I wrote yesterday that, as evidence mounts for what we’ve already known all along—Benedict is right at the center of the cover-up of clerical sexual abuse of minors, pulling the strings—we’ll hear ever stranger accusations that somebody other than the Vatican and bishops is responsible for the abuse crisis.
We’re already hearing that the devil is stirring up the current attack on the pope,* and that the gays have declared thermonuclear war against the church. As I noted yesterday, these charges echo the Vatican’s insistence that French lesbians were responsible for the initial spate of bad publicity when Benedict chose to rehabilitate notorious anti-semite and Holocaust denier (and gay basher and misogynist) Bishop Richard Williamson of SSPX.
This attempt to pin blame on the “enemies of the church” when church officials are caught red-handed doing something dishonorable is a tried and true strategy in the Catholic tradition. For years, American Catholics were taught to close ranks and resist, whenever the media published any information unflattering to the church. They were taught that the secular media are anti-Catholic and controlled by “enemies” out to do the church in.
As the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) noted in a press release yesterday, what’s shocking about these finger-pointing escapades is how childish they are. They reflect the puerile behavior of the playground. They’re hardly admirable strategies on the part of grown men—particularly ones long used to standing in pulpits and shaking their fingers at the rest of us, as they call us to accept responsibility for our many sins.
Well, it now seems my list of “enemies” who are fomenting the current thermonuclear war on the church was incomplete, when I posted yesterday. Now here come the Jews: as Leon J. Podles writes, if the Catholic church is going to try to revive the old Freemasons-as-diabolical-enemy meme, can the Jews be far behind?
Podles notes that the Jews-as-enemy suggestion is already in play in the Vatican, citing a 2002 report of John Allen, in which Allen states that when the abuse revelations got underway in 2002, Vatican insiders began talking about the maleficent intent of the American secular media to attack the church. And the media are, doncha know, controlled by the Jews. Those ever-vigilant, crafty old enemies working inside Christian civilization to dismantle it from inside . . . .
Allen’s musing carry weight. If anyone would know what’s being whispered ad intra, within the walls of the Vatican, it would be John Allen, who has unprecedented entrée there. Allen receives tips and interviews from Vatican officials denied to almost all other reporters, and he never writes anything that would rattle the cage either of those officials or their right-leaning supporters in the U.S. and abroad.
So when John Allen says that Vatican insiders are whispering that the Jews are up to their old business with all the revelations about clerical abuse of minors and how top church officials have covered these up and continued to place children at risk, I take him very seriously.
If it weren’t so dangerous and so—well, wicked is an appropriate word here—it would be ludicrous: wild French lesbians, the Freemasons, the gays. And now the Jews.
When will the boys who have pulled all the strings up to now admit that they’ve been pulling the strings? And do something about what they’ve effected? And when will lay Catholics begin to put their feet down and insist that the wicked nonsense stop, or money will stop flowing into church coffers?
Frankly, I don’t look for things to change significantly, even now. The habits of scapegoating are too deeply ingrained, and the penalties for lying and blaming others too light, for anything to change substantially. And economically and politically powerful benefactors—men who have bought the church and expect value for what they’ve purchased—continue to prop up these empty religious authorities. And will continue to do so as long as they’re able.
* As a remark discussing yesterday's National Catholic article about the lesbian couple whose child has been put out of Catholic schools in the Denver archdiocese suggests, the blame-the-devil tactic is obviously coalescing with the blame-the-gays tactic in right-wing Catholic circles. Writing to praise Archbishop Chaput for standing firm against the lesbians, a reader named Stephan insists that the "smoke of Satan" is trying to get through the cracks into Catholic schools—through lesbian mothers, you understand—and Chaput is a hero. Case closed.
