Outside the Law (Updated)

Saw this report on a follow-up investigation to the Irish child abuse scandal involving the Catholic hierarchy and priesthood. This struck me:

It found that the Church placed its own reputation above the protection of children in its care.

It also said that state authorities facilitated the cover-up by allowing the Church to operate outside the law.

That's what "religious organizations" are demanding in the U.S. -- that they be allowed to operate outside the law in regard to statutes concerning discrimination.

Do you really want to trust them?

This is the second report, concentrating on Dublin. Note this:

Thursday's report comes six months after the publication of the Ryan report in May, which took submissions from 2,000 people who said they had suffered physical and sexual abuse while in the care of Catholic-run institutions.

The Ryan report, also known as the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, found church leaders knew that sexual abuse was "endemic" in boys' institutions.

This is the Church that says that gay couples are not fit to raise children.

Upate:

Via Andrew Sullivan, this choice bit by Patsy McGarry in the Irish Times:

One of the most fascinating discoveries in the Dublin Archdiocese report was that of the concept of “mental reservation” which allows clerics mislead people without believing they are lying. According to the Commission of Investigation report, “mental reservation is a concept developed and much discussed over the centuries, which permits a church man knowingly to convey a misleading impression to another person without being guilty of lying”.

Read her article -- it's a real eye-opener about one of the ways the Church hierarchy protect themselves without -- in their own minds -- actually sinning.

And don't forget that this is coming after a decade or more of revelations about similar scandals in the U.S., Australia, and other countries in which the Church occupies a privileged position.

These are the people who have the nerve to call me and those like me "intrinsically disordered" and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars funding campaigns to take away our basic rights. Frankly, they should all be jailed, not only the pedophiles themselves, but their enablers, up to and including the current pope.