as my uncle used to say, made you glad you didn’t winter kill.

Easter is the most important holiday to Christians, because it is the moment of our redemption. A lot of people have issues with Easter because it is based on a saxon pagan holiday- but if you look at the roots of Christianity, there is plenty of good reason for the integration of the so called “pagan” holidays into the Christian holidays. The idea of a “Gospel” account is in fact a pagan invention, just borrowed by the authors of the gospels. Likewise, the Pagan rites of spring were so embedded in the culture of the time, and they were so important to the people of the time, the Church wisely integrated them and taught, correctly so, that the celebrations they integrated were simply celebrations of Christianity before the arrival of Christ. So Easter, which was originally Oestre, the Saxon Goddess of Fertility, became integrated and is celebrated today both as a rite of spring and the moment of our redemption, which gave a sense of solidity and continuity to Christianity that it would have lacked otherwise. The history and tradition of the Catholic Church have always been steeped in formerly pagan rituals for very good reasons that I’m perfectly OK with because I know them and understand them, because they came from the Creator to people ignorant of Christ at the time.

Below the fold is a discussion of the Cantalamessa dustup, if you don’t want to read a long preachy post you might want to leave and go see what Brigid is up to.

Tam has a post about Cantalamessa and his Good Friday Sermon.

I can’t but agree, I expect this is one of the most egregious examples of stupidity in the church; the correspondence in question may have been an interesting subject for a private conversation and discussion, but not a sermon.

The same people who will screech loudly about the misrepresentation of political facts by newspapers will buy on the surface anything that those same papers will say about kiddy diddling priests. Roberta specifically posts:

Y’know, the voluntary funding of a global organization that has SOPs that put celibate men of unknown sexual predilections in close and unsupervised contact with children and which has a long-term pattern of shielding said men from the the consequences of their actions when things go a bit off-track is not a choice I, personally, would make, no matter what wonderful goodness said organization also performs.

Roberta, so far as I know, is not a Catholic, so I assume this lack of knowledge is not deliberate but lack of education on the subject at hand. It is pretty typical of the kind of lack of knowledge that gets everyone’s ass in an uproar about this specific subject, and it’s mostly because nobody knows the facts. So let’s deal with this on an issue by issue basis.

1: Celibacy. At one time the issue of celibacy related to the Church wanting to hang onto the cash of priests when they died, not wanting to let their accumulated wealth drift off to relatives. This is no longer the case, and in fact in the case of most but diocesan priests, there is a vow of poverty. Dowry no longer has anything to do with it. Celibacy in priests is necesary because a Catholic Priest is a priest 24/7. Remember those days in your youth (or maybe like me you still do them now, from time to time or even regularly?)when you worked 70- 80- hours or more in a week, busted your butt helping friends do one thing or another, and still managed to get in a couple hours of home improvement here and there?

yeah. That’s what a priests life is, all the fucking time, every day, all day. The work may not be physically arduous (for some it is. Spend a week at a Monastery retreat)but it is constant and taxing. the prayer requirements alone are staggering; I still have my breviary here on the shelf, and if I still took the time for all the proscribed prayers I would get about two hours sleep a night.

The fact that priests are celibate owes to the fact that they are acting in the persona of Christ, or are at least supposed to try to. Admittedly, this is a difficult pair of sandals to fill. Additionally, the emotional, spiritual, and horological demands on the Priest are such that no specific commitment to an individual is even possible let alone practical. Not only would it not be fair to the spouse of the priest, it would result in broken marriages almost by default. Those who doubt the utility of celibacy in the Catholic Clergy have absolutely no understanding whatsoever of the job they are doing. These are not presbyterian ministers or rabbis who have jobs during the week to suppliment their income and run their kids back and forth to soccer practice here.

As for “unknown sexual predilections”, well, that’s a lie people tell themselves to place the blame on someone else. If you see someone you suspect of kiddy diddling and you don’t do something about it, it’s YOU who are at fault. Nobody has ever made it to the priesthood whose “sexual predilections” were unknown, ever. The fact that some priests may, at root, be gay, is something that is widely known and not ignored. Are all gay men child molesters? No? Should we stop gay men from being around children because of their “Sexual predilections”? No. My experience is that the selfsame people who would claim a celibate priest should never be around children seem to think it’s perfectly OK for gay people to teach children, and they have it half right.

Sexual predilections are supposed to be supressed in a celibate priest. Most do. Being human, some do not. But let’s look at numbers:

The incidence of Child molestation in the general public is higher than among priests, children are statistically safer among the clergy than they are among their own parents and step parents.

A “Standard operating practice” of putting priests (or ANYONE) in unsupervised contact with children does not exist in America. The VIRTUS program is MANDATORY for all adults who work in any position which brings them into contact with children. This program, in which I have particpated, does ALL THE RIGHT THINGS. Here’s a few frinstances:

No child may be alone with any adult, ever.

No activity will take place, or even be planned, that does not have adequate adult representation so that the above rule cannot be followed.

And etc.

The program works and is being widely adopted even among non catholics. A few who should be l;ooking at it seriously are the baptists who have a very specific type of problem, and protestants in general, who are far more active than the Catholics in the respect of child molestation and abuse, but hardly anyone hears about it. Finally, look at pedophiles and priestsby Philip Jenkins , if you’d like a good understanding of what’s going on in the world of sex abuse.

As for “No matter what wonderful goodness”, let me posit this question: How many child molesters, by percentage, are there in the organizations you do support? Odds are good that there are more there than in the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church has a whole MANDATORY program to report, correct, and eliminate the situation. Does the organization you belong to have a mandatory program? Should it?
I’m not apologizing for kiddy diddling priests. As far as I’m concerned, they should all be sent to hell posthaste. But kiddy diddlers in general should, not just priests, and there are far more among the general populus than in the church, and nobody else is doing one damned thing about it. The Catholic church is.