Catholic Church

About

The Catholic Church (sometimes "Roman Catholic Church", or RCC) is the worldwide organization which organizes Catholics, defines the doctrine of Catholicism, and determines who may call themselves "a Catholic" through the ritual of communion.

The headquarters of the Catholic Church are known as the Vatican, and reside in Vatican City which is a quasi-independently-governed part of Rome, Italy. The head of the Church is called the Pope, and Catholic doctrine holds that he is infallible.

The views of the Church are often advanced by a number of independent organizations which, although officially not affiliated with the Church, clearly have the Church's blessing or perhaps work behind the scenes to be consistent with the Church's beliefs, as the Church has never been known to contradict their public statements (nor have they ever made statements critical of the Church):

• Catholic Campaign for Human Development
• Catholic League
• Confraternity of Catholic Clergy

Ethics

• They have also widely promoted the idea that condoms cause AIDS, rather than preventing it, and have thereby aided the deaths of millions.
  • Trying to find evidence on this, I find that in 2009 the Pope stated that condoms might make the AIDS problem worse, which was taken as confirmation of anti-condom policies by some leaders -- but apparently in 2012, the Pope reversed himself on this issue -- or did he?
    • a Catholic defense of the Church, claiming that their anti-condom policies have not abetted the spread of AIDS
    • more analysis arguing that condoms actually are not effective at preventing AIDS...
    • List of anti-condom quotes from prominent CC officials
    • wikipedia:Catholic Church and AIDS
• The Catholic Church has a long history of priests abusing choirboys and other parishioners. They also have an official (but secret) policy of covering up such incidents, and of victim-blaming.
• In the wake of the 2008 sacred wafer scandal, prominent members of the church hierarchy proclaimed improper usage of ritually-blessed crackers was a worse crime than genocide.
• The only Nazi leader who was excommunicated was Joseph Goebbels, for the crime of marrying a divorced Protestant.
• The Church apparently considers any effort towards certifying a woman as a priest to be a worse crime than pedophilia.

Conclusions

Although claiming to be a force for good in the world -- at least in modern times, since abandoning the practices of torture, inquisition, and crusade -- the Catholic Church has clearly surrendered any moral authority it might have regained by its repeated insistence on trivializing that which is truly wrong (e.g. abuse of choirboys by priests) and elevating utterly trivial offenses against itself as if they were serious crimes.

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia
• Conservapedia
• dKosopedia: no information as of 2010-04-11
• SourceWatch: no information as of 2010-04-11

News

version 2

• 2010-04-26 [Talk|Index] A Better Chance at Justice for Abuse Victims § “[The Catholic] church is not doing everything in its power to help victims. In fact, it is worsening the sins of the past by taking a leading role in preventing abused children from getting the compensation they need to help remedy past abuse.”
• 2010-03-24 [Talk|Index] Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys § “Top Vatican officials – including the future Pope Benedict XVI – did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.”
• 2008-11-04 [Talk|Index] Covering ACORN with a hatchet § A Catholic organization (CCHD) withdraws its support of ACORN; correspondent Drew Griffin apparently sees this as further proof of ACORN's corruption and Obama-bias, but doesn't get into details.
• 2008-07-07 [Talk|Index] Student Who Took Religious Icon Getting Death Threats § “Webster Cook says he smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn't eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it. .. "...if anything were to qualify as a hate crime, to us this seems like this might be it."”
• 2008-05-14 [Talk|Index] Astronomers Gone Wild! ... What's a Pope to do? § “This astronomer, Funes, gets himself "in" at the Vatican, presumably by assuaging the concerns of a science-weary pope. Then he comes up with this crazy idea that humanoids exist elsewhere in the universe that are just like us but without Original Sin.”

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