Catholic Church

About

The Catholic Church (sometimes "Roman Catholic Church", or RCC) is the worldwide organization which organizes Catholics, defines the doctrine of Catholicism, and determines who may call themselves "a Catholic" through the ritual of communion.

The headquarters of the Catholic Church are known as the Vatican, and reside in Vatican City which is a quasi-independently-governed part of Rome, Italy. The head of the Church is called the Pope, and Catholic doctrine holds that he is infallible.

The views of the Church are often advanced by a number of independent organizations which, although officially not affiliated with the Church, clearly have the Church's blessing or perhaps work behind the scenes to be consistent with the Church's beliefs, as the Church has never been known to contradict their public statements (nor have they ever made statements critical of the Church):

• Catholic Campaign for Human Development
• Catholic League
• Confraternity of Catholic Clergy

Ethics

• They have also widely promoted the idea that condoms cause AIDS, rather than preventing it, and have thereby aided the deaths of millions.
  • Trying to find evidence on this, I find that in 2009 the Pope stated that condoms might make the AIDS problem worse, which was taken as confirmation of anti-condom policies by some leaders -- but apparently in 2012, the Pope reversed himself on this issue. Was the 2009 statement the only instance of the CC promoting this false idea?
• The Catholic Church has a long history of priests abusing choirboys and other parishioners. They also have an official (but secret) policy of covering up such incidents, and of blaming the victims.
• In the wake of the 2008 sacred wafer scandal, prominent members of the church hierarchy proclaimed improper usage of ritually-blessed crackers was a worse crime than genocide.
• The only Nazi leader who was excommunicated was Joseph Goebbels, for the crime of marrying a divorced Protestant.
• The Church apparently considers any effort towards certifying a woman as a priest to be a worse crime than pedophilia.

Conclusions

Although claiming to be a force for good in the world -- at least in modern times, since abandoning the practices of torture, inquisition, and crusade -- the Catholic Church has clearly surrendered any moral authority it might have regained by its repeated insistence on trivializing that which is truly wrong (e.g. abuse of choirboys by priests) and elevating utterly trivial offenses against itself as if they were serious crimes.

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia
• Conservapedia
• dKosopedia: no information as of 2010-04-11
• SourceWatch: no information as of 2010-04-11

Related

• 2014/06/17 [L..T] Fall Into Theocracy #1: How the Catholic Church is Killing Polish Democracy
• 2014/02/25 [L..T] Secrets of the Vatican Video (83:41): "An inside look at the scandals that rocked Benedict's papacy."
• 2012/01/19 [L..T] Shock new revelations about Mother Teresa "In January, 2012, documents obtained by an investigative journalist working at SF Weekly, a successful alternative weekly newspaper in San Francisco, California, revealed that an Albanian nun, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, better known to the world today as Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), supported and praised a Catholic priest knowing that he was an accused serial abuser of young boys in his care."