Catholic Church PR

So the Catholic Church paedophilia crisis continues to look worse and worse. I try not to follow this story too closely, but it's hard to miss, especially given the appalling misbehaviour of the church hierarchy. The ways they've been making excuses lately also does not help.

For instance, Bill Donahue of the Catholic League ran an advert in the New York Times, which said that priests molesting children is somehow the fault of gay people thus reminding people that in addition to enabling the rape of children, the church has also campaigned heavily against the civil rights of LGBT people, including stripping us of marriage rights in California.

Then, on Good Friday, a vatican sermon linked the news coverage of the systematic and widespread rape of children to anti-semitism, with the logic that calling attention to a conspiracy to protect rapists is somehow like the genocidal murder of 6 million Jews. Which, it should be noted, the church didn't exactly have a problem with, since they never bothered to excommunicate or even dissuade their faithful churchgoing member, Adolf Hitler. Indeed, if you are looking for the organisation that enables the raping thousands of children and murdering millions of jews, well, here's one that stands at the intersection of both.

Will they next compare media attention and police investigations to the Spanish Inquisition? Perhaps to the enslaving of Native Americans in Missions? Maybe it's like denying women access to reproductive health care?

Their message seems to be, "Hey, in comparison with the other horrible abuses we've participated in, raping a few thousand little kids isn't so bad!" When I try to think of what would Jesus do, I think he would tell them to STFU.