The aspect I find the most disturbing of the Catholic faith (and there are many things, let me assure you) is their singular obsession with sin. Since Jesus is supposedly commissioned with forgiving us and, in ritual consumption of his flesh and blood, absorb these supposed sins, it’s a cottage industry of suffering and redemption.

Their obsession with salvation is like a giant set of blinders that makes even the most well-meaning priest unable to see the very corruption and villainy of his own institution. In some cases, the need to defend this organization stretches the limits of imagination, and more particularly, sanity. The National Post (perhaps my least favorite Canadian newspaper) has a resident man of the cloth, Father Raymond D’Souza, that they call upon every once in a while to try and explain away the ludicrous actions and behavior of the world’s single biggest religious organization. As you would expect, it’s a bunch of apologetic nonsense:

Aside from the sins themselves, the principal failing of the scandals is that those who should have been seized with moral outrage reacted instead as bureaucratic managers seeking damage control. The Lord Jesus willed the Church to be governed by bishops, not bureaucrats.

So is “bureaucracy” his way of explaining away the rape of children and the subsequent cover-up of this “boy’s club”? I can assure you in even the most corrupt non-religious organization, it’s doubtful anyone would knowingly protect known child molesters (can you imagine any major corporation surviving such a scandal?). Even in fucking prisons (a place bustling in “sin”), it’s understood child molesters need to be kept separate from the general population, otherwise there’s a chance their stay might be “cut” a little short. But wait, it gets better:

If the Church should be the place where more cases are exposed rather than fewer, that is for the good, for there is the possibility of grace and healing. Consequently, if the Church as a whole feels the pain of shame and disgrace, that can be an expiatory suffering for a sexually dissolute and depraved age. Expiatory suffering is, amongst other salvific things, what the Church exists for.

Let me tell you something: there is no amount of shame or pain the Church can feel that will ever fucking compare to what a child victimized by rape has to go through, not even by a long shot. Even if all guilty individuals were exposed and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, it does not change the fact the Catholic Church systematically protected these men and sheltered them from their crimes. If anything, these scandals have highlighted the fact they have lost all of their supposed ability to redeem anyone of sin. How dare D’Souza call this world “depraved” and sexually dissolute when these are problems in his own Church rather than society at large? The rest of us are not so morally blind as to shelter and protect those who would harm innocent children. So far I find the only thing depraved here is the indifference the author has over the fact that the very institution he is trying to defend is so corrupt as to be unable (and unwilling) to punish known child rapists. How much more scandal do believers need before they shake off their delusional bubble and finally say “enough is enough”?