Hitchens On Milwaukee Priest-Paedophile Scandal

It'd be nice to see Milwaukee in the national press for something other than 200 deaf boys being raped by a priest and having the whole thing washed over by Pope Fritzy.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

Also disgusting is how civil authorities failed in their duties.

Father Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims. Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.

What the hell was wrong with the criminal justice system? After trotting out the, "Yeah, but other people did it too" defense, Archbishop Dolan of New York claims:

Because, as we now sadly realize, nobody, nowhere, no time, no way, no how knew the extent, depth, or horror of this scourge, nor how to adequately address it.

So, is he sincere in saying that dealing with child rapists is one of the great advances of only the last 50 years? What an asshole. Pope Pius V had it figured out back in the 16th century when he declared that priests who rape children would be defrocked and handed over to the courts for punishment. Local constabularies have been dealing with this stuff for centuries. Are any of the bishops who reported Murphy's paedophilial predilections to Fritzy still alive? If so, instead of suing to block health care form, perhaps our Attorney General can bring those douchebags up on charges of aiding and abetting a child rapist along with any living civil authorities that stood by and did nothing.

While ACORN goes out of business because of some video editing, the Catholic Church remains, as Matt Taibbi points out, a taxpayer-subsidized guardian of child molesters.

In fact the Church is not only not sanctioned in any serious way, it gets to retain its outrageous tax-exempt status, which makes its systematic child abuse, in this country at least, a government-subsidized activity.