UNITED STATES
Big Think
Adam Lee on June 27, 2012
Over the last few years, it’s become increasingly clear that there’s no longer any place in Roman Catholicism for any but the most conservative and doctrinaire members. The signs of a top-down ideological cleansing are too obvious to ignore, including the Vatican hierarchy’s using the Eucharist as a bludgeon against politicians who show too much independence and cracking down on nuns for being suspiciously feminist. People, especially young people, are leaving in droves, and the FFRF has been helping them along with billboards and ads urging progressive Catholics to quit the church (I can’t tell you how much I love “Put Women’s Rights Over Bishops’ Wrongs”). Even the executive editor of the New York Times, hardly a voice of radicalism, is in agreement that liberals can do more good outside the church than in. And liberal Catholics who aren’t leaving feel compelled to articulate why not, a clear sign that they’re feeling the pressure as well.
But you can never have too many reasons on offer to quit the Catholic church. Today, I’d like to toss four more on the pile. Some of these are older stories I meant to write about earlier, but others are brand-new (the Catholic church being a veritable wellspring of self-embarrassment these past few years).
First: You’ve probably heard that the church has been offering generous severance packages – as much as $20,000 – to known pedophile priests, despite a specific earlier denial that they were doing this. The Vatican’s lame and belated excuse has been that laicizing a priest is an unavoidably slow and bureaucratic process, especially if the priest resists; that the church is bound to provide for the priest’s needs in the meantime; and that offering lump-sum payouts to the pedophiles so that they’d go quietly was the easiest way to get the process over with. This explanation is thrown into doubt by the case of a rogue archbishop, Emmanuel Milingo, who ordained married men as priests in a public show of defiance and was officially laicized all of six days later.
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