VATICAN CITY — The Vatican heatedly defended Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday, claiming accusations that he helped cover up the actions of pedophile priests are part of an anti-Catholic "hate" campaign targeting the pope for his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Vatican Radio broadcast comments by two senior cardinals explaining "the motive for these attacks" on the pope and the Vatican newspaper chipped in with spirited comments from another top cardinal.
"The pope defends life and the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman, in a world in which powerful lobbies would like to impose a completely different" agenda, Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, head of the disciplinary commission for Holy See officials, said on the radio. Herranz didn’t identify the lobbies but "defense of life" is Vatican shorthand for anti-abortion efforts.
Also arguing that Benedict’s promotion of conservative family models had provoked the so-called attacks was the Vatican’s dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano. "By now, it’s a cultural contrast," Sodano told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. "The pope embodies moral truths that aren’t accepted, and so, the shortcomings and errors of priests are used as weapons against the church."
Also rallying to Benedict’s side was Italian Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, who heads the Vatican City State’s governing apparatus. The pope "has done all that he could have" against sex abuse by clergy of minors, Lajolo said on Vatican radio, decrying what he described as a campaign of "hatred against the Catholic church"…
There’s a hierarchy of holiness here that’s out of kilter:
There are plenty of members of the Clergy who are not rapists or pedophiles and clearly there are Clergy who can be counted in that number…unholy lot, the entire crowd of them and, when I allow instinct to trump reason, perhaps empirical evidence even, irretrievable and untreatable. One strike and you’re out when it comes to preying on a child! How about in the “HEALTHY” rows, you add “Clergy who have sex with themselves or a consenting adult (who is not a parishioner) because they want to and because they are human and thus wired to do it regardless of what the Holy Fathers over the past couple of millenia have cooked up in making their case against nature (and I might speculate, against God, given that God himself might have had something to do with nature – at least insofar as one accepts that an omniscient, omnipotent, prime mover is the source and cause of everything there is or ever was or ever will be). But then, you’d have to reformat the whole table – fuck it.