Right Wing Catholics and Pedophile Priests

UNITED STATES
City of Angels

By Kay Ebeling

It was his Catholic conscience that caused Sargent Shriver* to create the Peace Corps, Job Corps, and Head Start in the 1960s. In 2011 it was his Catholic conscience that moved Paul Ryan** to oppose Social Security and claim a passion for Ayn Rand’s Objectivist theories. Republican Newt Gingrich converted to Catholicism so he could marry his third wife and run for president as someone who is prayerful.

When it comes to pedophile priests, on the right the Catholic League defends the “high number of falsely accused priests,” along with David Pierre whose website and books criticize SNAP for its “left wing” politics, as if it’s a given that left-wing means something bad.

What happened to the socially conscious Catholics, the politically compassionate such as the Kennedys? This century Catholics are part of the most extreme elements of the Republican Party in the USA, and somehow siding with the priests in the pedophile crisis got tagged onto this right wing Catholic phenomenon.

A Self-Perpetuated Authority

The pedophile priest apologists end up running each other’s talking points on each other’s websites. They self-publish books, and review each other’s self-published books, and give the appearance that Catholics are Republicans who think pedophile priests have gotten a bad rap. A kind of legitimacy results from the redundancy.

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