WOW, probably the MOST worst post I have ever read here. I am AMAZED at the ignorance as too what Mr. Roe’s understanding of what the Church teaches…Unbelievable ill informed, and ignorant. It looks as if these are one mans OPINIONS and not based on fact.. Nothing in this article is based in fact. Very suprised that this is considered as an article on ANP. I thought you guys were authors. Authors deal in fact, not immature, ill informed opinion..

I almost never read comment threads on things I write, but I accidently stumbled across this one the other day and feel I should, at least, point out that I write OPINION columns for this site, not straight news copy.  You want AP, go to AP’s website.

Now, to the mental midgets commenting here who think I know nothing about the RCC and their dogmatic teachings, let alone their historical policies and modern-day crusade to shield child rapists from secular justice, I would like to suggest that perhaps they should (ever so carefully) pull their heads out of their asses and take a good, long look at The Church.  

I can practically guarantee that I know more than either you about almost everything, but in particular I am sure that I know more about the RCC than you two lackwits.

If you think I am lying when I point out that the RCC is a male-transvestite-dominated child rapist protection club/thieves den, replete with a horrifyingly antiquated moral compass, which is hoarding untold amounts of money (despite holding status in the U.S. as a nonprofit organization) in their own private country, then you should present evidence to the contrary.  

Of course, I understand that your limited mental capacities only allow you to do things like call me the (sic) “most unstable,deviated,sick,mother fucker on earth.”   While I am flattered that you consider me unlike you to such an extent that you would hurdle these epithets my way, I believe that particular title is reserved for the Pope.

Thanks for your time,

Theodore

P.S. – Before you go whip out your Catechism, I am aware that among the Pope’s title is not the honorific Most Unstable, Deviated Sick Mother Fucker On Earth.  I often employ a little tool called sarcasm, which, while beyond the reach of literary Luddites like yourselves, is a commonly utilized mode of criticism in the English language.  For more on this subject, please consult your neighborhood library.

Mr. Roe, While I agree with you that there have been many mistakes made by the Church in regards recycling pedopheliac Priests…As you know, per capita there are more pedophiliacs in other churches, the boy scouts, etc, etc.. As a victim of a pedophile in the late 70s, I agree that there are many Bishops and Cardinals that have ubstructed justice and should be held accountable.. However, having a strong knowledge of what the Church teaches, beyond the Chateticsm, by studying  Aquinas, Augustine, and other Fathers and Doctors of the  Church I cannot at ALL agree with the total fallicy of painting every Cardinal, Bishop, Priest with the broad strokes of all of them being evil. 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 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..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. 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 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”….

Also, the Church is BY FAR, per capita, NOT the worlds leader in pedophelia….Mr. Roe, what is it exactly are the social and moral issues that are so reprehensible and wrong?

Excellent respone

Do you know – the Catholic  Church educates 2.6 million students  everyday at  the  cost to that Church of 10 billion dollars, and a  savings on  the other  hand to the American taxpayer of 18 billion   dollars. The graduates go on to  graduate studies at  the rate of 92%.
 
The Church has 230 colleges and  universities in the   U.S.  with an  enrollment of  700,000 students.
 
The Catholic Church has a  non-profit hospital system of 637 hospitals, which  account  for hospital treatment of 1 out of every 5 people – not  just   Catholics – in the   United States   today
 
But the press is vindictive and trying to  totally denigrate in every  way the  Catholic Church in  this country. They have blamed the disease  of pedophilia   on the Catholic Church, which is as irresponsible as  
blaming adultery on the  institution of  marriage.
 
Let me give you some figures that Catholics  should know and remember.  For  example, 12% of the 300  Protestant clergy surveyed admitted to  sexual   intercourse with a parishioner; 38% acknowledged other   inappropriate sexual  contact in a study by the   United   Methodist  Church  , 41.8% of clergy  women reported unwanted sexual  behavior;
17% of laywomen  have been sexually harassed. Meanwhile,   1.7% of the Catholic clergy has been found guilty of   pedophilia. 10% of the  Protestant ministers have been  found guilty of  pedophilia. This is not a  Catholic  Problem. A study of American priests showed that most  are happy in the  priesthood and  find it even better  than they had expected, and that  most, if given the   choice, would choose to be priests again in face of all  this obnoxious PR the  church has been  receiving. The Catholic Church is bleeding from  self-inflicted wounds. The agony  that  Catholics have  felt and suffered is not necessarily the fault of  the  Church.  You have been hurt by a small number of wayward  priests  that have probably  been totally weeded out by  now. Walk with your shoulders high and you head  higher. Be a proud member of  the  most important  non-governmental agency in the   United States…

This Article was written by a prominent Jewish leader  

Thank You Pagliaccio..I also enjoy all you write….

Mr. Roe,
Can you please respond to the last couple of posts???

Mr Roe???

(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.

Theo,
I will resond to you ludicrous response line item by line item soon. I like religious debates, especially with people who make assumtions(no pun intented), like you do that are not at all based in fact…Also, use passive aggressive phrases to try and arouse some sort of vitriolic response….

It would be foolish to characterize this as a religious argument.
Use of your religion to justify your view is useless, as I do not subscribe to the uniquely strange tenets your religion in even the vaguest way. If you want to argue about the degree of influence Arianism had upon Manichaeism within the context of heretical Roman Catholic movements or the theological underpinnings of transubstantiation versus consubstantiation , then it could be said we are having a conversation about religion. Since we are (strangely) arguing about whether or not child rapists should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law despite the fact that they are members of a church, the only angle in this argument is whether or not priests should be a protected class in American society.
Please concentrate upon making some kind of objective sense. I will not bother responding if all my work gets is another religious diatribe masquerading as observable, secular reality.

We need Father Guido

I am not hear to discuss historical heresy, manichaeism or otherwise. Nor am I here to discuss the difference between transubstantiation versus consubstantiation. If you read in my first post, I agreed that Cardinals, Bishops as well as many Priests should are in fact criminals. However, the facts do speak for themselves. World wide, there are more pedophiles in the protestant church’s as well as organizations such as the boy scouts. Again, I also believe that, like Luther, who did not want to start his own church, but wanted to reform the one he loved, I too would like to see the Church make some changes. Protestant church’s where the clergy can marry have more pediphiles per capita then the Universal Church.  As far as all your issues with the Church,  you certainly are entitled to your opinions. As that is what the are, your opnions. By taking out of context what the Holy Father(non his popeness LOL), your article, as well as your posts say much more about you then the Church. Now, say 5 Our Fathers and 5 Hail Mary’s and your penance is complete.