Pope Immunity

[bender]

When you consider the fact that there has been about two prosecutions of Church Officials who had alleged complicity in hiding sexual abuse by other priests in their community Buzz I really doubt the Pope has to worry about a knock on the door and given the fact that being Pope for the past 5 years or so would surely have brought out any allegations of such from his earlier career within the church if they existed, I'd be fairly confident that the Pope isn't going to need diplomatic immunity.

His safety is another issue. In this day and age any person who's been a head of state would have pretty legitimate fears that someone might bump them off for no other reason then it will get widespread media coverage and as such give the assassin their fifteen miniutes of fame.

[Deleted]

Who to say the Pope Benedick wasn't a kiddie fiddler himself....and why he has opted out.

[pim]

And your "evidence" for that is ... ?

I mean, really Spindrift, that's the sort of bottom-feeding post I'd have expected of Matt or Garfield.

[Deleted]

Have you any evidence he hasn't...given a recent report of Vatician smarmy biz going on...cardials protecting fiddlers..etc etc ....time to bail before something is pinged on him, while speculative...would you be surprised if true..??

[pim]

We used to object to Jockstrap following that kind of phony reasoning. Here's how it works:

Jockstrap: XYZ (here insert name or category of people you're demonising) are criminals and paedophiles ...

You: Prove it

Jockstrap: Prove that they aren't.

And he objected when all he got from people like you and me was ridicule and scorn. A bit like Garfield these days, actually.

That line of reasoning is also toxic because it's manipulative in a sinister way. It demands that anyone responding to the "Benedict-is-probably-a-kiddie-fiddler" line either accepts that proposition as a no-brainer or goes into bat and defends Benedict, the Papacy, the whole kit & kaboodle of the Catholic Church.

I refuse to do either. I don't accept as a given that Pope Benedict is a paedophile and neither do I carry a brief for the Catholic Church.

I agree with Bender. I think that if there'd been anything that remotely linked Benedict in a personal way to paedophile behaviour - i.e. that he Joseph Ratzinger had personally sexually abused a child or children at some stage during his adult life - then it would have come out during his pontificate or beforehand. These things tend to do just that.

Benedict is obviously a deeply religious man so let's use that type of language. It's called "sin". We won't go into mortal sin or venial sin. Forget all that stuff. There are two types of sin for our purposes here: there are sins of commission and sins of omission. A sin of commission is about what you've actually done and a sin of omission is about what you've failed to do.

You, Spindrift, are alleging sins of commission on the part of Benedict without the slightest shred of evidence. Don't you think that if there were any evidence - any evidence!! - that the Pope had personally interfered with kids that it would be trumpted in banner headlines in the world media?

What you don't come near are the sins of omission - and if the Pope is guilty of anything it would probably be what he failed to do rather than what he actually did. And therein lies the most profound spiritual crisis in the Catholic Church since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of his church in Wittenberg back in 1517 and unleashed the Protestant Refomation. This is bigger than the scandal after WW2 when the Vatican, under the then Pope Pius XII, made it possible for Nazi war criminals to escape war crimes trials by giving them Vatican passports to enable them to escape to South America. It's bigger than the Rissorgimento of the 1870s when Italy unified as a country by depriving the Papacy of its ancient territories that cut a great swathe acriss central Italy and cut it in two, and confining the Pope to a small plot of land in Rome we call the "Vatican". This crisis in the Catholic Church today is twofold:

1: Widespread paedophile behaviour among the clergy, especially in English-speaking countries, and a culture of cover-ups by the hierarchy which protects and shelters the paedophiles.

2: Unresolved financial scandals which in my view is the great sleeper. Remember why Karol Woytila took the name John-Paul II as Pope? It was because there had been a John-Paul I. JP1 had been JP2s immediate predecessor who was found dead one month into his Papacy. They said, simply, "heart attack" and then drew a veil. There's a banking mystery which the Vatican - a most secretive organisation - refuses to explain. I won't go into it. Just google "Vatican banker hanged London" and you'll find lots of info about it.

The paedophile crisis will be dealt with ... or not. If they fail to deal with it then they've lost their moral authority. They used to have a lot of moral authority. When I left school several lifetimes ago as a kid from a country town going down to the Big Smoke, a character reference from the local parish priest stood you in good stead if you were looking for work or trying to establish your credibility in a strange town. I'm not so sure of that anymore.

When the Papacy lost the Papal States in the Rissorgimento of the 1870s which saw Italy unified and the Pope confined to the Vatican (if you don't know about this then become a fan of the operas of Verdi), the Pope ceased being a temporal power - or a "prince among princes". What happened was that the Pope decided not to get even, but to get smart. They knew they'd lost their earthly territories so they re-oriented to Papacy to an "Empire of Souls". In other words they went for morals. The Papacy was going to set itself up as the chief Christian spokesman on questions of morality, and this has defined the Papacy ever since. You had the First Vatican Council and a whole lot of other stuff which if you're not Catholic it won't mean anything to you like the rosary and the cult of Mary.

It worked. It redefined the Papacy and invested the Pope with immense moral authority. Stalin once asked sarcastically "how many divisions does the Pope have?" Look at what ultimately happened to the regime that Stalin did so much to set up. And the Vatican is still there but the soviet Union? In fact, look at the role of the Papacy under JP2 in burying the whole Soviet mess. The answer is that the Pope didn't need an army and there' no denying the immense power of the Papacy which stems from its moral authority. The downside for the Pope is that if everything is based on your moral authority then you'd better take bloody good care of your moral authority because without it you're nothing.

It's that moral authority that the paedophile crisis puts at risk. To suggest that the Pope is most likely a kiddie-fiddler himself is to trivialise it in a grubby way by diverting the conversation into salacious and tittilating innuendo.

[fat]

Have you any evidence he hasn't

Great way to assassinate any character.

[bender]

Only if you're willing to buy into that sort of debate Fat.

[fat]

I'm not Bender.
I don't believe it is a valid way to argue. Even our legal system is based on (at least in principle if not in practice) a presumption of innocence.

Oops I guess I just did

[volk]

Feb 26, 2013 10:26:02 GMT 10 pim said:

We used to object to Jockstrap following that kind of phony reasoning. Here's how it works:

Jockstrap: XYZ (here insert name or category of people you're demonising) are criminals and paedophiles ...

You: Prove it

Jockstrap: Prove that they aren't.

Pim, this is the very same reason why we have the principle in Common Law, "He who asserts must prove." When a person makes a claim it's up to them to prove, it's not up to another person, or people, to prove the opposite. Certainly a bizarre form of logic as accurately outlined in your example above.

[pim]

I'm amazed that such a secular world and media finds the Pope such an object of fascination. Spindrift's gratuitous slander is part of the tabloid race to the bottom in which innuendo substitutes for evidence and titillation substitutes for analysis.

This sort of stuff is par for the course for the Garfields of this world. But I'm beginning to see that it isn't just Garfield.

[geopol]

pim. it rather surprises me that a person such as you, I imagine a man of the world, aware, indeed well aware of the ways of the world, the concomitant manipulation, the chicanery of the media and the use of spin, even by the chusch and many other bodies, religious and lay, charitable and hardnosed expoitative, as in hightly comercial, could opine, so innocentlly,"I'm amazed that such a secular.....such an object of fascination...." Methinks you almost protesteth a little.......The church, is among much else, about the Pope as an object of...... .

[Deleted]

Well seems I have upset you Pim and now you are angry with me all over the place.

Firstly I never accused the Pope of unsavory business I raised the possibility he may have been involved, given that the RC church was rife with it, albeit not the only organisation where kids were involved, seems people with a bent were attracted to places where they could have access to children or they turned that way while involved in their work.

Pope Benedict was know as a bit of a dandy, fancy shoes and rings while that is no proof of anything, or fits the profile exactly, he did ascend into office with an understanding he would deal with abuse, and gave a public apology, though that doesn't help those abused who committed suicide.

If he was involved in any deviate action the Catholic church with all its wealth will be paying hush money big time rather than like the old days of moving priest on while leaving the abused and their family in deep hurt and pain.

[caskur]

Bottom line... parents should NEVER have allowed their children to be alone with single men WITHOUT chaperones. ...PERIOD.

[matt]

Every catholic building is a child molestation gallery!

[Deleted]

Feb 26, 2013 19:19:16 GMT 10 @matt said:

Every catholic building is a child molestation gallery!

You are a piss-take, aren't you Jesus?

[Deleted]

The abuse of children runs throughout history and not just with catholic church, mostly poor children, where they were taken away from parents to be placed in orphanages or workhouse run by christian charities.

The Catholic Church is in a mess now because they wouldn't admit that child abuse was going on, where as other organisations dealt with earlier on, they didn't deal with it and used their wealth to bully people with lawyers....so the Catholic church deserves the flack that it gets and including the seemingly gay Pope as he was in on the not dealing with the kiddie abuse process. The Catholic church thought it was holier than thou and the Pope infallible now it has to deal with its demons it had lied about.

Now just like Nixon fleeing the Whitehouse after Watergate via helicopter so is Pope Benedict...exit stage right via chopper, so long folks I leave the shit fight behind for the next Pope and perhaps the fall of Rome itself, if the next Pope is found guilty of something.