The Roman Catholic church hasn’t really recovered from the series of pedophile scandals that have rocked it around the world over the last thirty years.

In places like Ireland, where it was especially bad, plus other bad stuff, the church is closing fast on collapse – although you should cast a sceptical eye on something that has the cringe title “Only Sky” (🙄🙄🙄🙄 – come back John, all is forgiven)

This is down less to ordinary Catholics – who in my experience tend to be good, if naive, souls – than to the leadership of the church, starting with priests who averted their eyes, and moving up through the chain of Bishops all the way to the Pope – the management if you will. And they still aren’t getting it:

As usual, Catholics have now learned about the predatory behavior of a prominent bishop not from Church officials but from the media. A Dutch magazine recently revealed that Bishop Carlos Belo of East Timor, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996, is a serial rapist of teenage boys. The crimes go back decades and explain his mysterious resignation in 2002 well before he reached retirement age. But has he been defrocked since then? Of course not. For all of its PR-driven talk of “zero tolerance,” the Vatican is loath to laicize abusive bishops. The Belo case looks like a replay of the Theodore McCarrick scandal, whom the Vatican only reluctantly removed from the clerical state after his crimes came to light and caused a firestorm in the press.

This is something beyond mere hypocrisy, which is bad enough for an outfit whose entire existence is supposed to about morality. This is actually evil.

Having said that I don’t want to get too preachy in turn because I’m well aware of the sexual abuse that’s going on in secular institutions (At least 269 K-12 educators arrested on child sex crimes in first nine months of 2022), including in State schools, which gets nowhere near the attention that the Catholic church does – even when similar levels of moral hypocrisy – this time secular – are involved.

But the management are also not helping themselves with bullshit like this:

Cardinal Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, announced on an interview program that the Catholic Church had no interest in opposing Italy’s law allowing abortion. Indeed, while encouraging more women to have children, Paglia called the law “a pillar of our social life.”

What cuts even further with a jagged blade is the irony that the Academy was set up by Pope John Paul II specifically to combat abortion. It’s notable that after appointing Paglia as president Pope Francis fired the remaining 70 people on the council. No wonder pro-abortion extremist politicians like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are still getting communion instead of excommunicated.

Or how about this:

They routinely portray support for illegal immigration as “Catholic teaching.” But it isn’t. The Church has never officially taught that it is “unjust” for a country’s leaders to enforce immigration laws.
…
Yet the bishops act like they hold the moral high ground here, casting illegal immigrants as saintly and responsible politicians as wicked. The bishops spin the nonenforcement of immigration law as a corporal work of mercy, evident in their celebration of “National Migration Week.”

According to that article they were tub-thumping on this issue relentlessly in the 1980’s – until the wave of sexual abuse stories put them into the Quiet Room. But not for long: one of the leaders of the current lobbying in D.C. for another illegal immigrant amnesty is a Bishop who housed none other than the rapist ex-cardinal McCarrick mentioned earlier.

But this is all in keeping with Pope Francis’s determination to get a “Church open to everyone”. One such action in the US was elevating San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy to the office of cardinal ahead of the higher-ranked Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, presumably because Cordileone actually did take a stand by banning Pelosi from taking Communion:

Along with his auxiliary bishop John Dolan, McElroy once celebrated a mass for “families of the LGBT community.”  After Holy Communion “Nicole” Murray-Ramirez, a nationally-known drag queen activist, was allowed to speak to the congregation from the lectern.  Afterwards, Murray-Ramirez presented Mc Elroy and Dolan with a humanitarian award on behalf of an international drag queen organization.

Given recent history the drag queens may fit into the church better than you’d expect – and it’ll certainly dampen down those accusations of pedophilia and sexual abuse.

Aside from the cynical take, this all sounds very gooey and comforting (very much Francis’s 60’s Latin Lefty culture) until you realise this key point:

Traditionally, when Catholics spoke of a “Church of sinners” it was understood to mean repentant sinners:  people who were sorry for their sins and were trying their best to sin no more.

By contrast, what Francis and other woke/progressive Catholics seems to mean is “proud sinners:” people who are proud of their lifestyle choices and see nothing sinful about them.

I can’t see this working in attracting people to the Church, whether new or ex-Catholics. Do they really think that pro-abortion or pro-LGBTQ types will want to join? The latter don’t care about being “forgiven” and anybody who does care about sin and forgiveness will wonder what the point is of joining such a place. The Roman Catholic church is simply trending down the same declining path as mainline Protestant churches in the West (to all intents and purposes the latter are dead):

[In the USA] between 1970 and 2021, the number of priests fell from 59,192 to 34,923. Meanwhile, weekly Mass attendance fell from 54.9 percent to 17.3 percent; and infant baptism from 1.089 million to 411,482.  

Finally there’s the simple fact that people who truly are oppressed, including any number of Catholics, just aren’t getting the same attention and support from the Church, from the Pope on down. Read this Cuban Priest’s Open Letter to the Pope in which he basically begs for Francis to speak out:

How is it possible that the Pope can overlook a brutal repression against peaceful citizens who shouted at Villa Vida … and expressed their enormous yearning for liberty and justice against a government that has spent 63 years in power removing rights and crushing an entire population?
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Don’t let yourself be cajoled or deceived by the illustrious of this world. Your place is not among them, but by the side of the people. Your logic should be that of Jesus Christ: detached from all range and category, to serve from the low and the poor. You must defend the sheep: in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, China. Always with the oppressed, never with the oppressors.

Francis would likely argue that in demanding greater efforts to combat Climate Change he is standing up to the oppressors – the capitalist ones of course.

Silence from the Pope also on the recent FBI SWAT team raids on Pro-Life protestors, including several Catholics, and even an 87 year old concentration camp survivor – while the dozens of attacks on Catholic churches and pregnancy help centres across the USA by “Jane’s Revenge” and others have not yielded a single arrest to date, let alone an armed FBI raid.

Francis probably needs to keep Biden and Pelosi onside. Can’t have a silly little thing like abortion or Gestapo/NKVD behaviour getting in the way of saving the planet.

Some will ask what is the point of focusing on the Roman Catholic church? After all, religions have come and gone, as have institutions. But the Left Footers have always had a pretty big cultural footprint – even in WASP and Jewish-dominated Classic Hollywood there were more movies about priests and nuns than about Baptist preachers and Rabis – and the fact is that they’re yet another example of a Western institution that is failing.