This week’s TIME (August 27, 2018) reports on page 8 the drama of an Horizon Air grounds-crewman, an authorized employee, who had learned to fly from flight-simulator software, stealing, flying and crashing a 76-seat plane. His suicide, due, he said in a recorded, surprisingly rational message, to the fact that he was “just a broken guy” with “a few screws loose”, raised the question for the airline industry of its exposure to what an expert called the “insider threat”. On the next page, there is a full column on the “catalog of sins” of the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania. Nauseating details of 300 priests’ pedophiliac abuse of 1000 victim-children over 7 decades include “the ring of clergymen who took nude photos of a boy posing as Christ on the Cross” : the Catholic Church’s “insider threat” ?
Since Voltaire, outsiders and even former insiders like me, author of this Blog dedicated to ridiculing and destroying religion, have been a thorn in the side of the Catholic Church. But clerical pederasty has done far more damage to the “Immaculate Bride of Christ”, the One, True, Holy Catholic Church, than the attacks of apostates. Will this “insider threat” bring down the Church ? I’m afraid not. Catholicism survived Protestantism; the Protestant Revolt was tamed into peaceful co-existence by the Catholic Reform of Trent. The Catholic Church will survive, but individual Believers on the Brink should get the hell out of this den of perverts they once thought to be the “Mystical Body of Christ”.
In his letter to all 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, published August 18, 2018, Pope Francis asks their help to root out this “culture of death”, vowing there would be no more cover-ups. Some of them may forgive and even forget the crimes of its clergy. Believers on the Brink must not.
P.S. “Culture of death” : The Pope’s disgust, shame and anger explain his hyperbole in applying this phrase usually – and accurately – reserved for radical islamism, to clerical pederasty. Its victims however suffer a truly mortal blow to their self-esteem, their dignity and their trust in fellow human beings, especially “men of God” with a vow of celibacy, monsters pretending to have sublimated their sexual drive.
RIDENDA RELIGIO