We now have a smoking gun implicating Pope Ratzi in the cover-up of child abuse by priests.

Pope Benedict XVI has become embroiled in new revelations over child sexual abuse, over a letter he is said to have signed in 1985 before becoming pontiff.

Associated Press said it had obtained the letter, signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, resisting the defrocking of offending US priest Stephen Kiesle.

Cardinal Ratzinger said the “good of the universal Church” needed to be considered in defrocking, AP reported.

The good of the innocent seems to be much, much lower in the church’s priorities.

Now what will happen, though?

I predict…absolutely nothing. The church will hunker down and change nothing, the flock will make excuses for the abuses as they’ve always done, and the story will repeat year after year. We just have to hope that the scandals will erode church membership further, and that secular authorities will be quicker to protect the kids.

But I’ll just keep on dreaming of the Pope making a visit to some secular country, getting arrested, and being forced to do a perp walk in front of broadcast cameras. It’s not going to happen, but it would be so sweet.

The Bishop of Tenerife has voiced the latest excuse in the Catholic pedophilia scandals, and it is a predictable one. Women have heard this claim about rape over and over again: the victim was asking for it.

His comments were that there are youngsters who want to be abused, and he compared that abuse to homosexuality, describing them both as prejudicial to society. He said that on occasions the abuse happened because the there are children who consent to it.

“There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what’s more wanting it, and if you are careless they will even provoke you”, he said.

Oh, it is so hard to be a noble heterosexual man in this society, with every woman, every gay man, every child, every moist orifice, every knothole, every small animal burrow on the ground, every lemon meringue pie, every velvety wrinkle in the Pope’s cassock, all just taunting and teasing and tantalizing you, begging you to stick your penis in them. And then when you finally give in and let them have what they want, despite all your insistence that you’re doing it for their benefit, not yours, what do they do? They cry rape, or lock you up for child abuse, or the Vatican dry cleaning service sends you an extravagant bill.

It’s just so unfair!

Sorry, I’m going to have to ruin your breakfast again. The Stranger has a revealing article on pedophile priests — in particular, it focuses on the native populations of Alaska and Canada, which were used as a nice, obscure dumping ground for the very worst sexual predators the Catholic Church could provide. Small children were raped, entire villages are decimated by mental health trauma and suicides brought on by these monsters, and in one particularly appalling instance, a priest was caught raping a dying woman he was supposed to give the last rites. There’s also an interview with a former priest who was a “cleaner” (yes, he actually calls himself that), brought in to tidy up the messes these evil men brought into a community…before they got shipped off to another community.

The sheer concentration of known sex offenders in these isolated communities begins to look less like an accident than a plan. Their institutional protection looks less like an embarrassed cover-up than aiding and abetting. And the way the church has settled case after case across the country, refusing to let most of them go to trial for a public airing, is starting to look like an admission of guilt.

Here’s the reason why the church covers up for rapist priests.

Why does the church keep sending these priests, who have come to be such a major liability, back into ministry? “It’s all about keeping the stores open, keeping the revenue rolling,” Wall says. The Alaskan provinces in particular, Wall says, were a source of revenue–not from the Native population living there, but from parishioners in the lower 48 who were encouraged to donate for the Native ministry up north. “You could raise thousands to fund a mission that cost very little to run,” Wall says. “The profit margin is huge.”

The story makes 1950s Ireland look like a paradise of blissful religious sanctity. It is not for the squeamish.

If you’d rather read something a little more encouraging, read Katha Politt on priestly pedophilia. She nails the priesthood on their sanctimony and hypocrisy, and their pretense to a moral superiority that is so patently betrayed. She also mentions this surprising story:

In February, Bishop Margot Kaessmann, the first woman to head the German Protestant Church and a much-admired public figure, was caught running a red light while intoxicated. There was a lot of sympathy for her, even in the conservative media, which disagreed with her liberal and anti-war views, and she received the support of the church’s governing body. Nonetheless, within four days Kaessmann resigned, saying her moral authority had been so compromised she could no longer do right by her high office. Maybe Pope Benedict and his bishops could learn something from her example.

What? A Protestant bishop resigns for the crime of running a red light under the influence? She got a traffic ticket and felt her moral authority was compromised? I mean, that’s a bit excessive, but OK, at least she’s taking religion’s claims of morality extremely seriously.

Meanwhile, the Pope heads a Catholic office that was sheltering child-rapers, and the entire Catholic hierarchy is busily claiming the martyrdom of Christ for itself because people have started to complain about their intrusive little penises. They aren’t even trying for the moral flood plain, let alone the moral high ground. It’s more like they’re taking a dive in the Marianas Trench of turpitude while pretending to climb the Everest of propriety.

While we can’t expect the church to expire in shame, at least we should start regarding Catholicism as a Mafia-like criminal organization…and maybe our governments should stop treating with them.

It’s Easter. Once again, the masses will gawp in awe at a bizarre and unbelievable story…because it is such a good example of how religion will piggy-back on our cognitive biases.

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Poor Paddy K. He wants to formally leave the Catholic church, so he followed the official procedures…and what does he get? A long letter from a priest telling him how wonderful the church is.

Maybe he needs to send the priest this video of Bill Donohue reiterating his claim that the problem is the infiltration of the church by the homosexual agenda. The low point for me was when the really terrible interviewer, Rick Sanchez, asks whether the problem with the church isn’t priestly celibacy, and Donohue smugly takes this as a vindication of his point, somehow. I don’t get it. He sure seems positive that he’s got a logical point connecting celibacy with gayness, though.

Anyway, it’s hard to question one’s desire to leave the church when one sees the kind of vermin defending it.

By the way, a while back I tried to follow the official Lutheran church’s procedure for being formally stricken from the rolls, and wrote to the only church I was ever a member of, way back in my childhood. They have no record of me, not even a baptismal record. I felt a little miffed that I was forgotten, but I got over it — I guess this just means I was never really a Christian, which is fine with me. I can set that brief youthful embarrassment aside and pretend it never happened.

Donohue is also an amazing fellow, always able to top himself in serial excuses for the crimes of the church. His latest escapade is to pardon a priestly abuser because his victims were over some magical age.

The head of the influential Catholic League says that the priest who allegedly sexually abused 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin did not engage in pedophilia because ‘the vast majority of the victims [were] post-pubescent.”

Bill Donohue made the argument during a raucous debate on Larry King Live Tuesday night, during which he repeatedly pointed the finger to homosexuality — rather than pedophilia — as the cause of the church’s sex abuse problems.

He’s playing word games, and managed to successfully derail the discussion into a debate over how young the victims have to be for it to count as pedophilia — Donohue is claiming that once a kid is over 12 or 13, he’s fair game. At that age, it’s just homosexuality.

Where to even begin? The problem is not the sex of his victims, it’s that this was a priest abusing his authority, acting as a sexual predator on much, much younger members of his flock — young people who were in his charge, who were dependent on him, and who had been indoctrinated with the belief that they should trust the priest. Donohue is resorting to arguing that because a 13-year-old had pubic hair, he had the full autonomy of an adult and the abuse of the priest was simply a love affair between equals. And that is bullshit.

It’s a mistake to get into an argument about a chronological dividing line at all. The one thing Donohue is really good at, though, is spewing out distractions, and that’s what he has accomplished here — he’s obscuring a clear pattern of abuse with a lot of irrelevant noise.

He thinks I missed his important distinction.

Christianity flees power as Jesus did; Christianism seeks it above everything else. And there is nothing more powerful than killing others, except for torturing them. Hence my distinction, which I make from no authority. I merely think that declaring a homeless, apolitical, non-violent hippie in first century Palestine as someone who would bless a twenty-first century terrorist militia in North America is a bit of a stretch.

Funny thing, that: that was my whole point. Modern Christianity is nothing but Christianists, then, and it’s a distinction that makes no difference. His Pope runs an official state, a member of the UN, that is dripping with extravagantly displayed wealth. Would his homeless, apolitical, non-violent hippie bless this man, this Pontifex Maximus, this Goldfather?

Or perhaps Urban II, the man who fired off the First Crusade, would be a man more to the hippie’s taste.

I don’t think I’ve missed any distinction at all. If your Palestinian hippie were here today, he’d be horrified and damn the whole mad carnival that has been established in his name, and they’re all Christianists.

For that matter, the weird theology that the old hippie espoused would be a ghastly basis for a world, and any culture in which Jesus would be comfortable would be a nightmare for the rest of us.

This is nice. Andrew Sullivan has a suggestion to exempt those wanna-be terrorists, the Hutarees, from the fold of the faithful.

Surely we can all assent to the notion that a Christian militia of the type now accused of planning domestic terrorism is not Christian. This is why I call them Christianist. Anyone planning to murder innocents by way of IEDs cannot plausibly call himself or herself a follower of Jesus of Nazareth.

Good thing he threw in that specific bit about IEDs, or I’d have to mention all the innocents slaughtered in Christ’s name since, oh, the Dark Ages. They are spared by a technological technicality!

But OK, if we’re going to redefine Christians, let’s go all the way.

Anyone denying the evidence of the world around them, like, say, a creationist, is a Christianist.

Anyone who denies the joys of sex and abstains because they think God likes them celibate is a Christianist.

Anyone who uses their religious affiliation as a tool to acquire temporal power is a Christianist.

Anyone who prays in public is a Christianist.

Anyone who uses their faith as an excuse to peep into their neighbors’ bedrooms and tell them that they’re doing it wrong is a Christianist.

Anyone who begs for money so they can convert other people to their Christian faith is a Christianist.

Anyone who thinks women should be a subservient sex is a Christianist.

Anyone who threatens others with the wrath of God is a Christianist.

Anyone who believes that Jesus manifests himself in this world via magic tricks, like turning crackers into flesh, is a Christianist.

Anyone who believes that all they have to do is have faith in Jesus, never mind what they do in life, in order to get into heaven is a Christianist.

Anyone who uses the phrase “God and Country” non-ironically is a Christianist.

Anyone who hides behind their religion to rape anyone else is a Christianist.

Anyone who shelters a religious rapist is a Christianist.

Anyone who complains about those lazy poor people getting health care and food stamps is a Christianist.

I could go on and on, listing lots of things that I think are foolish and reprehensible, and declaring that those who hold those views are not True Christians.

Unfortunately, I think that it all means that there aren’t any Christians anywhere, and they’re all damned dirty Christianists. I can’t tell them apart from the Christians!

I’m afraid the Hutarees were Christian, real-live testifyin’ preachifyin’ Jebus-lovin’ Bible-readin’ Christians. They weren’t Andrew Sullivan’s preferred version of Christian, but then, a weird gay Catholic has about as much authority to define who gets to be Christian as an obnoxious and flamingly anti-religious atheist.

At least this will be a useful one. And it is hallowed by the Pope!

Pope Benedict, facing the worst crisis of his papacy as a sexual abuse scandal sweeps the Catholic church, declared today he would not be “intimidated” by “petty gossip”, angering activists who say he has done too little to stamp out paedophilia.

Hey, Pope Ratzi. Petty gossip you, too — sideways with a rusty knife. Could you possibly trivialize child rape a little more?