf, and the trolling would continue.

It was impressed upon me, however, that you had repeatedly queried me for a response to your postings, so, against my better judgment, I shall tackle your… interesting rebuttal which seems very concerned with the Church’s protection of child rapists and not my artful attempt to take the Pope’s strange diatribe about the supreme importance of marriage and reproduction and turn it into an indictment of the RC’s sacrament of Holy Orders.

I shall be using quotations from your previous postings in this rebuttal.  I am not sure if this commenting system will let me use blockquotes, so I instead will be using normal quotations.

“Mr. Roe, While I agree with you that there have been many mistakes made by the Church in regards recycling pedophiliac (sic) Priests…As you know, per capita there are more pedophiliacs in other churches, the boy scouts, etc, etc..”

I am glad we agree that the Roman Catholic Church has made many, many mistakes in handling the child raping issue.  I was not (nor am I now) in possession of raw numbers concerning the ratio of administrative staff that are pedophiles against administrators of non-pedophile orientation in other organizations (i.e. The Boy Scouts of America), but I believe my assertion was that the Pope was the head of the world’s largest entity protecting child rapists from justice, which I feel is an entirely valid claim, given that the RC has roughly 1.2 billion members.

“As a victim of a pedophile in the late 70s, I agree that there are many Bishops and Cardinals that have ubstructed (sic) justice and should be held accountable.. However, having a strong knowledge of what the Church teaches, beyond the Chateticsm (sic), by studying  Aquinas, Augustine, and other Fathers and Doctors of the  Church I cannot at ALL agree with the total fallicy (sic) of painting every Cardinal, Bishop, Priest with the broad strokes of all of them being evil.”

I do not believe anywhere in my article I boasted that every member of the RC clergy is actively evil, or even that the vast majority are.  If I did, please inform me as to where this occurred.  My article was about mocking the idiocy of the Pope, who, while most likely not evil, is certainly more concerned with the continued well being and ethical superiority of his organization than the fates of abused children and his moral culpability in such matters.

However, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo and other earlier fathers of the Church (like Tertullian, Jerome and Origen – I can name drop, too!) did not, to my knowledge, do any work defending the honor or righteousness of priests who, either through their own direct action or willful inaction, wantonly broke, or allowed other members of their brotherhood to wantonly break, the teachings of the RCC by raping children.  Pope John Paul II himself deemed sexual misconduct perpetrated by a priest upon anyone (not just children) as delictum gravius.

“The enemy  has spent over 2,000 years trying to Destroy the Church. I do not claim to be such an expert on the doctrine of the Church. There are many things I disagree with. However, the  fact remains that EVERY sacrament is from Scripture, that the HOLY FATHER is the successor to the first Pope, Peter, the Bishops are the successors to the Aposltes (sic) and they every single HOLY FATHER from past to present can  trace the historical lineage back to Peter as well as the Bishops to the Aposltes..”
Okay, this is where you really go off the rails. 

Before I begin to get into that, however, I would like t interject a moment of levity and stipulate that I believe your use of the term “The Enemy” is not directed at me…

I feel the need to avail you of a very important fact: none of that gibberish you wrote above MEANS ANYTHING (since you brought CAPS into it) to someone who is not a Roman Catholic.  This confession of faith as a way to prove your assertion of the overall goodness and importance of the RC is laughable, especially given the fact that the man you are arguing with is an atheist.

Aside from little old me, about half of the world’s Christian population would not agree with your paragraph above.  Aside from Christians, roughly 6/7ths of the planet’s population would find your assertions above to be untrue or irrelevant, especially in the light of proving the RCC is a good thing.

Do yourself a favor and learn to separate your improvable, doctrinal beliefs from reality.

“There is no doubt that the men who lead our Church are sinful, and there are parts of the Church that needs reform. This however, has NO bearing that the fundamental Truths of the Church are the same as they were 2,000 years ago as they are know.”

I feel, yet again, I should inform you as to something you should already know.  Several of these RC truths you speak of are much less than 2,000 years old.  If you had read your early Church fathers as you previously claimed to, you would know that the concept of truth in terms of the RC (pivotal ideas like the immaculate conception, the true nature of Jesus of Nazareth and Trinitarian doctrine) did not even approach becoming a fixed thing until at least three or four centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.  Even after that many other finer points of RC theology were not settled until the Counter Reformation and beyond. 

Also, the admission that these men that lead the RCC are imperfect is actually very important, because the rules and conduct of the RCC are composed by these same imperfect men.  As far as I know, the RC does not believe in inerrant and infallible revelation, aside from certain (and rare) statements given by a Pope ex cathedra (as defined under Vatican I).  Therefore these imperfect men (who I am sure were imperfect throughout the past as well as in current day) have influenced RC teachings and the Church’s application of moral law.

“When I  walk into Our Lady of Pompie, with the Blessed Sacrament near the alter, I am LITERALLY in the presence of God. I feel the Majesty and Beauty of our Church. At Mass, I do not go to see some effiminant (sic) rolly polly Priest, I go to hear the WORD of God as well as to receive our Lord in the Eucharist……. It is about God, Faith, Hope and Love…. ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those of others’….”

I say good for you that you find comfort in your church.  Feeling good is, in my opinion, the main function of religion and if you obtain some satisfaction from worship, then by all means continue – provided you do not engage in furthering social intolerance or attempt to force others (myself included) to adhere to your entirely faith-based belief structure (after all, you would not like it if I forced you to bow to Mecca five times a day because another holy man tells you to do it).  I believe it is entirely possible to enjoy a religion and manage to avoid those two snags.

But also remember that the RC, while it may have ‘asked’ forgiveness for its sins of covering up child rape (and the plethora of other horrible, nasty things its members have done in the past and present) means nothing if it does not change its conduct.  To date, it has not changed anything.

Your second posting is a badly spaced copy of a few pieces of an often reprinted but
entirely impossible to find article that appeared (first?) in The Buckeye Bulletin (which could be either a University of Ohio alumni zine, the Educational Office Professionals of Ohio newsletter or any of about ten thousand different publications in Ohio and beyond) written by Sam Miller, a prominent Cleveland businessman (who I cannot seem to find on the Internet).  So the origin of this article, which appears, from my research, to be from at least some time in 2008, is iffy at best – but this hardly changes the content of the article.

In short the piece you reprinted brings up the fact that Catholics do positive things for the community at large.  This is true, though I would argue the motivation for doing these things is a wish to extend their teachings and create converts (a typical practice among proselytizing religions like Christianity).  If they only wanted to help people, they would not make a point of shoving Catholic dogma down people’s throats.

Sam Miller seems pre-occupied, though, with the “media” and their persecution of the RC’s attempts to keep child rapists from justice, and he uses some strange numbers to show that other groups have bigger issues than the RC. I found notes on that 1990 United Methodist Study and those numbers did not include clergy raping children, or even specifically rape in general. His other numbers appear to have no origin, and so we are asked to believe the unreferenced statistics of what appears to be an unknown author published in a bulletin that cannot be found as a primary source.  Indeed, there is a lot of proof that his numbers cannot be taken at face value and are so unspecific that they are difficult to use constructively.
But we (along with the nebulous Sam Miller) are wasting time on minutiae here. Discussion of statistics has nothing to do with the fact that raping children is a crime no matter who does it.

Mr. Hungyhound, I am sure I do not have to tell you that pointing out that other groups of people rape children ultimately has no bearing on the fact that the RC has covered up child rapes committed by their clergy across the planet for at least the last several decades. 

Lastly, your final posting asked me this specific question:

“the Church is BY FAR, per capita, NOT the worlds leader in pedophilia (sic) ….Mr. Roe, what is it exactly are the social and moral issues that are so reprehensible and wrong?”

That statement/question makes me feel ill.  How dare you continue to defend the RCC because it is “not the worlds (sic) leader in pedophilia” – a statement that cannot even remotely be proven, as no one HAS THE FIRST CLUE HOW WIDESPREAD THE PROBLEM IS since the RCC is still COVERING IT UP!

Instead of truly taking responsibility for their actions, the RC instead continues mewling about persecution.  It is so incredibly pathetic that I do not have the vocabulary to properly express it.  The fact that brain-washed followers like you actually DEFEND this institution upon this point sickens me.  Wake up and realize that the theological teachings you embrace are not a license to defend men who have been actors in a multi-national effort to deny justice for victims of sexual abuse.  If any other institution claiming over one billion members conducted itself thus, it would be the subject of endless investigations, criminal penalties, prosecution and forcible disillusion. 

You need to take a long look at yourself and figure out where exactly your moral compass got screwed up.  Blindly lashing out at me for pointing out what a goddamn mess the RC has made for itself and rightfully calling them out on it is not a productive application of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  It is a close-minded, xenophobic reaction to my opinion. Because I do not share your strange necessity (indeed, doctrinal requirement) to obtain salvation though the offices of a sacrament-wielding priestly class should not be an issue in this instance, but your overriding and destructive need to defend this spiritual (a.k.a. entirely subjective and improvable) belief at the cost human freedom from sexual abuse at the hands of religious leaders is ghastly.