House-cleaning at the Vatican

Obviously, needed now more than ever.

And this should include the relativist apologists like Ross Douthat and the folks at First Things, whose defenses seem to entirely consist of shifting the blame to things like Vatican II or the New York Times.

Conservative Catholics have pushed the "slippery slope" argument with respect to gay rights for decades now, claiming that welcoming gays into the church would lead to the acceptance of polygamy, pedophilia and even sex with animals -- but here we are, in 2010, and the the most vehement apologists and defenders of actual pedophiles and child abusers -- and not the hypothetical ones at the end of the "slippery slope" -- are the conservative Catholics.

It's repugnant to see a wing of the church who has claimed the banner of eternal mores sink into such a relativistic morass, but not unexpected given the Church's long history. Reading Ross Douthat feebly blame Vatican II for unleashing a torrent of teh Gay on the clergy must be how outraged Catholics felt when reading defenses of simony or other medieval institutional ills during the Dark Ages. Reprehensible charlatans like Bill Donahue are even more despicable.

The scandal in Germany is just now reaching a fevered pitch. In Ireland the church is in crisis. The scandal is even reaching Brazil and once it has a foothold in South America it has the potential to run like wold-fire through the Spanish-speaking and deeply Catholic Americas where a culture of machismo and deference has likely made silence surrounding the abuse all the more difficult to break.

There are no less than three sins being committed for each case of abuse: the act against the child, the hypocrisy o the perpetrator and the cover-up by the church. The child abuse scandals make a gay prostitution ring in the Vatican look down right quaint by comparison. The church can expect to continue to hemorrhage moral authority until it finally understands that it has to come clean.