The Pope is NOT a moral authority.

Not after this statement:

In his traditional Christmas address yesterday to cardinals and officials working in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI also claimed that child pornography was increasingly considered “normal” by society.

“In the 1970s, pedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” the Pope said.

“It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than’ and a ‘worse than’. Nothing is good or bad in itself.”

What is this? I was always taught that absolute good and absolute evil existed in the form of God and his commandments, and Satan and his lures and machinations. And I was raised Catholic. So, the Pope is arguing that morals are entirely subjective? Does that make our present set of morals — the ones that say sexual predation of children is horrible and immoral — are superior to those morals of the 70s wherein people ostensibly accepted pedophilia as “in conformity with man and even with children”? Because I’d like to think that that’s the case, that we as a society have evolved our morals over time to protect the weak from those in positions of power. (As a side note, I’d like to see any theory originating from the 70s saying that kiddy-fiddling is just fine. I’m seriously skeptical that any such position was ever postulated.)

Though religious nutbags like to complain about being forced to conform to society’s set of morals, they are always more than happy to claim that atheists are incapable of emotions like empathy or love, both of which lead directly to the morals we rely upon for society. Since we have empathy for other human beings, and we understand that as children sexual advances would empirically harm if not destroy a child’s psychologial state, it seems obvious that we’d endeavour to protect these children from these acts with or without some deity’s say-so.

The Pope is supposedly the arbiter of what’s wrong and what’s right — the emissary of God on Earth. He’s supposedly got a direct line to the big man himself. Why not ask him whether pedophilia is, was, or even should be, wrong?

Either way, the Pope has all but admitted that morality is subjective. I disagree with him on the salient point about whether pedophilia was acceptable or accepted in the 70s, and consider it tangential at best to the point that these priests were in positions of power over children, and they abused that position in order to put the kids into other positions. Is that abuse of privilege not sufficient, when coupled with the fact that these priests have vowed celibacy, to prove the whole practice immoral and counter to the foundation of his religion? Why equivocate, or obfuscate, or outright lie, about these acts, if they are so subjective, and were subjectively moral at the time they were committed?

Fuck this Pope. Fuck all the popes, but fuck this one in particular. If you have such moral paucity you’re incapable of standing strong against these acts, especially when you once actively covered them up in your past (and in the same time frame you’re referring to), you really ought to shut the fuck up and just let this scandal disappear down the memory hole. You know it will happen, if you just stop reminding your sheep over and over about how immoral a fuckwit you are. I mean, seriously. I have a fraction of a percent of the audience you do — no matter how loudly I scream about it, your feeble protestations that child rape is acceptable does more than I ever could to prove you immoral and incapable of moral judgement.

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The Pope is NOT a moral authority.
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3 thoughts on “The Pope is NOT a moral authority.

  1. 1

    Yes, this pope is the first one that really made me angry to realize that I am an ex-Catholic. I knew he would be a bastard as soon as they announced him; the Vladimir Putin of Popes, he is.

    Someone was talking today about how rapidly the Church has turned rightward since the Vatican II relaxation of the 1960’s. I was okay with being a Catholic in a Church that was “opening up” and even considered the possibility of women being priests in the 1970’s. But then, the vigor of the anti-abortion movement has pulled the Chorch so far to the right that they can’t see Vatican II with binoculars and we have Bill Donohue sputtering every time someone suggests that priests should be held accountable for child rape.

    I not only renounce my baptism, I wish I could deny that I had ever been a Catholic.

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