Close Down the Fucking Catholic Church

A priest raped a 7-year-old girl while he was visiting her in the hospital after she’d had her tonsils removed. Another priest forced a 9-year-old boy into having oral sex, then rinsed out the boy’s mouth with holy water. One boy was forced to say confession to the priest who sexually abused him. Those children are among the victims of roughly 300 Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania who molested more than 1,000 children — and possibly many more — since the 1940s, according to a sweeping state grand jury report released Tuesday that accused senior church officials, including a clergyman who is now the archbishop of Washington, DC, of systematically covering up complaints. Top church officials have mostly been protected and many, including some named in the report, have been promoted, the grand jury said, concluding that “it is too early to close the book on the Catholic Church sex scandal.”

One of the more insidious aspects of the Church is the manner in which it has boll-weeviled its way into areas involving the most vulnerable among us (besides children). San Francisco in the mid-1990s wanted to give LGBTQ city workers equal benefits, but the Church said no, and threatened to stop performing hospice work for the city’s AIDS patients if the city went through with the plan. Because the Church performed the vast majority of the city’s AIDS hospice work at the time, the city was forced to back down.

The same goes for Catholic Charities, which is hugely into adoptions. In other words, mess with the Church and you risk blowing up the chance for kids to find a good home. I am just cynical enough today to see all this as deliberate. Make yourself indispensable and no one can touch you … which is why what I am proposing will hurt a lot of good people in the short term.

This entire nightmare is the end result of an existence without genuine consequences. The Catholic church has enjoyed that existence long enough.

My proposal: Padlock every Catholic church in the country. Strip them of any tax-exempt status they enjoy and any tax breaks they may get from state and local governments, shut the whole damned thing down, until this unfathomable crime spree is fully and completely adjudicated. A criminal organization running an illegal operation of such length and breadth would face RICO charges the likes of which no Mafiosi has ever seen. Instead, we get another Pope making another apology.