Image by h.koppdelaney

Image by h.koppdelaney

Frankly, I’m surprised that an institution as homophobic as the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t blame the gays for its molestation scandal more often…

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said in a news conference in Chile on Monday that “many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relation between celibacy and pedophilia.”

They do believe, however, “that there is a relation between homosexuality and pedophilia,” he said. “That is true. … That is the problem.”

(…)

Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League, similarly pointed at homosexuality last month as the true problem behind the child abuse sex scandal.

In a full-page ad taken out in The New York Times, he called it a “homosexual crisis,” claiming that “eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male.”

Maybe they resisted the temptation to gay-bash because that particular explanation would mean that the Church routinely made exceptions to its own prohibition against homosexual priests – but only for the ones who molested children.  Or maybe just because it’s complete bullshit.

But this is not the only example of the Church and its apologists trying to shift responsibility for its monstrous crimes.

How about blaming the Jews? (And oh by the way, that Holocaust thing?  We were totally asking for it.)

Last week, retired Bishop Giacomo Babini of the Italian town of Grosseto told the Catholic Pontifex website that the Catholic pedophile scandal is being orchestrated by the “eternal enemies of Catholicism, namely the freemasons and the Jews, whose mutual entanglements are not always easy to see through… I think that it is primarily a Zionist attack, in view of its power and refinement. They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God-killers.”

….”The Holocaust was a shame for all of humanity,” the good bishop told the world, “but now we have to look at it without rhetoric and with open eyes. Don’t believe that Hitler was merely crazy. The truth is that the Nazis’ criminal fury was provoked by the Jews’ economic embezzlement, by which they choked the German economy.” He concluded that the Jews’ “guilt is graver than what Christ predicted would happen to them, saying ‘do not cry for me, but for your own children.’”

Or how about blaming the victims themselves, for being part of some sort of “clear and despicable” conspiracy against the Pope?  This particular theme of persecution by vague Church-hating, probably-liberal “powerful lobbies” comes up a lot, actually – one senior Vatican priest even compares the Church’s persecution to that of the Jews (although Bishop Babini would probably disagree).

I can give them a pass for the one anti-semitic loon, but the rest of the apologists are all high-ranking Vatican priests and Cardinals, not obscure lone nuts.  How can senior members of a church that emphasizes confession and penance be so insistent on blaming others for its sins?  And how could senior members of a church so obsessed with controlling the consensual sex of others have been so cavalier about the non-consensual sex of their own?

Just a matter of time before someone figures out a way to blame the whole fiasco on birth control and abortions…