Men in Dresses

I've been reading the book Hitler's Pope by John Cornwell. It's a fine book, though it really can be boiled down to: Pope Pius XII could have done something other than collude with the Nazis, but he didn't, and here are 100 examples. It does not make me regret leaving the Catholic Church.

I haven't been to a Catholic church since 1997 or so. At some point I realized: 1) A lot of unmarried and (officially) childless men, wearing dresses, were talking very earnestly about the importance of traditional gender roles and the nuclear family. This just seemed somehow a bit off. 2) More importantly: a lot of these preachy moralizing men were actually abusing children, lots of children, over many years, and the church hierarchy was often complicit in these abuses. The church actively sought to protect abusive priests (though much of the attention has been focused on pedophile priests who abused boys, I think it's vital to remember that many girls and women were also harassed, raped, abused, and exploited by priests). Around the time that this scandal leaked out, the pope-before-this-pope got all shirty about the possibility of women becoming priests, like it was just totally unthinkable and wrong and wasn't going to happen on his watch, etc. Aha, I thought, this is it: pedophile priests, okay, women priests, totally not okay. Now we're all clear, and I can do something else with my Sunday mornings.

A recent and lengthy report in Ireland details sadly familiar abuses and cover-ups. Meanwhile, the current pope, Pope Very Scary German Man IX, goes about the place acting as if the last 1500 years of history (and in particular, the last 100 years or so) have never happened at all and we should all just forget about trifling things like birth control and women's rights and the HIV epidemic in Africa, but make sure to send money to those nice men in fabulous hats and red leather shoes, c/o The Vatican, Rome, Italy. It's as if he has seen Somewhere in Time, and he hopes that if he and the cardinals just dress up in period clothes and concentrate really really hard, we'll all wake up in a previous century.