This Charming Man

Con­sid­er the Catholic Church: an or­ga­ni­za­tion which ad­ver­tis­es it­self as the great­est force for good and as the on­ly true bul­wark against evil in the uni­verse. Even among non-Catholics, its doc­trines are wide­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with the con­cepts of “moral­ity” and “hu­man val­ues.” How­ev­er, the Vat­ican is an or­ga­ni­za­tion that ex­com­mu­ni­cates wom­en for at­tempt­ing to be­come priests but does not ex­com­mu­ni­cate male priests for rap­ing chil­dren. It ex­com­mu­ni­cates doc­tors who per­form abor­tions to save a moth­er’s life — even if the moth­er is a nine-year-old girl raped by her step­fa­ther and preg­nant with twins —but it did not ex­com­mu­ni­cate a sin­gle mem­ber of the Third Re­ich for com­mit­ting geno­cide. Are we re­al­ly obliged to con­sid­er such a di­abol­ical in­ver­sion of pri­or­ities to be ev­idence of an al­ter­na­tive “moral” frame­work? No. It seems clear that the Catholic Church is as mis­guid­ed in speak­ing about the “moral” per­il of con­tra­cep­tion, for in­stance, as it would be in speak­ing about the “physics” of Tran­sub­stan­ti­ation. In both do­mains, it is true to say that the Church is grotesque­ly con­fused about which things in this world are worth pay­ing at­ten­tion to.

Sam Harris

The Catholic Church has spent two mil­len­nia de­mo­niz­ing hu­man sex­ual­ity to a de­gree un­matched by any oth­er in­sti­tu­tion, declar­ing the most ba­sic, healthy, ma­ture, and con­sen­su­al be­hav­iors taboo. In­deed, this or­ga­ni­za­tion still op­pos­es the use of con­tra­cep­tion: pre­fer­ring, in­stead, that the poor­est peo­ple on earth be blessed with the largest fam­ilies and the short­est lives. As a con­se­quence of this hal­lowed and in­cor­ri­gi­ble stu­pid­ity, the Church has con­demned gen­er­ations of de­cent peo­ple to shame and hypocrisy—or to Ne­olith­ic fe­cun­di­ty, pover­ty, and death by AIDS.              

  

Add to this in­hu­man­ity the ar­ti­fice of clois­tered celiba­cy, and you now have an in­sti­tu­tion —one of the wealth­iest on earth— that pref­er­en­tial­ly at­tracts ped­erasts, pe­dophiles, and sex­ual sadists in­to its ranks, pro­motes them to po­si­tions of au­thor­ity, and grants them priv­ileged ac­cess to chil­dren. Fi­nal­ly, con­sid­er that vast num­bers of chil­dren will be born out of wed­lock, and their un­wed moth­ers vil­ified, wher­ev­er Church teach­ing holds sway—lead­ing boys and girls by the thou­sands to be aban­doned to Church-run or­phan­ages on­ly to be raped and ter­ror­ized by the cler­gy. Here, in this ghoul­ish ma­chin­ery set to whirling through the ages by the op­pos­ing winds of shame and sadism, we mor­tals can fi­nal­ly glimpse how strange­ly per­fect are the ways of the Lord.

Sam Harris.

(Picture: Wojtyla blessing notorious pedophile Marcial Maciel.)