Can we please stop this charade now that the Catholic Church has any kind of moral authority?

For that matter, can we please stop this nonsense that ANY religion has any kind of moral authority?

On the evangelical side, we have closet case and meth user Ted Haggard, embezzler Jim Bakker, hooker-fucker Jimmy Swaggart, and on and on and on. While the ex-Nazi Pope goes around the world lecturing us on the evils of abortion, his minions in Ireland have been committing child abuse for decades -- and the Church hierarchy did nothing:

Tens of thousands of Irish children were sexually, physically and emotionally abused by nuns, priests and others over 60 years in a network of church-run residential schools meant to care for the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted, according to a report released in Dublin on Wednesday.

The 2,600-page report paints a picture of institutions run more like Dickensian orphanages than 20th-century schools, characterized by privation and cruelty that could be both casual and choreographed.

“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions,” the report says. In the boys’ schools, it says, sexual abuse was “endemic.”

The report, by a state-appointed commission, took nine years to produce and was meant to help Ireland face and move on from one of the ugliest aspects of its recent history. But it has infuriated many victims’ groups because it does not name any of the hundreds of individuals accused of abuse and thus cannot be used as a basis for prosecutions.

[snip]

In a litany that sounds as if it comes from the records of a P.O.W. camp, the report chronicles some of the forms of physical abuse suffered in the boys’ schools:

“Punching, flogging, assault and bodily attacks, hitting with the hand, kicking, ear pulling, hair pulling, head shaving, beating on the soles of the feet, burning, scalding, stabbing, severe beatings with or without clothes, being made to kneel and stand in fixed positions for lengthy periods, made to sleep outside overnight, being forced into cold or excessively hot baths and showers, hosed down with cold water before being beaten, beaten while hanging from hooks on the wall, being set upon by dogs, being restrained in order to be beaten, physical assaults by more than one person, and having objects thrown at them.”

Some of the schools operated essentially as workhouses. In one school, Goldenbridge, girls as young as 7 spent hours a day making rosaries by stringing beads onto lengths of wire. They were given quotas: 600 beads on weekdays and 900 on Sundays.

Girls were routinely sexually abused, often by more than one person at a time, the report said, in “dormitories, schools, motor vehicles, bathrooms, staff bedrooms, churches, sacristies, fields, parlors, the residences of clergy, holiday locations and while with godparents and employers.”

The Vatican had no response. But leaders of various religious orders — who often argued during the investigations that the abuse was a relic of another time, reflecting past societal standards — issued abject apologies on Wednesday, taking care to frame the problem as something that is now behind them.

Aborting babies = bad.
Abusing them after they're born = perfectly OK.

Tens of thousands of children subject to the most foul kinds of abuse -- and the response is to "face it and look forward"? What about those who were abused? What about justice for them?

When you think of the self-righteousness of this ex-Nazi head of this so-called religious hierarchy with as foul a history as we've ever seen, going around the world preaching about morality, it's difficult to imagine how anyone on the face of the earth can embrace a theology put forth by such people. But when criminals in high places commit the most vile of crimes, we're supposed to "face it and look forward." But if you get caught stealing a case of baby food from Wal-Mart, you're going to go to jail. If you get caught smoking a joint in your house that's within 1000 feet of a school, you're going to jail. But if you put on a clerical collar and you have the power of the Vatican institution behind you, you can abuse children with impunity -- and when the facts come out, well, there's nothing to be gained by prosecutions. It's all just so icky, can't we just let bygones be bygones and just move on from here?

No, we can't.

If you want to know why those of us clamoring for investigation and prosecution of Bush Administration officials are doing so, THIS is why. I've long talked about a "tipping point of evil" -- a point at which the doings of an institutional structure are just so foul that they stretch our ability to face that our species and the institutions we think of as authoritative are capable of such things. When one man abuses one child, we can wrap our minds around that and want to stone him to death. But what do we do when hundreds of people abuse tens of thousands of children under the auspices of an institution that holds itself up as having a direct conduit to God? What do we do when the President and Vice President of a country that holds itself up as a beacon of decency and freedom and opportunity to the world order the most foul torture of people captured on a battlefield even AFTER they've given up whatever information they have?

I'll tell you what we don't do. We don't say "Well, it's behind us now, let's move on." We seek justice. And we never, ever take the claims of authority of these institutions at face value ever again.