Susan Jacoby To Pope: Stop Aggravating Me!

Susan Jacoby – ‘journalist’ and author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism – now you know where she is coming from, has a particularly …..um…. stupid post on the Newsweek/WaPo blog ‘On Faith’. My emphases and comments.

Religious Bureaucrats Are To Religion As Military Music Is To Music [Good Start!]

Last week, Pope Benedict managed to aggravate [the truth can be very aggravating, yes?] both Jews and Protestants–the former by encouraging a form of the mass that, on Good Friday, includes a prayer for the conversion of the Jews, and the latter by reaffirming the Roman Catholic Church’s traditional stance that it is the One True Church and all other are sub-churches. Quite a week’s work! [Indeed!]

Since I discussed what the pope had to say about other Christians in a postscript to last week’s essay on the Latin mass, I will not go over the same ground this week. The pope approved a document released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [Oh yeah….wait for it….wait for it…] (from 1542 until 1908, the agency was called the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition) [Yeah! There it is! Man, I love that!] reaffirming the church’s traditional position that it is the only church to trace its origins back to Jesus and the twelve apostles. [Right, nothing has changed. The Catholic Church remains Catholic.]

Does anyone care, apart from theological bureaucrats defending their turf? [Are the theological bureaucrats the Jews and Protestants who are aggravated that the Church has not changed its traditional position?] Probably not. What is important [oh tell us o’ great sage of freethinking secularism – please tell us what we should really be thinking about…] about this pope’s preoccupations is his obliviousness to certain real and disturbing moral issues (as distinct from nit-picking about who is or is not descended from the twelve apostles). [Like the murder of unborn millions, war, poverty, injustice? These real and disturbing moral issues? Nope.]

Just think about it: During the week when Benedict was issuing proclamations about the Latin mass and apostolic succession, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles–the largest Catholic diocese in the United States–was preparing to agree to a $660 million settlement with victims of sexual abuse by priests over a 70-year period. The purpose of the settlement, of course, was to keep the actual details out of open court in order to prevent the public from learning even more than it already knows about the ecclesiastical coverup of the activities of pedophile [homosexual] priests. [OK, I am thinking about it. The Church continues to be the Church even during a week in which the horror of the abuse scandal once again hits the papers. Go figure.]

A real spiritual leader [someone more like Ms. Jacoby – you just know that she has to be a Ms…. right?]–as opposed to a dispenser of vainglorious dogma [that is a good one, vainglorious dogma. Yes because these two proclamations have been very popular]–would have been issuing heartfelt apologies to the victims whose lives were ruined by misplaced faith in the priests supposedly ordained by apostolic successors of Peter [Supposedly? Is anyone actually denying this?]. Pope Benedict should have been on his knees to those victims, begging personally for their forgiveness on behalf of the church he heads, at a time when he was occupying himself with petty decrees about church ritual and church primacy. [So every time a lawsuit is settled, or somebody in the WaPo writes an article on the abuse scandal, or any time anyone associated with the Catholic church publicly sins, the Pope must immediately cease all Church business and appear crying on Oprah? Stupid]

If you doubt the importance of America’s separation of church and state, consider the fact that the church was brought to account for these crimes–yes, crimes–mainly by the reporting of Catholic journalists in both Catholic and non-Catholic newspapers and by the willingness of lay Catholics to pursue their claims under American law. [I am all for freedom of the press and I am grateful that this horror was exposed, but this never would have been discovered if children were allowed to pray in school? This never would have been discovered if Thomas Jefferson hadn’t written the phrase in a letter that appears nowhere in the constitution?]But most of the hierarchy, [Rat bastards were all in on it, I knew it!] exemplifying the preoccupation with church power embodied by Benedict, [see what a bad example can do to children?] fought accountability as long as it could, trying to invoke freedom of religion as an excuse for not answering to the legal system. [Yeah, let’s do away with that part of the establishment clause!]

I think ‘journalist’ blogs are the greatest thing ever. It gives these secular atheist malcontents a chance to show their true colors. Ms. Jacoby just showed hers. One other thing, is it unreasonable to think that a blog called ‘On Faith’ might actually have people who actually believe?