The church is not God. It’s run by men. No man is God. It’s tattered and torn like the man of laMancha but it’s no dream. It’s a man-made nightmare nad lately the nightmare has grown.
In Ireland, on the stage only a few feet from the pope, Mr. Varadkar, the prime minister, gave a forceful criticism of the church’s sins that many wished the pope would deliver.
“In place of Christian charity, forgiveness and compassion, far too often there was judgment, severity and cruelty, in particular, towards women and children and those on the margins,” he said, citing “stains” such as child abuse, illegal adoptions, forced labor and other sins. “People kept in dark corners, behind closed doors, cries for help that went unheard.”\
the one factor many seemed to agree on is that clericalism, from the seminaries to the top of the hierarchy, is insidious.
Ireland knows the ravages of clericalism first hand, from its sex abuse scandals to forcing the adoption of the children of unwed mothers to many other exploitations of what was for decades authoritarian power.
The abuses the clergy committed, and their tendency to seek exaltation by parishioners instead of humbly serving and accompanying them through troubles, cost the church a country where it once had more than 90 percent attendance at mass. Now it has about 30 percent.
In Ireland the Scars of Sex Abuse Are ‘Worse Than the I.R.A.’
In the United States, where last week a grand jury in Pennsylvania released a sweeping report that the church had covered up the abuse of more than 1,000 minors by some 300 priests over 70 years. Francis himself acknowledged the global scale of the problem this week, when he issued a rare letter to Catholics worldwide condemning such “atrocities.” That’s far too little and far too late.
It’s worse than the I.R.A., because it’s like putting a bomb into a child’s mind.”
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