The Pope’s Personal Priest, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #165

April 5, 2010 Mike Gold 0 Comments

Sometimes the law can be a confusing morass of words that would leave M.C. Escher wondering which end is up. But sometimes the law is breathtakingly simple. For example, let’s take pederasty. Here, the law is a four-part process and each part is a no-brainer:

1. You molest a child.
2. You get arrested.
3. You go to trial and if found guilty you go to jail, or
4. You go to trial and if found not guilty (innocent isn’t an option) you go free, sometimes with an apology from the judge.

However, on Good Friday, the day a lot of Christians blame on Jews, Pope Benedict XVI’s personal preacher Raniero Cantalamessa compared the priestly pederasty scandal that appears to have reached the top to the “more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism” and to “collective violence against the Jews.”

Say what?

First of all, I didn’t know the Pope had his own personal preacher, but as an atheist I’m not supposed to get that. More to the point, the only thing that Cantalamessa has going against him are the facts. Yes, there have been a great many preachers who have committed this crime. It’s a fact, and there are plenty of apologies out there to prove it. It’s also a fact that in a great many of these cases, once the Church discovered the problem, the criminal was transferred out to another location, many times still in contact with children. That’s what we call a “cover-up,” and that’s what did Richard M. Nixon in.

If the Church is a source of comfort – and that’s what church people keep on telling me and, honest, I think that’s great – it can hardly be comforting that the Church is sanctioning pederasty. Transferring these men to other locations, paying off the victims’ families (hey, it worked for Michael Jackson), and then getting all stuffy about it does not provide much comfort. Were I a rational Catholic with a child, I’d have second thoughts about that “alter boy” thing.

The Pope was sitting right there when Cantalamessa made this pathetic claim. Did he leap up and say “Whoa there, Dude! Preach for yourself!” The Associated Press said Pope Benedict looked “weary.” As in “Oh, thanks. You’re not helping here!”

Let’s put this in the form of an equation. Accusing the Church of a sex scandal cover-up is more-or-less the same as the systematic destruction of an entire race of people in Eurasia by Nazis, Soviets, and Spanish Catholics and Crusaders, leaving about ten million corpses in the 20^th century alone. Yeah, that’s about the same.

In an interview with the AP, German Jewish leader Stephan Kramer described Cantalamessa’s remarks as “insolence” that “is repulsive, obscene and most of all offensive toward all abuse victims as well as to all the victims of the Holocaust.”

If Cantalamessa wants to make a comparison to Jewish persecution, he should try another tack. He should own up to the situation just as the Germans owned up to the Holocaust. He should see to it that his church no longer shields those of their brood who sexually prey on children and that no impediment is placed between those who are accused and their fair day in court.

Media metaphysician and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed the following Thursdays at 10:00 PM Eastern. Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue. Mike will be appearing on a comics history panel at the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo at McCormick Place on Saturday, April 17at 12:15 PM.